the wind blows where it will...

Where What You've Got Came From, and Where it Should Go

2009-08-22T22:00:00.001-04:00

Matthew 26:6-13
The Anointing at Bethany
6 Now while Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, 7a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment, and she poured it on his head as he sat at the table. 8But when the disciples saw it, they were angry and said, ‘Why this waste? 9For this ointment could have been sold for a large sum, and the money given to the poor.’ 10But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, ‘Why do you trouble the woman? She has performed a good service for me. 11For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me. 12By pouring this ointment on my body she has prepared me for burial. 13Truly I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.’

Several years ago, Dave and I participated in a live recreation of the city of Bethlehem. Our post was at the manger where Jesus was born on the outside of the city. We played the rolls of Mary and Joseph for a night. There was a musical score at the scene, so we didn’t have any lines. We were just there: sitting in the places we all imagine the parents of Jesus to occupy moments after his birth—adoring the new baby and meeting the visitors who came to see him. After the music finished, we would pick up the baby doll swaddled in a blanket and carry him along the line of people lined up at the stable to see. It seemed silly to me the first time the director described the act of walking a doll around like a real baby. Won’t the people realize that this is not real? What kind of significance could this really have?

On one of the last rounds of the little drama we were portraying that night, there was a little girl standing in the line at the stable with her mom. As we passed by with the baby doll in our arms, trying not to let the children recognize that it was just a doll, this little girl dropped her mommy’s hand and reached in her pocket and pulled out a tiny plastic doll and tried to place it in the folds of the blanket wrapped tightly around the baby Jesus. Not wanting her to discover out secret, that it wasn’t really him, I reached my hand out in an attempt to help her find a place for the doll. She quickly pulled her hand back and the doll and looked at me and said—with some contempt, to be honest—“It’s not for you! It’s for Baby Jesus.”

What that girl had came to her as a gift, and just as freely as she received it, she gave it. As she was trying desperately to shove this tiny plastic doll into Baby Jesus’ blanket, her mother noticed what she was doing and gently tugged at her arm and asked if she was sure she wanted to give away the doll. “Mommy,” she said, “it’s for Baby Jesus!” You may not be close enough to see this little doll, but it looks to be part of something bigger than himself. I suspect that there is still a plastic family out there missing their baby son. It’s been obviously well-loved; and that all took place before he came to live in our house because ever since that night I’ve had this little guy in safe keeping for Baby Jesus. He came to her as a gift, to me as a gift, and is meant ultimately for Christ as a gift—a sacrificial gift that was likely missed in that little girl’s household.

Friends, for me there is not better telling of the Christmas story than that. And there is no better way to think about what it means to give in the United Methodist tradition. John Wesley’s sermon on giving titled “Serving God with Mammon” says it this way:

"I entreat you, in the name of the Lord Jesus, act up to the dignity of your calling! No more sloth! Whatsoever your hand find[s] to do, do it with your might! No more waste! Cut off every expense which fashion, caprice, or flesh and blood demand! No more covetousness! But employ whatever God has entrusted y[ou] with, in doing good, all possible good, in every possible kind and degree to the household of faith, to all [people]! This is no small part of 'the wisdom of the just.' Give all y[ou] have, as well as all y[ou] are, a spiritual sacrifice to God who withheld not from you [God’]s Son, [God’]s only Son.”

It is our calling, brothers and sisters, to give—not just what we have to spare but what is also a sacrifice for us. How can we begin to understand what that might be for each of us individually?

The obvious first answer is that we can give more money to the church, and I’m not going to lie to you: I like that answer. Not for my sake but for the sake of the people who need for us to give. If you think about what the world needs that we can provide, so much of that is dollars and cents. Churches, service organizations, non-profits all need us and our wallets right now. Did you know that United Methodists lead the way most of the time in financial response to disasters around the world? Giving through the United Methodist Committee on Relief to help the victims of the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in the gulf coast of the United States in 2005 broke records in giving to these 2 relief funds, and those funds continue to be used today. On a more local level, your giving here makes us able to have diapers and toys for the children who spend time in our nursery on any given Sunday or to provide a place for senior citizens to gather during the week that is safe, cool and warm in hot and cold climates, and where there is the guarantee of a meal at least 2 days per week. But it’s not just even about the money.

Your gifts are shared and needed in so many ways. There are so many opportunities for you to give. It may even seem overwhelming sometimes. And there may even be more you could give if only you had the courage, or maybe even just the time. You may have gifts to share—voice, instrument, teaching, dance, caring for others—and you may be holding them back because you are honestly not sure that what you have to give can truly be useful to someone else. Or, you may simply be afraid that its just not good enough.

That night in recreated Bethlehem, when I dared to put on the costume of the mother of Jesus, I was converted again by the generosity and sacrificial giving of the little girl who wanted Baby Jesus to have her tiny plastic baby. That gift came to her out of generosity and love. And it was passed on to Jesus the same way. And it probably didn’t cost much money or even take very long to produce; how much more can our gifts be pleasing to God and nurturing to the world around us—those gifts which are hard to give or hard to give up?

You may know that the Methodist movement both in England and in America grew so quickly among the members of society who had the least. Wesley himself commented once on how he preferred the soft, velvet cushion of the pulpits throughout the beautiful church buildings across the English country but how God had called him to go into the fields to share the news of God’s love and mercy with those who had never heard. He gave it all, everything he had, even what had been given to him as a gift, and gave it to the people of God who needed him. And we continue to follow in his tradition today. We are United Methodists because we give. We can do more. When we give money or time that we miss, then we know we are on the right track.

So I encourage you, friends, to follow the example of our sister in today’s gospel lesson who gave what she had to the dying body of Christ so that the Body of Christ would continue to live. We can only assume she was saving the ointment for her own burial or that of someone she loved. But she gave it to Jesus because she recognized in some way that he needed it now. She saved it until just the right moment, and then she gave it, and we continue to tell her story every time we give something that we might need later, give until it hurts, give something that is very precious to us so that the Body of Christ can continue to live, grow, and thrive.

The little girl in Bethlehem with us that night saved her gift until just the right moment, and I continue to receive grace and blessing from that gift even today. May we never forget that as United Methodists we are not in this for what we can get out of it. We are in it for what we can give to it, and the grace and blessing we receive anyway—well, that is just a gift.

Amen.

You Had to Be There...

2009-08-22T21:59:00.001-04:00

Luke 10:38-42 (New International Version)
At the Home of Martha and Mary

38As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. 39She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said. 40But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, "Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!"

41"Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "you are worried and upset about many things, 42but only one thing is needed.[a] Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."

When I was in about the seventh grade, I attended the First United Methodist Church of Commerce, Georgia. It was a beautiful sanctuary, not totally unlike the one we are gathered in today. Great big stained glass windows lined the side walls, long curved pews lined the floor, and a balcony loomed over the main floor. It was there that I sat with my other friends in the youth group every Sunday on the back row. Just as we do here, we received holy communion on the first Sunday of every month in that church, and the dutiful ushers led us row by row to the front where the curved kneeling rail surrounded the altar. The back row of the balcony was usually the last group to gather around the altar together. One first Sunday, there was an elementary-age kid invading our space on the back row, and when it was our turn to go to the front and receive the bread and cup, we lined up neatly around the rail which, because it was curved, made it possible for us to see each other while we were kneeling. As my dad and the other communion server made their way around the rail offering us a small wafer and a tiny cup of grape juice, everyone’s eyes were drawn to the child among us who ended up kneeling at the point in the curved rail where the rest of us had a good view of him. As the wafer and cups made their way to him, he took the wafer just as he should and ate it quietly without much disturbance or mess. The excitement came when he received the cup of juice. He set it down on the rail for just a moment while he reached inside his jacket to the inside pocket where a straw had been carefully placed at home that morning in preparation for church. In what seemed like 2 seconds he pulled the straw out, stuck it in the cup, slurped every drop but one of the little glass, set it back in the tray that came behind to collect all the little cups, shook the straw out to dry, and placed it back in his pocket. And we all saw it. We were stunned; we were shocked; we could not stop the laughter that welled up inside so we just stayed there a few moments shaking in uncontrollable but silent laughter. Then we were led dutifully back to our seats, and it was over. But I’ll never forget it.

And then there was another time that I gathered with the community of faith at the Lord’s Table. I was in seminary; it was my second year. It was my 6th year of worshiping in Cannon Chapel on Emory’s campus, a place where I would later be married and where we would take our daughter Joy to be baptized. We basically consider it to be our family chapel. In fact, when I first arrived there, I didn’t care much for the space. If you’ve ever seen it, you might have a clue as to why. Having come from spending most of my years growing up in historic sanctuaries and small town churches, when I discovered that Cannon Chapel was “modern” and mostly decorated with copper, wood, and concrete, I was underwhelmed. Those first few Sundays that I attended worship there were wonderful in spite of the space. I just hoped I’d get used to it after a few months of Sundays came to pass. Six years later, it had become a sacred place to me: wood, concrete, copper, and all.

And so there I was on a Friday for the weekly Eucharist in the midst of a difficult semester, a season of questioning about what was next in ministry for me, and some personal challenges, sometimes wondering why on earth I was there and what in heaven’s name God could possibly want with me in a pulpit or the office of an elder in the United Methodist Church. I came to the eucharist that day thinking that I really didn’t have time to be there, that I needed to be several other places, that I had class assignments that were due, that I needed to planning for youth I was working with while in school, maybe just getting some rest, doing anything but being there for a mere 45 minutes—long enough to hear the readings for the day, sing the Psalm, pray for the community and the world, and receive the bread and the cup. I was distracted during the service, not by the concrete and copper but by the questions and queasiness I was wrestling while trying to figure out ministry and life all at the ripe age of 24. And then the celebrant began with the words, “The Lord be with you,” and I started to cry.

In the midst of the chaos, the busy-ness, the uncertainty, I was brought to my knees by the words of the prayer that followers of Christ have been praying for generations: “Pour out your Holy Spirit on us gathered here, and on these gifts of bread and wine. Make them be for us the body and blood of Christ that we may be for the world the body of Christ, redeemed by his blood. Make us one with Christ, one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world until Christ comes in final victory and we feast at the heavenly banquet…” It was a moment of palpable grace for me. In the breath I breathed were the words, voices, and presence of people praying with me as far back as the apostles themselves and so were the words, voices, and presence of people who will come long after me to be joined into the body of Christ, redeemed by his blood. The practice of communal prayer, the practice of coming together to the table, the practice of hearing scripture read and interpreted to the gathered body, the life lived in the community of the faithful—it is a gift, a means of grace, the way that God communicates with us, sometimes when we least expect it.

Our brother John Wesley and his brother Charles were Anglican priests. The Methodist societies they started were groups of Anglicans who gathered together for prayer and bible study but who also continued to attend the weekly service where Eucharist was offered so that they could be sure to receive the grace of God available to them in every opportunity of the gathered body. The ideal of the gathered Body of Christ has always been an important part of the identity and legacy of the people called Methodists. Even our ancestors, the Evangelical United Bretheren with whom the Methodist Church merged in 1968 to become the United Methodist Church held it in high regard to gather together for worship and for study and prayer, understanding the need to attend to the rituals of religious life and to do so with others so that one’s knowledge and love of God would increase as life came and went. The ways that the Wesleys and their class societies understood to be the most common ways we receive God’s grace were prayer, study of scripture, and participation in holy communion—all things that were encouraged to be done with others when at all possible. We know that prayer and study of scripture can be done individually and that John Wesley himself would often receive holy communion when he was alone on the road traveling from one field preaching post to the next, but ultimately the celebration of holy communion is meant to be done with others, in community, with all of our voices raised together in praise and thanksgiving—a holy and living sacrifice in union with Christ’s offering for us.

When Jesus tells Martha that Mary has chosen the better part by removing herself from the preparation of the meal and devoting herself to Jesus and to listening to his word and teaching, we who overhear this exchange learn something about the importance of taking time away from the regular busy-ness of life to be in the presence of Christ. It’s not that Martha was not in his presence doing her preparation routine; but she was not of a mind to pay attention to what he was saying to her as she rushed from one end of the house to the other performing her tasks. When we gather for worship and study, we take the time to pay attention to the voice of God who speaks to us in music, in the spoken word, in the children, in dance and movement, in the words we share together before and after the service, in just being here together to set our busy lives aside for a while and be in the presence of God.

Presence is about being there, being with and for each other, and being with Christ, just as Mary is in our story today: where he meets us—in God’s house, paying attention, listening, doing God’s work, living into God’s grace.

My life of faith would not be what it is today without you, without that kid in Commerce, Georgia, who prepared for communion in his own way that day because he knew what Sunday it was and what was waiting on us at Church, and especially without that moment in Cannon Chapel when I simply sat at the feet of Jesus and listened.

You just have to be there, my friends. You have to be there.

Amen.

Why United Methodist Prayers Seem to Work So Well

2009-08-08T21:27:00.000-04:00

Luke 11: 1-13
The Lord’s Prayer
He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’ He said to them, ‘When you pray, say: 
Father, hallowed be your name. 
Your kingdom come.  
Give us each day our daily bread.  
And forgive us our sins, 
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. 
And do not bring us to the time of trial.’
Perseverance in Prayer
And he said to them, ‘Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, “Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.” And he answers from within, “Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.” I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

‘So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’

In my last appointment, the prayer group that met weekly at church had quite a reputation. It wasn’t the negative kind that congregations sometimes have; it was a positive one. That group of 5 or 6 people were known for their praying. We met every Monday at 1 pm; we went over the prayer list from the Sunday before as well as the monthly list. They kept me updated on the pastoral care needs of the congregation, and I asked them to pray for situations that needed an extra special showering of prayers. It was holy time we spent together, lifting up one another in love and prayer, and asking God to come near to serve the needs of the church and the community.

One week a member of the prayer group came with a request from a friend of hers who attended a local Roman Catholic church. Her friend had sent her with a request for our group and our church to pray for her and said, “Methodist prayers just seem to work better than any others!” What is it that is special about prayer in the Wesleyan tradition?

I have a friend whose mother is an alcoholic. Many Christmases ago, when we were young adults, my friend and I had a long conversation about how the things that we wanted in life, our wish lists, were changing as we matured. She felt a tremendous amount of guilt about that fact that one of the things she often found herself wishing was that her family would stop having to live with the problem that was her mother. “How could I wish my mother to be dead and gone,” she wondered? But what else was she supposed to wish for? She didn’t even know how to live with her mother’s disease anymore. She had been cooking meals and keeping house for herself, her brother, and her father since she was about 11. There just weren’t any words anymore, hardly much feeling left in her. It broke my heart. So I began to pray for my friend and her mother. I didn’t know what I was praying for. I wasn’t praying for a cure to her mother’s alcoholism. Those prayers hadn’t worked before; why would they work now? So I started praying for my friend and her mother every night by name. I simply said their names in prayer, not knowing what to say or how to pray for them, but simply calling God’s attention to their family and the pain they were all living with and how much I hoped God would attend to them. Today, my friend and her mother have found ways to be in each other’s lives, although it is still difficult and always will be. But since then, my friend has found greater and greater peace in her life and with her mother, who still lives with the disease. But I think that I may have been more affected by the prayers for them than either of them was.

What I realized was that I began to feel a very strong connection to both my friend and her mother, a woman I had only met a few times at that point in our lives. I began to care deeply for them and to truly ask God to act in their lives in some way, whether I knew what it would be or not. I didn’t need to control the outcome; I needed to connect to the problem and the hope for its resolution. And connect I did. Not only did I feel a deeper connection with my friend, but I felt a deeper connection with God. Through prayer, I was connecting to the action of God in our lives, to the love and compassion that God shows us through each other, to the feeling of being loved by God beginning to know the heart of God through a very personal relationship that I had with a close friend. I knew that God loved her and her mother, and I knew that it pleased God for me to love them and pray for them. And I know that I was deepening my relationship with God by asking for God to help them in their time of need. Does that make sense?

It takes work to know the heart of God. It takes the work of living through the struggles that our lives present to us and entangle us in every single day. It takes the work of coming to the realization that we need God’s help to get through those struggles and to help each other through. It takes work to build a relationship of any kind, and the relationship we each have with God is the most important we’ll ever have; how much more do we need to work at making sure that connection is strong and alive and growing?

As much as I may like to imagine it so from time to time, Jesus Christ was not a United Methodist. Actually, our dear brother John Wesley was not a United Methodist. But we are, and one of the things that makes us so is our understanding of prayer as a means by which we receive God’s grace. When we pray, we not only speak, but we also listen. We not only ask but we also receive. We don’t control God or time or circumstances or life in anyway. We open ourselves up to the presence and action of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in the lives of others. And we open ourselves to one another in deep and abiding ways so that over time we realize that we are at work in the lives of others, too. By receiving God’s grace in prayer, we also give it to others for whom we pray regularly.

I loved my friend before I ever began to pray for her and her mother; but since that time, I have felt connected to her in a way that I have not felt with many others, and it continues even now, and that first Christmas conversation was more than 10 years ago. It is the grace of God that keeps them both in my heart now, and it is the grace I received by praying for them that helps to deepen my faith and calls me into prayer for others.

Prayer is not passive; it is active. It takes work to listen, to ask, and to receive. We pray when it is easy to give God thanks, and we pray when it is hard to understand what is happening in the world or in our own lives. We pray to bring order into our lives. We pray so that we can do anything else. Brother John said “I have so much to do that I spend several hours in prayer before I am able to do it.” He saw life as lived in constant prayer and so taught the people of the Methodist movement to live their lives. In his sermon A Plain Account of Christian Perfection he says that “whether we speak of, or speak to, God, whether we act or suffer for him, all is prayer.” This is our heritage: life lived seeking the presence, grace, and connection with God.

Right after the attack on the World Trade Centers in New York, CNN ran one of the brand new United Methodist Church television commercials at no cost to the church because we were the only ones putting a hopeful, compassionate message out to the nation at time of deep pain and distress. The ad showed a diverse group of people praying in a variety of ways, and the tag line at the end was, “No matter how you pray, the people of the United Methodist Church are praying with you.”

That is why we are United Methodist.

Women in the Bible: Sam, the Evangelist

2009-08-08T21:24:00.000-04:00

John 4: 1-30, 39

Jesus and the Woman of Samaria
4Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, ‘Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John’— 2 although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized— 3he left Judea and started back to Galilee. 4But he had to go through Samaria. 5So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink’. 8(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink”, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’ 11The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?’ 13Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ 15The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’

16 Jesus said to her, ‘Go, call your husband, and come back.’ 17The woman answered him, ‘I have no husband.’ Jesus said to her, ‘You are right in saying, “I have no husband”; 18for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!’ 19The woman said to him, ‘Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.’ 21Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.’ 25The woman said to him, ‘I know that Messiah is coming’ (who is called Christ). ‘When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.’ 26Jesus said to her, ‘I am he, the one who is speaking to you.’

27 Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, ‘What do you want?’ or, ‘Why are you speaking with her?’ 28Then the woman left her water-jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, 29‘Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?’ 30They left the city and were on their way to him.

39 Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, ‘He told me everything I have ever done.’

This text is normally heard during the season of Lent. About halfway through his journey to Jerusalem, Jesus finds himself with the opportunity to travel through Samaria on his way. He probably didn’t have to take the road he took; isn’t that just like Jesus?

On this un-needed sojourn, Jesus meets an un-necessary woman, or at least, she seems this way at first. Coming to the well in the middle of the day is code language for the fact that she was shunned by her community. But Jesus turned that on its ear: this is the longest recorded conversation we know of between Jesus and anyone else. And its kind of a one-sided conversation—it’s all about her: her past, her men, her choices, her consequences, like having to come out in the hottest hours of the day to get the water to sustain your life.

And speaking of her life, Jesus sure does know a lot about it. And isn’t that an interesting testimony that she is left with; “He told me everything I’ve ever done.” Fred Craddock comments that this is not exactly a recitation of the Apostles’ Creed. Barbara Brown Taylor says that when Jesus tells her who she is, he is also telling her who he is. She’s a woman, not allowed to have much choice in how her life is lived out, not even allowed to pray with the men in the synagogue, born a Samaritan and, therefore, a half-breed child of God. The morning devotions of men included a prayer that actually said, basically, “Thank God I am not a woman.” She was all the things that one was not supposed to be—at least one who spent time with the Son of God. But then again, so was he.

I think that sometimes Jesus surprises us with who he is. He know us; he get us; he loves us; he shares God with us. Sam wasn’t really known by anyone anymore, and I am certain that no one “got” her. I wonder if she had ever received much real love in her life, and she was excluded from everything—God included. By knowing and spending time with her, Jesus opened the relationship back up between God and her, and that was something so wonderful in her life, something she needed so much, that she just couldn’t keep quiet about it. I imagine it might have been something like that feeling you have when something unbelievable happens to you and you tell others whom you don’t expect to believe you with a sense of unbelief yourself. Her message is simple: he knew me. My God, he knew me.

And her audience: the people who have no interest in anything she has to say. They already know her. Who cares who else knows her? And her declaration is actually a question: could he be the one? She’s not really even sure of anything except that something unbelievable has happened, something that could change her life forever. And it changed all of our lives. The ones who heard her, not Jews, born enemies of Jesus and his people, call him by name: the Messiah. She is among the first to preach the Word.

Once again, Jesus surprises us with his embrace of this woman. He reminds us that we are all loved beyond expectation by God, no matter who we are or what is in our past. I think that sometimes we hide behind the belief that we are not good enough for God’s love. It is easy to stand outside the love and expectation of God if we can prove that we are undeserving. And to be able to stand outside the love of God is to not live with an expectation on our lives, the expectation of living that love out in our own lives. Once we are brought inside the circle of God’s love and expectation, we now live in the knowledge that something is expected of us. We are expected to live in and contribute to the community. Up until this point, Sam was not allowed to do that. But now she brings them the word, and she suddenly has new expectations around which to orient her life. Now she matters to someone; now she has a story to share. Now she understands that there is love available to her that is positive and supportive, and she’ll have to pay that forward at some point. There is a lot of responsibility tied up in accepting God’s love and grace.

Sam does her part by having the courage to tell an unbelievable story to folks who probably tend not to believe anything that comes out of her mouth. The Greek text tells us that what came out of her mouth was “the Word.” The gospel; the story of Jesus. And it came from her own life.

Maybe you have a story to tell. Maybe you have no cause to make anyone listen to you. Maybe you believe based on experience or your own ideas that no one wants to hear anything you have to say. But you have encountered the graceful love of God, and you need to talk that out, to tell someone.

What are you going to say?

Women in the Bible: Miriam, the Singer

2009-07-18T16:26:00.000-04:00

Exodus 15: 19-21
19 When the horses of Pharaoh with his chariots and his chariot drivers went into the sea, the Lord brought back the waters of the sea upon them; but the Israelites walked through the sea on dry ground.
The Song of Miriam
20 Then the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing. 21And Miriam sang to them: ‘Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.’

Truthfully, these few verses do not do Miriam, the sister of Moses, much justice. In fact, usually when you say, “Miriam, you know, Moses’ sister,” everybody says, “Oh, yeah, right.” While Moses’ song is verses and verses long, hers is 1. But then again, that is the story of Miriam: always there with her brother, moving the story of God and God’s salvation for God’s people along, making sure that the right person is available for God’s mission at the right time. Take a quick trip with me back to the beginning of the story of Miriam.

Long before they arrived at the sea of Reeds, also called the Red Sea where Pharoh’s guys lost the trail of the Israelites, Miriam stood at the side of another river: the Nile. The Hebrews were still enslaved in Egypt, and there was an order from the Pharoh for every boy born in the land to be thrown into the river but that the girls were to live. This would prevent the Hebrews for continuing to grow rapidly in number and would allow him to keep control over them. So, Miriam’s mother gave birth to a boy during this time and hid him as long as she could. But when she couldn’t hide him any longer, she put him in a kind of basket and set him into the Nile so that he would not be thrown there and drown. But he wasn’t left their to drown on his own; Miriam was there watching, making sure that he made it. And the story goes that he did make it, at the hand of the Pharoh’s daughter and the breast of his very own mother. How was this boy so lucky? It wasn’t luck: it was Miriam.

Miriam watched her baby brother, Moses, and when Pharoh’s daughter found him, Miriam was the one who suggested that she get a wet nurse for him from among the Hebrew people. It was really a brilliant plan—this way, Moses would be reunited with his mother and her mother with her infant son whom she had given up so that he would have a chance to live. And that chance came under the watchful eye of Miriam. But who among them—Miriam, Moses, their mother, or Pharoh’s daughter—could have known what would come to pass as a result of an older sister’s careful eye?

Ten years ago I was working as the Director of Youth Ministries at the Briarcliff United Methodist Church. About halfway through my tenure there, a family arrived at our church who had 2 teenaged children. The older of the 2 was a girl, and the younger was a boy. The boy was one of the most difficult kids I had ever worked with. He ran away from the church every week for a while when they first started coming. We would have supper and he would have a little fit because he didn’t like the food. Then we would move to the youth room to start our program for the evening, and as soon as we would close our eyes to pray, he would run out of the room. I had to recruit an adult leader just to run after this boy when he ran out of the room because we were close to an outside entrance and located at a pretty busy intersection. I had no idea what he would do, and I was worried about whether or not he would make it, quite honestly, into adulthood. When we went on retreats, there was a constant battle between this guy and the adult chaperones: he didn’t want to participate in our activities and was always starting trouble. He was exhausting. When I left that church as I was getting ready to graduate from seminary, I stood before the congregation on my last Sunday and thanked them, especially the youth and their families, for their gracious welcome to me and for working with me in ministry for a great group of kids. I knew I would miss them.

The troublemaker ran to me after I had addressed the congregation and hugged me tight. “I’m going to miss you so much,” he said. I couldn’t imagine why, but it seemed genuine. A few months ago, this kid—now a young adult working full time and making a way for himself in life—found me on Facebook of all places. He survived. I was relieved to know it having had my doubts. Looking back on that show of emotion, I have wondered if the reason he was going to miss me was that he knew that underneath the correction and the reprimand he constantly received from me he saw that someone was watching out for him, that someone cared what happened to him. I had no idea that he would make it to adulthood or if so be able to support himself and make a life. But he has, knowing that there are people in the world who care about him.

We don’t always get to see the result of the seeds we plant in life, and we don’t always know how much someone’s participating in our lives is going to mean later on. As Miriam stood by the Nile watching that basket that contained her baby brother, I don’t imagine she had any idea they would stand together at the side of the Sea of Reeds, singing the praises of God who had saved them from Egypt, the land where the Pharoh called for the drowning of baby boys and the slavery of the Hebrew people. I bet she had no idea why it would be so important to her people for Moses’ life to be saved. How could she have known as a little girl that Moses would be the one God would choose to stand up to the Pharaoh, to lead the people out of Egypt, and to share with them the vision of the Promised Land and the 10 Commandments? If Miriam had not stood by the side of the Nile, making sure that her brother didn’t perish as so many other baby boys did, Moses would not have been able to consider and say yes to God’s call, to step up with the help of his brother and sister and speak to the Hebrews about the recovery of their freedom, and the religious world as we know it would not be what it is today.

Have you ever wondered if some small thing you have done in someone’s life really made a difference? Has someone done something that seemed small at the time but has played a very big part in who you have turned out to be? God has not promised us that salvation would be an easy road. If you read the whole story of the Exodus, you will find that it was pretty tough going between Egypt and Canaan. The road to Jerusalem was not easy for Jesus. And our journey of faith is not easy for us, either. But thank God there are Miriams in life to give us a boost, watch over us, and make sure that God has the chance to do all the things God wants to do in our lives and through us in the world.

So keep doing the small things in the lives of the people you know. And keep letting people watch over you and urge you along the path that God has chosen for you. You never know what could happen.

Amen.

Women in the Bible: Rahab, the Savior

2009-07-18T16:07:00.000-04:00

Joshua 2:1-22
Then Joshua son of Nun sent two men secretly from Shittim as spies, saying, ‘Go, view the land, especially Jericho.’ So they went, and entered the house of a prostitute whose name was Rahab, and spent the night there. The king of Jericho was told, ‘Some Israelites have come here tonight to search out the land.’ Then the king of Jericho sent orders to Rahab, ‘Bring out the men who have come to you, who entered your house, for they have come only to search out the whole land.’ But the woman took the two men and hid them. Then she said, ‘True, the men came to me, but I did not know where they came from. And when it was time to close the gate at dark, the men went out. Where the men went I do not know. Pursue them quickly, for you can overtake them.’ She had, however, brought them up to the roof and hidden them with the stalks of flax that she had laid out on the roof. So the men pursued them on the way to the Jordan as far as the fords. As soon as the pursuers had gone out, the gate was shut.

Before they went to sleep, she came up to them on the roof and said to the men: ‘I know that the Lord has given you the land, and that dread of you has fallen on us, and that all the inhabitants of the land melt in fear before you. For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites that were beyond the Jordan, to Sihon and Og, whom you utterly destroyed. As soon as we heard it, our hearts failed, and there was no courage left in any of us because of you. The Lord your God is indeed God in heaven above and on earth below. Now then, since I have dealt kindly with you, swear to me by the Lord that you in turn will deal kindly with my family. Give me a sign of good faith that you will spare my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them, and deliver our lives from death.’ The men said to her, ‘Our life for yours! If you do not tell this business of ours, then we will deal kindly and faithfully with you when the Lord gives us the land.’

Then she let them down by a rope through the window, for her house was on the outer side of the city wall and she resided within the wall itself. She said to them, ‘Go towards the hill country, so that the pursuers may not come upon you. Hide yourselves there for three days, until the pursuers have returned; then afterwards you may go on your way.’ The men said to her, ‘We will be released from this oath that you have made us swear to you if we invade the land and you do not tie this crimson cord in the window through which you let us down, and you do not gather into your house your father and mother, your brothers, and all your family. If any of you go out of the doors of your house into the street, they shall be responsible for their own death, and we shall be innocent; but if a hand is laid upon any who are with you in the house, we shall bear the responsibility for their death. But if you tell this business of ours, then we shall be released from this oath that you made us swear to you.’ She said, ‘According to your words, so be it.’ She sent them away and they departed. Then she tied the crimson cord in the window.

They departed and went into the hill country and stayed there for three days, until the pursuers returned. The pursuers had searched all along the way and found nothing.

If you have ever felt like an outsider, than have we got a story for you today!

Allow me to introduce you to today’s “Woman of the Bible”: Rahab. Here’s what we know about her:
• She was a prostitute,
• The king knew her (he sent word to her, specifically, about the men who had come to her),
• She believed that YHWH was the God of heaven and earth,
• She wanted to protect her family,
• She was from a poor family who apparently depended on her for livelihood
• She had courage,
• She observed Passover (because of the flax on the roof of the house she lived in),
• She was the mother of Boaz, one of the main characters in the story of Esther and the reason Rahab is mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew,
• She was shrewd, a quality that Jesus seemed to approve of when it came to
negotiating the entrance of the kingdom of God.

So, why her? Why today? What do we need to hear about this woman’s witness to the love and life of God?

You may have noticed the job description I have given her in the sermon title for today: Rahab, the Savior. This is in no way meant to be offensive but to provoke your thought and imagination about the many ways that God’s hand saves us in many different situations. Without Rahab, Joshua might not have been able to “fit the battle of Jericho,” and Rahab would not have married Salmon, the father of Boaz, and we might not have had a window into the ways that God loves and works through even the most unexpected and, in our eyes, undeserving human beings.

Much has been written about King David and his shameful act of just taking a woman he wanted away from her husband by having him killed. But he was a king, beloved already by God, and went on to great things and a great legacy among the Hebrew people, so he is excused: beloved and excused. More and more is being conceptualized about Prostitute Rahab and her courageous act in helping the spies from the camp of Joshua, who was working hard to make the vision of the promised land come to pass for the Hebrews who had been rescued from Egypt in another generation by God through the life of Moses. Perhaps she, too, deserves a great place in the history of the people of God: a place in the generational lineage of Abraham to Jesus, a place among the great ancestors of faith mentioned in the letter to the Hebrews, a place in the definition of works as a demonstration of faith in the letter of James. Rahab is on the scene, just like the men of her day, offering her life for the salvation of her people and the people of God.

Now when I say her people, I mean that in the Southern way we talk about our “people.” Surely you’ve heard or maybe even said it yourself: “I know some of her people,” or “You know, her people are from up north in the mountains.” Rahab’s people were her family, and they were likely poor and unnoticed by the rest of the society of Jericho and the land of Canaan—the very place God had promised to the Hebrews as their new homeland. As a poor woman from a poor family, whose options for making a living were extremely limited, she did what she had to do to support her mother and father and siblings and family. And she lived not belonging to any group within Canaanite society but on the margins—literally living in the wall between the city of Jericho and the outside world. She was about as much of an outsider as you could find—no one wanted her as her best friend, lover, wife, mother, or even child.

…until they needed her. Of all the houses and all the prostitutes in the world, how lucky those spies were to have walked into the life of Rahab!

A little Joshua background: Joshua was the one to take over leadership of the Israelites in exile from Moses. He was a fairly young guy, probably on the biggest conquest of his life. He loved and served God and encouraged the people to keep faith and heart as they continued to journey toward the new life of freedom that God had promised them as they were coming out of Egypt. In fact, think back to that time of passing over from slavery to freedom for those folks: there are some references to the first Passover in the story of Rahab. The flax on the roof of the house—a tradition of Passover. The crimson cord by which Rahab would communicate safety to Joshua’s spies—a symbol of the blood of the lamb to be put over the doors of the Hebrews during the slaughter of the firstborn of Egypt as the Hebrews were being delivered. These signs of a connection between Rahab and one of the most important holy observances of the Hebrews are important indicators that in heart she is one of them: finally a place for her to belong and contribute.

I think one of the reasons we often feel marginalized is that we cannot find ways to contribute to communal life. Have you ever said to yourself, “If only they knew what I have to give?” I think it’s a question that resonates with people in a very deep place: belonging is not just about getting along with most everybody. It is also about having a place and a purpose for being in that group. This was Rahab’s moment; after a life of living in between and making decisions that isolated her from any community, this was finally the time for her to matter, for her life to make a difference.

Are you wondering when that time will come for you? It’s easy to get wrapped up in the tasks of daily life—work, taking care of family, connecting with friends, to do lists—and to forget that there is a bigger purpose for each of us as we make our way through life on this earth together. There is a place for each one of us to belong in the reign of God: there are gifts for each one of us to use; there is courage for each one of us to exercise; there is acceptance for each one of us to feel; and there is work for each one of us to do. Salvation from death, whether it be at the hands of sin, depression, disease, war, or anything else that pursues us in this life, is available to us. Jesus showed us that salvation from God is open to all people as he overturned death in his resurrection. Rahab showed us that really anyone can participate in salvation as she came from the margins, from outside the Hebrew community and tradition, recognized our God as the God of all, and offered salvation to the Israelites through putting her own safety at risk and her marginalized place in society to good use. Without that red cord, where would the people of God be today?

We don’t thank God for the life of Rahab because she was a prostitute, because she lived on the margins, or because she was a woman. We give thanks to God for her life because she had courage to respond to the goodness of God in a terrible situation for herself and her family. She had the courage to recognize that God could save her and her family from indebtedness that could never be repaid and a life of slavery to that debt. She had the courage to help people she didn’t know but whom she knew were out to kill her and her fellow Canaanites. She embraced the power of God to save others, not for her own sake, but for the sake of people whom she loved.

I like to think of Rahab as the first one at the middle school dance to get up from the row of chairs around the wall of the gym and go ask someone to join her on the dance floor. She may not be wearing the best dress, but she has the courage to make a place for herself. She will be remembered for generations and her story told.

Because of Rahab’s belief in the saving power of God, she, herself, became a kind of savior for others. She believed so much in the power of God to save even folks outside the recognized “family” that she took a step out in faith that God would save her, too. It takes courage to believe in God, my friends. It takes courage to believe that you don’t have to stay on the outside or continue to be marginalized. Our sister Rahab has shown us with her life that no matter who you are, God loves you, looks after you, and can use you to help others. You may think you are on the outside, that you have nothing to give, that no one cares about you. But God has made you, loves you, and helps you find your place in the life of the community to contribute, to give back, to belong.

This may be your place. This body of faithful folk may be the one where you can let God’s love pull you in, you can find the courage God has given you to reach out to others who are on the outside, where you help save someone else. Rahab is not some far away, fairy tale character in the Bible. She is us, and we are her.
So muster up your courage, my friends, to find the place in God’s reign where you belong, where you are needed, where you can contribute. And there you will find Rahab, a prostitute, a poor woman, one whom the rest of the community was willing to overlook. And she will be there cheering you on, handing you a red cord, and giving you courage to help someone else.

May it be for you.

Amen.

Women in the Bible: Mary Magdalene, the Faithful

2009-07-04T23:38:00.000-04:00

John 20: 1-18

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. 2So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’ 3Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went towards the tomb. 4The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. 6Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. 8Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10Then the disciples returned to their homes.

11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; 12and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. 13They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ 14When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ 16Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher). 17Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” ’ 18Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

Poor Mary Magdalene.

I suspect she spent most of her life wondering: what would it have been like to be one of the 12? Obviously in those days it wouldn’t have been possible or even proper for her to have been one of the guys, and she certainly did not make it into the lists of Jesus’ disciples given in all 4 of our gospels. But she is mentioned as a companion of Jesus in Luke’s gospel, after the twelve, of course, and along with 2 other women from whom Jesus had cast our evil spirits or demons—not a very impressive introduction to this woman who would become the very first person to whom the risen Christ would reveal himself.

The church has perpetrated Mary Magdalene for centuries as a prostitute, linking her with the story in John 7 and 8 of the woman caught in the act of adultery, but that woman is never named. The references in the gospels to Jesus casting seven demons out of Mary Magdalene is another reason that ancient scholars and church officials tried to make a sexual sinner out of Mary. But Mary’s friends and admirers through out the ages of church history have kept the faith and now found no proof that she ever sold herself or was caught in any kind of inappropriate act that would deem her deserving of such a derogatory identification. So, rather than speculate on what we don’t know for sure about her, let’s talk about what we do know.

Mary was from the town of Magdala. It was a small place on the Western shore of the Sea of Galilee. So, you could say she was a hometown girl. Most of the other disciples were found at Galilee’s shore; so was she, apparently. Most of the other guys were just regular guys, fishing and making a living. Then they were called and they followed. We don’t know how Mary became a part of the group, but we know she was faithful.

Do you remember that it was Mary who was at the cross with the other women? We have accounts in the gospels of the events that took place surrounding Jesus’ death: Judas turning Jesus in for money, Peter denying that he knew him, and no record whatsoever of the 12 being present with Jesus in the last hours of his life except for John, the one to whom Jesus gave his mother. But there is Mary—standing, praying, weeping, experiencing the death of one whose life had transformed her own. For a long time she had been witness to his teaching, his healing, his forgiving, his very life. We suspect that the women were the ones taking care of the needs of Jesus and the 12 as they traveled. Mary had been supporting the ministry of Jesus for some time, and she wasn’t about to give that up now.

It’s almost like she knew that something extraordinary was going on. She was faithful to Jesus to the very end and beyond. When the disciples were nowhere to be found at the cross, she was there. When they were hiding behind closed doors, she was scurrying to the tomb early in the morning on the third day to be sure that Jesus’ body was properly prepared for death since he had died so close to the Sabbath day. When the ones she called to come and see the tomb ran away, she stayed around, unsure of what was happening but I imagine with some sense that there was more to be experienced there than the emptiness of the place where they had buried her Lord. She was faithful; she was there.

There were a million reasons for her not to be there. She was, after all, a girl. Being considered of delicate existence and second-class citizenship, women were not to be part of the team. They could cook for the team, but they would not play a role in helping the team do their work. I suspect she might have been a little aggressive since she actually did make it into the gospels—all 4!—and was the one that was sent to tell the others that Jesus had risen from the tomb and overcome death. And while we’re on the subject, Peter and the beloved disciple came to the tomb, saw that Jesus wasn’t there, and went back home. We are not told that they looked for Jesus, that they stopped off anywhere to tell anyone what they had seen. Mary is the one given the charge by Jesus to go and tell the guys what has happened. Mary is the first witness to encounter the risen Christ.

That is quite an honor.

I have to wonder what that conversation was like. We know what she said: “I have seen the Lord.” What we know as we read further in John 20 is that when Jesus appeared to the disciples, they were huddled together behind closed doors “for fear of the Jews.” And when they saw him and heard him, they rejoiced. What did they do when Mary appeared and told them what she had seen? Perhaps we should let Thomas off the proverbial doubting hook since apparently his brothers also came to believe the risen Christ when they saw him. I would love to have been a fly on the inside of the closed up room when Mary gave the password, came in, and told them what she saw.

Throughout her own life and throughout her life as a revered and sometimes reviled figure in the history of our faith, Mary Magdalene has been questioned about her faith. Was she a prostitute? Was she married to Jesus? What effect did the demons who possessed her have on her life? We have questioned her and questioned her, seemingly trying to beat the faithfulness out of her and get at the real reason why she always seemed to be around wherever Jesus was. We have put obstacles between her and our acknowledgement of her as a true disciple of Jesus, and we have missed until the recent past what I believe is the real story of Mary Magdalene: she was faithful. She attended to the needs of Jesus and the disciples as they traveled around offering the love of God in every place they went. She attended to the pain and suffering of Jesus as he stood up to the trials and tests of his spirit and his very life when he was crucified. And she got up early to get to his tomb as soon as she could so that his body would not have to go a moment longer than required in respect of the Sabbath without a proper burial. She even stayed around at the tomb, wondering what to do next when he was no where to be found and the others, having seen for themselves that he was not buried where he had once been, went home. She was there; she was faithful.

Mary probably didn’t have an easy life. None of us do who decide to follow Jesus and attend to his ministry in the world. But she never stopped being faithful to him. Even through the ages of our questioning of her character, she has remained faithful. She was a disciple of Jesus. She followed in the path of his ministry. She told his story. Even when she wasn’t sure what she was experiencing, she knew it was of God, and she gathered other people around it so that they could know God’s action, too. She was there; she was faithful.

These days the church doesn’t ask a lot of us. We are happy to be able to report good numbers in worship attendance and a month or two of operating in the financial black. And while these are good things that do indicate the level of health of the church, faithfulness is so much more than that. For us it is often measured in numbers. One of the problems I have at Annual Conference every year is that I over hear my clergy brothers and sisters greeting each other in the name of 150 or 200 people in worship, a $1,000,000 new building, or a great big ministry staff instead of offering to each other their own versions of Mary’s greeting to the disciples: “I have seen the Lord.” How our lives might be transformed if we chose to look upon our faithfulness to the church in ways that would measure how we are sharing Mary’s testimony with the world in our parish: “I have seen him, and it has changed my life.”

There are obstacles between us and our faithfulness. Summer Sunday mornings, when life seems to be more calm and relaxed, often call us to read the paper, sit on the porch, or go to brunch instead of coming to hear the Word of God and experience the support and encouragement of the gathered body of Christ. Our busy jobs and family lives pull us away from finding ways to serve the community, especially here in Grant Park where not everyone lives the kind of lives that we live with enough to eat, wear, and entertain ourselves. Our questions about things that the institution of the church does and doesn’t do sometimes separate us from the ministry of the gospel that is before us everywhere we look:
• in the lives of children who need something constructive to do during the summer or who need to know that someone cares about them year round,
• in the lives of senior adults who are wasting away in loneliness and who need to know that there are places where they can reach out to and be reached by other people who want to love them,
• at the “other schools” to which we don’t want to send our children but to which somebody’s kids have to go and whose students need a little extra help in tutoring or in mentoring.

There are obstacles to faithfulness, but our sister Mary did not heed those obstacles. Instead, her faithfulness gave her the gift of being the first to encounter the risen Christ and being the first to get to tell the good news.

What will your faithfulness bring to your life? Are there obstacles standing in the way of you living out your faith the way Jesus is calling you to do? Are there things that keep you from participating in the body of Christ and cause your faith to be shaken from time to time? Are there ways that you would like to practice your faith but you are afraid to do so? Let Mary be inspiration for you, for in a time when women were to be seen and not heard, she was the first to say “I have seen the Lord.” And in a time when women were to take their place in the back of the crowd, she was up front and center at the foot of the cross when others had found it too difficult to be there. And in time when women were mostly used to create a comfortable environment, she became a force to be reckoned with throughout the ages that would come after her, threatening the status quo with every century that passed.

And she was a girl.

Imagine all the things that your faithfulness could bring into being.

Disciples Got Talent, Part 2

2009-06-27T23:42:00.000-04:00

Mark 8: 27-33

Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that I am?’ And they answered him, ‘John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.’ He asked them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter answered him, ‘You are the Messiah.’ And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’

One of the things that I am really enjoying about this summer at St Paul is the combined Adult Sunday school class that Mark Crenshaw and I are leading together. “Our Faithful Neighbors” has been, so far, a wonderful exercise in thinking and talking about what other faiths believe and how that impacts us as Christians. Having been a student of the religions of the world for many years, I am enjoying the conversation about what we know, what we don’t know, and what we’d like to learn about our brothers and sisters of other faiths as well as other sects within Christianity. Much of what we are discussing and doing together is about forming our perspective and reflecting on our own faith in new and deeply formative ways. It really is fascinating to hear the stories of others, both in the class and from other faiths, and it really is helpful to hear about how other faithful people and groups see the world and respond to life.

Jesus chose 12 disciples. From their eyes came 12 different perspectives on him and his life and ministry. So this question about who people say that he is and who they say that he is is a very important one. I just think it is too bad that we don’t have a response from every one of them. Wouldn’t it have been fun to have a response of some sort from all of them? I think that hearing their answers to this question might have given us a little more insight into who they were.

One of the most popular answers to the sermon topic survey was the desire to know more about the disciples. Here are some things we know according the legend and the gospels themselves:

• Andrew was Peter’s brother. In John, Andrew brings Peter to Jesus, declaring him the Messiah. He also brought the boy with the 5 loaves and 2 fish to Jesus for the feeing of the 5,000.
• Philip was always bringing people to Jesus: he recruited Nathaniel. He was, however, skeptical that they would be able to feed 5,000 people. He is the one who asks Jesus to show them the Father, and Jesus responds by asking him how he could have been with Jesus all this time and not realize that he is one with the Father? He was from the same town as Peter and Andrew.
• Nathaniel/Bartholomew was skeptical that anything “good” could come out of Nazareth but was converted when Jesus told him he knew him before they ever met. He was one of the ones gathered at the seashore when Jesus appeared to them a third time after his resurrection and ate breakfast with them.
• John was believed to be the beloved disciple. He was probably the one who followed the crown taking Jesus to the high priest when he was arrested in the garden, and since the high priest knew him, he was allowed to go into the courtyard with Jesus while Peter had to wait at the gate. This is likely the only disciple mentioned as present at the cross, the one to whom Jesus “gave” his mother. He is probably the one summoned to the empty tomb by Mary Magdalene, the one who went in and saw that the body was gone and then believed. He sat next to Jesus at the last supper and asked who it was that would betray Jesus. Early in the book of Acts, he was brought with Peter before the Temple authorities because of their preaching. He gets to go to experience the transfiguration with Peter and James. He also goes with them to the garden to pray with Jesus but falls asleep while waiting for Jesus. His mother asks for seats for him and his brother James next to Jesus in heaven.
• Thomas is often called a doubter because he couldn’t believe the account of the risen Christ when the other disciples told him they’d seen him after the crucifixion until he had seen Jesus for himself. He said that they should all go with Jesus to the tomb of Lazarus so that they could “die with him.” He was also one of the ones who saw Jesus and ate breakfast with him by the shore on his third appearance to the disciples after the crucifixion. He also asks Jesus how they will know where Jesus is going and how they will know how to get there when Jesus talks of going to the Father in John 14.
• Judas Iscariot ...the treasurer of the group, sold Jesus for 30 pieces of silver and then was sorry for what he had done and gave the money back; then he took his own life.
• Matthew/Levi was a Tax Collector. He gave a great banquet for Jesus in his home. Others asked why Jesus would call a tax collector (probably a thief) to be his disciples. This is when Jesus announces that he has not come for the righteous but for the sinner.
• James, the brother of John, was one of the Sons of Thunder, as called by Jesus. It was his mother who asked for places for him and John next to Jesus in heaven. Jesus asks them if they can “drink the cup he is to drink,” and they say yes. He also attended Jesus at the transfiguration, in the garden where he and the other slept while Jesus prayed in agony, and at the seashore where the risen Jesus appeared and shared breakfast with them.
• James, son of Alphaeus
• Thaddeus/Judas, son of James
• Simon the Cananaean/the Zealot
• Peter was first called Simon. His name is changed in our lesson for today, when he responds that Jesus is the Messiah. Then he challenges Jesus’ prediction that he will have to die, and Jesus rebukes Peter. He is also called the Rock upon which Jesus will build the church and the one to receive the keys to the kingdom of God. He also calls Jesus the Holy One of God when Jesus gives a difficult teaching about riches and getting into heaven and many other disciples leave. He was called while at work as a fisherman. Peter’s mother-in-law was healed from a fever early on in his ministry, so we know he was married. He asks Jesus how many times he should forgive someone in the church who wrongs him. He asks Jesus what will happen to the disciples who have left everything behind to follow him. Jesus commands Peter to get out of the boat and walk to him on the water, and he does at first but then begins to sink. He is in the small groups that go with Jesus to the transfiguration, go with Jesus to pray in the garden, go to the temple court with Jesus after he is arrested, and this is where he denies Jesus 3 times. At the last supper, when Jesus begins to wash their feet, it is Peter who protests but eventually asks for all of him to we washed by Jesus. In the garden when the soldiers come to arrest Jesus, Peter pulls out his sword and tries to defend Jesus. Peter is summoned to come and see the empty tomb. At Jesus’ appearance at the seashore where they share breakfast with him post-resurrection, Peter is asked 3 times if he loves Jesus and then told to care for his followers. He is a great preacher in the book of Acts and is brought before Temple authorities because of his preaching after the ascension of Jesus.

They all go through periods of unbelief and misunderstanding. While they believe what Jesus tells them about his going to be with God and they come to the conclusion that he is truly of God and the son of God, they also at times are confused by his parables about the way God intends for the world to be. They wonder who can be saved when he tells them how difficult it is for a rich person to get into the kingdom of heaven. They are all on the boat together when a storm comes up and they fear that they will die as the boat is tossed on the water. Jesus questions their lack of faith when they call on him to save them, and they wonder who he could really be when he is able to calm the water. They ask him questions, like who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, and when will he return and restore the kingdom of God. Jesus tells them that they will all be persecuted, too, as he will be. They do things that ignore Sabbath policy, like plucking the heads off grains of wheat as they pass the field during the travels and do not wash their hands before a meal. Yet, they complain when the woman uses expensive ointment on Jesus in preparation for his burial, saying it should have been sold and the money given to the poor. At the last supper they promise never to desert him when he says they will, but only 1 is recorded to have shown up at the cross, and they hide when he has been crucified for fear of the same fate coming to them. Matthew even tells us that after his resurrection the disciple meet Jesus where he had told them he’d be, and they worship him, but some doubted.
Who were these men, this band of 12 people who were hand-picked to be Jesus’ closest companions?
What I wonder is how much more we might have known about them had we heard the answer they each had for the question Jesus asks in today’s reading: who do you say that I am?

Perhaps Phillip would have said that Jesus was one who should be known as the Son of God since he brought people to Jesus. And maybe Andrew would have said that Jesus is the Son of God because he is able to do things only God can do, like multiply loaves and fish into a feast for 5,000. Nathaniel or Bartholomew might have called Jesus Messiah because he knew him the way only God could know him—completely and before they had ever come face-to-face. John might have called Jesus Messiah because he demonstrates the love of God in a perfect way. And Thomas might have said that he’d need some kind of proof before he could answer the question. Judas and Matthew might have framed the question in terms of what they stood to gain by answering—Judas might finally have the answers he, himself, needed so desperately, and Matthew might have wondered what wealth and power being with the Messiah might bring. James, son of Zebedee, might have just offered whatever his brother had to say, and we just really can’t have a clue as to what the other James, Thaddeus, or Simon the Zealot might have said.

But we know what Peter said: “You are the Messiah,” and then he denied him.

The question, my friends, is not who do they say that he is. It is this: who do you say that Jesus is?

Because of Jesus, we know by tradition that these men who were his chosen band of brothers all went to untimely and brutal deaths. Because they were ultimately committed to the ministry and message of Jesus, they all died at the hands of someone who wanted to put down the movement. That says that they believed what he said, what he did, who he was, and who they were because of him. They believed; their lives spoke the truth about Jesus; they were his witnesses just as he asked them to be.

What we know about these disciples, besides the sparse details we can gather by reading the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, was that they believed in Jesus and they loved Jesus and they gave their lives so that his message of love, forgiveness, and the coming of God into the world would not die. The disciples of Jesus are our brothers, our companions in faith. They are us.

And so today, they pass the torch, and we must stand ready to receive it. It is a simple entrance exam into this band of followers who continue to preach the good news of love, the forgiveness of sin, and the healing of brokenness that comes to us through Jesus as a gift from God. It is only one question, and your life will speak your answer. Are you ready to receive this call, this invitation to a transformed life?

Who do you say that he is?

Disciples Got Talent, Part 1

2009-06-20T22:52:00.000-04:00

Mark 3: 13-19a; 6: 7-13
Jesus Appoints the Twelve
13 He went up the mountain and called to him those whom he wanted, and they came to him. 14And he appointed twelve, whom he also named apostles, to be with him, and to be sent out to proclaim the message, 15and to have authority to cast out demons. 16So he appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter); 17James son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder); 18and Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Cananaean, 19and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

7He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. 8He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; 9but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics. 10He said to them, ‘Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. 11If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.’ 12So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. 13They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.

Just in case you haven’t yet set your DVRs or TiVos, you still have 2 days before the beginning of NBC’s smash summer hit, “America’s Got Talent.” I’ve never actually seen a full episode of this show, and I don’t know whether I’m proud of that or embarrassed by it. But I don’t live completely under a rock; I have seen that clip from “Britain’s Got Talent”—you know the one I’m talking about because you’ve all seen it, too: the one where an ordinary looking Scottish woman takes the stage and the judges and audience are practically laughing her off until she begins to sing “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical Les Miserables. Susan Boyle is now an international sensation with her own recording contract, and I suspect that this is not the first sermon that has mentioned her. Newspaper articles, internet news stories, network and cable news shows alike have been reporting on her for a while, although now that she has had what some might call a “break down”, the news seems to have slowed about Ms. Boyle, along with the apparent interest of the world. We just can’t commit to someone who is not in the news every day.

But here is something I have learned upon investigating her story a little more closely: the music industry is changing.

I read an article comparing Susan Boyle to U2 soley because they now share a business manager. While it is an obvious stretch to compare the 2 musical acts, there is a contrast that is easily pointed out between them and their respective rise to fame. U2 is a band who became famous along what Ben Quinn of the Christian Science Monitor calls the traditional route: “the culmination of years of gigs and creeping critical acclaim.” There seems to be a new way to rise to the top of the music game now and rather quickly, at that. Just find your way on to some unscripted television talent show, and you could be the next Kelly Clarskson. When I was a kid, it was called “Star Search”, but it was not the way Michael Jackson became famous. That was a lifetime of work coupled with a famous family, and a pretty big price to pay for becoming a household name.

Now rewind history about two thousand years. Imagine a live show called Galilee’s Got Talent, and the judge is a locally known teacher and healer named Jesus. He’s got twelve open spots, and he’s ready to take auditions. Those in line for the job are people that are basically unknown, whose talent has only ever been seen or discerned by their family and maybe some friends. But mostly they fish. Their days are taken up with the ones they catch and the ones that get away. But this risk they take on this locally known teacher and healer will put them on the fast track to fame. Twelve unknown, regular guys are taking the world’s stage, not realize that overnight they will be asked to live very different lives and will be remembered, literally, forever. Relative nobodies yesterday; Disciples Got Talent today. No years of gigs, no creeping critical acclaim. Come to think of it, no critical acclaim to speak of for a long time and absolutely no gigs prior to this day by the sea when Jesus calls.

Here’s what we know about the twelve disciples:
• There were 12 of them, as named in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and kind of in John chapter 6.
• Most of them were fisherman; Matthew was a tax collector.
• Judas was the betrayer.
• Peter was a hothead.
• All of them were a little chicken—afraid of the things that happened to them when they were with Jesus.
• They were a little confused by all the talking Jesus did about what would come to pass—his death and resurrection.
• Basically, they often just didn’t get it.
• Oh, and we know that Jesus called James son of Zebedee and John the brother of James “Sons of Thunder,” but we don’t know why.

We know why Bono and U2 are famous.

When Susan Boyle opened her mouth to sing on British television that first time, we figured out why she’d be famous.

But these guys, they were just ordinary Simons and Johns and James—nothing particularly special, not working toward becoming famous teachers and healers, not planning on being the seed of an entirely new religious movement that would last for centuries into a time when people drove cars to the local house of God and updated their tweets on Twitter and had them forwarded to Facebook if they were really smart, when email was a thing of the past. But Jesus saw something in them, and their lives were instantly changed forever.

Sadly, though, they weren’t offered recording contracts or concert tours. They weren’t even offered tenure-track teaching jobs or a lecture circuit. They weren’t given their own reality shows about what its like to be a Disciple. They weren’t even sent out with provisions for their journey. But he did tell them to heal and to teach. He told them to offer themselves and to receive the hospitality of others as long as it was offered. He told them not to fret failure or the absence of success but to keep at it.

So we can add one thing to the list of stuff we know about the disciples: they had perseverance.

Would you try out for this show? Reality television is now called “unscripted.” Would you try out for the chance to be the next Disciple, one who is called on to leave your notions of life behind and try on a different kind of life for a time? If Jesus were offering you the contract today, would you sign? If your name were being called, and you were asked to go taking only a few things, not even all the things you might need, would you walk out on the stage and open your heart to whatever it was that Jesus had to say to you?

You may be asked to go to those members of our community in Grant Park who never enter our doors because there is too great a chasm between their life situations and ours. You may be asked to step outside the zone in which you are comfortable and do something here that you’ve never done before and never thought you could, like teach children or be an important presence in the life of youth. You may be called to examine your life, what you really need, what you can give to the church—probably more than you think you can spare. You may be asked to pray for or even go to Iran where people are being killed in their homes because they chose to protest the recent election results in Tehran. You may be asked to look at the world differently, telling the story of your faith by making different choices about the way you live, where you live, the kind of car you drive, the way you treat the environmental backdrop around you, the way you spend your money. You may be the next contestant on Disciples Got Talent.

If Jesus showed up in your life today and simply said, “Follow me,” would you go? Maybe that has already happened, and you don’t know what to do next. Maybe you know what you’re being called to do, and you don’t want to do it. Maybe you don’t know how to start. Maybe you are afraid. Whatever your situation, this is the time and place for you to take up your staff, leave the baggage behind, and begin to follow where Christ leads. If you need help, stay here for a while and learn how you can grow into God’s vision for your life. But when it is time to get moving, get moving. Sing your hit song. Play that big gig. Say yes to Jesus.

It’s fun to picture the twelve disciples coming across a stage of sorts by the sea, with Jesus sitting at a table and 2 big cue cards on the table in front of him face down: one with a huge X on it, and one with a huge check mark on it. With absolutely no credentials, tour under their belts, or critical acclaim, they got the check mark, the big “Yes.” And so they went, and their lives were changed. And because of them, so were ours.

Jesus calls you and waits with a giant check mark to show you as you enter the stage of Christian faith and service. You’ve got talent, friends, God-given talent that God waits to use in you when you say yes to God. Are you the next star in the story of Jesus?

Are you a Disciple?

Burned by the Word: Isaiah, and how Sometimes it Hurts to be a Christian

2009-06-13T21:57:00.000-04:00

Isaiah 6:1-13

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke.

And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”

My daughter, Joy, is on the cusp of being able to get into things that could hurt her. A few weeks ago she figured out how to roll over, and now her favorite thing to do is roll all over our living room floor. She can quickly make it across the room, so there is no leaving her for a flash to run into the kitchen and grab a drink of water. There is no putting her down to answer the phone in another room. There is no leaving her just long enough to go to the rest room on the other side of the wall. She’s mobile; therefore, she’s dangerous. Sure, it is exciting to see her learning all kinds of new ways to explore the world around her, but I can hardly stand to think about the kind of accidents she could get into and really hurt herself. I would love to spare her of any pain at all, if only I could figure out how to avoid the situations her life will surely encounter that will be difficult and painful.

I know as well as you do, however, that this is not possible. Joy will grow and learn and experiment and explore, and she will come home with broken skin, perhaps bones, and from time to time, a broken heart. To keep her from feeling pain would be to keep her from experiencing life as she was created to experience it. It would keep her from living her life at full stretch, the way God intends for her to live.

We feel this for ourselves, too. We do not like to experience pain or suffering. We want life to be easy. We want to live the joys and happinesses of life and avoid the pain and sorrows at just about all costs. Consider our brother Isaiah, whose story we receive today. The king of Judah named Uzziah had reigned for 41 years. During that time Judah had grown in land and prosperity. It had lived peaceably with its neighbor to the north, Israel. They had formerly been a unified nation, but throughout their history as 2 separate nations, Uzziah’s reign represented a time of peace between the 2 kingdoms. But on the horizon was the rise of Assyria who would, in just a few years time, who would cause the fall of Samaria in Israel and Jerusalem in Judah and the destruction of the temple. The people of God had come to enjoy a kind of domesticated Hebrew life, even a kind of domesticated God who seemed to be always on their side and supporting their prosperity and growing dominance over others.

Then, God called Isaiah, and everything changed.

Knowing he was from a people who had displeased God, Isaiah immediately freaked out when God called and began pleading with God not to put him on the spot. To say he was a man of unclean lips was to say that he was from a people who were not faithful to God in their practice. They did not refer to God with proper reverence in worship. Their words were likely empty praise, giving thanks to God for life all the while believing that it was their own hands which had brought them prosperity. I even imagine them gathering to hear the Word of the Lord read in worship, to pray the psalms, and then to go away from the temple patting themselves on the back and getting back to the work of expanding the kingdom and bringing wealth to the land. They likely were not interested in what brother Isaiah had to say.

The kind of transformation Isaiah and the people of Judah faced was one that would change their world of power and prosperity to one of crisis and subservience to another nation. The wealth they had built for themselves would disappear before their eyes. They would watch their nation crumble to the power of another, and they would be distraught—wondering what happened and how they would get out of it. Would they ever see economic prosperity again? Would they ever have religious independence again? Isaiah was being called to a very difficult job: to bring hope to a people who would find themselves drowning in a sea of hopelessness. It was a huge job. It was probably meant for someone who was really prepared, had studied for it, was someone that people would listen to.

God called Isaiah.

God called a man who was afraid of the job. God called a man who had no idea how to respond to the presence and voice of God. God called a man who was not only not worthy of the job but also, and probably more importantly, not ready for the job. Isaiah was none of the above, at least in his own opinion. But God fixed that. The seraph was the member of God’s court in charge of healing. So the pain that Isaiah experienced was actually pain that helped him to heal that in his life which held him back from being able to say yes to God. The vision of God in the holy temple tears Isaiah apart; he is made painfully aware of his shortcomings and inadequacies. He calls himself out as being of “unclean lips,” and a seraph places a hot coal to his lips. But this is ultimately a healing action, and God’s call in his life is not just to get his own self and life straightened out but also to do all he can to help straighten out the broken, hurting world in which he lives.

The rest of Isaiah’s story and legacy is his engagement on God’s behalf of what is wrong in the world by imposing a vision of what is right. God’s vision for the world is still alive and could be close at hand if Isaiah can help turn the hearts of the people. It is a hard job; nobody wants to change, especially when things seem to be going so well with or without God. Why would the people of Judah want to listen to Isaiah when they are living in a period of prosperity and cannot see the devastation coming on the horizon? It was hard work for Isaiah; painful work. And it was the call of God upon Isaiah’s life.

Much of what we are called to do as Christians is hard work. And sometimes we have to go through our own kind of hot coals on the lips to be truly ready to be a follower of God in Christ. Isaiah is an example of someone who declared himself unready, unworthy, and the last one on earth God should call. Yet, without his career as a prophet, where would the people of God be today? Without the example he set of speaking truth to power and hope to hopelessness, where would the people of God be now? Because of Isaiah, we have a tradition of hoping for things that seem impossible which prepared us for the story of Jesus: his life, death, and resurrection. It was the story of Isaiah that echoed when Mary Magdalene came to the empty tomb and believed what she saw there.

And it was those hot coals that made it possible. It was the coals—the pain of being called and transformed for a life of service to God that touches even our generation of faith and give us courage to say yes to God’s call in our lives. And God is still calling.

God calls us to stand up for repentance, for change. We need to participate in the prophecy of the Word of God in this time and this place. Where are the places we see injustice? Where are the walls that need to be torn down, the words of hope that need to be spoken, the hubris that needs to be checked so that God’s word of salvation and hope can be heard and believed and lived out in our lives?

Before he could truly live into God’s purpose for his life, Isaiah had to experience pain and accept the humility with which one must respond to God’s call. How has your life as a Christian been painful? Can you relate to the story of Isaiah—a story of calling of a very ordinary person with some skeletons lurking in the proverbial closet?

Is God calling you to something hard, something big, something painful, for which you don’t think you are ready? God’s vision of restoration is still at work in the world, and to make a God-sized vision come true, God still needs Isaiahs, people of unclean lips, of prideful nations, who will say yes to the painful and glorious work of the transformation of the world. You see, these people, these ancestors, these brothers and sisters of ours are not far away, fanciful characters of the past. They are you and me. I am Isaiah, and Isaiah is you. We are called to speak truth when no one wants to hear it; to be faithful to the word of God and the hope that the world can and will change, and that we are an important part of making that change a reality. We are today’s prophetic voices; we are the ones sharing the hope of Christ with the world—the world that is hurting because of occupation, economic hardship and injustice, hatred and violence, and isolation from God.

But friends, we believe that things can change or we wouldn’t be here today. We believe Isaiahs are still out there spreading the message of God, and some of us are those Isaiahs. Our dear brother of long ago simply said yes. He didn’t know what God would ultimately ask of him, but he said yes anyway. In retrospect, it was probably the easiest decision of his life, the one he worked the hardest to fulfill. It wasn’t easy. It caused him pain, and probably the loss of some friends, family, and in the short run, respect. But because of Isaiah, the unworthy and unready, the story of Christ has been heard, accepted, lived, and passed on for generations. The faithful members of the Civil Rights Movement in this country, Archbishop Desmund Tutu and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, and the many, many faithful fighting hard against discrimination directed legally, theologically, and personally against members of the LGBTQ community are the Isaiahs that God continues to call.

And we gather here today waiting for the next word from God.

Whom will the Lord send? Who are the Isaiahs here today? Who will go into the world with the good news of hope and God’s grace? Will it be you?

Eating the Bible

2009-06-13T21:55:00.000-04:00

Ezekiel 3:1-11

He said to me, O mortal, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel. So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat. He said to me, Mortal, eat this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it. Then I ate it; and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey.

He said to me: Mortal, go to the house of Israel and speak my very words to them. For you are not sent to a people of obscure speech and difficult language, but to the house of Israel— not to many peoples of obscure speech and difficult language, whose words you cannot understand. Surely, if I sent you to them, they would listen to you. But the house of Israel will not listen to you, for they are not willing to listen to me; because all the house of Israel have a hard forehead and a stubborn heart. See, I have made your face hard against their faces, and your forehead hard against their foreheads. Like the hardest stone, harder than flint, I have made your forehead; do not fear them or be dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house. He said to me: Mortal, all my words that I shall speak to you receive in your heart and hear with your ears; then go to the exiles, to your people, and speak to them. Say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God’; whether they hear or refuse to hear.

Several years ago I saw a new product that REALLY got my attention. I try not to fall victim to marketing campaigns, but I couldn’t believe this one. It was a little package of mints, like LifeSavers, except these were square. There was a picture of one of them on the outside of the package, and I noticed it had a cross on it. The wrapper had the phrase, “Pass the Word!” written on it. I cracked up there in the store! I had never seen, heard, or even thought of anything like this. You may have heard of them; they are called “Testamints”. When you buy a bag of the things, each one is wrapped in scripture. They are an easy way to get the Word of God out there in the hands of all kinds of people—maybe even people who don’t know anything about the Word of God. Now, it is not my intention to be flippant about the Testamints, although I suspect there may be other and better ways to teach people the Word of God than by printing it on the wrappers of mints.

When I was in the third grade, we moved to a new city and a new church. The first Sunday we were there, my mom and dad helped me find my Sunday school class which was Mrs. Lang’s class. It was for 3rd – 5th graders, and there were about 8 of us in that class. I loved Mrs. Lang; all I really remember about her was that she was always there, she was sweet, and I loved her a whole lot. She was the first teacher I ever had who made me memorize scripture, and I’m pretty sure she was also the last. Mine to remember was the parable of the lost sheep. I’m not sure we were actually supposed to memorize it word by word as much as we were supposed to learn it. I was so embarrassed when I couldn’t remember the whole thing! The only other thing we’d had to learn in Sunday school was the Lord’s Prayer, and since we said that in church every week, that wasn’t so hard to remember. But the parable of the lost sheep has a few more details that you might remember—at least for a 3rd grader it did. Luckily, Mrs. Lang gave me another chance to learn the story. I suspect she would have given me a hundred more chances to get it right.

The very first lesson of Disciple I Bible study involves an exercise in which the participants in the class talk about the first Bible they ever received. Where did it come from? What do you remember about it? The first one I ever remember receiving was quite large. I think it must have been printed on paper that was at least 11 x 17 inches, because it was almost hard to carry it. It was the one that kids at my church received when we finished third grade. It had pictures and was written in English that was supposed to be a little easier to understand. And it had a blue cover. I still have it at home, and one day I’ll show it to Joy when she is big enough not to eat the pages or rip them out.

Do you remember your first encounter with the Word of God?

Part of my intent in designing summer messages that introduced us to some of the characters in the Bible was to help us understand and think about the fact that the people described in the Bible were real, flesh and blood children of God just like you and I are, and they were called for a purpose just like you and I are, and their “Yes,” to God took their lives on some pretty amazing and interesting paths, just like yours and mine do—although we are hesitant to think of ourselves on equal playing ground with the characters of the Old and New Testaments, aren’t we? We tend to place the people in the bible on a kind of supernatural pedestal and assume that they were a little larger than life and somehow a little closer to God than we are today. The truth is that they are us, and we are them. Last week we talked about our brother Isaiah and his call to speak the word of God to people who had grown convinced that they really didn’t need God anymore. He brought words not only of conviction but also of hope to the people of God. And today Ezekiel: our brother, the prophet, who saw great visions of God, gave life to dry bones, and brought the Word of God to God’s people when they were in exile in Babylon.

So, as for relating your life to Ezekiel’s, I wouldn’t start with the first chapter. There you will find his vision of human beings with 4 faces, a great chariot, something described as a wheel within a wheel, and an incredible throne. He was, after all, a priest, and you know that we come up with some crazy things from time to time. We talk about things that no one else talks about; we tend to be a little nerdy about the Bible and God stuff; we even use words like justification and sanctification, and we know that people stare at us, befuddled. But one of the things that draws me into the story of Ezekiel is his willingness to embrace the vision of God, outrageous as it is.

We enter his story as the inaugural vision seems to be winding down: God has approached Ezekiel and has begun to give him his assignment. ‘Speak to your people, who are stubborn and won’t hear you, and tell them that I am God and that bad times are coming.’ Ezekiel got the fun job.

In the verses immediately preceding chapter 3, we find out that the scroll Ezekiel is invited to eat has words written all over it—on the front and the back—and the words were words of lamentation, mourning, and woe. These were the words that Ezekiel had to swallow, take into his being, and then share with others—whether they wanted to hear it or not. And the scroll was sweet in his mouth; the Word of God was very pleasing to his mouth.

And then came the instruction: go to your own people, people you know, people who know you, and speak the words of lamentation, mourning, and woe to them. You won’t even have to learn a new language or new people. God has such high hopes for Ezekiel: “Surely, if I send you to them they will listen to you,” God says in verse 6. Ezekiel was a priest who was asked to eat scripture and then sent to the people of his community to tell them that they were in trouble with God. Sounds just like us, doesn’t it?

We are not priests. Well, except for Laura and me, the rest of us here are members of the congregation. We do not actually eat the Bible. Who needs to eat paper or even vegetables when we have a range of tasty fiber bars to choose from these days? And I doubt that any of you will leave here today and go walking down your street telling all your neighbors how disappointing their lives are to God. Ezekiel, our brother?

But it’s the way he did it! Ezekiel likely had spent his childhood in the Temple, gathering with other children to hear the Word of God from the Torah and its interpretation from the priests. He had been trained in the story and proper worship of God. He had heard the stories of other people and their experiences with God while contemplating his own. And then this happened!

What God wanted for Ezekiel was that he would take God’s Word not just into his mind but into his whole heart, soul, and mind. God wanted the Word to be Ezekiel’s essential being. It is one thing to know what holy scripture says; it is quite another to live it out in your life. For generations, the people of God had relied upon simply knowing what the Torah said: about God and God’s power, God’s love for God’s people, and God’s mercy and forgiveness for people who rebel. But they had lost the ability to live in that knowledge. They relied upon their own power and the power of Babylon to provide a comfortable, entertaining life. And God knew that words would not necessarily win them over. It would take much more: it would take faithfulness, vision, and keeping the Word of God close in your heart, your soul, your mind—your very being.

Then the Word of God would just eminate from you. It would pour out of your life, out of everything you did. It would turn you all into priests, the kind who live sermons with your lives and only use words when it is absolutely necessary. You wouldn’t have to tell your neighbors how sinful they are; you would tell the church how much it needs to change by opening yourself to others in ways the church doesn’t yet.. You wouldn’t have to remind anyone to love others; you would enjoy watching them respond to your good example. You would not have to convince people that forgiveness is the way to go—holding grudges would be a thing of the past. Have you ever considered the influence of your behavior on the people around you?

Our brother Ezekiel reminds us of the fact that having a relationship with God requires more of us than reading the words on the page. Having God in your life is having God IN your life. It is telling the world about the selfless love of Christ with your life and how you give of yourself expecting nothing in return but love to be given freely. It is taking God’s Word into your very being and letting it live and grow there for others to see—a witness far more meaningful than words on a mint wrapper.

What are the things you know by heart? Is the story of God’s love for the world in Jesus Christ one of those things? Does your life speak the sweet Word of God? If you need a little help, I bet we have a scroll or 2 around here that you could snack on for a while. Thank you, brother Ezekiel, for your strange visions, for saying, “Yes,” to God, and for reminding us that its not about how many verses we memorize but how much our lives reflect God to all to whom you send us.

It truly is the Word of God—honey, lamentation, and all—for the people of God.

Thanks be to God!

Pentecost 2009

2009-05-31T01:39:00.000-04:00

Romans 8:22-27
We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

On my count of 3, take a deep breath and hold it in for 3 seconds; then let it out slowly in the form of a sigh.

Again, on my count of 3, take in a deeper breath and hold it for 3 seconds; then let it out slowly in the form of a deeper sigh.

And a third time, on my count of 3, take in an even deeper breath and hold it for 3 seconds; then let it out slowly in the form of an even deeper sigh.

Now, are we all ready for our mid-morning nap? Do you feel calmer than you did 5 minutes ago? Is your mind clear? Are you more aware of what and who surrounds you, both what you can see and what you can sense?

Many Sundays when you arrive here, I have prepared for you what I hope is a sermon that makes you think about something a little differently than you had before or, perhaps, about something you’ve never before considered. Sometimes I feel a prophetic sort of call to share with you a word from God about how we should be living our faithful lives. Today, however, I’d like to share a pastoral word with you on loan from the apostle Paul.

It’s the end of spring and the beginning of summer. I don’t care what the calendar tells us; the first day of June is the default first day of summer. Children and youth are out of school now. Vacations are beginning. Gas prices are up. It’s starting to get hot outside, at least on the afternoons that it is not raining. And summer rain is here. All the signs are pointing to life slowing down and a few lazy days by the pool or in the shade.

Only there are those of us who no longer can see those kind of days on our calendars. While it is so much easier to hope for things that we are sure of or that we do know, many of us are left hoping for things we can’t see, don’t know, don’t really have any reason to actually believe will come to be. There are those of us suffering from diseases like cancer: even with the best treatments available, hope seems far, far away sometimes. There are those of us suffering from depression: even with medication and counseling and people around who really care, there just doesn’t always seem like there is a way out of the darkness. There are those of us who feel trapped by our life circumstances: a marriage that doesn’t work anymore; estranged relationships with children, parents, or friends; the complete inability to find a job even though you’ve been looking for years; the fear of losing your care, home, livelihood, or dignity the longer you look for work. Even with prayer there just doesn’t always seem like there is any reason to hope that things will get better. There are those among us facing death: the death of a loved one or even our own. And all the verses of scripture we can quote to each other or find for each other that talk about the resurrected life cannot ease the anxiety and pain we feel at the idea of an “end.”

No matter what breaks your heart today or causes you to feel desperate, we all know the feeling Paul is describing in the 8th chapter of Romans. The whole world groans in the pains of making new life. It hurts being made into something new. And that is often what is happening when we feel the pains of life setting in. When we are fighting disease or depression, when we are looking for a new vocation or career, when we are trying to find a way to let go of a loved one or of some way of life to which we’ve become attached, sometimes we are going through the pain of being made into something new—some kind of new creation. We may not always welcome change, but that’s what human being is about.

Several years ago, I sat with a family who was facing the loss of their husband and father to brain cancer. Steve’s cancer had set in quickly, and he was young. Not even 55, he started receiving radiation treatments for a brain tumor that quickly spread to his spine. When there was no more treatment and his body began to quickly deteriorate, the family had to make a decision about hospice care. They couldn’t agree on what to do, but Steve made his wishes clear, and it was not long until his body was unable to continue life. I gathered with the family around his bed as we felt that his last breath was close at hand. While I value the training I received in pastoral care at Candler, no book, role play, class discussion, or exam can prepare you for the moment of death until you have experienced it. When we all joined hands around the hospital bed, I suddenly felt the weight of the moment and the expectations of the family members standing with me. And so our prayer began: “O God, we don’t know the words to pray right now, but we need your presence among us and your hand upon your servant, Steve…” It was in the moments of prayer that we all uttered deep sighs, hoping for God to come and calm our spirits and ease the suffering of one whom we loved. Our weakness was the pain of impatiently waiting for God to “show up” (as *they* say) and do something in Steve’s body. The Spirit’s presence arrived for us in our sighs, too deep for words, to close to see, but interceding for us and bringing us the peace of Christ in our time of need.

Friends, no matter what troubles your heart today, no matter what it is that you don’t have the words for, that you dare not share in public, that you don’t even begin to know how to deal with, the Spirit is already there with you, praying for you and with you in sighs too deep for words. Think of it: that incredibly calming feeling of releasing tension through a deep sigh. That’s the presence of the Spirit.

Generations ago, people gathered from all over the known Jewish dispersed world. They came together for the holy day of Pentecost: the Festival of Weeks. It was the festival in which people brought the first fruits of their harvest to the Temple. It was also the remembrance of Moses receiving the commandments at Mt. Sinai. It was one of those big days in which everyone knew that their place, no matter what, was in the presence of all the others offering tithes and prayers of thanksgiving to God. They came no matter what. They came when their loves ones were dying. They came when there was hardly any fruit to consume, much less to give away. They came when their children were estranged, when they were angry with God, when they were worried about how they were going to make it. They came, and the prayed, especially when they didn’t have the words because the Spirit provided what they needed to hear: the story of God’s deeds of power that had taken place in the lives of the people—people just like them.

Friends, don’t leave here today without letting a deep sigh of prayer out and breathing in the Spirit of God. There are deeds of power to be done in your life, and when you don’t even know how to talk to God about your needs, that is when the gift of the Spirit—in words that may be unknown to you now but will become for you the most sacred utterance between you and God. The miracle of Pentecost was not in the speaking but in the hearing of God’s story, your story when you expected the status quo.

May that be for you, friends. When you cannot speak with God, may the Spirit allow you to hear from God, reminding you of what God has, can, and will do in your life. May it be.

Ascension

2009-05-24T07:24:00.000-04:00

Acts of the Apostles 1.1-11

In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. “This,” he said, “is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”

So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

I don’t want to scare anyone, but Christmas Eve is 7 months away from today. I am acutely aware of this because I will have a 1-year-old this Christmas, and I’m told that she will be way more into the whole holiday season this time around than she was last year. There are 214 shopping days until Christmas Eve this year, so you’d better get cracking away at your wish lists. And since it is so early, you have time to really think about it. Could I make a few suggestions?

How about world peace? Yes, that’s a good start. Let’s add world peace to our list. That would rule out all the wars that we know of today and even the ones we don’t know about. And to accomplish that we’ll need some kind of extraordinary world leader who can tackle even the most dangerous and the deepest divisions, especially the conflict between Israel and Palestine. So, I’d guess we better add that to the list—someone to bring us world peace.

What else could we add to the list? How about the end to poverty and hunger? Yes—that’s a good one. That would mean that no woman, man, or child would ever die of starvation again. And while we’re at the poverty issue, let’s erase homelessness, too. So, we’ll just need someone that will find for us a permanent fix for the problem. Hmm…one more thing for the list, I suppose.

Anything else you’d like to throw in while we’re at it? I suppose we could consider adding a new revival of the Christian faith—churches unable to hold the crowds gathered for worship and study, and (especially important to our church and many others right now) there would be no more money problems in the church at all. Or, we could add economic recovery in this nation and around the world, but I am not sure that the ones currently working on this will be the ones to deliver. Then again, I am not sure that anything other than magic could really repair the damage that has been done. But Christmas is all about hope, right??

Ok, so today is not Christmas Eve. It’s May 24th, the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend 2009. It’s the 4th Sunday in May, the 7th Sunday of Easter. It’s just like many other Sundays when we gather here for worship: we’ve all gotten up and dressed for church and assembled in this place that is so full of Spirit and meaning for us. We gaze at and through the windows; we hear the music that Kevin, Jonathan, and the choir provide for the glory of God; we listen to the reading of scripture; we pray. It’s just like any other Sunday, right?

If your answer to that question was yes, I invite you to hear the reading for today again:

In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. “This,” he said, “is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”
So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

Did you hear it? Did you hear the question of the disciples of Jesus as he is leaving them and leaving the earth to return to heaven? It’s the last time they will be together, and he has given them some instructions about what he expects of them once he is back home with God. He has promised again the presence of the Spirit and wants them to be ready for what the Spirit will empower them to do and call them to do in his name. It will be a very important transition for them. This ministry, this life they’ve been living together is about to become something larger than any of them are ready for, but with the power of the Spirit, anything is possible. And so at this powerful climax in the story of salvation, as Jesus is preparing for his ultimate exit/entrance, the befuddled disciples we have come to know for their inability to understand what Jesus tells them about what is coming to pass don’t disappoint. Listen to their question: “Is this time you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

Now, to be fair to these guys, they’ve been through a lot in these last 42 days. It is no wonder that they have questions. I imagine them standing there stunned, listening to Jesus and not really knowing what to do next and not really wanting to move because the next movement could be the cue that this moment—this time with the risen Christ—is over. It seems plausible that his resurrection would be the trigger of all the things that the Hebrews have been expecting from their Messiah to start happening. They were waiting for a great ruler to appear who would restore order and dignity and independence to the people of Israel. They had lived under Roman rule for quite some time; the days of the kingdom of Israel and the great kings of the Hebrews, like David and Solomon, were now over. And as great as those kings were, they were only a foretaste of what the kingdom of God would be like. Actually, truth be told, they weren’t really that great. Remember David? The one who had his girlfriend’s husband killed in battle so that she could be his girl? We only got those kings because we begged God for them. God was pretty sure we didn’t need an earthly king, but because we kept asking and because we rejected God’s reign over us, God gave us what we asked for all those generations ago. And just look where it has gotten us now!

So, generations later, the Messiah was expected to come and resume the rule of the beloved King David. He would accomplish things like world peace, the end of all war, and most importantly, the re-establishment of the kingdom of Israel—the place where all people of Hebrew origin would live freely and would prosper for ever. And then, there would be no more worries, no more war, no more poverty, etc. It would be like that feeling we have about the world on Christmas—like everything really will turn out ok because God loves us and sent us Jesus. The coming of the Messiah would make everyone feel like everything would turn out ok because God loves us and would send us a great warrior king to make everything go the way we and God wanted it to. And by we, I don’t mean us; I mean the Hebrews.

So, the world waiting for the Messiah was pretty disappointed with Jesus. The disciples were not part of that world; they saw glimpses from time to time of the messianic secret we see especially in Mark when Jesus lets on that there is something extraordinary about him and his ministry but tells his companions not to tell anyone what they know about him. Maybe now that he had been to the cross and had overcome death, it would be time for the messianic secret to come out in the open. This must be it—the time when all those things they hadn’t been able to tell about Jesus could be told. This must be it—the time when they would finally be rewarded for their devotion to a movement that was pretty good for a while but had recently seen some pretty hard times. This must be it—the time when not only the hurts of the world but the hurts of the people of God would all be healed and God would dry their tears, etc. This must be it—the time when the kingdom would be restored, Israel would be a powerful nation again, and the world would finally know and accept the Messiah. Isn’t this it, Jesus?

Maybe you are asking the same question. Is this the time, Jesus, when you’ll restore the kingdom of Israel to me, when you’ll make everything right again—the way it is supposed to be in my life? Isn’t it time that my investment in this movement of faith that at one time totally captivated my spirit and life finally paid off and showed some tangible fruit in my life? Isn’t time that my retirement account started to grow again? I’ve done what I was supposed to do; can I stop being punished, please? I’ve lived here for many years; isn’t it time that I got to live one summer free of crime and the fear of crime in my neighborhood? I’ve been giving to the church for a while; isn’t it time that a suitcase full of a million dollars fell in the road in front of me on the way home from worship? Today would be just fine. Isn’t it time that my life, my job, my family, my relationships, my children, my parents, my friends, my partner, my career path finally became what I am sure God has in mind for me?

If your answer to that question was yes, I invite you to hear a few verses again from our passage for today:

So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

“Actually,” he says, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, in Summer Hill and Capitol View, in Peoplestown and Mechanicsville, in Grant Park and Ormewood Park, on Memorial Drive and on Cherokee Avenue, in Israel and Palestine, in Pakistan, North Korea, and Iraq. This is in your hands. It’s not a transaction; it is a gift. And the world needs to receive it now.”

So , actually, this day isn’t at all about what you or I want or even need. This day is about what the world needs and the fact that Christ has called us to get out there and see what we can do about it. This day is about school being out and youth having a lot of free time on their hands and us having a gym upstairs and many of us having the time to be here for a few hours here and there. This day is about being sure that we don’t’ forget that the children of God don’t just live in Jerusalem, or Israel, or nice houses, or in our “neighborhood.” This day is about the fact that our lives and very presence here provide witness to the love of God, especially for those to whom love is a stranger. So, we have to get to work. We’re not making our Christmas list anymore; we are taking God’s list to the rest of the elves where we will pray, and wait for the power to make it all come to be. It’s not up to someone else; it’s not some random date on a calendar way out in the future; it’s not at the random will of some crazy God but of the God who holds all things—time, space, our lives, your heart—in God’s hands.

Joy to the world, the Lord is come. And he has gone and has called us to recreate the body of love and grace he showed us. The Spirit will help us know what to do if we will just listen. The Spirit will guide and support us. Everything on our list is possible for God, even the things that seem completely impossible to us. That’s the point: the eternal presence of God prays with and for us and the world. And then the Spirit comes in, disrupts the way we may think it all ought to be, and then we begin to see the kingdom of God.

May it be, friends! May it be.

Easter 4: Mother's Day

2009-05-09T22:47:00.000-04:00

1 John 4:7-21
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.

And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

On the second Sunday in May 1907 at the Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1907, the observation of Mother’s Day in the United States was born. The service was organized by a Methodist laywoman, Anna Jarvis, to honor her mother, who had died on May 9, 1905. By 1908 Anna Jarvis was advocating that all mothers be honored on the second Sunday in May, and in 1912 the Methodist Episcopal Church recognized the day and raised it to the national agenda.

So be proud of your church today: without the Methodist Church, there might not be a nation-wide celebration of Mother’s Day and we might not have a day on which we all take time to recognize the ones who have been our mothers and what they have given us. Good for Anna Jarvis for recognizing that mothers are essential to the health and stability of the family! With children everywhere today, we celebrate the ones who have given us birth, given us life, who have helped us find joy, who have taught us life lessons, and who have modeled for us the extravagant love of God—the kind of love that the writer of 1 John has so carefully described in the 4th chapter, our passage for today.

This text is so appropriate for Mother’s Day: a rich description of the love of God for us and how it is shown. In my discernment around the meaning of this text for us, I found my reflections pouring out in the form of a letter, my own kind of epistle. I would like to offer it today as a gift to mothers and those who have been mothered, especially to one of my own whom I have never seen but have come to know through the love that her life gave to others.

Dear Joy,

I write to wish you a happy Mother’s day, and it might be a little strange that since we have never met that I would be wishing you happiness on this day, but your mothering has had a profound influence in my life, and I’d like to take a few moments to thank you for the ways that your love has found its way into my own life and heart.

But before I get started, I’d like to assure you that Dave is doing just fine. He has turned out to be the kind of person of whom I am sure you would be very proud. He has answered God’s call into the life of ordained ministry, and he has opened his heart to people who are searching for their own calling, their own relationship with God. He is very good at what he does. He’s very smart and he’s good with people. His heart contains a vast amount of love, and he is more than willing to share it wherever he finds another heart in need, or just whenever he finds another heart.

Even though we never had the chance to meet in this life, I feel as though I know you. There are a few pictures around and many stories shared that have given me a bit of insight into who you were. From what I can tell, you were intelligent, confident, faithful, and deeply loving. All of these things I know, of course, because members of your family have been your witnesses to those of us who weren’t lucky enough to know you while you were alive. Not only has Dave told me about you but so has Lisa, and what an incredible aunt/second mom she has been for him. They are like 2 peas in a pod—just like your mother, our beloved Juggy, used to tell me! But I also know these things about you to be true because I see evidence of them in your child. Now that we have our own Joy, I am more aware than ever before how much the children in the world really do learn and are formed into the people they become by the world that surrounds them. What a good life you gave to Dave while you were with him!

You know, we have been married now for more than seven years, and there is so much I have learned about you in that time. I know that you valued education because I know the high value Dave places on it for himself and for others. I know you taught him to be confident in himself and that he must have had a good example of that in you because he understands how important it is to believe in yourself so that you can believe in others. I have heard the stories of how you held your family together, sometimes just on faith that you were doing the right thing and not much else, and I can certainly see that value alive and well in the way Dave lives his life. Family is so important to him, especially now that we have Joy—it must be for him like having a second chance at the kind of joy being part of a family can bring.

But I think the strongest lesson you passed on to your son was about love. You must have been a living example of the love of God—being one who clearly abided in God because of the great love you had and shared. And so God abided in you, too, and now you abide not only in God’s love but in God’s eternal presence that will now be forever unchanged for you. Even though we cannot see God, we can see evidence of God’s love all over the world. Even though I cannot see you, I can see evidence of you all over Dave’s life and who he is—especially in how he loves.

He loves completely. He loves people even when they mistreat him. He loves with a deep love that overcomes fear and hatred. He loves the way God intended us to love: without reserve and with justice and equality. And he loves in the model of Christ—the one who was sent in love, lived in love, died in love, and was raised from the tomb in love. He treats people with respect, and he works at making decisions that follow the way of Christ.

While he is not naïve to the ways people often take advantage of others’ love and trust, he continues to offer it. It’s like what I once heard Dr. Joseph Lowery say about all the fights that the church has started over issues of sexuality and the search for proof of one argument or another in the Bible or in church tradition: “If we’re going to err, I prefer that we err on the side of love.” You clearly gave him the example of striving to be the truest form of what God has made each of us to be, even when we fail. You showed him perfect love, the love that is shared between us as a result of the love we have received. You were, for him, the representation of what the perfect love of God is for us—a gift that cannot be earned but can be given over and over again.

And more than any other way that I have seen in our life together, I see the evidence of your presence in Dave’s life through the way he loves our new Joy. She has brought your presence to light in his life in a way nothing else has. We intentionally named her for you, you know. He chose the name because of his love for you; I chose it because of your love for him and how it has made him into the person I am proud to love and call my life’s partner.

I have gotten to know you through knowing and loving your son. And I will continue to get to know you by knowing and loving your granddaughter. I don’t think it is a coincidence that whenever we pass by your childhood portrait that now hangs in our house that Joy smiles and seems to want to linger an extra moment. She and her daddy are both are a living testimony of your love and your life through the way that they do and will give love to others—a love that can never and will never die.

So thank you, Joy. Thank you for giving Dave the example of the love of God that he could always rely on in his life no matter what comes to pass. Thank you for teaching him that reflecting God’s love in the world is about giving it away to others freely, with no strings attached. Thank you for teaching him all about love so that he could be the most loving parent I could ever imagine for my child and so that he can now teach others what real love is about. Thank you for loving him and continuing to watch over him and us now, too. And thank you for connecting with your granddaughter in a way that we can really see not with our eyes but with our hearts, across time and space in a way that only that great cloud of witnesses can do, so that she will have a personal experience of the hope of resurrection as she grows in faith and love with God. Thank you.

May God’s eternal light and rest be upon your soul, Joy. Happy Mother’s Day!

Love,
Susan

Easter 4: How to Be a Christian, 101

2009-05-02T18:28:00.000-04:00

1 John 3:16-24
…We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God; and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him.

And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.

Welcome to How to Be a Christian, 101.

You didn’t know it when you walked in here today, but this lesson from the first letter of John to a broken community offers us a very succinct lesson on what this Trinitarian faith is all about.

A word of context about the original audience of this letter is important. 1 John, unlike the other 2 which you’ll find just after it, close to the end of the Bible, is less a letter and more a homily or essay. As with all epistles, there is an anticipated audience for it—likely a religious community that has experienced a kind of a split. There is evidence throughout the letter that there is deep antagonism between this community and the ones who have left. The writer often refers to anti-christs and spirits that must be tested for truth, leaving us to believe they may have split over disagreements on what constituted proper Christian belief and practice. Our passage for today contains a commentary on how to truly practice one’s individual and the community belief in the Holy Trinity: God the creator, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

First, you must understand that God is love and that to believe in God is to practice that love toward others. Apparently this has been a problem for the people in the community since the exodus of the others who had broken away and gone somewhere else. And so to be sure that the remnant here was continuing on in the proper worship of and faith in the true God and the true Christ and the true Spirit, the author wants the community to understand that the children of God who follow Christ must first and foremost love others.

Second, you must believe that Jesus was truly the Son of God, meaning that not only was he holy because he was of the same being as God and sent from God but he was also truly human, a real Son, who lived and breathed and died and rose from the dead among us. This had also been an issue in the newly formed and divided Christian community—that there were lots of groups and individuals running around at saying that Jesus was not actually human, that there was no way it could have been true that he was fully human and fully divine. This is the origin of the concern about anti-christ. The author likely meant to use that word to describe people who were against the true identity of Christ: Son of Man and Son of God. And belief in Jesus Christ meant abiding by his commandment to love one another. That meant that the kind of thing the community had been experiencing with people who once called each other brother and sister now calling each other anti-christ and bogus teachers and prophets, did not reflect the both human and divine person of Christ, his love, or his commandment to love.

Loving others was the way to know that Christ was present in your life, and that leads us to the third piece of commentary on how to be a practicing, Trinitarian Christian: recognizing the Spirit in your life through the commandment of Christ to love and be loved. The writer says that the way you’ll know that Christ is dwelling in you and in your life is by the Spirit—the Spirit that Christ has given us. When Jesus was with the disciples as they hid in a locked room, he gave them the Spirit, which he had promised to do before the crucifixion, and told them that the Spirit would be with them always. So how would they be assured of the Spirit’s presence? When they felt and gave love. And we can know the Spirit in the same way—that feeling of overwhelming love that we know can only come from God; the same feeling we are called to give away to others.

So, end of context lesson. Back to How to Be a Christian, 101. Take out your text books and turn to today’s lesson: 1 John 3:16-24. Here you will find the story of all of our Christian journeys:
1. how to respond to God’s love;
2. discovering the purpose of Jesus and what Jesus means for us;
3. letting the love of Jesus (both what he showed us and what he commanded us) show in what we do in the world, and that is our assurance that the Spirit is with us.

1. We cannot be in this world to which God’s love has been so freely given without feeling it for and sharing it with our neighbors, especially those who are in need. Did you hear the story this past week of a Dekalb County school child who took his own life as a result of bullying at school? Or how about the residents of Grant Park who don’t have life as good as most of us do? Or how about when one of our community of faith is facing a hard time? “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” Reach out to children in every school, especially the ones where the kids have the roughest time and the smallest shot at making it. Lend a hand to your neighbors here, even the ones you wish didn’t live down the street. When you see a brother or sister shedding tears of pain, offer your shoulder and your heart. This is the most straightforward definition of who God is that we will find—God is the love that you feel and the love you give away. Only the hearts that feel or share no love are the ones that “condemn” us. But let God’s love live in you and through you in me.

2. Jesus came as an ultimate demonstration of that love. He was practically a broken record—“Love your neighbor,” “Love your enemies,” “Love one another,” “Abide in my love.” So understanding who Jesus was and is is knowing that he is nothing more or less than the love of God housed in flesh, blood, and now eternal presence, and making sure that others come to know that same love through how you treat them. And we’re not just talking about the people you already love here, or even the people you just like. We’re talking about the people that God loves—even the ones you don’t like very much.

3. The Spirit’s presence in our lives—that still, small voice; that feeling of someone always being there for you whom you cannot see—is the proof that Jesus’ commandment to love is the ultimate fulfilling of the love of God. Jesus did lay down his life for us—for those who went before us and for those who will come after us—and that proves God’s love toward us. We are reunited with the love of God in a way that cannot be changed now. The words of our prayers at the communion table say it best: “When we turned away and our love failed, God’s love remained steadfast.” And we have known that love through Jesus Christ, through the Spirit, and through one another.

So friends, there is only a short test for our class session today, and you can all answer at the same time:
a. Does God love us? [yes]
b. Does God want us to love others? [yes]
c. If we accept God’s love, should it be possible for us to withhold that love from other people? [no]
d. What characteristic of God did Jesus show us and command us to show others? [love]
e. What do we call that feeling of God’s presence we have when we follow Christ’s example, especially when we are loving each other? [the Spirit]

Last question: do you believe it?

Easter 3: Too Good to be True

2009-04-25T22:50:00.000-04:00

Luke 24:36b-48
Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” 37They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. 38He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? 39Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” 40And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. 41While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” 42They gave him a piece of broiled fish, 43and he took it and ate in their presence. 44Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” 45Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, 46and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, 47and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48You are witnesses of these things.

I’ve tried to be careful not to talk about my daughter, Joy, too much in my sermons since I’ve been back at work. I mean, there is more to my life than being her mommy, although at 4 am it doesn’t always feel that way. But loving her, getting to know her, and looking after her are all taking up a lot of our time as her parents these days—time we never knew we had! She is at the same time the most delightful and most exhausting thing we’ve ever had in our lives. She woos us with her smiles and coos, and she wears us out getting up and down at night, although thankfully far less often than she did a couple of months ago.

But since I’m on the subject, I’d like to share with you some of her qualities which delight me the most: she’s really cute. Her smile lights up a room, and I love the fact that I get one from her just about every time she notices that I have come into the room. She’s playful—she likes to tease with you and play the “Where’s Joy’s nose?” game with her daddy over and over again. She likes church—or at least, she cooperates well so far, even if she does sleep through my sermons. What else is new, right? She likes meeting people. Unless she skipped a nap or bottle, she is as happy as can be to make a new friend. Even though we are her parents, we think she is just about the most perfect baby that ever lived. Some days, the fact that she is mine and I am hers seems almost too good to be true.

What are your experiences of those things in life that are too good to be true?

Sometimes I look at my spouse and think that I can’t believe someone as good and smart as he is has taken me on for life. I am thankful every day for the family in which I was raised—a family with parents who are still married to each other and who made it often on less than a shoestring but who was always able to feed, clothe, and creatively entertain us and who loved us more than anything else. My appointment to be your pastor—what a gift in my life of ministry! Many of my peers ran me down at the annual conference session a couple of years ago—the year I moved here—and wanted to know how I got this appointment. There are many things in my life, both that I am aware of and that I take for granted, that I could put into the category “too good to be true.”

How about you?

You’ve got to feel for these disciples. Doug did a great job of setting the scene for us last week of their gathering. Of course they were afraid. They were human beings, and they had been seeing some crazy stuff happening in those last few days. They had seen Jesus arrested, tried, and killed. They had seen the group fall apart, the others shy away from Jesus’ death. They had received the strange and wonderful news of Jesus’ resurrection from the women who saw the empty tomb. They get that there is a reason for them to stay huddled together, but they don’t know what the reason is. And then he suddenly appears to them, and they wonder if they are seeing a ghost.

It’s a valid question. How could he really be there? Where had he been in the mean time between the cross and now? And what was going to happen next? This passage follows directly after the story of Jesus revealing himself to the two on the walk to Emmaus. They spend quite a while with him without realizing who he is until he is made known to them in the breaking of the bread. All over the place people are discovering that Jesus is not dead after all. He has moved beyond death, and he is flesh again. It is the sharing of meals that proves that he is fully human again and living with them in all the presence he did before. It’s almost as if nothing ever happened and yet it is even better than that. Nothing could ever happen now to break the love of God that is available for all people and that Jesus has clearly demonstrated in a very real and physical way in his death on the cross and resurrection from the grave.

Too good to be true?

One, when I was in seminary, I was preparing a lesson plan for a Sunday school class at the church where I was on staff. I was teaching on early Christian heresies—one in particular that taught that Jesus was not really human but actually was something like a hologram: some sort of 3-dimensional light representation of a human body but consisting of no actual flesh and bone. I was trying to make it easy to grasp but having a difficult time, so I asked my roommate to listen to the presentation and tell me if she could understand it based on what I said. She is Jewish, and that is why I thought it was worth trying on her; she would have an actual objective perspective on the whole thing. When I finished the lesson with her I said, “Isn’t that the craziest thing you’ve ever heard of?” Her response to me was, “Susan, you’re whole religion is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of. Someone came back from the dead? You’ve got to be kidding me!”

Just so you know, we share a healthy respect for each other’s religious background, beliefs, and practices. But I thought she had a point. It almost sounds just too good to be true.

If you look back at verse 11 in this same chapter, just after the women have discovered that the tomb is empty and they have gone to tell the disciples, the disciples actually don’t believe what they hear. They can’t. It is too fantastic, too “out there”, not possible. Luke wants us to understand, though, that this Jesus who is reunited with the disciples is actual flesh and blood, the way a physician might ask for proof, himself. Let’s prove that he can actually perform regular human-body functions, like eating. So, Jesus asks for food, and he eats. And they all witness it. Wow—he really is there.

Wait a minute: wow! He REALLY is there! He’s back. This is great. We can get back on the healing and teaching circuit. We can get back to work. Our lives will have purpose again. We’re so glad he has rescued us from the depths of failure and despair. Thank God he is back, literally. But, he died. How is this possible? It all seems too good to be true!

It’s ridiculous that someone would come back to life from the dead. It doesn’t make sense that he would die and then have life all over again. That’s not the way things work. And how could all that mourning we’ve been doing for the last several days be all for naught? What comes next for us: will it be exactly like it was before, back when life was full and good and right?

I suspect something about the grief they had experienced made them skeptical. We know how that feels, don’t we? I have grieved with friends over lost pregnancies and lost children. How could I receive such a beautiful child to have for my own? I have seen friends and family members agonize over their search for partners with whom to share their lives. How could I be lucky enough to have found my life’s partner and for him to return my affection and commitment? Surely there are things that seem too good to be true in life that really are. It’s like my favorite old poet, Kilian McDonnell, says in his poem about Abraham and Sara: “…I pasture my flock in the valley/ where Persian Reeds and Lemon Grass/ grow lush and tall, waiting/ for [Yahweh’s] other shoe to fall.” Surely something is going to go wrong, right?

We have learned that lesson in a most painful way in the last year. Our national economy has been jeopardized by the subprime mortgage deals and the subsequent collapse of some of our biggest financial institutions. In those cases, what seemed too good to be true really was. And now we are all literally paying the price for some bad decision-making, the blame for which does not discriminate. And now we wait impatiently to see just how bad it will get before it gets better.

That’s just it. With God’s love for us, there is no other shoe dangling in the proverbial air, waiting to fall right between our eyes and knock us off our foundation. There is no catch or string attached to the resurrection, and we have no control over whether or not the resurrection is real or not or whether or not it saves us. It just is. It just does. God’s love for us as demonstrated in Christ is just that real, that good, too good to be true.

So what does that mean in your life?

Like the disciples in the room with him that day, we are called to be witnesses. While we are not the ones who have eyewitness testimony to share about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, we are ones who have witness to share about how our hearts have been warmed and changed by his presence in our lives. And the only way that is even possible for us is that the message of the gospels is true: by taking on human form, God made God’s self become like us so that we could know God, love God, and learn to live the kind of life God intended for us by God showing us that face-to-face. That incarnation came to an end at our hand, but we could not ultimately erase it from time and truth. Instead, the living God is alive eternally in Christ and in us through the Holy Spirit. We now bear witness to the Spirit of God in action in our lives. We tell the stories of how God has changed our lives, how prayer has saved us, how our relationships with other members of the body of Christ have helped us when there seemed no other way we could survive.

Ours is the story to tell: our story of how God is alive in our world and in our lives. While in our joy, there will be disbelief in us, too. But that’s all part of telling the story, of being a witness. It’s not always easy, it doesn’t always make sense, and we certainly do not deserve it, but even when we have turned away and our love has failed, God’s love remains steadfast. It lives. It is eternal. Death cannot change it, bankrupt it, or drop another shoe on it.

Now that is good news. Thanks be to God!

Easter

2009-04-11T21:32:00.000-04:00

John 20:1-18
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.
But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

“Don’t hold on to me.”

I imagine that the very first thing that Mary wanted to do when she realized it was Jesus that morning in the garden was to embrace him—to be sure that it was real, to calm all the fear and anxiety she had been living with for the last several days. She had seen him die. She was sure they had buried him in this tomb and rolled a stone in front of it. No one had been out since the Sabbath day had come and gone since he had died and been buried. Their whole existence had been turned upside down when he was gone, and now he’s back, and she can’t grab hold of him? I would imagine she and the others would never want to let him go.

In fact, two of the others had just been there. When she first discovered that something was not right at the tomb, she went to Jesus’ right hand and the disciple whom he loved, according to John’s gospel. They came with her to see what had happened, and found nothing. Literally, they found nothing. No body, no thieves, no explanation, and apparently they didn’t even see the angel. They just saw the place where the body had been laid, and in its place they saw the linen wrappings that had been wrapped around it for burial. Now there was no body. John tells us that the beloved disciple saw and believed.

Mary couldn’t believe what she saw. Those guys were no help to her; the very ones whom Jesus trusted and with whom he had shared everything seemed useless in the end. They did come when she asked them to, but they didn’t stay long enough to encounter the gardener. They didn’t yet fully understand what had taken place and how it fulfilled scripture. They simply took in the details of the scene, and then they were gone.

Mary must have been frustrated. She had likely hoped that they would have some kind of explanation for the lack of body she had found. Surely they would know something about this; surely there would be some kind of explanation that she could grasp that might help her make sense, not just of what she was seeing or not seeing now but also of what had been happening these last few days. Everything was wrong: their beloved Jesus had been arrested. What had he ever done that was wrong? He had been tried in the synagogue—the Son of God! Pilate had tried to save his life—the envoy of the Roman Empire had tried to spare the life of a Jew! He had died a cruel and humiliating death while she stood at his feet and watched it happen, and now his body was missing! How confusing and troubling it must have all been.

I imagine it would be something like what one of us might feel like if you were to lose your job, be unable to pay your mortgage, have credit card debt piled up in bills at your door, suffer the loss of a significant life relationship, and then have your car break down and leave you stranded in the home you can’t afford with nothing to do but worry about your piled up bills and mourn the loss of an important relationship. If just one of these happens to us, we feel that the world could quite possibly come to an end, at least as we know it. Try to think of the worst things you can imagine happening to a person all at one time, and that’s how I imagine that Mary and the others felt when Christ was taken away from them. And so to encounter him in the garden near the tomb where his dead body was laid just days before, this would have been utterly unbelievable. Surely she rubbed her eyes, cleaned out her ears, blinked a few times, and pinched herself to be sure it was true. Of course she wanted to run to him. It is what we do when we find ourselves in the very worst situations of our lives and the grace of Jesus breaks through, calls us by name, and pulls us up from the very depths of despair. We want to grab hold of the presence of Christ that reassures us and brings us peace, and we want to hold on to it for dear life. We want Christ’s presence in our time of need, that feeling we get when we are as low as we can go and we feel him lifting us up—we want that feeling to go on forever. We want to grab on to it and never let go.

Didn’t it feel like a foretaste of glory when we sang “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” just a short while ago? Wouldn’t you love to hang on to that feeling whenever you gathered here at St. Paul? What if we sang our hearts out like that every week? What if everything we do here we did with giant grins on our faces and with the kind of energy we sang that hymn? We would probably prefer that to the times we gather for more difficult discussions about money or everyone’s lack thereof, when we gather to settle disputes among us, or when it just feels like our hearts are not in it and it is hard to be here. It sure is better today when are all here for the exact same reason and we are all so happy to be here together. We just want to hold on to that feeling…

“Don’t hold on to me.”

The glory of Easter is not that everything is all chocolate bunnies and sugary peeps and stuffed rabbits and nicely packaged baskets. It is not even new clothes or big family brunches. The glory of Easter, brothers and sisters, is simply that he was not in the tomb. The Son of God, the one sent to love us, the incarnation of the God who created everything was not done in by death and, therefore, neither will we be. The glory of Easter is the very promise that just as Jesus stood in the garden that day when all hope was lost and brought hope back to life right in front of one who loved him as much as any other, we are not separated forever from the ones whom we love by death. Whatever happens to cause us pain in this life is not the end. When all hope is lost, there is still hope to be found!

Today we gather in the moment when Mary realized that it was her Lord, Savior, and Teacher standing before her. It was with great joy that she ran from that tomb to tell the others, and in so doing to tell the world: “I have seen the Lord!”

You have seen him in your life. He has come to you when all hope has been lost, when death and darkness has surrounded you and there seemed to be no breaking in of morning light. He has called your name.

Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed! Alleluia! Thanks be to God!

Easter Sunrise

2009-04-11T18:34:00.000-04:00

Mark 16:1-8
When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

I used to get a lot of teasing in my last appointment for being tardy: not really from the people in my congregation but from my colleagues in neighboring United Methodist churches. As pastors in the same area, we met together every week to pray, offer each other support and accountability, and to plan ways we could be in ministry together. One of the things we did annually was plan a community-wide Easter sunrise service. Our meetings were Tuesday mornings at 8:30, every week of the year; the Easter sunrise service was one out of 365 and a quarter days. I rarely arrived at our meeting at 8:30 am on Tuesdays, but for 4 years in a row I arrived at the Easter sunrise service no less than a half hour BEFORE it was to start. And to top it off, I was the one who set the starting time for that service because I insisted that the crowd gathered actually see the sun rise during the time we were together. That meant that the service began before 7 am a couple of years. And when I suggested that we meet for worship at 6:30 in the morning, not only did they all tell me I was ridiculous, but they all doubted that I would be able to make it on time, much less early, to such an un-Godly hour. But I was always there and ready to go.

There is something that I dearly love about the early morning Easter service. I like having this one morning of the year when I get up way before anyone should, get ready in the very dark with not even a glimmer of morning sun, and get out on the road and be the only car traveling in either direction. We’ve barely finished with the night when we gather for sunrise worship on Easter Sunday. It’s out of our natural order of things to be up and out so early on a Sunday. The rest of the world doesn’t even get why we get up and out to church on ANY Sunday, and this must seem all the crazier. Normal people work and play in the regular hours of the day—you know, 8-5. When it is the weekend, we have brunch at 10 and stay up late watching TV and movies or spending time with friend or family. We rest so that when our work begins again on Monday morning, we’ll have enough energy to face another week.

Maybe that’s another thing I love about Easter sunrise and it’s upset of the natural order of things to which we’ve grown accustomed: it asks us to consider a new way of looking at work and accomplishment. I go back and forth between being very productive in the night hours and being too sleepy to do anything but fall asleep. But we find that God is hard at work, doing God’s best work in the wee hours of this most holy morning. While we slept, God raised Jesus from the grave and set the order of heaven and earth right again by returning Jesus to his rightful place as the eternal Word of God.

Even though I’m not a morning person, things just seem to be right and at peace on Easter morning, early, when it’s not quite light yet, but the night is over; when sane people are in their beds still sleeping; when coffee makers are just starting to make the morning coffee that will be ready when everyone is finally awake; when the Easter bunny is still delivering last minute baskets. There is a very natural order of things when the faithful, usually only a few, gather to greet the risen Lord, expecting to find things way out of worldly order and the tomb where his dead human body was laid empty.

I think this is the true order of things. It turns everything else upside down. The hardest work is not done 8-5 but while the rest of the world sleeps. Women were the ones given the news and charged to go out and tell it. Nothing is as we might expect it to be, yet everything is finally right.

So many terrible things happen in the cover of night: theft, rape, murder, war. And we continue to sleep through the most devastating hurts of the world. But thanks be to God on this holiest of days that while we slept, while someone somewhere stole human dignity and life, God was working harder than any evil we can point to in the world and turning things upside down. It’s no wonder they fled the tomb terrified. The world suddenly didn’t make sense anymore; and yet, nothing was ever more right.

Christ is risen; he is risen, indeed.

Amen!

Palm/Passion Sunday

2009-04-05T20:43:00.000-04:00

Mark 14:12-25
12On the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb is sacrificed, his disciples said to him, “Where do you want us to go and make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?” 13So he sent two of his disciples, saying to them, “Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him, 14and wherever he enters, say to the owner of the house, ‘The Teacher asks, Where is my guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ 15He will show you a large room upstairs, furnished and ready. Make preparations for us there.” 16So the disciples set out and went to the city, and found everything as he had told them; and they prepared the Passover meal.
17When it was evening, he came with the twelve. 18And when they had taken their places and were eating, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me.” 19They began to be distressed and to say to him one after another, “Surely, not I?” 20He said to them, “It is one of the twelve, one who is dipping bread into the bowl with me. 21For the Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that one by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that one not to have been born.”
22While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” 23Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it. 24He said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. 25Truly I tell you, I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”

The journey toward Easter is almost over, my friends. These last several weeks we have been thinking together about our faith journeys—where we see hope that may seem impossible to hold on to, the ways we receive grace for the journey, allowing the Light of the World to lead us out of our darkness, considering the life and death, loss and gain that we go through as we commit ourselves and our lives to Christ. I hope this has been a time of deep self-reflection for you as it has been for me.

And so today we are arrived at Jerusalem with Jesus and the twelve. As the children reminded us, Hosanna was the word on the lips of the crowds as he entered the city. They laid their clothing on the ground for the donkey he was riding to travel over. That is some serious devotion! They waved branches at him in a gesture of honor and praise. It is almost painful for me when I read and hear this story now, knowing what is to come in just the few days that will follow this great celebratory day. The long journey to the holy city is completed for Jesus and the disciples. They are there as were so many other Jews to celebrate the high holy days of Passover—the sacred time in which they gathered to celebrate God’s salvation of the Hebrews out of Egypt as they escaped the slaughter of the children and were able to slip out of Egypt into the dessert.

Remember that story for just a moment: what happiness there must have been as the people were finally able to leave the country that had held them in slavery for so many generations. They just walked out under the hand of God—the God who had always been faithful to them even when they turned away and their faithfulness to God failed. They celebrated and gave thanks, only to turn on God once again as they traveled the desert, complaining about the circumstances of their exodus, the food provided, the time it was taking to get to the Promised Land. And yet, God did not turn God’s back on them; instead God continued to love and lead them to safety and security, and today they continue to give thanks for the faithfulness of God’s journey through the generations of their people even into today.

Now fast-forward yourself to the Passover festival when Jesus and his companions were joined together for a meal. Jesus sits at the celebratory table with the others, likely saying the prayers and recalling the traditions of the meal they share together. They may still be on the high of the entrance into Jerusalem they had just experienced a few days earlier. Things seem to be going well. Jesus just gets more and more popular and well known for his deeds of healing and mercy and his teaching on how God really wants the world and our lives to be—an exodus from the slavery the people continued to live in: slavery to the government of Rome, slavery to the interpretation handed down to them of the Law of God. Jesus breaks the barriers that keep people from fully knowing and loving God and offers a new way of living and journeying through life with God. And these twelve were witnesses to that as we are today through the study of their story with Jesus in the gospels.

What glory they must have been living in since they arrived in the holy city. And so they gather at table with Jesus for this sacred meal, and suddenly they are derailed by his announcement that one of them will betray him, one who sits at that very table and shares the food they all eat. And then he serves them the bread and the wine and shares with them that this is the last time he will receive this meal until he shares in a new way in the kingdom of God. This is too much information to bear: after this climax of Jesus ministry and celebration of him, one of these who have journeyed with him all this way and time will turn on him? How could that be? Not a single one of them could imagine that he would be the one who would do it. Surely not they, who were the insiders of this movement, would be the ones to betray the Son of God whom they had come to know and love and whose power had been at work changing lives all around them, even theirs. It just couldn’t be. And to be sitting at this most holy table, too! How could one of them share in this meal and remember God’s presence and protection for their ancestors while all the while plotting against God’s Son whose presence had offered them new life all these many months they had shared together?

In a few moments we will gather around this holy table here to remember all the mighty acts of God in Jesus Christ and to ask the presence of the Spirit to bind us together into the resurrected body of Jesus Christ who has gone before us to death and has been raised again. We will each respond to the invitation to gather here and receive this sacred food that will be bread for our journey and the cup that fills us with the grace and presence of God. We will come with love in our hearts, offer prayers of thanksgiving and petition while kneeling before the altar of God. Some of us may even join hands with others and shed tears of deep emotion while feeling true communion with God. As it always is, it will be a powerful experience of putting back together the body of the ministry and gospel of Christ. What a beautiful time to be a Christian and part of this community of faith who demonstrates some of the diversity of those called to be at this table from many different situations in life. We are not all perfect, but we are all loved by Christ as he meets us here and offers us the bread of life and the cup of salvation.

And yet, he looks at us across the table and says, “One of you will betray me, one who is eating with me.” And we look around at each other and say, “Surely, not I?” Surely I am not the one who will deny that I know him. Surely I will not sell him for money or things of great material value. Surely I will not think that I know better than God how life ought to go and try to do things that force God’s hand to prove that I am right. Surely I will not be the one who comes here for a great celebration and to sing and shout “Hosanna!” and then be conspicuously absent at the cross in just a few days as only a few actually gather to remember the death of Jesus or his resurrection early in the morning on Easter.

Surely I am not the one who will not live up to the name “disciple of Jesus.” I am here in church; I go to Sunday school; I pray a lot of the time; I try to treat people well; I read and study the scriptures; I serve when I can. Surely, it isn’t I?

Surely, it isn’t I?

Lent 5

2009-03-28T20:41:00.000-04:00

John 12:20-36
20Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. 21They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” 22Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. 23Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. 25Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. 26Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.

27“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. 28Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” 29The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” 30Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. 31Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. 32And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” 33He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.

I once served a church whose population was made up mostly of older adults. I presided at a decent number of funeral services for the members of that congregation as they passed on, and I came to know the liturgy we United Methodists use for the service of death and resurrection quite well. Especially poignant for me are the words said and shared at the place of burial: “Jesus said, ‘Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but it if dies, it bears much fruit.’” I have stood at many a graveside saying these words that I prayerfully hoped were received as comfort in a time of mourning. I have said them over the lives of those whom I have not known well and those whom I have known and loved as if they were members of my own family. They have come to be a kind of portal for me from this life to the eternal, representing both the loss of what we hold dear in this life and the gain of the life that is to come, the resurrection proven and promised to us in Jesus Christ.

It’s a paradox that the world in which we live is hesitant to accept. We do not or cannot embrace the idea that in order to be faithful to the Christian life there are things we may have to lose, pain we may have to feel. Our society tells us that success is all about gaining: gaining wealth, gaining status, gaining the right size house and the right brand of car, sending our kids to the right schools. We value what looks right, not necessarily what is right. We experience pain and loss as things to be avoided. As Australian theologian William Loader puts it,

“Pain is real, even for the triumphant, confident Jesus of John[‘s gospel]. Pain is sometimes the path of truth and its avoidance a denial. Not exactly the theme of a society which flees from pain.”

On the other side of the coin, there is something that is safe about dwelling in loss, isn’t there? There is a safety in mourning over a single grain of wheat that never was able to produce any fruit to speak of, perhaps never put in the right situation in which to grow. The world was unkind to it; woe are we who knew it and feel the loss of that grain and all its potential. Sound silly? Listen to us when we talk about jobs we have lost, relationships we have lost, the sad situations in which we find ourselves from time to time and how we were right there, ready with our single grain to make something grow, but we just never got the chance and it withered away before we ever had the right opportunity to grow. Death is about the only thing in life we cannot escape or make excuse for so that we don’t have to own up to the permanent loss we experience and over which we have absolutely no control.

Even here in the twelfth chapter of John, Jesus is trying yet again to share with his disciples what is about to happen to all of them. They are in Jerusalem. The cross is not to far away now. They are at what the language of music calls the penultimate step in the journey to Jerusalem: this is the next-to-last moment—one of mourning for what was while what will come to pass is still a short ways off in the distance.

Those moments of standing at a grave where a body is just about to be laid to rest call into my mind images of Jesus in the garden. While there is certain finality in the images of caskets, dirt, and shovels all around, there is still a moment of “it’s not over yet” to be felt and lived by the loved ones starting with deep sighs into the last moments of the presence of the beloved’s body in front of them. And yet, they are to get up from those chairs covered in velour, step out from under that tent, and go forward into life—a new way of living without the one whose body has just been officially turned over to death. Jesus knew that this moment was coming for the twelve and the crowds who had come to follow him and love him everywhere he went. He wanted to prepare them for the penultimate step and the ultimate reality: it would be difficult losing him. His death would be tragic, and their sense of loss would be great. But there would still be much life to be lived and joy to be had in the days and months to come after his resurrection.

And so he was still teaching them about this journey of faith that we share with them even today. They had grown accustomed to the parts of the faith journey that were joyful: healing, teaching, perhaps even the spiritual high of challenging the leaders of the synagogue on matters of God’s goodness rather than blind adherence to and, therefore, distortion of God’s law. They had gotten used to following their leader. To consider the death of Jesus, and even his resurrection was to consider that everything would change forever. Their beloved leader would no longer be with them. The synagogue might treat them even more unkindly than they had been treated before. Who would heal the sick? Who would raise people from the dead? Who would teach in parables? What would happen to this life, this movement they were living day to day? It wasn’t even a question of what they would lose but how much they would lose when they lost Jesus. I believe that if I were in their shoes I might be gathering up all the single grains I could find that were falling to the ground and trying as long and hard as I could to hold them together until someone or something else came along that could bind them together into bread for the world again. Grace, hope, risk and wisdom, light: it’s all well and good when Jesus is there to direct the journey. But the thought of going it alone? That must have been terrifying for those who had been his closest friends and companions.

Could they even see what was to be gained by his crucifixion and resurrection? We know that for days afterward they hid in a locked room for fear of being discovered as his disciples. Still trying desperately to gather up all those grains of wheat before they fell to the ground to be trampled by the mob of nay-say-ers and people poised in the most annoying “I told you so,” stature, the companions of Christ were not yet able to see the power of the resurrection at work in their lives or in the world. They could not yet know what they stood to gain by continuing the ministry of Jesus—a ministry of healing, love, forgiveness, mercy, and grace in a world that was broken, unloved, grudge-holding, unkind, and unjust. Would they be bound by the regret of having lost years of livelihood that they surrendered when they said yes to the call to follow Jesus? Would they be torn apart by loneliness for the “good ole days” when they got to live with Jesus who healed, taught, and transformed the world in their everyday journey together through life? There was a lot at stake.

And so there is for us. There is a lot at stake when we enter into the journey of faith with Jesus. He calls us, not just into belief in his identity as Son of God, Savior of the world, but also to a life lived in that belief. That means that we believe that God really did love us enough to send God’s Son, and that Christ loved us enough to come to us. Jesus was, in the words of the prophet Jeremiah, the new covenant God made with us, and we are to take an active part in living out that covenant. And the reward of faith is not great riches, the easy life, the best of all things. It will from time to time be pain and loss.

Have you lost relationships in your life because of your faith in Christ? Have you lost jobs or the possibility of work because of your faith? Have you had to set aside pleasures of life because enjoying them meant that someone else had to do without? Have you sacrificed material possessions so that you could contribute to the needs of the community of faith? Have you made changes in your life and life’s schedule because of your commitment to the church that have made it hard to do other things you might have wanted to do?

Yet what there is to gain by living in relationship with God in Christ! Have you felt the strength of your own spirit increased in prayer when you spend one-on-one time with God, both speaking and listening? Have you found joy in the holy occupation of attending to the life of the church when you’ve taught or participated in Sunday school or a small group? Have you found that your own life and faith are increased a hundred fold when you give back to God’s work a portion of what you have received?

Take time to consider along your faith journey what you have gained because of your relationship with God in Christ. Look around at the friends and community of support and encouragement you have here. Think of the opportunities you have found to serve others and the warmth it has brought to your heart because you answered the call of Christ to love your neighbors. Consider how your heart has been changed by the experiences you’ve had in the study of scripture and the Christian life you have lived in community here. And remember the joy of knowing that God is always there with and for us, in every situation, making something special out of the lives we’ve been given to live.

The journey of faith, which we have taken time and care to observe in this holy season of Lent, is one of loss and gain. It is one of death and life. Thanks be to God for the death and life of Jesus that shows us that pain is going to happen, but it is not the final thing. Life will come, joy will be restored, and God, eternal, will be with us every step of the way.

Amen.

Lent 4: The True Mirror

2009-03-21T22:43:00.000-04:00

Numbers 21:4-9
From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

John 3:14-21
And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

How many times do you look in the mirror when you are getting ready to leave home? Actress Nicole Kidman doesn’t like to look in the mirror very often. She says she cares more about looking “healthy” than beautiful. I confess that I have a love/hate relationship with mirrors. I suffer from the usual amount of negative self-image: just enough to make me dread what I’ll see when I look in a mirror, whether at home or out in public where there seem to be plenty of chances for us to gaze at our own images wherever we go. If you’re like me, though, you also can’t resist the urge to look when your reflection comes calling. You suffer from the simultaneous desires to hide from the reality staring back at you and to scrutinize why that reality is so displeasing. It’s a little game that our image-obsessed society teaches us to play early on in life.

There is a brother and sister team in New York who are seeking a patent for a product they have developed called “true mirror.” It is a mirror that is actually two mirrors joined together in a box at a perfect 90-degree angle. When you look into a “true mirror”, you may see things you are not used to seeing when you check out your reflection in the storefront window. Brian Connolly, a New Yorker, who publishes a magazine called “Natural Health and Fitness”, bought one and used it for introspection. "I look into it for five or 10 minutes three or four times a week," he said. "It reveals parts of me I'm very unfamiliar with."
Some people love the true mirror; some people hate it. “Some people have even run away from it screaming," said John Walter, inventor of the True Mirror. "Then there are people who said they didn't see any difference." And to a few come painful moments of self-recognition. Walter recalls a movie actress who took one look into the True Mirror and exclaimed that she finally understood why she was always getting cast in roles portraying ‘tough, hard-boiled women.’ Before that moment, she said, she never could understand why people would see her that way.”+
Part of the journey of faith is discovering some things about yourself that you might rather not know. Just like we do not like to look at our physical appearance in a mirror of any kind, we also shy away from the characteristics and decisions that cause us embarrassment or shame. We’d rather hide our complaints against God for the terrible situations life hands us from time to time than let God see our hearts for all that they are—jealous, petty, and occasionally small. Of all of our relationships, we worry the most about being “perfect” with God—the one who designed us in the first place and knows us in and out, imperfections and all. We’d rather be fooled by funhouse mirror images of our faults and pretend that what we see is just a distortion of who and what we really are. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the closer we get to God, the more things about ourselves that we discover that would chip away at that relationship, and we hide them in the dark, or as we used to say it in children’s choir, under a bushel.

The Hebrew people had been journeying with God for quite some time. God had found a way to rescue them from Egypt where they were living in slavery after the relationship between the royal family and the family of Joseph had disintegrated. Moses, God’s servant, had led the Israelites against all odds on foot out of the bounds of their captivity. They were free; they could finally worship when and where they wanted. Their children’s children would never remember what it was like to be slaves to someone else. A new life was out there, courtesy of the God who has always come to their rescue when they were in trouble. That’s how much God loved them, and what did they do?

They spoke against God and Moses. They complained, not only about the amount of time it was taking to get to the new life but even about the daily food God was providing for them while they were on the journey. The complained that God had lured them out of their old life, bad as it was, and had led them into this new one that seemed to be worse than ever. Something had to be done to make this relationship right. They had to see the truth.

God showed truth to the Israelites in the desert with the serpent, the symbol we now use to represent the healing of modern medicine. Generations later, when the story of the bronze serpent on the pole had been told to every child of the Hebrews, they still had questions. Remember Niccodemus early in the third chapter of John? Deep into his faith journey with God, he encounters a disruption in Jesus and questions him about being born again. Then John offers us what is now a staple of our faith: the 16th verse of the third chapter: “For God so loved the world…” and the image of Jesus as the light of a world living in darkness. All those generations after the Exodus, we still hadn’t quite caught on to the fact that the journey of faith is not easy, doesn’t always make sense, and still produces hope for new life that we cannot yet even imagine possible.

John’s right, you know: we love darkness. We love it because it hides all those things we’d rather not see or know about ourselves. And we think that if we can’t see them, then no one else can, either: especially not God. It’s like not looking in a mirror: if I don’t have to see what I actually look like, I can imagine my reflection to be whatever pleases me at the moment. When we avoid seeing our own image, we don’t have to confront the disappointment that God must feel at how far from God’s own image ours has turned out to be. We don’t have to feel shame when we don’t live up to the full potential God has given us or when we don’t use the gifts God has given us for the good of others or at all. We don’t have to be embarrassed at the decisions we’ve made in life that have hurt us or people we love…or even people we don’t know. We don’t have to think about the canyon between who we are right now and who we are called to be. It’s just so much easier to walk by the mirror and look in the other direction.

But every now and then we encounter a true mirror: one that shows us what other people see when they look at us. It sheds light in the dark places of our lives that we’d just as soon not show to the rest of the world, least of all to God. That true mirror reflects the judgment we pass on one another based on income, professional accomplishment, even the streets we live on; the racism we say is in the past until it comes to a question of what schools we’ll send our children to; the sexism we hide behind practicality when we say that there are just some jobs that men do better than women or that there are some places, like the home, that women belong rather than men; the heterosexism we passively participate in by sitting back and doing nothing to help our brothers and sisters in the LGBTandQ community gain the rights due to every human being; or the complacency we practice when we listen to the news and hear about war happening around the world and crime in our own backyards and still think that there is nothing we can or have to do that can stop it.

We just may find ourselves running away screaming from the true mirror, the light that no darkness can extinguish, in the name of shame and disgrace, thinking that the grace of God could not possibly be enough to save us from the poison of the mistakes we have made, the sin we have committed, the lies we have told, the relationships we have broken, the breakdown of community to which we have contributed. We have all been there, some of us finding ourselves there more frequently than any of the other stops along the journey of faith. But then we turn around, and out of the darkness Moses is still coming at us with that bronze snake on a pole, catching the light and reflecting it on us and on our dark lives. But here’s the thing: that snake is saving us. The symbol of our very life and death, it has the antedote for the poison we bring on ourselves when we choose not to let God shine light in our lives. We continue to do evil to ourselves and to one another, and we continue to let the poison travel in our system because we are too afraid to consider the remedy. How is it possible that God could keep trying and trying to help us, to save us?

We are now more than half way through Lent and the journey with Jesus to Jerusalem. It is just starting to come into focus and we know the dark days and hours that are coming. If you were in his shoes, would you want to turn back? Would you imagine that it was better just living in the world that couldn’t figure out how to be in right relationship with God, hoping it would just get better someday? Are you at a place in your faith journey now that seems like to push forward and go deeper into relationship with God is scary and may require more of you than you are willing to give? Are you thinking that it might just be easier to continue to live in darkness because even though it may be bad, you’ve figured out your way around and learning something new might not work out the way you expect?

That’s the hard part about sticking with the journey. It’s not always hearts and flowers. Sometimes it is painful and troubling, especially when we take time to look back and wonder if we are better off for having begun this journey in the first place than we would be had we never considered a relationship with God. But when you take a look into a true mirror that shows you more than a 2-dimensional reflection of yourself, you will see something that is at the very core of everyone of us: the image of God. The same God who created us in the beginning is the God who loves us in the darkest of the middle days and who will gracefully welcome us in the light of the days to come when we finally come face to face with God and who we are. It is the same God who saved the Israelites in the desert and who sent the Son into a world where he would surely have to be eliminated because of the message of his life. And that is the same God who loves you and me enough to keep pursuing us even into these dark days when things seem to be getting worse and worse.

The good news for us today is that God will never desert us, leave us in the dark places of our wilderness forever, but we have to keep going on in faith. We have to believe that God loves us enough to send the Son into the world to save us, to be raised up in glory so that we could be raised up out of darkness and have the chance to live in light—the light of unexpected love, life-long grace and companionship, and the promise of a better life. So look into the true mirror, friends; look at the bronze serpent representing for us the darkest places along our faith journeys. See those places, those shameful places in our lives that pull us away from the love of God, and realize that God offers you a way out. It means confronting the very things about ourselves that we dread exposing the most. But it also means shining light on the promise of what can be—the reality of God’s saving love for us in Jesus, the glory of being forgiven for all of that which we would rather hide, and the promise of the milk and honey of love, mercy, and forgiveness, flowing freely and in abundance. Now that is a reflection I can’t wait to see.

In the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sustainer. Amen.

+ www.truemirror.com

Lent 3 2009: Top-to-Bottom

2009-03-14T23:23:00.000-04:00

1 Corinthians 1:18-31
18For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” 20Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. 22For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

I suspect there are Sundays when you have a hard time convincing yourself to actually get up in enough time to get dressed and out the door for church. Perhaps some of you have a hard time (as I do) getting up and out the door any day that there is somewhere to be before lunch. And even though we try to make it easy for folks by starting worship at 5 minutes to 11 am, I suspect there are still those days when either it feels like getting up at the crack of dawn the way you do for 5 of the other days of the week to get to work on time or there are just a lot of other things you can think of that you’d rather be doing with your morning and early afternoon since it is your time, not work time. We are trained by a society that says that the weekdays belong to the boss and the weekends belong to us. It’s our time to do with what we choose. And fewer Americans than ever report now that they choose to attend any kind of worship on those weekend or other free hours. 100 years ago, this building housed the largest Methodist congregation in the state of Georgia. The place was regularly packed, as I imagine were the many other church buildings in Grant Park. It was just what you did with Sunday morning. Its not like that anymore, is it? Today we often suffer the grief of time we feel we’ve lost by coming to church for an hour or 2 or 3 on Sunday mornings. Children’s sports find it ridiculous that we would want to be anywhere else but a baseball or soccer field on Sunday mornings. The gods of television are making it easier and easier for us to just stay in and watch movies or any one of our top 50 favorite TV shows on Sunday morning instead of coming to church. Or forget any of that: we don’t have to settle for our own coffee or our own kitchens anymore; we can go take our pick of any local or chain coffee house and blend along with a newspaper or a friend and relax on Sunday mornings. Doesn’t it seem almost ridiculous that we would choose anything else?

And yet, we are all gathered here in this sacred space, expecting to meet the Spirit of God here and to go away changed in some little or big way because we were here to sing and pray. The world calls, urges, even pushes us in the other direction, but we all find ourselves here today at another spot along the journeys of faith we travel singularly and as a body. What seems foolish to the world watching us gather here has the power to save us because we have been here. Why in the world does God work like that?

It’s what Paul is saying to the church in Corinth: the church, the body of Christ, the community of faith doesn’t work the way the rest of the world works. You see, they were fighting among themselves in the Corinthian church. There were folks in that community who believed they had “special wisdom” and knowledge about the faith given to them by Paul himself. Divisions had come up among them, and they had sent word to Paul asking for his own wisdom to settle their disputes, sure he would know since he had introduced this faith to them in the first place. Surely he could offer them wise answers to their questions of authority and call one another’s foolishness out in order to settle the hard feelings and get them back on track for being a unified body of Christ.

Only he doesn’t give them the answers they might have been looking for. I have sometimes imagined that they sought justification for their self-created hierarchy of spiritual gifts and human wisdom, and Paul offers them a world and world order turned upside down. Remember that our God is not one who conforms to our standards, he says. Our God is one who, instead, has created God’s own world order—one that, by the way, doesn’t make any sense to us whatsoever.

Has Christian faith ever seemed foolish to you? Sometimes we get so caught up in setting and trying to live by the rules for how to be Christians that we forget how God has already set things up to be: completely the opposite of how we think they should be! Divine foolishness and weakness are on display in Christ’s cross. Fully human, fully divine: was God crazy to make this possible among our power-hungry species? No, not crazy. FOOLISH!!!! We worship a God who, by the standards of our world, is foolish and weak.

So why do we keep at it? Because the foolishness of God is what has saved us.
• This foolish God is always allowing the Hebrew people to repent in the stories of the OT after they stray time and time again.
• This foolish God makes it possible for Abraham and Sarah to have a baby when they are approaching 100 years old!
• This foolish God picked David to become the most beloved king of Israel even though he would go on to use his position of power to have the husband of the woman he desired to be killed in battle.
• This foolish God produces the savior of the world by using Mary: an unwed pregnant teenager
• This foolish God in Jesus appears to women first at the empty tomb
• This foolish God chose Peter, the one whose lack of faith caused him to sink in the water when called by Jesus, to be the foundation of the church we have committed ourselves to today.
• This foolish God calls Paul to preach the good news of the gospel after he has lived most of his life persecuting followers of Christ. Paul, who had spent his life hunting down followers of Jesus and putting them in jail or ordering their execution. Paul, who was quickly rising to the top of his game and in the eyes of the leaders of the synagogue when Christ met him in a journey across the desert and turned every idea he had about how life was supposed to be on its head.

Foolishness, indeed.

We go through life collecting a lot of things that we think will save us: save us from boredom, loneliness, being second-best, those dark places that contain our biggest fears and hurts. We put others down so we can lift ourselves up. We search and fight for status, promotions, high appointments, and round-the-clock entertainment while flying through this life at warp speed so we don’t have to notice our disappointments. If we get to the top fast enough, we won’t have to look down anymore, right?

Only that’s not the way life is. Not real life. Not life lived in the way of Christ. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. We don’t look down on each other; we help each other up. The way of Christ leads us not to fight each other for the top spot but to race each other in goodness to the bottom, or as Paul says in his letter to the Romans, outdo one another in showing love. To this world in which we live, it’s as crazy an idea of success as choosing to go to church on Sunday mornings rather than all the places we could be right now. The way of Christ is upside down from how we think things ought to be.

There’s an old Catholic brother named Kilian McDonnell who, late in his life, began writing beautiful poetry based on his life and his life’s understanding of God and Holy Scripture. In one of his collections of poetry is a piece called “A Manual for Climbers”+ that reads as follows:

Surely, this is right.
One begins at the bottom,
like ascending the ladder
to conquer the fire.

One foot up, then the other.
No parachutes to the top,
no express elevator.
The faint need not apply.

God wrestled with primeval
darkness in the waters
of chaos. After seven days,
God rested. Not I.

To build muscle
I keep pumping iron.
If I stop to breathe,
I am back at the bottom.

After decades of climbing
I’m still on ground floor.
I had it all wrong.
You start at the top.

How could your life be different if you lived it top-to-bottom, not bottom-to-top?

Think about your work, your family, your relationships. Where are you headed? What are you building toward every day?

Think about your faith: where do you see yourself in this faith down the road? What do you hope will happen? How do you hope and expect to change?

Friends, I believe that the good word for us today is that it is foolishness that we practice together here. We get together every week and proclaim Christ crucified and risen. We believe that the Son of Man is also the Son of God. We know Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit and because our ancestors in faith gave up the bottom-to-top lives that were set up for them by society—Abraham and his comfortable end of life; Peter and the family fishing business; Paul, the rising star of the synagogue—and started living lives headed toward the bottom, toward the ones never intended to hear the gospel, toward us. And perhaps the most foolish thing of all—that God would go so far to save us!

If you turned your life around, if it started going top-to-bottom, if you start climbing your journey of faith at the top with God, you’ll be headed out into the world that still needs ancestors of faith to share the news that God loves this world and everyone and everything in it.

Good for you for crossing society and getting yourself to worship today. It’s all downhill from here—where will your top-to-bottom faith journey take you next?

+ From Swift, Lord, You are Not. The Order of St. Benedict. Collegeville, Minnesota. 2003.

Lent 2 2009: Hope

2009-03-07T21:52:00.000-05:00

Romans 4:13-25
For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation. For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”) —in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.” He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore his faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness.”
Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.

What was the last piece of good news you heard?

We’re not hearing much these days. Whenever I turn on the news on the radio or the television, I hear basically the same things: the economy is bad, it is getting worse, and the people with the power to fix it are fighting over what the best fix is. There is even talk on the news about how we should be talking about the bad news that we receive every day. Do you remember not 2 months ago when the world was watching the inauguration of this country’s 44th president? It was quite a day. Things seemed so good to me that day. Without ignoring our differences, we all seemed to be reading from the same script that day. For about 18 hours we were united again by something bigger than our parties or our politics in a way I don’t remember since the days immediately following the attacks on September 11, 2001. Joy and I were glued to the television all day. I know she’s way too young for TV, but I wanted her to be able to tell her friends that her crazy mommy made her watch the inauguration of this country’s first non-Caucasian president ever. After experiencing a campaign in which we heard the word “hope” mentioned so many times it almost because boring, I was once again filled with and surrounded by it that day. I confess that at times I was moved to tears thinking that Joy will never remember a country in which people of any other decent besides European don’t have a prayer of ever attaining an important elected office or that women are second class or second choice participants in most areas of professional life. I was hopeful because before my very eyes things were coming into existence that had never existed before.

We are 47 days into this new presidential administration, yet January 20th already seems like a lifetime away. Last weekend I heard some of the speeches made at a political convention, and it made me sad again. It made me lose a little hope. The spirit of a unified nation across party and political lines has disintegrated. What happened to the spirit of one-ness I felt just 47 days ago? A month and a half into a new era, and we’re tearing each other apart. Hope, huh?

William Sloan Coffin once said something about Christianity being unique because we really believe there is hope in a world in which hope has no business existing. That was the thing about Abraham—belief that God could make something happen that seemed impossible, hope that surpassed sanity in the case of his son Isaac. In our faith life, in our national life, in our individual lives, each of us has experienced moments of hope: belief in the possibility of things being called into existence that do not currently exist. And the one doing the calling is God.

In this holy season of Lent, we go along with Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem. It is there that he will bring into existence the hope of an everlasting life in the presence of God—something we dare to continue to hope for even now. Paul recalls the work God did in Christ by raising him, body and spirit, from the dead and showing the world that the most impossible thing we could imagine—the fact that life doesn’t end when there is no more breath in this body—is not only possible but can and will be. Paul recalls the faith journey of Abraham, begun late in his life: when he was too old to father a child, he and Sarah had Isaac. When he thought his life and legacy were long past their prime, God gave him a new life to live and a new promise of a future he never imagined possible—to be the ancestor of a great nation of people. What a journey of faith he entered when he made a covenant with God!

The good news for us today is that our faith journeys will not always be easy they will always be life changing. When it isn’t easy, when you want to give up, when you think that nothing good will ever come of this faith or your life, when everything else in the world tells us that the world can’t recover from the situation in which we find ourselves now, that is when God gives us hope for the journey. God: who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. It came true for Abraham. It is true for Jesus. It will be for St. Paul, and it will be for you.

In the name of the Hope of the World. Amen.

Lent 1 2009

2009-02-28T19:47:00.000-05:00

Mark 1:9-15
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.
Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

Several weeks ago Joy and I were in the car together driving along to some errand we were doing together. Actually, usually I do the errands and she sleeps. We were listening to All Things Considered on public radio. We heard an interesting story about some plans in the making to offer internet access on airplanes in flight. What if you could spend that time sitting on the airplane checking and responding to email or surfing the web instead of trying to read a magazine, book, or newspaper. Especially for business travelers, this could be a plus for flying from coast to coast—time to do work while flying from work to do more work. No time lost, and for any of you who travel often for your career this may be at least an intriguing possibility. But I travel for leisure for the most part, and I must admit that I was a little saddened by this proposal. An opinion piece by author Eric Weiner followed the news story, and the author gave some points for keeping the in-flight experience free from connectivity. He talked about a 17-hour flight he had recently taken in which he was able to read 2 books, stare out the window, and have some…thoughts. But what I really connected with was when he said that without access to the internet while in flight he feels no guilt. He’s free to think and have new ideas and wonder about things like the decline of downtime and expressions like “offline,” “out of the office,” or “on vacation.”

Can you remember that feeling of setting your voicemail or email to give the same message to everyone who tries to connect with you while you are taking some time off to relax and be with family? It seems like a very long time ago now that I saw at my desk here and recorded a message on my voice mail and wrote a return message on my email both letting anyone trying to contact me that I would be on maternity leave from December 1 through February 28. At the time, that seemed like an amount of time that I couldn’t even calculate. Now it feels like a blink. But what a journey it has been since November 30th, 2008: the last time I was with you to lead in worship. On that day, I had no idea what I was in for, but I knew it was less than 24 hours away.

There is something wonderful about going away—from your regular schedule, from the busy-ness that seems to suck up all of our time, from the things in life which take us away from our relationship with God, from the mercy of Christ, from the presence of the Spirit in and around us all the time. Time away frees us for a little while from the expectations placed upon us at work and at home. It can free us from stressful decision-making, and give us time to recharge and refresh so that we will be more productive when we return to the daily grind. It also helps us reconnect with who we are—the people God created us to be in the first place and the new things God has in store for us if we will just pay attention and receive the message. Mr. Weiner talks about the cultural practice all over the world of going “offline” for a while:

Every culture has its out-of-bounds venues, circumscribed places and times in which the normal demands of society no longer apply. Buddhist monks on meditation retreats, college students on spring break. Instinctively, we humans recognize the value of tuning out the world, at least for a while. We know we'll return refreshed and ready to cope again.

There is something important about observing your faith journey. It is not, after all, just about getting into heaven when this life is over. It is about this life! It is about the decisions we make, the people we know, the relationships we cultivate, the work of the people done in faith and in community. I agree with Mr. Weiner about keeping internet connectivity offline while in the air. “So, please, airline executives,” he says. “I beg of you: Don't do it. You've already deprived me of leg room, decent food and dignity. Don't take away my peace of mind, too.”

I want to invite you to observe a holy journey during this season of Lent. The rest of the world is now on the bandwagon of giving things up; that is no longer a practice unique to the Christian world during these 40 days of Lent not counting Sundays. On Wednesday I heard a local DJ announcing her noon hour “Radio Free Lunch” theme: "Songs about all the things that you could give up for 40 days for Lent." People called in with suggestions like , “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones and “Chocolate” by Snow Patrol. Usually for Lent we decide to give up things that are vices, and then we suffer for 40 days without those things all the while planning a huge coffee/sugar/caffeine/chocolate/desert/carbs blow-out for Easter Sunday and the week following. But this year we’re already in the habit of giving things up, aren’t we? What’s different about the church’s call to deprive yourself of something that you probably don’t need to survive when many are already doing without things they really do need because our economy is tanking? What kind of counter-cultural witness can we have in this holy season that invites the world to come and see what is so special about this faith we share, where there is hope when all the things we normally rely on for life are failing us, where there is a place to find some kind of relief from the constant woe of serious changes we’re all making in life just to make it. We offer something different, something holy.

We are here today because at some time in our lives we have decided to begin the holy journey of faith because God called and we responded. What has the journey been like for you so far? Where will we be when it is over? Are the risks we take along the way worth it, and what about the ones we don’t take? This year, let’s not make it about what we are giving up. Jesus’ journey into the desert as told to us in Mark’s gospel does not focus on the fact that Jesus fasted for 40 days but that he was sent by the Spirit away from everything. He had time to deal with Satan, and he was in the presence of the messengers of God. It is no accident that this journey began immediately after his baptism. So it is for us. As we are initiated into the faith, we are prepared for the journey that is ahead—a journey of God- and self-discovery. Friends, today I invite you to begin a journey through Lent, observing the call of God in your life perhaps to do and be new things, the risks you will take for the sake of believing in the hope of Christ crucified and raised from the dead. Let it begin for us here, at this table, where we receive bread for the journey. And be sure to make time during these 40 days to be offline, even for just a little while, to stare out the window, to have thoughts, and to listen to God.

May it be a holy season for us, friends. May it be.

 “The End Of Offline In Flight? Say It Ain't So” by Eric Weiner.

Been a while...

2008-11-23T14:47:00.000-05:00

I've not updated this blog in quite a while. About to go on maternity leave from my work as a pastor, I will not be preparing or preaching sermons for a while. I thought maybe I could catch up in the mean time on my posts.

So, here is Pentecost + 17:

Matthew 18:21-35
21Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” 22Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times. 23“For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. 24When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; 25and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. 26So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ 27And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. 28But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ 29Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ 30But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. 31When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. 32Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. 33Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ 34And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. 35So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

I use a study bible that gives every section or passage a heading. At the beginning of the 18th chapter of Matthew, the heading is “True Greatness.” I can’t help but think back to where we begin this chapter: a conversation among the disciples of Jesus about who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. I have to imagine that they were hoping for a cushy spot pretty close to the greatest when they arrived there, and they set the tone for the rest of this chapter in which we get a discussion of conflict resolution, the humility of being great, and the parable of the shepherd who wouldn’t let even one sheep out of a hundred get lost from the rest of the flock. It’s a nice outline:
a. Humility: We enter faith with humility, realizing that we need God in our lives and that with God’s help and guidance, things can be and are far greater than we could ever accomplish on our own.
b. Temptation to sin: Then we are continually faced with the temptation to separate ourselves from God because we might like trying things on our own for a while better than relying upon God.
c. Extravagant love from God: We are reminded that even when we turn away and our love fails, the love of God never lets us go completely but seeks us wherever we are.
d. Learning to live with each other in peace: Then we must learn to accept that God’s love for us is mirrored and God’s love for others, and we must learn to live peaceably with each other, offering mercy when mercy is due, and holding each other accountable for how we live out our lives of faith.
e. Forgiveness and more forgiveness: And when we make mistakes, we are shown that forgiveness is the only true reconciliation and reconnection with each other and with God.
f. … and then unforgiveness: Here at the end of the chapter, Jesus tells another parable without such a happy ending as the Lost Sheep just a few verses before.

Forgiveness is a big deal. We use that word to describe many different situations in life. Fashion gurus talk about fabric that is forgiving when describing clothing that hides the parts of our bodies we’d rather the rest of the world didn’t notice. Insurance companies offer accident forgiveness so that our rates aren’t jacked up so high for so long. Several years ago the talk about forgiving the debts of developing countries was all the rage among the Group of 8 and the citizens of those nations. And there is the most often intended meaning of the word: to let go of anger toward another person or group when he, she, or they has caused you some offense. Jesus wants us to consider God as our model for forgiveness—the one who forgives us when we don’t deserve it, who has shown us in Christ that forgiveness of even the most vile misdeed is possible, and who desperately hopes we’ll catch on one day and truly start living a life oriented toward forgiveness of one another’s wrong-doing rather than searching for the way to benefit most from one another’s mistakes.

Both parts of our passage today demonstrate God-sized forgiveness. First, Peter—the rock of the church—asks Jesus how many times he should forgive another member of the church, a brother or sister, when he/she sins against him. I would have expected more from Peter. He’s the first among his peers; he knows exactly who and what Jesus is and isn’t afraid to say it…yet. In fact, he, himself, is often the recipient of forgiveness when he acts impetuously or out of fear before thinking through the implications of his actions. He’s a guy who would rather ask for forgiveness than permission. Knowing what we know about him, we might think he would be the first to step forward into the bold and extravagant act of offering others forgiveness. Yet he almost seems stingy here, or maybe resentful. Isn’t just accepting an apology or telling someone there are no hard feelings between you enough? Do we really have to make a big deal out of this forgiveness thing?

Jesus uses some code language in his response. Not just 7 times, but 77 times should you forgive someone who does you wrong. 7 being the perfect number and mentioned elsewhere with this connotation, Jesus tells Peter than feigning forgiveness just won’t cut it. You have to really mean it; and to mean it you have to work at it; and to work at it you have to follow God’s perfect example of forgiveness in your own life. It’s the whole “Do unto others…” concept.

But 77 is an extravagant number. At this point, Jesus is piling on his point about the generous love of God—the love that reaches out to children and other members of society whom the rest tend to forget; the love that seeks out those who wander or run away from the fold; the love that tries everything possible to reconcile a broken relationship; love that we are not used to practicing or receiving when you get right down to it.

I’ve always equated this passage with the idea of “forgive and forget.” I think this is an attractive idea for us when we are on the receiving end of forgiveness, but isn’t it so much harder to accomplish when we are the ones who have to forgive? That is the whole point of the parable he tells next. You have this guy, a slave to a king who probably owns quite a bit of wealth and property. Surely from time to time he had the opportunity to help his servants when they were in financial need. It was beneficial for him to do so because it kept them in his debt and gave them cause not to think of trying to become free of him. After all, were they to try and leave him, their debts would likely make it impossible for them to survive on their own. But for the king to forgive a debt in this kind of circumstance was unusual. The debt the king decided to forgive was enormous. A talent was worth more than 15 years’ wages of a laborer. That was some debt—probably accrued over a long period of time and hardly repay-able by a slave who earned little to nothing. When the king offers forgiveness for the debt, the slave can hardly believe it. Where did this kind of generosity come from? He did not deserve it, yet there it was for him to enjoy.

Isn’t it strange that he, then, chooses not to offer one of his debtors the same kind of generosity and relief? His debtor, his fellow slave, one who was in the same boat he had been in even offered the same plea he had offered the king: “Have patience with me, and I will repay you.” Yet he offers nothing to his debtor. And he didn’t get away with it, either. When the king got wind of it, he had the slave tortured until he would be able to repay his debt—a debt he would likely never be able to pay in full.

What does this say about models for forgiveness? If we liken God to the king, then we see at once an extravagant forgiving nature who, when we ask, is willing to do even the most ridiculous things for us. But we also see a God who will not accept our lack of that kind of love and grace toward each other. While I think the torture is best understood in the context of the hyperbole of the whole story, the fact that the king was so angered by his slave’s disregard of a fellow human being teaches us something about forgiveness: it’s not about us. It is about the relationship—between God and us, and among us.

We were made to need each other’s companionship through life. We were not made to be isolationists, yet we continue to grow farther and farther apart when we forget that forgiveness only truly works when it is both received and given. It feels good, doesn’t it, when you receive forgiveness? What does it feel like when you give it to someone else?

Receiving forgiveness is not our ultimate reward. When we are converted to the love of Christ, we recognize that God forgives the sin in which we live and move, and the relief we feel in those moments is real and strong. But it is not ultimate. The reward of forgiveness comes from offering it to someone else, even when they do not deserve it. It is the feeling that you are truly making a connection or reconnection with another human being, that your life is actually intertwined with the life of another, that you have something meaningful and powerful to give to someone else.

If we’re going to talk about who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, I think we’d better be careful of nominating ourselves to the position. We don’t deserve that title any more than anyone else does, but we can help each other move toward the kingdom of heaven by forgiving debts, letting an “I’m sorry” really mean something, and forgetting the past in favor of moving forward to a reconciled future. To hold on to resentment and anger only makes it harder for us in the long run. Jesus knew this was true and urged us not to live in that kind of state. The reward for forgiving your neighbor’s debts to you is getting to live a life free of greed or malice.

So who is the greatest? Ultimately it is the one who realizes that forgiveness, for it to be truly effective and transformative in this life, must be passed on to another.

What would you do? If your bank or credit card company decided to forgive your mortgage or consumer debt, would you still make your friend pay the 50 bucks he owes you from a few years ago when he doesn’t really have the money to pay? If someone close to you forgives you for breaking her heart, would you forgive a sister for breaking yours?

I challenge us today to think of forgiveness as complete only when we have both received it and offered it. I ask you to think about the times in your life when you have been forgiven, be thankful for those times, and let them be inspiration to you to find the dark places and broken relationships in your life that need your kind and generous offer of forgiveness. After all, being the body of Christ is about being whole, healing brokenness, and making sure no one is left to live alone in a life of sin without the understanding that there is another way.

Forgive and really forget, my friends. It is the way of Christ. It is the life we have been created to live. It is what will finally bring us into wholeness in the body of Christ.

Amen.

Pentecost + 16

2008-09-13T00:34:00.000-04:00

Matthew 18:15-20
15“If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. 16But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. 18Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. 19Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. 20For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

…
You might be a United Methodist if…your pastor has ever said to you, “What I hear you saying is…”

This funny little quip about the way we as United Methodists may tend to offer pastoral care through a process called “active listening,” points me toward this passage—mainly because active listening is not something that comes naturally to most of us; we have to work at it. And this kind of conflict resolution doesn’t really come naturally to us either; in fact, I am afraid that not many kinds of conflict resolution come naturally to us as human beings any more. When was the last time you had a conflict, a fight with someone? Especially someone close to you?

It happens all the time, doesn’t it? You and your significant other, you and your child or parent, you and the dog or cat(!), you and the person who sits near you at work or works closely with you, you and your close friend—we just can’t seem to avoid conflicts with one another. I think it is part of what is called the “Human Condition”: that wonderful gift God gave us of discerning brains and thought patterns we have organized into free will. Having the will to make our own decisions and choose our own actions will inevitably, from time to time, cause us to offend a brother or sister somewhere down the line. Sometimes it is something you have said, whether you meant harm or not. Sometimes it is something you have done or not done. There are things in life that happen to separate us from one another, and Jesus took note of that while he was among us in the human condition. Then he gave us some advice about how to deal with and live with one another that, if were to actually listen to it or try to follow it, just might prove helpful in resolving the conflicts that can break relationships for good.

If we take a look at the whole 18th chapter of Matthew, we get an idea of where all this “how to treat each other” manual part of the gospel comes from. The beginning of the chapter finds the disciples approaching Jesus with the question, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” When I read that, I kinda want to scream at them: are you kidding me with this question? Have you heard nothing he has said to you? Jesus, though, answers them by comparing their allusions of grandeur to the natural humility of children, telling them that they must become like little children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. Also in this chapter is Matthew’s version of the parable of the lost sheep—a story known for its ridiculous description of how much God cares for every person individually and makes an effort to develop and maintain a relationship with each one of us, not settling for the big congregations of thousands of people or even a simple majority of believers among the population. And then we come to our passage about practicing the discipline of conflict resolution among the members of the church. In fact, the words he used are a kind of language of kinship, probably not imagining the way we sit in rows together in pews here at St. Paul as “another member of the church,” but more suggesting that there is a tie that binds us together that we cannot see or touch. Our belief in the saving love of Jesus brings us here and holds us here with the help of the Holy Spirit. But we’ll get to that Spirit in just a minute.

So, Jesus is aware that conflict is going to come up. He experiences it himself, usually something to do with some kind of class warfare: either within the synagogue or among his disciples. He’ll even be confronted by Peter in the next few verses asking Jesus if he really has to forgive a sin against him once and for all! Jesus knows that we are not so great at settling the things that come up between and among us. Nations of the world have created formal processes of dealing with disagreements so that we don’t have to come face-to-face with the people who sin against us. Matthew’s gospel was written for the community of Jewish folk who themselves had been excommunicated from the synagogues because of their belief in Jesus as the Messiah and, therefore, their incompatibility with Jewish tradition and teaching. We are still doing it today: excommunicating one another either one by one or in large groups because of disagreements that arise between and among us. And all along, we’ve had a solution right in front of us—a resolution to our disagreements that can so quickly rise to the point of fights, battles, and wars over saving face or proving ourselves to be right above all costs to us interpersonally. Is there another way?

Just imagine for a moment a time when you have been at odds with someone else. Maybe it was your spouse or partner; maybe a child or parent; maybe a co-worker or someone who sits in this sanctuary with you on Sunday morning for worship. How many of those times that you can recall ended with reconciliation? Did you actually bring your concerns and hurts out in the open with the intention of trying to make things better between you, or did you walk away with hurt feelings, writing off the relationship for lack of willingness to try to reconcile or the security of your own mind that the other person wouldn’t want to try, either? What if you tried the process that Jesus proposes in this passage? It would involve speaking openly about what has hurt you and how with the person who has done the hurting. And if that didn’t work, you’d have to let someone else step in as mediator between the two of you, and you’d have to tell the whole story to that person who would then listen to the whole story from “the other side,” too. And if that didn’t work, you’d have to let us—your community of faith and the people who pray with and for you on a regular basis—step in to help. And if that didn’t work, that person would continue to exist, just as an outsider to the religious community. What if we actually asked people to leave as a result of this process not working? Other churches do it all the time. Should we?

I believe the whole point of this passage is not the excommunication of those who can’t participate in the process of reconciliation. I believe that Jesus’ message for us this day is one of hope—that we truly can help one another in our hours of need. And I don’t just think that we can help each other in our hours of financial or physical need. We can go farther than being there for each other when it is easy to do so. We can help each other by holding one another accountable for our actions, calling each other out when sin has been committed against one another, and trying really hard to work it out.

I realize that sometimes we just can’t do this on our own. And that is where the good news comes from today. Through the power of the Spirit who binds us together in our faith in Christ, we have power beyond our human condition to really reach out to each other. Yes, it is easier to send one another packing out of our lives, to say, “We used to be close, but then we had a big falling out;” to hire professional people to mediate and settle our conflicts financially and legally. But the hard work of reconciliation is the work of God, the work of Christ among us to bring us back into relationship with God, the work of the Spirit to continue to saving work of Christ. And since we are created in God’s image, maybe it’s about time we started trying this reconciliation thing a little more often. It requires work and time, effort and commitment. It requires a lot of energy spent and sometimes un-recognized attempts at doing the right thing. Where can we even start, you may be asking?

We can start here, around the table. We can start by coming here together today, not just for what we experience individually in communion with God while kneeling here and receiving the bread and cup, but also for what we can experience from this time on into the week knowing that we have participated in this sacred meal together. No matter where we come from, what has gone before, or what is still weighing us down as we approach this altar, the body of Christ is big enough for all us and needs all of us in order to be whole.

Today I invite you to put aside those grudges, that anger, and that resentment that you feel—whether it be toward someone here today or someone far away from here. Instead, let the Spirit of God lead you to this table and begin the long, often difficult process of reconciliation by accepting the presence of Christ in your life, in your body and spirit. By bringing your whole self—joy, sadness, anger, all of it!—to this table, you will find strength to put aside those things which divide us and look for the grace and mercy to forgive one another. We gather here not in the name of grudge, anger, or resentment. We gather here in the name of Jesus, for he has promised us: wherever 2 or 3 are gathered in his name, Christ is among us.

Thanks be to God.
Thanks be to God its not just us who sometimes would rather just separate than work things out.
Thanks be to God that Christ is with us, all of us, now and always.

Amen.

Pentecost + 14

2008-08-17T06:54:00.000-04:00

Genesis 45:1-28
Then Joseph could no longer control himself before all those who stood by him, and he cried out, “Send everyone away from me.” So no one stayed with him when Joseph made himself known to his brothers. And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it. Joseph said to his brothers, “I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?” But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at his presence. Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Come closer to me.” And they came closer. He said, “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years; and there are five more years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest. God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God; he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. Hurry and go up to my father and say to him, ‘Thus says your son Joseph, God has made me lord of all Egypt; come down to me, do not delay. You shall settle in the land of Goshen, and you shall be near me, you and your children and your children’s children, as well as your flocks, your herds, and all that you have. I will provide for you there—since there are five more years of famine to come—so that you and your household, and all that you have, will not come to poverty.’ And now your eyes and the eyes of my brother Benjamin see that it is my own mouth that speaks to you. You must tell my father how greatly I am honored in Egypt, and all that you have seen. Hurry and bring my father down here.” Then he fell upon his brother Benjamin’s neck and wept, while Benjamin wept upon his neck. And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them; and after that his brothers talked with him.

When I was four or five years old, we lived in a house that had a basement. The basement stairs descended into the middle of the space, and there was an open passageway between one side of the room and the other. We stored boxes, my dad’s tools and scraps of wood, and toys in the basement, so my older sister and I would play down there, especially in the summer time or on Saturdays when we had lots of time to do whatever we wanted. Lots of funny family stories were born down there, like the time my sister and I played hide and seek, just the 2 of us, and she told me where to hide. She found me every time! One time she told me to hide in an old laundry hamper that was oval-shaped and had a lid. Once we shoved me down inside it, I couldn’t get out. That was no fun. Another time we decided to play with a pile of 2 x 4s that were just waiting for mischief in the basement. She thought it would be fun to build a little “jail” underneath the stairway by standing the 2 x 4s up like prison bars and inviting me to be the first prisoner. Remember that I was only 4 or 5 years old, and my playmate was my older sibling, and I never suspected that she would do anything that would hurt me. And she wouldn’t have, and wouldn’t to this day, nor I to her. But it’s often the first story that comes to my mind when I think of the story of Joseph and his brothers.

It’s the archetype story of sibling rivalry. There were 12 of them, so to be sure there were moments when one or 2 or 6 of them would gang up on the others. Fights must have broken out constantly when they were young. And they had a variety of mothers—undoubtedly a reason the rivalry was even stronger than anything we could imagine in our own experiences. The two youngest, Joseph and Benjamin, were the sons of Rachel, the true love of their father Jacob. You may remember the torment Jacob went through with Laban, Rachel and Leah’s father, when Jacob first came to ask for Rachel’s hand. When she is finally able to conceive and have a child, she names him Joseph, and he instantly becomes his father’s favorite, followed closely behind by his younger brother to come, Benjamin. Remember the amazing technicolor dream coat? It was a gift for Joseph from his father, and the other brothers hated it and they hated him for it. So, they tried to get rid of him by tossing him aside into a hole and letting him be sold into slavery in Egypt. And the people who took him away happened to be the relatives of their long lost uncle, Ishmael—their grandfather Isaac’s brother whom grandmother Sarah had sent away with his mother when Sarah became worried that her son Isaac was growing too close to his brother, Ishmael. Jealousy won out in the end of that part of the story: Ishmael and his mother were sent away to have their own life story away from Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and eventually Jacob and his family, including Joseph. And considering in the anthropology of the Bible they and we are all descendents of Cain and Abel, sibling rivalry has been a part of our story since the beginning. Jealousy over abilities and affections has always plagued us, even us—the children of the God of generous benevolence, who shows no partiality and loved us enough to send God’s own Son to live, die, and be resurrected for our sake; to save us from living with the consequences of practicing jealousy and revenge on each other.

Look at the world we share: countries invading one another for power and political and monetary gain, nations overlooking one another’s pain and suffering in order stabilize their own power and political and monetary gain. Look at crime in our city, in our neighborhood: for every reason from boredom to resentment, homes are being burglarized and families are living in fear everywhere we look. Look at the people of faith across the world: the family of humanity which God created for relationship with God and with one another has split and faction-ed off and now threatens one another over property, authority, and Biblical interpretation. Look at our personal relationships with friends, family, co-workers: the people who surround us and with whom we live life, and the people who seem to hurt us the most when jealousy and rivalry get wrapped up in how we treat each other. It is as if we have forgotten that we were created by a loving God to love and care for each other, to offer each other forgiveness and mercy.

It is no longer our natural way to forgive others who do wrong to us. Even when we pronounce forgiveness with our words, our actions and our hearts often continue to hold onto the feelings of resentment that go along with injustice and malice. We feel vindicated when we can continue to show our enemy as the one in the wrong, when we can humiliate and shame them for the wrong that has been done to us. Somehow, that makes our hurt feel validated, and we trick ourselves into believing that there is good reason for us to hold onto our feelings of anger and bitterness. But Joseph’s story teaches us that God’s intention for us, even in the midst of our own destructive and hurtful behavior toward one another, is for us to live in peace, to forgive one another, and to offer one another grace in the way God offers it to us when we turn away from God’s love. Joseph is a model for forgiving AND forgetting. Not only does he forgive his brothers, he rescues his family from starvation by offering them food and shelter when they are in most need. It is the reunion which eventually means more to him than his own vindication.

How can we learn to practice this kind of forgiveness and reconciliation? Where are there relationships or experiences in your life which have hurt you but to which you continue to hold, unable to forgive and forget? Can we be moved by the passion and beauty of this story to understand that compassion is far more important and fruitful than resentment?

I had the privilege of studying with Archbishop Desmond Tutu while I was a student at Candler. Week after week I got to spend walking through the life experience of a man whose ministry has been bringing the people of God together after generations of unjust separation. Month after month he listened to the confessions of people who committed tragic crimes against his people in South Africa, and then he offered them not revenge but reconciliation and their victims reparation and rehabilitation. When Archbishop Tutu and the Black South Africans had every emotional right to exact revenge on the perpetrators of Apartheid, instead they offered reconciliation. It wasn’t free; but it was merciful.

The world’s eyes are on Beijing, China, as we watch who is winning gold medals in the 29th Olympic Games. Most of the world did not know that Georgia and Russia would be in the midst of war today when the 2 countries entered the walk of nations on August 8th. And now the world is asked to take sides as these two former soviet nations now battle for power. And in the backdrop for this conflict are the wars we have waged in Afghanistan and Iraq, tensions between Israel and Palestine, the atrocities of Darfur in Sudan, and the crisis in Zimbabwe. Where are we today? How have we forgotten that we are brothers and sisters, no matter how far apart we are in distance, policy, and world outlook? What stands between us and reconciliation?

One of the great lessons we can learn from God’s servant Joseph and the restoration of his family is what to do when we have wronged each other. Their story is not one of prevention but one of reconciliation after a terrible crime of jealousy has been committed against a member of the family. Long after it seems that the family will be brought back together, Joseph’s brothers appear at his door asking for relief from starvation and sustenance for the family. They don’t even know who he is when they arrive. This is not their first encounter with Joseph in Egypt, but it is the moment when his identity is revealed to them. No one is prepared for the reunion; feelings are raw and something like an apology for throwing Joseph into a whole all those years ago just doesn’t seem to do. But without seeking revenge on his brothers, Joseph offers them mercy and forgives them for how they hurt him all those years ago. He’s living a different life now, and so are they, and now they need him to survive. Even though they turned their backs on him and left him for dead, he will not do the same to them.

Do you have relationships in your life that need this kind of healing? Are you struggling with a brother or sister, with a spouse or partner, with a child or parent, with a friend? Watch the actions of Joseph—the great emotions through which he works so that he can get to the place where he can offer forgiveness to his brothers and really mean it. Listen to the words he speaks to them and take note of the way they are treated in their greatest hour of need by one from whom they attempted to take life itself.

He forgives them. Without apology, he forgives them and sees that what has taken place was what needed to happen so that now when his family finds itself in need, he can provide. His father’s favorite son will now be the one to save the whole family. The years of fighting, of hurting each other, of saying and doing things that cannot be taken back, of leaving each other for dead—both physically and emotionally—are all put behind them as Joseph demonstrates to his brothers the love of God that truly does surpass all of our human understanding and reaches beyond the limits of revenge and retribution or payback. The love of God for us—for you and me and for the people who have hurt us, like the love of Joseph for his brothers—is limitless.

Can we practice that kind of love, that kind of forgiveness? Can we set as a goal the kind of reconciliation modeled for us in this story of faith? Can we accept apologies when they are offered and move forward with forgiveness? Can we find ways to set our relationships right when they become estranged?

Joseph said to his brothers, “And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.” Brothers and sisters, let us be sent by God to preserve life, love, relationship, and forgiveness. Let us practice extraordinary, generous, and unexplainable grace with one another.

May it be. Amen.

Pentecost +13

2008-08-10T18:39:00.000-04:00

I guess I could come up with snazzier titles for my sermons. Its just that sermon titles tend to be...

a. misleading sometimes, and
2. (for all you "Mad About You" fans) a little cheezy!

So, here you go: for the 13th Sunday after Pentecost...

Romans 10:5-15
Moses writes concerning the righteousness that comes from the law, that “the person who does these things will live by them.” But the righteousness that comes from faith says, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’” (that is, to bring Christ down) “or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. The scripture says, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.”

For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”

I believe the church has become ashamed of the message we have to proclaim. Would you agree?

Think for just a minute about the first time you ever came to a Christian church, or the first time anyone ever told you the story of Jesus—of his life, death, and resurrection. Or remember the first time someone invited you to go to church and you went and had a good experience. Or, if you spent some time away from the church and then decided to come back and give it another try, what did that first time back feel like?

You see, I believe that we are gathered here today to proclaim in some way, whether it be in great praise and thanksgiving, great fear and trembling, or great doubt and trepidation, to acknowledge that Jesus is, indeed, the Son of the living God, and that the Holy Spirit has compelled us to come here to pray, hear the Word of God, and give God thanks and praise for life. But what happens when we leave here?

When Paul writes to the Romans, he writes to a group of people whom he does not already know. He did not establish a church in Rome. In fact, he never made it there. All the recipients of his letter may have known about Paul was the reputation that preceded him: a zealous Jew turned zealous Christian. As strongly as he persecuted followers of Jesus he now persuaded Gentiles to become followers of Jesus. People probably knew that he preached with great commitment and fervor for Christ—the same Christ whom he publically called a contradiction to the faith of his birth and the Law of his God and his people. Once, he believed only one people could have access to or relationship with God. Now he preached that anyone and everyone could have both, and not even through the practice of the Law exclusively but now through the practice of the heart: the belief that God had reached out to us in sending Christ into the world and acted in ultimate selflessness and love for us by raising Christ from the dead. Belief in that and the statement of that belief was Paul’s new message. And he was no longer presiding over the persecution of people in order to get them to surrender to his long-held beliefs. He, instead, had surrendered himself to his own long-held practices in favor of the new thing God was doing in his life through his encounter with the risen Christ.

Now its true that many of us do not have such a dramatic experience of faith as Paul had. Not many of us encounter Jesus in a great flash of light across the sky while journeying in the desert. Some of us do have deeply personal encounters with Jesus in many life situations, but not many of us respond the way that Paul did to his converting encounter with Christ. And we are not all called to proclamation the way Paul was. In this economy, it would be difficult to give up the livelihood many of us are lucky to have and go to places we had never been and where we had little or no acquaintance to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And yet, the relationship with God, that assurance of God’s presence with us and love for us, that hope that God will provide safety and harbor for us against all things that seem negative and threatening—that is as real for you and me as it ever has been for anyone, especially today when there are so many reasons why we could all be somewhere else today, right now, and we have all chosen to be here. That presence, that knowing of God in our hearts, that belief that Jesus really is who he says he is—it has us here now, week after week, to pray, to connect with God. And Paul’s message for us today, God’s Word to hear this morning is hooray for us for making room in our lives for this when so many others don’t…now: what comes next? How do we go out and share this with the world who needs to know that there is belonging in the love of God, that God loved us enough to send Christ into the world for life, death, and then resurrection so that we could see, experience, and believe the love of God which passes all understanding?

Paul knew that in Rome there were folks who needed to hear the gospel. There were people there who had heard about Jesus but did not truly know him. And to truly know him is to truly know that he is the Son of God who came to us, loved us, healed us, taught us, initiated us into God’s ultimate reign which—although supported by the Law God had given was not subject to it—and returned to prepare heaven and earth for God’s presence with and for us. People in Rome, people in Corinth needed to hear that. He found a way to use who he was, the gifts for commitment and strength and perseverance he had been given to share that message. People in Atlanta, in your workplace, in your family, among your friends need to hear and know that message. And so today, allow yourself to be confronted with the call that is issued to us in this passage: “how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent?” It is hard for us to know how we as individual Christians are sent to proclaim the message that Jesus is Lord. Perhaps it is because we are not sure what that means for us individually. Perhaps it is troublesome language in our time and context. Perhaps we fall into the belief that only those called to preach are given the necessary tools or gifts to proclaim Jesus to others.

But Paul calls us all to proclamation. What are the ways that we, as individual Christians, whether or not we are called to preach, proclaim the Word of God that Christ has come for us all? The final verse of this passage says that the feet of the messenger of the Word are beautiful—that the calling to proclaim the Word of God in Christ is a task of great beauty, great importance, and great responsibility. How shall we accept this task and accomplish it?

"Preach the gospel. And if necessary, use words." The words of St. Francis of Assisi have been quoted and used for hundreds of years to help people understand the work of proclaiming the gospel. I myself have seen and experienced far more sermons that I remember than those I have heard. ‘Why is she saying that about her own profession?’ you may be wondering. But how many preachers do you know who stand in pulpits every Sunday morning with stoles around their necks? And how many do you know who work in banks, in advertising, in public schools, as lifeguards or museum curators, as social workers and professional musicians? When do you have the opportunity to preach? To proclaim the gospel you have come to know to be true and in which you have the utmost faith? When do you have the chance to let your life show that you believe in Jesus as the loving Son of God who loves the whole world more than we could ever imagine possible and who longs for all of us to connect or reconnect with God and God’s love? When does your life and witness make someone else want to hear more or want to believe? Do your Monday through Saturday decisions, actions, and words demonstrate your Sunday faith?

It is a tall order: the commandment to share the gospel message we have come to know with the world around us. And it is especially hard now when the church has so much for which to be ashamed. As Paul says to the Romans, “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart.” And not only is it in you, but the task of sharing it is work that is, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, beautiful upon the mountains. This is not a calling of which we should be afraid or ashamed but to which we should be drawn. Are we? Are you?

What would it take in your life for the gospel, the story of Jesus and God’s love for the world lived out in him to be the most beautiful, important, and satisfying work you could ever practice? What would you need to put aside?

Friends, the calling is now. The church needs you more than it needs me out there proclaiming the love of God. The church is not just law, but it is love and grace, and our “Rome” out there needs to hear and see in us the proclamation of that love and grace. In kind words when you feel like using selfish ones, in thinking about and working for the good of the whole sometimes in spite of or in place of your own good, in reaching out to people you don’t want to be around, in making relationship with people who think and feel differently than you about just about everything, in making space for people who don’t seem to belong anywhere else, and in all things letting God be shown through your life—when we do this “they” will hear, believe, and come to proclaim in their own worlds.

And we will be that much closer to helping God’s reign over all things really come true: justice rolling down like waters, righteousness like and ever-flowing stream, and all the things we see going wrong today finally becoming right. We can help. We can do it. As far as it depends on us, the church doesn’t have to be ashamed anymore.

Now that is something to which I can say, “May it be!” “Amen!”

Pentecost + 12

2008-08-03T17:38:00.000-04:00

Matthew 14:13-21
Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.” Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

Table stories are among the most entertaining and meaningful stories we tell. Think about the times you have been at your family’s table—your family of origin, your immediate family, your urban family—and remember the things you have shared and learned, talked over and talked out. There is something magical about food and proximity that brings us into communion with one another around a meal table that not many other things do.

When I was in high school, the monthly Family Night Suppers our church in Madison, Georgia, hosted were just wonderful. The kitchen counter was filled with all kinds of homemade dishes: meats, vegetables, breads, salads of all kinds, and my personal favorite: macaroni and cheese. One night, a friend and I surveyed the table before the supper was to begin and were delighted to discover more dishes of homemade macaroni and cheese than we could count. So, we decided this would be a special night; we would pile our plates high (like everyone else would do!) but only with macaroni and cheese. There would be no vegetables, no meat, not even any bread to fill our tummies that night. Just the most delicious combination of cheese, pasta, and cream that God ever made come to life on this earth. And the best part was that those suppers brought the community together for nourishment. Each member of the community brought something to share. Each person ate from the fruits of the labor and generosity of someone else. And there was always enough to go around a few times with plenty leftover for shut ins and the hungry. I thought of those suppers as monthly miracles of sharing, and boy did they keep me nourished and satisfied. I won’t even mention the desert table which required an entire wall of the fellowship hall all for itself.

We gather around other tables at other times in the life of the community of faith. We gather around conference tables to settle the business of keeping an organization up and running. We sit around classroom tables to discuss faith and ask questions. We read the Bible together and learn from each other’s experience and perspective. We gather regularly around this table here to receive grace for the journey in bread and juice. These occasions bring us together in laughter, in tears, in joy, in sorrow, in anger sometimes, and forgiveness in others.

Once, when I was a young teenager in Commerce, Georgia, I was kneeling at the rail in the front of the church to receive Holy Communion with other youth. In our midst was a younger kid—probably about 3rd grade or so. This was a small town, First Church, so we were all dressed in our “Sunday best”, dresses, heels, slacks, and jackets. The little boy at the rail with us had on a little elementary-sized suit, complete with a jacket and tie. We were the most dignified looking group of teenagers you could imagine. In this congregation we used individual serving cups instead of a chalice to serve the grape juice, and when the tray came around, you chose your own, drank it in a sip or two, and left it on the rail when you returned to your seat. When the dressed up 3rd grader got his cup out of the tray, he didn’t immediately turn his head back and drink it. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, pulled out a plastic drinking straw, stuck it in the cup, slurped out the sips of juice, shook it a couple of times to rid it of excess juice that didn’t make it to his mouth, and put it right back in his pocket. I could hardly keep the giggles from escaping and was SO relieved when it was time to get up and go back to my seat.

Another time, when I was in seminary at Emory, I attended a Friday morning Communion service. It was simple and small, with scripture reading, prayers of the people, some contemplative music, and the celebration of the holy meal. I was living with a lot of stress at the time as students are wont to do. I had a time consuming job, more reading and studying to do than could possibly have been done in the course of 14 weeks, and so many questions in my mind and heart about where exactly God was leading me in ministry beyond that point. As I sat in the chapel that morning and heard the familiar words of the prayer that, by this time, I had learned by heart after weekly celebration of the sacrament, I realized only after it had begun that tears were streaming down my face. It was the familiar grace and belonging that I felt in that moment that seemed to rescue me from the dark place into which I had spiraling when I walked in the door.

When Jesus encountered the crowd that day, he had just received word of the beheading of his beloved partner in ministry John the Baptist. Wanting to be alone for some time to grieve and pray, he left the others and went off by himself. But the crowds followed him, desperate for something they just knew he had that they wanted. What it turned out that they needed after he had healed them was simply to be fed. There were lots of them, and the disciples were understandably nervous about a hungry mob of people surrounding them on the side of the sea. They had not prepared a fellowship supper with every kind of macaroni and cheese you could imagine and a dessert table as long as the eye could see. There weren’t urns of sweet tea and cups filled with ice waiting to be served. There wasn’t even a tray of wafers and tiny cups of juice prepared to be shared among the crowd. All there was to be consumed was some bread and fish, and likely not enough to feed a crowd of thousands of people.

Feelings were undoubtedly stirred up. Would there be enough? Would my family get anything to eat? Would my children have to go hungry? Would fighting break out as a result of a food shortage? With whom would I have to share?

It is this story that introduces us to the 4-fold action of Christ at the Eucharist, the holy meal, which calls each of us to a table of plenty, often out of personal circumstances of scarcity. Among the doubt and fear the disciples must have been feeling, Jesus took what was offered; blessed it; broke it so that it would feed everyone; and shared it with all who were gathered.

The first action is to take. In our passage Jesus took the five loaves and two fish that were offered to him from the disciples—all they had to feed the massive crowd. In our communion liturgy, we acknowledge that on the night in which he gave himself up for us, he took break and the cup as they were prepared for use in the meal he would share with them. There he began to proclaim to them the very words of institution of both the supper they would share and that we share today, as well as the giving of himself for them and for us. God takes the talents we have, the gifts we have been given, the times in which we live, the situations in which we find ourselves either accidentally or on purpose, and finds ways to use them ultimately for the salvation of the world. What do you have to give that God can use? Perhaps you have a gift for music and could help enhance the worship service each week or on occasion. Maybe you have administrative abilities that could help us continue to thrive as an organization of people whose purpose is Christian worship and service. Perhaps you are called to serve in mission projects—locally, internationally, or both—and could help us continue to rediscover our calling and commitment to helping others. No matter what you bring to the table, God will take it and use it for good.

In the story today we see Jesus immediately bless the food he has taken from the disciples. He offers prayer for it—thanking God for it and how it will be used among them. So it is in blessing and thanksgiving that we gather today around the Lord’s table, remembering the miracle of abundance promised to us in Jesus’ feeding of the thousands as told in our gospel for today and in his mysterious presence in this meal we share together. We, too, give thanks at table together: for the opportunity to worship, for brothers and sisters who love us and hold us accountable, for the experience of the Holy Spirit that inspires and drives us forward in reaching out to others, and for the journey of faith, no matter how long or frustrating or full of joy it can be.

We even give thanks for the times in life when we have experienced brokenness. It is Christ’s third action and one that we may often misunderstand. I know that just as mine has your heart has been broken from time to time: by a loved one, by dashed expectations, by your own pride or the damage someone else’s pride has done to you, or even by the people and institution called the church. How often we hurt one another within the Body of Christ! But it is often in this brokenness that we eventually find wholeness and healing, the wholeness and healing we needed all along but could not see until there was an urgent situation before us—a time of great hunger as in the story from Matthew, or a time of great pain and suffering as in the story of our Lord’s trial and crucifixion. But from those experiences or brokenness, ultimate hope and promise springs forth. The hungry are fed, what was dead is raised to new life, and darkness is overcome by light.

But being broken is not the end. Finally, we share. We are shared, and we share. The good news is that we don’t have to live in a state of brokenness. There is healing for us; there is sustenance for our needs at the hand of Christ. When Jesus feed the thousands by the sea, he took a small gift, gave thanks for and blessed it, broke it, and had enough to feed the crowd with twelve baskets full of leftovers. In our prayers at the table, after having taken the bread and cup, blessed and given thanks for them, and breaking the bread, he shares bread and cup with the others, commanding them, and now us, to continue to share bread, drink, and life in his name.

We can learn something about communal living and sharing from this story. When we are willing to put something of ourselves forward for someone else, Christ takes what we give and blesses it, sometimes helping us to see that in our brokenness can be found pieces that fit the needs of others, and then calls us to give what we have found away. Then we are an outward-facing fellowship, sustained on the inside by the gifts of the body. So come to the table, friends, and take part in our communal table story, confessing those things that separate us from God and one another, giving of ourselves what is needed to fully realize the reign of God, receiving the blessing of Christ and giving thanks, recognizing our brokenness, and sharing the love of God with those who are hungry for it.

Amen.

Pentecost + 11

2008-07-27T18:58:00.000-04:00

So, for the 4 of you who might be reading this blog from time to time, I didn't realize how long it had been since I posted. I was away the past 2 Sundays on vacation, so that is one reason. Another is that I have been in kind of a black whole of sermon writing and feel bad that my congregation had to listen to some of the stuff I've been giving them lately, so I won't put it out there for anyone else to suffer through. But, today's was ok. I think the time off did me some good. So, I'm back home, back to work, and back on track. Hope you're having a lovely summer!

Matthew 13:31-52

31He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; 32it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” 33He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”

44“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. 45“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; 46on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. 47“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; 48when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. 49So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous 50and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 51“Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.” 52And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”

I am struck when I read this passage by the way it begins. The author of Matthew tells us that Jesus is using parable here to make his point as he often does. He has just completed the telling of the well-known parables of the sower and the weeds. These parables are well-known to us not only because they are often used in Christian teaching and preaching but also because they are actually explained in their context—something Jesus rarely does when using parables to teach. They are often more like riddles or stories, and their meanings are implied or inferred by the hearers. But these parables in our passage for today are less like stories and more like simile. Rather than telling a story about a mustard seed, a loaf of bread, a treasure-seeker, or a fisherman, Jesus simply uses them as objects in comparison with the kingdom of heaven.

Do you remember from English class what a simile is? The Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines simile as a figure of speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared. So, rather than trying to find an image or a story of something or someone who could be easily compared with God and God’s reign, Jesus uses things that are not at first glance similar to God or God’s reign at all. Like, comparing God with a mustard seed? This must have sounded a little strange to the hearers—God being what we understand to be bigger in being than anything we can imagine and a mustard seed being very small indeed. Or God, the creator and ruler of the universe, being made to be like yeast—a fungus that is capable of fermenting carbohydrates into alcohol and carbon dioxide; something women used in the simple, everyday act of making bread for their families. Or our omnipotent, ever-present God being likened to something hidden away and kept under close guard by an ordinary human being. Or our all-knowing God of great wisdom being like a merchant who made what seems like a foolish decision to sell everything he has so that he can take a gamble on buying one item of great price. Who knows what might happen to him and his livelihood? Or how about God, the one who orders all the galaxies that exist and who has set everything in motion that we know to be compared not to a fisherman but to a fisherman’s net—a tool that is manipulated by the hands of the one throwing it into the water so that the most fish can be caught and a better livelihood can be made.

Simile after simile here represents how God and God’s kingdom are unlike anything that we know. I suspect that if there had been room for one more section in this chapter before Jesus begins to discuss his unwelcome homecoming, someone might have asked what all these unlikely comparisons between God’s reign and this random assortment of things and situations could mean. They seem, at the surface, more like contrasts than comparisons. And yet, when you listen a little more closely, you begin to understand that the point of the whole thing is not to tell us what we already know about God’s reign. In fact, the whole point of Jesus was not to bring us a message of good news that we already knew. If we truly already knew it, why would it have been necessary in the first place? No, these parables serve as a device to jog our brains and our complacency a little bit. Is God only like some big field in which miracles of sharing bread and fish take place? Is God only like the power contained in the presence of Jesus when he is able to calm the storms on the water and in the hearts of the disciples? Is God’s will completely contained in the act of taking a delinquent child back into the family in an act of great hospitality and forgiveness? No. Good for Jesus for stretching our minds a little bit by forcing us to think of God and God’s reign in heaven and earth a little differently.

So I want to ask you to do a little more of this today. Let’s say we’re writing our own version of these parables using simile to describe the kingdom of God by comparing it to unlikely things. The mustard seed is not actually the smallest seed that exists. But it is a seed that produces a plant much larger than itself in the end. Wanting to describe how God’s reign may just have small beginnings which then promise much bigger and greater endings, what image might we use to describe it? Could we say the kingdom of God is like an African American woman who refused to sit in the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, simply because a white passenger needed a place to sit? Look what happened next: it was not the first time a confrontation over race occurred on a bus, but it was an event which catapulted the Civil Rights movement into action, and look where we are today. We’re not there yet, but we’re a lot further down the road toward the way God intended us to live and thrive together in our difference and uniqueness as the whole people of God.

And how about the parable of the yeast? Probably making a lot more bread than just for her family, the unidentified woman in this simile uses enough flour and yeast to make hundreds of loaves of bread. It is not the amount that matters; it is the role that the yeast plays in the whole process: the agent of change. Thinking about what we add to things to cause them to become something else, to rise and expand into a new thing, what image can we find to describe the kingdom of God in the same way? Could we say it is like welcoming the poor into the lives of the rich, welcoming the poor into the pews of the church, welcoming the poor into a society which thrives when they stay poor so others can get rich? It is like helping people repair their houses as some of our very own church family did just yesterday so that they can continue to safely live in their own homes when they could not afford to make the repairs necessary to stay in their homes where they may have been for decades? This kind of demonstration of the love of God toward neighbors is a further demonstration of the way God means for us to live with and for one another—when the small things that we do in the midst of the big struggles of life create change by keeping people in their homes when their economic situation threatens to evict them out of the lives to which they have grown accustomed over a long period of time.

Then there are the two parables in verses 44-46 that paint the kingdom of God to be worth risking everything we have for the chance to have the one thing that is far more valuable than anything else: a relationship, a place to be with and belong with God. While we may search for this kind of treasure, this kind of relationship and belonging in other situations in life, to what that we know can we compare such a sought-after thing as the kingdom of God? It is not only the place we belong, it is also the place we want to be in the end when things are finally made right and everything is as it was meant to be in creation. How can we have a glimpse of that kind of reality in this life? This past week we had the second ultrasound in which the doctor and sonographer measure all kinds of weights and lengths of our child as she continues to grow. Watching that little body, that little life, that little soul on the screen in that dark room—even for just a moment—was a miracle of seeing for me. It was an extraordinary experience of understanding that God continues to value us, each one of us, enough to continue to plant new life as a treasure in the ground of the struggle to make it that we each face in one way or another. Someone once told me that he believed that as long as babies were being born that God had not given up on us yet. I would take that to the next place where God not only hasn’t given up on us yet but also continues to invest deeply in each one of us and the life experience that we each have. That investment, that relationship is worth more than anything we own or could ever hope to have in this life. That is the kingdom of God.

And perhaps the image of the kingdom of God with which we may be the least comfortable, or perhaps just the least comfortable talking about to others: the separation of the good from the bad in the end. This is often described by using words like heaven and hell, or righteousness and sin. But the bottom line is that we do not like to think about or talk about the kingdom of God as being a kind of weeded-out existence in which some folk are embraced and others are sent away. Why would a loving God dwell in this kind of life? At this point, Jesus is speaking directly with his disciples: the group of 12 he was training to be the ministry of love and reconciliation that he was beginning after he was gone from their human presence. They were the ones who were to understand better than anyone else the dangers of living a life unconnected to God—dangers of loneliness, depression, brokenness, and never finding a place where one could truly be who God had made him or her to be. Therefore, they should get that this little parable was a call to them to continue their lives of fishing, only now using the net that God would provide to bring all manner of people toward the loving presence of God so that they could all have the opportunity to accept God’s love and transforming grace in their lives. They were the simile. They were the nets. And so are we. And we are the scribes in the last few verses that bring together the old and the new, the scripture on which we have based our faith tradition and the life that Jesus breathes into it, helping it to be a living source of faith and understanding for us.

So what do we take with us from this encounter with Christ and his vision for the ultimate reign of God? What is your parable of God’s kingdom? What is mine? What is your experience of God’s presence and promise in your life, and what difference does it make in how you live? Simile teaches us to think about things differently, to look at something from a different perspective. The topic for today is God’s ultimate reign in this life and the next. What does that mean for how we live this life? And what does it mean for what is to come?

For starters, we can participate in the small beginnings God uses to lead us to great endings, great big culminations of the work of making the love of Jesus real in this world. We can also be a part of changing things for the better, of helping this world to become more and more like what God intended when our own will became mixed with God’s. And we can begin to meditate on and truly come to believe what Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection has demonstrated to us in a very real way—that we are more valuable to God than the punishment our sinful choices deserve. Our joy, our life, our gifts, our presence in the world is more valuable to God than punishing us for making decisions that tear us away from God. We just need to wake up and realize it and participate in life that is abundant, not selfish; sustaining, not destructive; hopeful, not hopeless.

How will you do that? What will your parables be? And how will they tell the crowds, the world, our neighbors about the wondrous, loving kingdom of heaven?

Amen.

Pentecost +6

2008-06-23T11:04:00.000-04:00

Genesis 21:8-21

The child grew, and was weaned; and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned.

But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son. But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.”

So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. And God heard the voice of the boy; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the boy a drink. God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran; and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.

I spent this past week in Athens at the North Georgia Annual Conference. The week was a roller coaster for me of ups and downs emotionally and spiritually. There are always some very enjoyable parts of the annual meeting of clergy and lay delegates from every church and ministry in the conference, like seeing the people who are to be ordained at the evening worship service on the first day of the conference. Last week got off to a particularly good start with the opening worship service on Tuesday afternoon. It was a memorial service in which we remembered the clergy and clergy spouses who have died since the last time we gathered for conferencing. The preacher for that service was our own district superintendent, the Rev. Jim Cantrell. He challenged us to remember why we were gathered there: to celebrate and give thanks for the ministry we have been able to do in the name of Jesus in the past year and to look forward to what is to come. He said, “I hope we are not here to pat ourselves on our Methodist backs for all the good we’ve done; I hope we are here to hear the call of Christ to continue to be in ministry in our communities in every way that we can.”

It was a really good way to set the tone for the conference: looking to the future and having great faith and hope for what God is calling us to do together that is new and exciting. I was reminded of St. Paul and the possibilities that we face for ministry in our community, and I was excited and invigorated for the work of the year ahead. We have a diversity of people, situations, and needs in this community, and I continue to pinch myself when I wake up to prepare to come here for worship and prayer. What an incredible opportunity we have here to bridge gaps that we human beings have created among and between ourselves based on how we are different and how those differences make us uncomfortable! What welcome we offer here to those who aren’t necessarily like us in every way! That is a gift that not every Christian congregation can claim. Our commitment to inclusiveness and the embracing of diversity are things of which I am very proud when I think of all the reasons I am blessed to be the pastor of this real-life congregation.

And then I attended the ordination service at Annual Conference last Tuesday night. The preacher for the night was a retired United Methodist elder who spent many years as president of a seminary in Kentucky. He has written lots of books and is known to be theologically pretty conservative. Not considering myself to fall into that category, I went to the service with as much of an open mind as I could muster, hoping he’d have some things to say that would encourage me to look upon him as a brother and not as an enemy. You see, I am aware of the great danger we are in as we continue to draw lines in the sand from both sides marking where the correct theology stands and the incorrect continues to be misguided. And most of what he preached was interesting and not offensive to me; I thought I was safe in getting away with listening to his sermon without feeling alienated from him and his pronouncements about what the Christian faith should be. But toward the end I was saddened to hear him say to the ordinands to be careful of theology and practices of ministry that would lead them away from the heart of the Christian faith and the true call of Jesus. “Ministers who are concerned with diversity and inclusiveness are being led away from the true meaning of the gospel,” I heard him say. I was immediately sad and angry at the same time. How did he and I come from the same church, the same polity, the same theological traditions? How do we claim to have relationship with the same God and the same Jesus Christ and the same Holy Spirit? I could hardly stand to listen to it; had I not had friends who were being ordained, I might not have stayed for the rest of the service.

I thought about his words all week: we shouldn’t be concerned with fostering diversity or inclusiveness, and we shouldn’t even be friendly toward other religions that steer us away from the true heart and ministry of God. I thought about how differently I consider the practice of hospitality toward people of other faiths, people who are different than I, people who are otherwise excluded from many parts of the life of faith in the church. I realized that I wished that this preacher had never opened his mouth and spread that kind of thinking to the thousand or more people who were gathered in that room. What better faith and theology I have! What poor interpretation of the Word of God he has! I am a part of the real church, and the church he proclaims is some kind of an imposter. Surely there is no gray area here; only black and white.

And then I attended the breakfast meeting of the Methodist Federation for Social Action where I heard a young woman speak about her experience in advocacy for Palestinians in the midst of the war and strife of the Middle East, particularly those living in the West Bank. Beth Corrie’s cousin, Rachel, was killed in 2003 while standing in front of the home of a Palestinian in the West Bank, challenging a bulldozer meant to bring the house down. After several retreats, the bulldozer seemed to back off before it took one last charge toward the house and ran over Rachel Corrie twice in its path to demolishing the Palestinian home. Beth spoke about the difference between being anti-Israel and being sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians losing their homes in the occupation of the West Bank by Israel. It is possible, she said, to fight for the rights of Palestinians and to have respect for the story of the people of Israel. Has God ultimately shown favor for one people over another?

For generations we have read this passage for today as the story of the singling out of Isaac to be the continuing patriarch of the people of God after Abraham. Taking care of the struggle between his 2 sons, Abraham is convinced to send the troublemaker, Ishmael, away with his mother—possibly to die alone in the wilderness, away from the place where they had made a home for themselves and their family. And for what cause? Because Ishmael dared to have a relationship with his half-brother Isaac. I know that sibling relationships are not all happy days and flowers, but we learn important life lessons through struggling with and growing with our siblings. We learn how to approach difference, how to hear the story of someone who is living a different life from our own, how to live with someone whom you don’t love all the time, and how to make a life that is worth something together with another who may not be worth very much to you from time to time.

Two days after the ordination service, I sat in the business session in which the conference was to be addressed briefly by the new dean of the Candler School of Theology, Dr. Jan Love. Always excited to hear her speak, I was looking forward to seeing her. I looked down the row from where I sat and saw her one row in front of me sitting with none other than the preacher from the ordination service who had made me so angry, whom I had decided was not even worthy of being called by the same name of Christ by which I call myself. They were chatting and laughing together, looking as if they were long lost friends. Now, I’m not naive: I know there is not much love lost between the two schools they represent and probably, therefore, between themselves. But could they come together in the spirit of Christian conference and conversation to see each other as rooted in the same God, the same Mercy, the same Steadfast Love, and the same Forgiveness? Could the living God and the compassionate Christ actually have sent the Holy Spirit into the world to bind us together when we want to pull each other apart?

Friends, I chose this passage from the lectionary today so that it could serve as a reminder to us that God is a bigger God than we can name, imagine, describe, or even fight over. The love of God who sent Jesus to us sends us each to each other so that we can learn from each other lessons of grace, forgiveness, diversity (even when we don’t see its value!), inclusiveness (even when we preach against it), and mercy. The God of Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, the sons of Paran, and Jacob…the God of us here at St. Paul is not a God we contain here or control here. Our God does not even agree with us all the time. But our God does love us all the time, and not just us but all people—even the ones who turn against God in word or in deed, and we have all found ourselves among those numbers at one time or another in our lives.

I believe it is time to stop calling each other names and pointing our fingers in one another’s faces; I believe it is time to let our children play and struggle together, not to separate them into homogenous groups as we have done ourselves as we grow into adulthood. I believe it is time to recognize that as much as we preach and teach the love of God here, it does not only exist here. It exists in the worshiping community to which my brother from the other seminary belongs; it exists in the congregations whose theological beliefs seem to be completely opposite and maybe even competing with our own. I believe that God has made a great nation out of Ishmael—a nation that rivals only every other nation created in the eyes and heart of God on the earth. We are brothers and sisters, friends, not bosses and servants.

How do we live this out? How do I go to my brother who preaches what is in my opinion such offensive Christian theology and make peace with his spirit so that we can begin to see the Spirit of God in one another? How do we join hands with other congregations in our community or extended community whose theological beliefs and practices are so different from our own that we can hardly recognize the prayers they pray as directed at the God to whom we pray?

How can we do it? How can we quit patting ourselves on our Methodist backs? On our theologically-open backs? On our open-to-diversity-and-inclusiveness-as-long-as-it-comes-to-us-first backs? On our mission-oriented- but-not-as-active-as-we-could-be backs? On our we’re-open-to-them-but-they’re-not-open-to-us backs?

How are we going to do it, friends? How are we going to do it?

Good Neighbor Day

2008-06-20T23:03:00.000-04:00

Luke 10: 25-37

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

I don’t consider myself to be a vagabond, but I have found myself on more than one occasion walking on the road due to some poor circumstance that has left me without the usual mode of transportation. Once when I was about 15, my dad and I were driving home from Athens to Madison on 441. If you don’t know, 441 South between Athens and Madison is dark at night—I mean, dark. There aren’t many street lights along the way, and there are very few homes and businesses to light up the side of the road other than the occasional gas station combined with a bait and tackle or Subway. Now, my dad and I are not known for our commitment to observing the gas gauge in the car; we are both known to be completely surprised when we run out of gas. So, here we are driving along when the car starts to shake and rattle a bit. “What is happening?” we both wondered. Only when the car started to sputter and slow down did we look at the gas gauge. It was empty. I mean, empty empty. There was nothing left. The car was stopped on the side of the road home, in the darkness, with no one else in sight. When deciding what to do, my dad faced quagmire: do I take my daughter with me along the dark road with no sidewalk where anything or anyone could encounter us and mean to do us both harm; or he could leave my alone in the car where anyone or anything could break in and mean to do me harm while he was walking a couple miles to the next gas station.

So, as we walked along together along the dark road with no sidewalk and all manner of things possibly hiding in the dark to either help us or do us harm, no one drove by on the road. It was like we were the only people who existed. Finally, a car came by and whizzed past. Then another one passed and a few more which and prompted me to say to my dad, “Why does no one stop to help us?”

“Well,” said my dad, “we could be anyone. For all they know, we could have a gun and mean to hurt anyone who will stop to find out if we need help. We could potentially be as dangerous to them as they could be to us.” A culture of fear has brought us to the place where we are afraid to help people we don’t already know. So we kept walking a little farther and another car passed. This one turned around in the road and came back toward us. I guess my dad was a little frightened; I was relieved. The driver rolled down his window and asked if we needed a ride. My dad said we were just heading to the BP a little farther down the road; I said, “Yes, thank you!” Perhaps a little over anxious, I headed for the car. My dad instructed me to get in the back seat and he’d get in the front. I struck up a conversation with the man in the car who told us he was an Episcopal priest who was on his way south from Athens. He knew the road and knew what a long walk it would be to the gas station, so he wanted to help. He had seen the car with its hazard lights blinking back behind where we had been walking and assumed we might be in search of fuel. When we got to the station, we got a gas can, filled it up, and headed back for the car.

It was still there when we returned. We put the gas in, thanked the priest for the ride, and headed home. We might have been ok if that man had not come along; but it was nice to know there are still people in the world who will help when you need help—stranger or not.

Just a few weeks ago, I was walking home from the Marta station near our house. It’s only about a mile’s walk, and normally I have no trouble walking it. This particular day, as soon as I stepped out of the station, I heard it in the distance: the storm siren. Figuring as I looked at the sky that it might be a tornado siren, I said a little prayer for safety and a swift walk home and started on my way. I was hoping all the way down the street across from the station that this was for a watch, not a warning. As I continued into the neighborhood, I saw people rushing toward their houses from their yards and a woman standing on her front porch. She called to me: “You know that’s a tornado siren, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I just live a couple of streets over; it’s not a long walk.”

She skipped one beat then said, “Would you like a ride? I don’t think you should be walking with the siren going like that.” Thoughts of that night on 441 South from Athens flashed through my mind and I wondered if she wondered if I were safe to ride in her car. Would I pull a gun on her? Would I try to steal her car? She stepped inside to get her keys and driver’s license and came right back out and said, “Get in.” So, she drove me the 2 minutes’ drive from her house to mine. I thanked her as I got out of the car, and she asked, “Do you have any place you can go in your house to get away from the storm?” I told her I had a basement, and so she seemed satisfied that I’d be safe and said her goodbyes. I thanked her again and walked into the house thinking about the risk she took on me and how grateful I was that she did.

The lawyer asked Jesus how to inherit eternal life. He had some kind of understanding that what we do in this life has an effect on the next and wanted to be sure that he was doing everything he could to secure his place of comfort and happiness there. Jesus, the crafty arguer that he was, turned the question on him: how do you think you should do it? How do you think this life is linked with the next one? And the man’s answer was to love God and love neighbors. That seemed to be the basic gist of how Jesus would have answered, so he says, “Yep, that’s it.”

But that wasn’t it for the lawyer. He wasn’t satisfied with Jesus’ answer so he asked, “Who is the neighbor that I’m supposed to love?” And, like any good preacher, Jesus told a story to make his point. He told of a man who fell into dark and dire circumstances along the road. And the point of his story was that this man’s neighbor was not anyone he had thought of as a neighbor but someone who he just plain didn’t think of at all. As you probably have heard by now, Samaritans and Jews were not neighbors but enemies. Instead of loving one another, they ignored and sometimes hated one another. And, although we often tend to focus on how the Jews felt about the Samaritans, the feeling was mutual. The Samaritan in the parable Jesus told took a risk helping the Jew and the Jew took a risk receiving help from the Samaritan—even in his greatest hour of need.

So, there they were: 2 people who naturally didn’t give a flying fig about one another treating each other as if they were the 2 most important people in the world to each other.

When you think about your neighbors today, don’t think of the people you already know and love. Think of the people whom you may be inclined to ignore or dislike or just look over. Is there a part of noticing their needs and responding in your journey to coming into communion with God? What if they noticed and responded to your needs; would you accept their attention and possibly help? When Jesus asks who your neighbor is, he doesn’t just hope you’ll name the people who live in the homes around yours. The Spirit of God hopes that you will recognize the Spirit of God in others, especially those in whom you may not expect to encounter it.

So, how can we be as gracious and merciful and open to our neighbors as the Samaritan was to the Jew in Jesus’ story? First we have to take notice of the people God has placed in our path. Are there people we tend to overlook? Perhaps we should notice the people in our neighborhood struggling to keep their home and keep them in functioning, working order. Are there people we are prone to dislike? Maybe we need to look into their eyes and their situations in life and recognize their places of need and offer a hand. Are there people who are showing up on our doorstep looking for reasons why God makes a difference in life? We probably ought to be out there living lives that show them what a difference the love and forgiveness of God makes to us and drawing them into that difference in their own lives and in the life of St. Paul. Are there people out there who are not finding love and grace anywhere they look? They should be able to find that in every part of life here. Are there neighbors who need a helping hand, a place to belong, a place where mercy and forgiveness are real and practiced as much as they are preached? Then we need to be good neighbors who live what we believe in such a way that we show the world what God has to offer here.

This past week in Bible school, our children, youth, and adults learned about serving God through serving family, friends, neighbors, community, and Jesus. Last Sunday Jim Cantrell asked us what kind of church we wanted to be. Don’t we want to be a church that people are proud to claim as a good neighbor in Grant Park, in the city of Atlanta, in this community where we have been given a life worth living together? Aren’t we made and called to be the church who serves family, friends, neighbors, community, and Jesus? Don’t we want our neighbors to live it with us, no matter who they are or how they come to us? Shall we be, as a community of faith, a good neighbor in the “Jesus” sense of the word?

It is simple: “And who is my neighbor—the one who showed mercy. Go and do likewise.”

Amen.

Pentecost +3

2008-06-04T13:42:00.000-04:00

Romans 1: 16-17, 3:22b-31

16For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.”

For there is no distinction, 23since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; 24they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; 26it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus. 27Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith. 28For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law. 29Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, 30since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. 31Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.

Recently I attended a wedding of a friend of mine who is a fellow “PK.” In case you aren’t familiar with clergy lingo, the initials “PK” stand for the term “preacher’s kid.” In fact both my friend the groom and the bride were PKs, so you might imagine that the room was filled with quite a few preachers. In fact, the table at which Dave and I sat during the reception hosted 6 clergy people at any given time while we were each up and down speaking to people all over the room as we crazy preacher-types are wont to do. And, since our Annual Conference is only a few weeks away, people were talking about it and what might happen there. Someone mentioned General Conference, too, and a few of the things that happened there. (This makes other single-vocation-heavy parties sound really exciting, doesn’t it?) A colleague and I got into a discussion about the fact that our denomination passed a resolution at General Conference in Texas in April to change our mandatory retirement age of clergy from 70 to 72 years of age. This, apparently, brings into question people who may be turning 70 between now and when the new Book of Discipline and its rules and guidelines take effect in January of 2009. What about people who turn 70 between July 1 and December 31 of this year? Are those people and those months included in our “old” rule that clergy retire at age 70, or could those people be grandfathered in and get the chance to have active clergy status for another 2 years?

If you’re still awake and paying attention, bless you. Your reaction to this conversation may be much like mine. I looked my friend in the eye as she explained this “controversy” to me and said, “Why on earth do we continue to fight outright over issues like this and scratch each other’s eyes out under the table on others that are for more important to the future and integrity of the ministry of the Church?”

Paul, being a man of extensive inner conflict and a tendency to appear to change his mind or at least think differently about issues from one letter and context to another, is a model for us in the church for how to work at resolving conflict. Think about the conflict you experience in your life: within your family, among your friends, in your workplace, and sometimes (though we are unlikely to admit it) in the church. What is it that is usually at stake?

Many times when we find ourselves in the midst of an argument or struggle, whether on a personal level or a corporate one, we find that our own interpretation of the world and the way it is supposed to work is what is ultimately at stake. In Paul’s case, what was at stake for him was his ministry. His critics were making claims that he was leading people away from a true understanding of faith, and their understanding had to do with practicing the law of Moses. In order to be a follower of Jesus, who was himself Jewish, one had to attempt to become Jewish in as many senses of the word as possible. But Paul, who was himself a Jew, was not interested in forcing the particularities of what set his people apart on the rest of the world. It was what was in their hearts that mattered.

Did one believe that God was the one God of the whole universe as the Hebrews had proclaimed long ago as recorded in Deuteronomy 6:4, the shema: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one,”? Did one know for certain that Jesus was the son of the one God who was sent to this world to atone for our sin? Did one have faith that God would remake all of us into the righteousness for which we were intended, the image of the holy and righteous self of God? If you could positively answer these questions, Paul was glad to receive you into the faith; so what was the problem with his practice of acceptance to the others who were out there preaching the faith?

They stood to loose something.

The fight between Paul and his critics was over how to act like true followers of the Way. Which was the most correct way: was one to believe first and then act based on that belief, or was one to practice the law of God as people had been handing it down generation after generation in order to achieve true faith and belief? Was the relationship one we earned or one we received? To believe it was one we earned was to devote oneself to the law and the practice of religion. To believe it was one we received was to devote oneself to the teachings of Paul and the other evangelists who taught the way of Christ: love, acceptance, hospitality, grace. But did this kind of life exist only free from the law of Moses? Not at all. And did the law assume that the ways of Christ had to be legislated in order to be lived out by the people of faith? No. Did the Hebrews stand to lose their identity in the movement of Christ among the people? Did the Gentiles stand to lose their independence and status and face becoming second-class Jewish converts?

Paul gives us a clue to as to the real conflict going on among the newly converted followers of Christ, no matter their background. What they are having the most trouble giving up is the right to be right—about each other, and all the time. As I read Paul, it is less about what they are doing wrong and more about the fact that they accuse, try, and convict one another from their own places of sin and misdeed. Do we continue to do that to each other today?

I fear that we spend far more time examining one another’s sins and misdeeds than our own, just as the people of the early church did generations ago. In the church we do it by trying to choose groups of people to exclude for one reason or another that we pick and choose, deciding to let the flaws in our own character and faith life go (we hope!) un-noticed and, therefore, in tact. One on one we do this by spending a lot of our energy pointing out the flaws in others and passing judgment on each other and each other’s right to a good life. That’s what it is ultimately is about: who will lose life? The good life? The life we have come to know? Compromise means someone looses; meeting in the middle means leaving the place where you are comfortable. And we come again to our old friend and challenger, Paul.

Paul left the life he knew, the traditions he lived, and met Christ on the road, in the middle…of no where, and it changed his life. He lost what he had before; and he gained a life he never imagined for himself. In the struggles of your life, what do you stand to lose? Paul encouraged both the Jews of his own heritage and the Gentiles he came to love to lose those things to which they held so tightly and gain faith in God and new life in Christ. If, in the struggles of your life you stand to lose something, what is it you stand to gain in its place?

Conflict is our way of life. We area really not that different from the earliest Christians. In our society, in our church, and in our private lives, we struggle between haves and have-nots; between one world view and another; between who has the correct interpretation of the Bible and who does not; between who calls God by the correct name and who does not; between who’s individual rights and privileges are the most valuable, between who has the right to life as they want it, and who does not. But in the life of faith, as followers of the Way of Christ, as children of God and companions of the Holy Spirit, we find the promise of God’s faithfulness to be true. In the mist of conflict, we find peace that passes understanding. In the midst of the loss of control, we find that we gain a remarkable and everlasting relationship with God.

And so let’s celebrate that today as we gather around this table to re-member the body of Christ, to give thanks that our shortcomings do not tear us away from God and they don’t have to tear us away from one another. The grace of Christ offers us new life, all of us--relief from our struggles, the chance to forgive ourselves and one another, and peace that passes all understanding. No matter what we lose in the fight in the mean time, we can never gain any reward better than that.

Amen.

Trinity

2008-06-04T13:40:00.000-04:00

Genesis 1:1 - 2:3
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.” So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.

God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.

Preachers often choose a different passage when they know they are going to be speaking about the Trinity. Actually, who am I kidding? We rarely talk openly about the Trinity, except to say that we believe it. We are clear that we believe that God is 3 in 1—the one God in three “persons.” We believe in the God who creates us, the Son who redeems us, and the Spirit who sustains us. But when you start asking questions like what it all means, people start to squirm. So I figured—why not look at this from a different perspective. While we often read the Matthew 28 passage in which Jesus gives the disciples the Great Commission to make disciples everywhere, teaching and baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, this passage from Genesis could offer us a fresh look at the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, one of the central tenets of our faith. So, here goes…

What I love about this passage is the creative force that you can almost feel blowing around and past you as you read it. God has been very busy creating—a process I believe God continues even unto our time, right now. By just the words of God’s mouth, everything that we could ever imagine, that has ever lived, that will ever be came into being. And if you try to imagine that in terms of human mouths and speech, you may be pretty limited by what you can imagine. I know, for example, some people who’ve been named “big mouth” in the course of their lives, but it would just about have to be the biggest mouth you could imagine and then some to be able to house vocal the power to make all things come into being, to enclose that kind of life force. And speaking of speaking life as we know it into existence, who was there to hear the Word and respond, and what most those ears have been like?

It kind of reminds me of the old brain teezer about a tree falling in a forest and the question about whether or not any sound is made if there is no one there to hear it. So when God spoke everything into existence, who was there to hear about it?

The answer is in the sixth day of this first creation story in Genesis. This is when we hear God saying that human kind is to be created in “our” image. It is in some more-than-one form that God exists and yet one image from which we are created. How does that work?

It is in the image of God that we were created for each other. God, then, created us in God’s image with the intention that within that image we would find ways to complement each other and work and live together. So in the one-ness of God, there is a plurality of being that makes this world and those who inhabit it at the same time from the same substance and being and with the variety of gifts and traits that make life and the world in which we live challenging and wonderful. It really was a good plan of God’s—not only to make trees make noise when they fall but also to make our ears so that we could receive and interpret the sound!

What this tells us about God, what the central Christian doctrine of the Trinity tells us about God, is that God exists in relationship. It’s not really that God has 3 different personalities from which to choose at any given time; and it’s not that God operates in different modes—sometimes the creator, sometimes the sustainer, but never the 2 or 3 shall meet. It’s not that God changes hats depending on the needs of the world at any given time. It’s that God contains all that we need, when we need it, and is who we need God to be and more all the time!

Think about the different ways you know God: you know God as the creator of all living things—we see that when we look at the sun and the rain and the beauty of the flowers and the wonder of how we are made. So God made us and everything around us in the natural world. And, since God gave us brains to invent all the un-natural gadgets we have come to need in life, God kinda made those, too: sometimes whether God has liked it or not. You know God as savior in the times when you have need a friend or comforting presence and nothing else in life has really filled that gap; or when you have been in real trouble and have felt the love and peace and strength of Christ giving you a way out of distress or help in your time of need. That’s where we get the old church phrase, “a very present help in time of need.” God has shown us in Jesus that not only does God give us life but God also saves us from destroying that life or being destroyed by it—sometimes even when we can’t see or recognize that it is God’s hand at work. You know God as a Spirit, the presence of God with you along the whole journey of life, the good times and the bad. You know that when a child is born or a relationship is healed that the presence of God is there with you to encourage and calm your own spirit and to encourage you to fully engage the life you have been given. Or how about when something terrible happens in the world and you don’t know how to cope, like when we experienced the atrocities of September 11, 2001, and we weren’t sure how the world would continue to go on, at least our world. And here we are almost 7 years later, perhaps struggling, but still going on. And I believe that there are some days when we as a church, we as families, we as friends, we as individuals rely fully on the Spirit of God to sustain us through another day because we have no idea how we will do that on our own. The very life we have been given by God, the very life that is rescued and saved over and over by God, the very life that we live for and sometimes only because of God—that is the way we know God.

And so why do we need this doctrine of faith that the church has handed down for generations? I believe it is because we so desperately need to know God that it is a help to us when we try and figure out who on earth or in heaven God is. It is healthy for us as people of faith to have questions: why did God send Jesus? What is the Holy Spirit supposed to do in our lives? Did God create everything and then send it off into space or is it more personal than that? As we ponder these things in our hearts, we can begin to know God more, to love God more, and to seek God more deeply and sincerely. And what meaning does it all have for us today? We live in a time when a lot of things are known—like the molecular structure of a lot of things we never thought possible a generation ago, and the ways to fight diseases that in the past took the lives and livelihood of countless people. But there are still a lot of things we don’t know—like why some people survive cancer and others don’t, or why we continue to say with our minds that things like racism and classism are wrong but we still do things in our actions that may tell the world we think that the status quo of separate and who-cares-if-its-equal is still ok, or what we are supposed to be doing with our lives (can I get an “Amen!” from a recent or soon-to-be graduate in the house?)…or, if a tree falls in a forest an no one is there to hear it, will it make a sound…or who God was talking to in the creation story in Genesis when God said that humanity was to be made in “our” image.

A doctrine that says we believe where we have not seen, we know where we have not known, we try to understand where we can not fully understand—I believe that on most days, that truly is the Word of God. And for all the others when we are not so sure, we go back to God who made us, who saves us, and who goes with us always and realize that there is no area of life of which God is not a part. And that is some really good news.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pentecost

2008-05-15T17:12:00.000-04:00

Acts 2:1-21
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o”clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

“What does this mean?”

It is this profound question that the people gathered in one place on Pentecost asked after the miracle of hearing took place; when the Spirit of God had rushed into the house and filled the place with miracle, fear, and presence and appeared to the folks gathered as “divided tongues of fire.”

What would you have said?

They were gathered as tradition bound them to do. Pentecost was a Jewish festival in which the people celebrated the gathering in of the harvest and then the delivery of the law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. It took place 50 days after Passover. It was one of those days that brought the whole world to Jerusalem. And by the whole world I mean, of course, people of Hebrew heritage living in Diaspora in every place that allowed travel to Jerusalem. By this time in their history, Jews of far off regions had begun to speak different languages, and there was beginning to be a separation of their story. So these festivals in the holy city were something that held them together in their difference. The tradition of the law, the celebration of harvest—these were things they held in common, even if language prevented them from talking about it.

So, there they are, in a traditional religious gathering. People have come to give thanks to God for abundance and for guidance. I wonder if they actually expected the Presence to be there, too. I wonder if they were all standing around waiting for it to get started, if they were listening to announcements, if some group were explaining how their ritual actions would be taking place. I wonder if they were milling around, looking for a seat or getting the children settled when all of a sudden there was this sound. It was a wind blowing into their presence, into their space, interrupting their preparations. It must have been pretty loud to get their attention away from getting ready to worship.

And then before they could process the Wind, some of the people there began to speak in tongues. Suddenly, people were speaking the now native languages of Jews from every place, languages they likely had no experience with before. It was a miracle—each person was hearing the sermon for the day in a language they could understand! There must have been young people there who were no longer learning or fluent in Hebrew, wondering if they would be bored by a religious service spoken in an unfamiliar tongue. Now they understood everything being said. It was unexpected and glorious. The Spirit of God had made it possible for everyone there to have a meaningful experience of worship and thanksgiving that day in the midst of Diaspora and the Babel separation the people of God have been living with for generations.

Imagine you had been there, not just physically in that place, but in that situation: gathered with people from all over the world, with language as some kind of a barrier, with one purpose—to worship the God who made and loves us all. Imagine that some big annual worship service were about to take place and people were milling around taking their places and preparing for a grand experience of being with other members of the faithful body. Think of yourself as knowing what to expect, as if it were Easter Sunday here at St. Paul—a trumpeter to accompany the organist on “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” lilies all over the place, white everywhere… Imagine the greatest planned celebration in church that you can think of with all the majesty and meaning that you can, and then spread it wide open with the wind of the Spirit of God. What kind of questions would you be asking?

What is going on? Why did this happen? Is all of our planning and preparation ruined? How shall we make this catastrophe work? What do we do when we are out of control? And my personal favorite, has someone been drinking??

I believe we like controlled environments in worship. We like to know the hymns, pray and sing in language that is familiar to us, have an order that we are used to, and welcome new faces in the midst of the old familiar ones we are used to seeing week after week. We are creatures of habit. We’ve gotten used to the way the Word of God is revealed: through sermon (I hope! You don’t have to nod or “Amen” that one; I know you’re doing it on the inside!) song, prayer, sacrament, and the occasional special addition to the worship service we welcome from time to time. And like our ancestors in faith, we have been doing this for a long time. There is meaning for us just in the fact that we are gathered together in this place week after week. But when was the last time something that we did here together really struck a deeply personal place in you? When have you been in worship, either here or elsewhere, and you felt that you had been changed because you were there? When have you been challenged to hear something that you didn’t expect or want to hear? When have you been swept up in the moment by the Spirit of God who blows where it will, how it will, and to whom it will at any moment given and declared by God?

Does the church need Pentecost II to get us going again? Have we gotten so used to our difference and our indifference that we just continue to live separately as much as we can and together only when necessary? Maybe we are coming here week after week no longer to be of service to one another as we hear and contemplate the Word of God which surely, in its own power, moves us toward those around us, both in the pew and outside these walls. Maybe instead we are coming to hear something that makes us feel one way or another and then grab lunch at the nearest cool place with a patio. If I’m stepping on your toes here I apologize—sometimes I don’t know what the Spirit of God will make me say…

And isn’t that the point of Pentecost? God led them to an experience of Spirit on that 50th day that was meant to renew their hearts and stir up in them a flame of passion for the life, story, and eternity of Jesus Christ that seemed to catch on when they least expected it. Until then, the disciples—his closest friends and allies—had been holed up in a secret place just waiting in fear for what would happen next, possibly not believing that anything ever would. Now, suddenly Peter takes a step forward to deliver the first sermon ever delivered on behalf of God in the risen Christ. And from there, thousands of people began to join in with the followers of the Way as it traveled out into the Diaspora and beyond. What will it take to get us working like that again?

I think that fire is already in us. I think it is in us when we listen to the things we ask one another to pray about when we share our concerns and joys. I think it is in the things we talk about in Sunday school when we are in a smaller setting and charged to discuss this life of faith we live together and separately. I think its in the children who pass through this space to sing and pray a little and then go upstairs into the care of people who love them and want to help them grow in faith. I think it is in us when we step outside these doors and find out what our neighbors need and try to do whatever we can to provide.

Dr. Walter Bruggemann has just put out a new book of prayers. In it is this one written for this day. It’s called, “Blown by the Spirit…We Know Not Where”.

We hear the story of the wind at Pentecost,
Holy wind that dismantles what was,
Holy wind that evokes what is to be,
Holy wind that overrides barriers and causes communication,
Holy wind that signals your rule even among us.

We are dazzled, but then—reverting to type—
We wonder how to harness the wind,
How to manage the wind by our technology,
How to turn the wind to our usefulness,
How to make ourselves managers of the wind.

Partly we do not believe such an odd tale
Because we are not religious freaks;
Partly we resist such a story,
Because it surges beyond our categories;
Partly we had imagined you to be more ordered
And reliable than that.

So we listen, depart, and return to our ordered existence:
We depart with only a little curiosity
But not yielding;
We return to how it was before,
Unconvinced but wistful, slightly praying for wind,
Craving for newness,
Wishing to have it all available to us.

We pray toward the wind and wait, unconvinced but wistful.*

I think that perhaps we find ourselves today where we believe we are supposed to be—at church (it is Sunday morning, after all!), wearing the right clothes, sitting in the right place, singing the right songs (thank you Kevin for stretching us from time to time and Jonathan for providing us the music to be stretched and inspired!), praying the words we’ve been taught, and occasionally sharing the bread and cup. I think that maybe we believe that this is what we’re supposed to do on Sunday morning and that because we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing while everyone else is in bed, on the porch, in the garden, or already on the patio at the cool restaurants, we may be approaching our religious practice as some probably did way back when—not really sure we’ll understand everything that’s happening but going through the motions because it’s what we know we should be doing. What would we do if the Holy Spirit blew through here like a bunch of fire and required something of us, asked us to do something, asked us to get up and say something about God and that of which we know God to be capable in this world and in our lives?

What would we say then?

*Prayers for a Privileged People. Walter Bruggemann. Abingdon Press, Nashville. 2008. P.33.

Ascension

2008-05-15T17:10:00.000-04:00

Acts 1:6-14
So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a sabbath day’s journey away. When they had entered the city, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying, Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.

Not long ago, one of my clergy brothers from another denomination wrote a sermon that was basically an apology to many of the people whom the church had abused, left out, or simply shown the door over the many years of our life together. He specifically addressed gay and lesbian folks, women who have had abortions, and couples who live together but are not married. He apologized on his own behalf, offering his regret for having judged his friends as well as people he did not know for doing things he considered to be incompatible with Christian teaching. Interestingly, he wasn’t actually stating that any kind of change had taken place in his beliefs; he simply wanted to say that the way he had gone about letting people know what those beliefs are he had now come to realize was hurtful, and he wanted to say he was sorry for that.

I found in intriguing and kind—that any of us would have the courage to stand up and say that the church just doesn’t treat everyone with the same regard, or furthermore that the church treats some people quite badly because of who they are or choices they make. Instead he wished to proclaim that Christ teaches love and that the sooner the church could get on board with that, the sooner we would stop declining in growth, especially in the generation of folks aged 18-28. Interesting.

In a sermon she wrote on the Ascension of Jesus, Barbara Brown Taylor says this: “I do not know why Christians act surprised when we read about our declining numbers in the newspaper. While we argue amongst ourselves about everything from what kind of music to sing in church to who may marry whom, the next generation walks right past our doors without even looking in. If they are searching at all, they are searching for more than we are offering them—for a place where they may sense the presence of God, among people who show some sign of having been changed by that presence. They are looking for a colony of heaven, and they are not finding it with us.”*

Do you ever wonder what the world outside of us thinks about the life we life inside here?

I have thought a little about what a “colony of heaven” might be like. As I think of Jesus and his life and teachings, his eternal presence with God on our behalf, and the unmistakable urging and voice of the Spirit that lives within us, it seems at first glance that building such a colony would not be very hard work at all. Using the gospel and the early church as our guide, we could easily find ways to practice our belief that Christ has come from God, died to save all people, rose from the grave, returned to God, and will come to us again; that God has created all things and called them good; that the Holy Spirit continues to be with us and help us to recognize God’s grace and God’s call to discipleship—a life lived in the way of Christ: practicing what he has preached, loving the way he loves, forgiving others and ourselves, being witnesses to Christ and his love for all the world.

It’s the same call that the eleven and the others received back in the day: to be witnesses for Christ, to tell the world about his extraordinary love and power to change lives for the better, to build a colony of heaven that would grow and grow until it encompassed the entire world. And they ask if Jesus will be wrapping things up anytime soon: is this the time? The time that everything will be made right and we’ll be able to all be happy again? Surely he wouldn’t leave them with more work to be done, right? Surely not. Surely he would leave us with everything in place for his next arrival so that we would not have to suffer in the mean time, right?

The truth is, my friends, that I don’t know how we do it. That may surprise you since I’m the one wearing the stole and standing up here before you. But a colony of heaven? If that job is left for me to manage, I’m afraid I’m going to do the same thing the eleven did at the beginning of the Book of Acts as we heard today. I’m going to run to Jesus and ask if it isn’t time yet for him to get himself back here on earth and whip the church into shape because surely he’ll be a whole lot better at it than I ever would. He knows what people need more than I do. He’s got the compassion and forgiveness things down pat—far more so than I. He truly does not judge people like I do when I say that I don’t or shouldn’t. And, let’s face it—he is God, and I am not.

But sometimes I wish I were. Don’t you? I wish I had been God at the time of the Crusades or the Inquisition way back when so that I could have just grabbed the perpetrators by the collar and told them they were being ridiculous and hateful to their fellow human beings and children of God. I wish I had been God on the day that hurricane Katrina hit the shores of the coastal Southeast so I could have just blown her in a different direction out to sea and away from human life. I wish I could have been God this past week in Fort Worth Texas when the United Methodist Church’s global gathering was working hard at trying to find a way to stay together in the midst of sharp and deep disagreements on issues like human sexuality. I would have shut the mouths of those calling themselves Christians while speaking messages of judgment, superiority, and sometimes downright hate toward their fellow human beings, their fellow children of God.

And yet, Christ says to me once again: It is not for me to know what God has done by God’s own authority and power. It is the Holy Spirit’s place to pass the power of he gospel on to me and then to urge me to get out there and let other people know about it—not about the politics of the church but about the saving, transforming, fulfilling, amazing love of God in Christ that has saved us from living a life eternally divided from God and offers us a life lived in full communion with God. I don’t have to be in charge of it for that to work out. It’s already been worked out. I just need to get up and start participating in it.

I need to recognize that there is a colony of heaven to be had in this life. There is a foretaste of glory, a glimpse of what it will be like when we live in the presence and sustaining love of God. And it is our job now to continue to build that colony up until it is the only way of life that people know here. It is home to everyone; it is the place where you can be the child of God you were made to be without having to have anyone’s permission, pass any litmus test, or wonder if what is proclaimed is really lived out.

I love the part of today’s passage in which the two men standing with the disciples as Jesus left this life to return to God’s side are surprised to see the disciples so engrossed with the sky, as if trying to see every last particle of matter that belongs to Jesus before it is all gone from plain view. The interpretation of the Bible called the Message phrases what the 2 men say like this: "You Galileans!—why do you just stand here looking up at an empty sky? This very Jesus who was taken up from among you to heaven will come as certainly—and mysteriously—as he left."

The fact is there is much about our faith that we cannot understand. We have a hard time getting our heads around one God in three persons. Although we believe it, we can hardly conceive of life after death and resurrection. We know the Holy Spirit is with us, but we cannot see it in plain view. And while we say we are a part of the church because we believe that Jesus is the Son of God and his life-transforming love is available to all, we often fail to act out that love in the things that we do to hurt one another in church, both on the global level and right here at home. I just don’t get why its going to take us at least another four years before we recognize that we are only hurting ourselves by keeping our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters at arm’s length when it comes to full inclusion in the life of the body of Christ. Why? I ask over and over.

Thank goodness I’m not God. Thank goodness that the work of saving the world is accomplished by hands greater than mine. But I’m not off the hook, either, and neither are you. We can’t just stand idly by and stare off into an empty sky thinking that if we just stay there long enough we’ll get what we’ve been seeking. People who stand around and look at the sky completely miss the world around them that is growing, hurting, questioning, looking. How can we be witness of Christ’s love to that world when we are constantly looking away from it?

This colony of heaven should probably take a cue from our brother in Sugar Hill and apologize for those times and places in which we have not done God’s will. And when we see God’s will being disrupted in other places and times, we should be witnesses for God’s love and forgiveness so that change can happen. We can’t give up, even when we want to, because to do so would be to simply stare at the clouds hoping for a fortune cookie to fall from the sky with the secret of life etched on a piece of paper on the inside. Instead, let us gather together where we know we feel the presence of Jesus, if no other place: around this table, in the sharing of his life—his body and blood made known to us in the bread and the cup. Let us confess what we need to confess and turn our lives away from idol sky-worship and toward the worship and knowledge of God and God’s Son and God’s Spirit.

And just maybe, as they search for the closest meeting of the colonies of heaven, they may just stop in here and find a place where the love of God for all of us that surpasses all the barriers we can throw in its way is alive and well. And that, friends, just may be about the time that Christ mysteriously comes to us.

And it will be about time. Amen.

* Home By Another Way. Barbara Brown Taylor. Cowley Publications, Boston. 1999. P. 137-138.

Easter 5

2008-04-22T16:03:00.000-04:00

John 14:1-14

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.

And you know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves.

Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.

Ok, I’m here to admit it: I am a details person. Are you one, too? It’s a trait that comes in quite handy when cleaning the bathroom but can also drive the people around us a little crazy. We can be what some call a little “obsessive” from time to time. I admit that, too. There are just some things in life that go better when in the hands of a details-oriented person. For example, those of us who tend to give more of our attention to the details of life get a little upset when the details of a story aren’t told correctly: that is, when they don’t match our version of the correct order of things. It’s because we have our own context, our own set of circumstances from which we see the world and our place in it, and we tell our stories from that context. It gives us reason to need the things we need, to want what we want, and to look at the world the way we look at it. Being a member of the details-oriented brigade, I am what some call “high context.” It means that when a story is told, I want to hear and tell as many of the details of the thing as possible. Somehow, that makes the story better, more plausible, and easier to understand for me. Fewer details only leave me with more questions: why? How? When? Who was there? What did they say? How did they seem to feel about what happened?

Have you ever had that problem of telling a story along with someone else and they tell some detail or event of the story “wrong”? I think the sharing of our faith story is often like that. Just get 2 people together and ask them to tell the chronology as we have it in the New Testament of how Jesus’ arrest, trial, and crucifixion took place, and you’ll likely get 2 stories that have basically similar timelines but with a variety of side stories and characters thrown in here and there. We do this because we often connect with certain moments or characters that are told in one gospel differently than another. For example, many folks are particularly moved by the Centurion whose eyes are opened as Jesus dies on the cross and who proclaims that Jesus surely must have been the Son of God. This man is mentioned in Matthew and Luke, but only in Matthew does he call Jesus the Son of God.

One of the details of the story of Jesus’ last supper as it is recorded in John in the chapter just before our passage for today is the conversation he has with the disciples about his betrayal. He tells them what will happen with Judas and with Peter, that he’ll be betrayed and denied by two of these gathered around the table with him. It’s difficult for them to hear these words that seem to be counter to the closeness they have developed over their life in ministry together. How could any of them turn his back on Jesus? And how could it all be coming to and end? This is the context for these verses we have for today: Jesus is preparing them for his departure, and they cannot accept that he is leaving them. Peter even asks where it is Jesus is going, but Jesus’ response is cryptic and a little frightening when he says they cannot follow him immediately but in the future. So when Jesus says that he is the way, the truth, and the life, we can begin to understand the reference back to his conversation with the 12 at the last supper when he has taught them about love and service—that they should consider themselves servants of all people in his name. This teaching helps us to know that the way of Christ is the way of service, the truth of the gospel is that we are called above all else to love one another in the name of Jesus, and that real life is the sharing of one another’s burdens and joys and serving one another in the name of Jesus.

But really to put these details into perspective, we must consider the introduction to John that sets the tone for the whole gospel. There we find not the birth narrative of Jesus but the emphasis on Jesus’ divinity as the Son of God, the light of the world sent to bring light into our darkness, received not by the people to who he was sent, but the true revelation of God in our world. In this way, we can add to the understanding of John 14 by seeing that when Jesus says he is the way, the truth, and the life, we must refer back to the words of the gospel writer when he first introduces us to Jesus: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us…full of grace and truth.” God came to us, to live as we live, so that we could learn to love and serve in the way that God loves and serves. That is the truth of what Jesus came to teach us; that is the way to get close to the heart of God.

But that really isn’t enough detail for me. I think we have to look at the whole message of the gospel, even the whole Bible, which as I read it is a rich story of the history of God’s love being given freely to us over and over. Look at our disastrous ancestors of the Old Testament who turn away from God over and over again, whose love for God failed time and time again, and then remember the God of the Old Testament who has every opportunity and then some to discard human beings on account of our fickleness and self-absorption but who decides, instead, to remain steadfastly in love with us and continue to invite us back into forgiveness and grace. That must be the way, the truth, and the real life that God has to offer, now to us in Christ.

But what about the details of how this passage plays a role in your own spirituality or theology? Your own understanding of God and God’s action in your life? Thinking about the context of the 14th chapter of John, the whole gospel of John, the whole Biblical witness, and your own faith experience, how would you tell John 14?

Here’s how I would do it:
There is nothing at all to fear in life because Jesus has shown us that God is with us always. In fact, there is no place we can go that would take us away from God. Jesus was and is God’s gift to us so that we could understand the way that God relates to us—a humble presence of love and service, teaching us to offer the same to the world around us in God’s name with the help of the Holy Spirit whom Jesus has sent to be our help and guide. We don’t need a picture of God to know what God is like; that’s why we have Jesus and the portrait of him painted for us in the biblical witness. There we find his life, death, and resurrection told in terms of his love for us. So the way to God’s heart is to be ready and willing, as Peter states in the previous chapter and Jesus, himself, states in the next chapter, to give up what you hold dear in life so that someone else can have fullness of life. The truth is that God loves us more than we could ever imagine, and that while we may not be able to make contact with that understanding while we continue to live self-absorbed lives, believing the love and mercy of Christ is the way God has offered to us to try and connect with God’s love and God’s intentions for our lives. And when we can make that connection, we can live out that love and mercy with others, making God’s plan for us become a reality—that we would figure out that what God wants is for us to treat each other with love and respect, to serve one another’s needs, and to make God’s love known to as many people as we possibly can as far as it depends on us.

And there it is: our call to spread the news. But what is it that we spread? The more exclusive version of this story that, frankly, leaves out too many details for me to ever accept? The one in which there is a bit of proof-texting involved in trying to use God’s love in poured out in Christ to keep people out rather than to draw as many as we can in? I believe it is, instead, the message of how God’s love in Christ gives us the very best way to live our lives in service to one another, the truth that God truly does love us more than we could ever imagine—and that means all of us! —and the life that we can experience in hopeful expectation that God’s love will ultimately reign over all the parameters we try to put around it, such as who really deserves it and who doesn’t.

I don’t think we can tell the story in any other way except in high context: the whole story of God’s love for us, the remarkable presence of God among us in Jesus, the call to believe and share the news that because of Christ and his resurrection we cannot ever be separated from God, and that God’s love for us surpasses all things that we can think of to put in its path.
I think that’s a witness of John 14 that the world needs to hear. How will you tell it?

Amen.

Easter 4

2008-04-13T08:17:00.000-04:00

This sermon will be given this morning to a congregation where I am the guest preacher.

Acts 2:42-47
They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

If we could bottle that last little bit of this passage and sell it, no church would ever have a money or attendance or volunteer crisis ever again! If only we could come up with a plan that would work in this church, at St. Paul, at the many, many churches who are threatened by bills that pile up with not enough support to keep the doors open—a plan that would not only keep our doors open but would also open those doors to the people that the Lord is just waiting to add to our numbers—to all those in whom God’s prevenient grace has been at work all their lives long, and who are now on their way to us in churches everywhere, who may even be here for the first time today.

Yes, if only we knew the secret, the thing to do to get the Lord to add to our numbers. Like in the old days, when things were really good. All of us have those days we remember, to which we travel in our minds when we fear that life in the community of faith has grown stagnant. “Those were the days—when we were brimming over with children, when the youth were all over the place, when there were families spilling into the aisles, when we had activities every night of the week, when things were really alive!” If you’ve ever been part of a church for more than a few years, you’ve probably said these words to yourself once or twice.

And people have made programs, seminars, and money off our memories of what it used to be like. The truth is, there are people out there who have figured out how to make money by teaching us their method of how to add to our numbers in churches across the world. Only I wonder if we look in every place we can find except the way it really was way back when, and by way back when, I mean in the good old, old days of the church: right after Peter’s sermon in Jerusalem on Pentecost.

Think back to that great sermon—when Peter stood before the large crowd of people gathered for a holy purpose. They had miraculously heard about God’s deeds of power in words they each understood although they were from places all over the known world. And then, to continue to describe the power of God, Peter paints for us the first directory portrait of the church: thousands of people so moved by the words of Peter’s mouth that they were baptized, claimed by God as forgiven, and added to the names of all those who call on the name of God for salvation.

Thousands of people were never the same after that day. What they did was start the Church, a church where thousands and thousands of people were saved, as John Wesley says in his commentary on the New Testament “from their sins; from the guilt and power of them.” People were discovering that there was a new way of life to be lived—a life lived in forgiveness, a life of repentance, a live shared together with other believers, a life of abundance in that no one ever needed anything that the body of Christ couldn’t provide, a life of faith in the one whom God had sent and had raised from the dead. They held everything in common, especially their belief and trust in God.

What did they do to add to their numbers? It’s easier than an expensive program, and more basic that many of our church consultants, and maybe all the things we’ve tried over and over in the name of church growth. Here’s what they did:
• They devoted themselves to the teaching of the disciples, which Jesus had commanded them to do.
• They devoted themselves to fellowship, to spending time together getting to know one another and being there for one another in their hours of need.
• They devoted themselves to the breaking of bread, the meals shared for the remembrance of Christ as he had shared with them just before his arrest.
• They prayed together.
• They shared each other’s lives.
• The shared everything they had.
• They sold what they had and gave what they made to those who needed money, again, following the teachings of Jesus as the apostles must have shown them.
• The praised God daily in their homes.
• They concerned themselves with the goodwill of all, or with how the lives of the community around them were—difficult or easy—and pledged themselves to ease the difficulties and celebrate with the joys people experienced in the life of the community.
And God added to their numbers, so they had to get more chairs, build bigger buildings, wear nametags, ask for names every time they got together, and burst with pride at how they were growing.

So, here in the book of the Acts of the Apostles is a free-of-charge plan for growing the church:
• Teaching the faith with integrity to children, youth, and adults—how do you teach here?
• Spending time together for the purpose of getting to know everyone—not just the folks you already know—so that whenever there is a need of any kind, the whole congregation will want to respond.
• Have Holy Communion together as often as you can, and be present at the Lord’s Table. Encourage one another to come, and delight in receiving the bread and the cup in each other’s presence as Christ did with his disciples.
• Pray. Pray in your homes, but pray also together—and not just in worship! Pray in small and large groups. Meet together for the sole purpose of praying together for the needs of the body of Christ.
• Share. Share not only your material possessions and your money, but share also when someone needs your support or, in some cases, accountability.
• When the things you accumulate in your life take away from attending to the body of Christ, then get rid of them. And any profit you make should come back to the body. The very idea of our United Methodist Apportionments is based on the idea of the body of Christ sharing the load of serving the needs of the world.
• Praise God all the time, even at home.
And I think in the time and culture in which we now live, this last thing might just be the most important:
• Be concerned about the good of the community in which you live and thrive. Be so concerned, in fact, that you lose interest in the building up of your own life in favor of the building up of the lives of others. Somewhere in there you’ll discover what Jesus meant when he said that those who want to save their lives must lose them.

So, that’s it. Easy as pie. Most of us in most churches are already doing these things—some, most, or even almost all of them. But it was when they checked off the whole list that God added to their number every day. It is, then, our task as members of the body of Christ gathered in every place, to figure out what it is that we need to work on. Which of these things are you doing well here? I suspect you fellowship and teach and pray well! What else are you doing that is good? What do you need to work on?

It’s easy to read or hear this story outside the context of the hard work and hours of laboring that the earliest members of the Church were putting in and to think that it sounds rosy and sweet and then to dismiss it and say, “Well, the world is different now.” Certainly it is, but human need is not different. Prayer is not different. Sharing with others is not different. And the power of God to re-member and continue to build the body of Christ is not different. God is as powerful as ever. Christ’s call is as compelling as it has ever been. The urging of the Spirit in our hearts is as strong now as it ever has been to be faithful to how we began this thing we do; this life we live called “Church” in the first place.
It doesn’t cost us any money. Christ has saved us from having to pay our own way and given us grace to turn around and give to the world, not as the world gives, but as the Church gives: with all things in common, with the goodwill of the people first in our hearts, with praise to God for helping us see the new lives that can be changed by the work we do together.

So, my brothers and sisters, now we have the list. Now we know the secret. It’s been right here in the book of Acts all the time. It is our task to call on the Spirit’s power within us to have the courage to live life together as the earliest Christians did, to whom God was faithful and who showed us that it has nothing to do with what buildings or programs we have. God will bring people to us in salvation; that is God’s work. It’s what we do for and with them next that is up to us! May the many lives that will come through these doors and halls and through your lives be richly blessed by your commitment to bringing to life once again the caring, saving, forgiving, graceful Body of Christ.

Amen.

Easter 3

2008-04-09T15:53:00.000-04:00

Luke 24:13-49

Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” He asked them, “What things?” They replied, “The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place. Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said; but they did not see him.” Then he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

In one of his stories about Lake Woebegone, Garrison Keeler once spoke of the days off from school that students and teachers get as “Easter break.” The context was the weather in Minnesota, and he said that they continued to call the days off in the spring “Easter break” because the word Easter refers to the Christian tradition of believing in things hoped for but not yet seen. It’s hardly spring in Minnesota in early April, according to Mr. Keeler. Having never been there, I’ll have to take his word for it.

Hebrews 11:1 defines faith for us. The old King James version of the Bible uses these words: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” It is what our faith tradition is built upon—the sincere hope for, or assurance (as other translations of the Bible call it) of things hoped for but not yet seen. Our faith story is filled with this kind of thing—the promise of our brother Moses to the Israelites that they would get to the promised land, finally knowing that he would never live there; the courage of our brother Samuel to answer when the Lord called though he could not see God when God called; the face of Christ turned toward Jerusalem when all he could see there was anger and destruction, not yet the empty tomb; the prophecy of our brother Martin who, 40 years ago, saw a vision of today, when people of all races would have what would be something resembling more equality in live and rights than had ever been known in this country before; our own encounters with the living Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Almighty God that we can neither explain nor photograph—our faith is an assurance of life hoped for but not yet seen.

I believe that the best understanding we as human beings can ever have of what resurrection feels and looks like is that thing we do after we have lost a loved one. You know what I mean—we get together in groups of 2 or 3 or 15 and share memories and stories of time and experiences we have shared. This so often happens around a table at a meal. We tell our favorite stories—the ones that make us laugh out loud or cry a tear of remembrance and joy for the one who has died. But in those precious moments of remembrance, when we are laughing and wiping away tears of remembrance, for me it is as if the one who has gone away has returned, but in a different and now unchangeable way.

Dave and I have his grandmother’s dining room suit in our home. It contains a china cabinet, a buffet, and a table with 6 chairs. It is the same table where I sat in November 6 years ago and hurriedly wrote down my thoughts to put them together into a sermon and service of death and resurrection for Daddy Howard—that’s Dave’s grandfather—when he died very suddenly of an aortic aneurism before we could even get over to Birmingham after we got the call that he had been taken to the hospital. But whenever we remember a funny story about him or admire one of his many admirable characteristics, I feel his presence in a way that is different than when he had a physical body and would sit around that table and tell me for the 5th or 6th time how he met Geraldine, Dave’s grandmother. It’s an eternal presence now that doesn’t leave when Christmas is over. He’s just there. And when I sit down there to share a meal with other folks now that he’s gone, he’s still there.

Not long ago I was sitting there with my mother, father, husband, sister, and her fiancé and realized that at the same table I had prepared to say good bye to one family member and hello to another. Around that piece of wood with legs, and in those chairs with old chair bottoms that need to be replaced, many important family moments have been shared. It is as if our home cannot contain all the lives represented at that table.

But the kingdom of God can. The reign of God in Christ and by the Holy Spirit brings us into communion with one another in the breaking of bread. When we eat together, when we feed together, when we receive nourishment from one another, when we come here empty and leave full, or when we come here full and leave empty of the things that crowd God out, when we embrace new little ones like Adelaide and her family and say to them that there are places set for them at the table of the family of God—in those holy moments, he is made known to us. And not in a way that recalls the past but in a way that sets our own faces and lives toward the future.

What does his presence make known to us? What about the future do you have hope for with no real visible sign that it has yet or will come to pass? What problems do you hold on to, just knowing that if you work on them hard enough you’ll be able to fix them yourself? What table fellowship draws you into the fellowship of God? If you do not have a table where the presence of Christ and all those who have gone before us is made known to you, then hear today the invitation to the Lord’s table, where all who desire to be known are invited to gather, where the body of blood of Christ are eternally offered to us without price or manipulation, where the holy scriptures are revealed to us, where we come together from places of difference and sometimes struggle, where the entire family of God at one time can join together in communion with the presence of Christ, in the mysterious way that only Christ can do.

In the breaking of bread. In the sharing. In the prayers. In the revelation of scripture. In the tears of joy and remembrance we show to one another. In the hand offered to one who needs help. In the arm held around the child who’s not sure what to do. In the Holy Spirit who moves us from our comfortable seat in this room to be humbled and celebrate the extraordinary love and presence of Christ that is now unchanging.

What Cleopas and his friend told the others was that Jesus was with them, that they didn’t know it at first, but that he was there at the table, in the breaking of bread. It’s what we do here all the time, friends—break bread in the name and presence of Christ. I invite you to let him be made known to you today in bread and cup. Let him be with you, reveal things to you, make your heart burn for desire of his presence, and lead you with the guidance of the Holy Spirit to go and tell others whom you have known.

Taste and see the goodness of the Lord. Amen.

Easter 2

2008-04-03T17:01:00.000-04:00

John 20:19-31

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

Recently, while visiting with my parents, their phone rang. My dad went to answer it while my mom explained to us that they get telemarketing calls add day long. When my dad came back from the phone, he explained with a glimmer in his eye which one had just called. “They were offering something for senior citizens,” he said, “...ages 40-85!” Senior citizens? Age 40? How many of us today are senior citizens today based on this newest age label? If you’re not there yet, you’re now closer than you’ve ever been before! I’m hoping my dad just heard the telemarketer wrong; but it got my attention.

There is something important to us about labels. As much as we may protest, we kinda thrive on assigning them to others and living into them if we are really honest with ourselves and each other. And now we find ourselves in the midst of preparation for a general election, probably the most important one of recent history. Labels are being tossed around, sometimes even thrown at one candidate or another--by the candidates themselves as well as the media and we, the consumers of this election. Liberal, conservative. Experienced, inexperienced. Ready, not ready. Mature, young. Black, female, old. There are times when our labels for ourselves and each other seem to take over our identities and turn us into a list of characteristics or a lithmus test of core beliefs and/or practices.

Or maybe it’s what we do. I saw a short story on CNN recently about a woman who had been labeled a hero because she became a kidney donor for a customer she met at the Starbucks where she is a barista. “One morning,” she said, “the customer came in and looked like something was wrong. Since she came in every day, I felt like I had a good enough repore with her to ask what was wrong. She came out and said that she needed a kidney transplant, so I said I wanted to get tested.” She was a match; now she’s a hero.

Labels: they tell the world who we are. And it’s not really new to us. People have been doing this in every generation since the beginning of time. It happens throughout the biblical story--take poor old Thomas, the disciples who gets top billing in today’s story. He’s called both Thomas “the twin” and “doubting” Thomas. We know him by the reputation he has for throwing a wet blanket on the interesting things that happen with Jesus in John’s gospel. In John 11, when the discover that Lazarus is at death’s door and Jesus considers returning to Bethany (which is a neighboring community to Jerusalem), the disciples warn Jesus that they should not go back there because the last time he was in Jerusalem he was nearly stoned over some comments he made at the Temple, claiming that he and God are one. If they go to Bethany, surely the ones from Jerusalem who meant to kill him before will get another chance. And Thomas, with his flair for the dramatic, says, “Yeah, let’s all go, and we can all die together!”

Then in John 14, when Jesus is offering words of comfort to the disciples as a follow up to a difficult events of chapter 13 in which Jesus tells them that he’ll be betrayed by them, Jesus begins to paint a picture for them of the enormous house of God in which there is and will be room for them all. And what does Thomas say? “We’ll never find it on our own.”
We can begin to see why the label “doubter” has stuck.

But I think it is precisely that identity of doubt that we use to characterize Thomas that makes him such a powerful witness to the risen Lord. If you think about it, the doubt he shows at the second gathering of the church of the disciples after the resurrection is founded in real human emotion and experience. It you compare Jesus’ first appearance to them the week before with the one in which Thomas is present, he does not ask to experience anything that the other disciples have not already experienced. The first time, Jesus showed the disciples his hands and side. Why can’t Thomas ask about it? Maybe it’s not doubt but inquisitiveness and impetuousness that we find in Thomas. Maybe there is something about him that we find to be counter to the characteristics we deem appropriate for disciples: he asks too many questions, he has too many opinions, he doesn’t seem to really get what Jesus says, he’s a downer.

But without the story of Thomas, we might not be sitting here today.

I think the best label we can give to Thomas is “witness.” He is a witness--eyes, mind, heart, and soul--to the risen Christ. Without his story, and the stories of the others who saw him in that liminal time between the resurrection and the ascension, what faith would we have today? What reason would we have to believe anything? What hope would we ever have in the midst of the tragedies we live with from day to day? How would we believe that the impossible is somehow possible?

We need witnesses today. We need folks who will take on that label with pride and tell the world that all things which seem like they’ll never happen become reality, like the end of the war in Iraq, the end of the hell that has come to pass in Darfur, the imbalance of us throwing away food we can’t squeeze into our full stomachs while children and adults in other parts of the world beg for enough food to keep their stomachs pain-free for a few hours, and then tell other people about it. We need people whose lives have been changed by the power of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit and the forgiveness offered to us in Christ to stand up and say it out loud so that the ones who think their lives will be horrible forever, who feel completely alone, who are convinced that they will never be worth forgiveness for the things they’ve done--those people can find some peace, rest, and joy in their lives. We need doubters, who can’t possibly understand how it could be true but who are, at the same time utterly convinced that it is, to share how their doubt has been turned into belief. We need witnesses so that the people who have not seen that kind of amazing thing in their own lives can come to believe that it can happen for them, too. That God is that good. That Jesus matters. That the Spirit is a constant companion. That what we do here every Sunday, every 7th day, behind these closed doors, is welcome the risen Christ who enters without our ever knowing how or where, but who speaks peace to us.

We need witnesses. The stories of Mary, the disciples, and Thomas let us know that it is true--he rose from the dead. He is risen, indeed. We are witnesses to what we have seen in our own lives, so that those who have not yet seen God’s presence and the difference it makes will come to believe. The church is called to continue the story of Christ’s resurrection in the lives of its members and friends. We are called to continue the life of the body of Christ in our own bodies, spirits, energies, and commitments.

If you’re not yet convinced, just hold on for a few more minutes and get your bulletins ready to sing and respond to Elliott Warner. He needs us to tell him the story of Thomas, that this stuff we say and pray and do together is real and that it matters. And today, we promise that we will do that with the way we live our lives, with being his teachers and supporters as he grows and learns and makes mistakes, and becomes the young, middle-aged, and senior citizen God has called him to be! (Maybe by the time he’s finishing college he’ll be applying for AARP!)

What would it take in your life for the people around you outside of this place to label you a “witness” to this faith? What kind of questions do you need to ask of Christ? How will you talk about your experience of God with others in a way that leads them to belief where they have not yet seen? And today, how will you back up the promises we make to Elliott, the promises made to his parents in their baptism to which they respond today by bringing their child for the same promises of witness?

Doubting. Quiet. Silly. Exuberant. Unusual. 4Faithful. Witness. May we be called all of these things and much, much worse, my friends, for the sake of our Lord and our God!

Amen.

Easter

2008-04-03T16:58:00.000-04:00

So, I had to write this one by hand because of a computer issue. It was good, actually. And when I finally typed it into my file, it felt like it was more of a poem than prose. So, here you go.

John 20:1-18
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

I am so glad that Lent is over and that today is Easter that I am going to begin with a joke:

[I do not know the origin of this joke.]

How many Christians does it take to change a light bulb?

Charismatic: Only one. Hands already in the air.

Pentecostals: Ten. One to change the bulb and nine to pray against the spirit of darkness.

Presbyterians: None. Lights will go off and on at predestined times.

Roman Catholic: None. Candles only.

Baptists: At least 15. One to change the light bulb and three committees to approve the change and decide who brings the potato salad.

Episcopalians: Three. One to call the electrician, one to mix the drinks and one to talk about how much better the old bulb was.

Mormons: Five. One man to change the bulb and four wives to tell him how to do it.

Unitarians: We choose not to make a statement either in favor of or against the need for a light bulb. However, if in your own journey you have found that light bulbs work for you, that is fine. You are invited to write a poem or compose a modern dance about your light bulb for the next Sunday service, in which we will explore a number of light bulb traditions including incandescent, fluorescent, three-way, long-life and tinted, all of which are equally valid paths to luminescence.

Methodists: Undetermined. Whether your light bulb is bright, dull, or completely out, you are loved. You can be a light bulb, turnip bulb or tulip bulb. A church-wide lighting service is planned for Sunday. Bring a bulb of your choice and a covered dish.

Nazarene: Six. One woman to replace the bulb while five men review the church lighting policy.

Lutherans: None. Lutherans don't believe in change.

Amish: What's a light bulb?

Regardless of how we do it,
on this day we gather
in the name of the one who transforms our grief
into new life.
And it all started—
this whole thing,
this faith we claim,
this liturgy we do together,
this belief that draws every single one of us here today—
it all started with a word:
her name, “Mary.”

I always imagine the story the same way:
the two Marys show up;
they have a job to do.
They think they know how it will all go down;
then they encounter a surprise!
Startled from their grief,
their eyes—swollen
from sobbing for 3 days—
are suddenly wide open.
He’s gone.

It’s kind of a funny way
to begin a message:
silence.
It must have been the setting:
utter silence.
Jaws dropped.
Eyes popping out.
Voice unable to speak at first.
Then feet hitting the ground hard,
as hard as a heart pounding.
Breath rushing in and out,
like something overwhelmingly tragic
and unbelievably wonderful
had happened.
But which was it?

Out of tribal loyalty and concern,
Mary goes to the 12,
and Peter goes back to the tomb
with her,
along with the un-named one.
Peter’s silence is deafening.
It’s like a silent movie at this point:
lots of action, no lines whatsoever.

In the silence,
Mary begins to cry.
Nothing but tears
for what feels like forever.
It’s gone from unbelievably awful…
to worse.
Now his body is gone.
“We were afraid something like this would happen”—
the words are all over her face,
and Peter’s
as he runs away.

The angels aren’t much help at first.
They do break the silence:
“What’s the matter with you, honey?”
And then the gardener:
“What’s the matter, ma’am?”
And then Jesus becomes recognizable:
“Mary!”

The beginning of all this—
this celebration,
this creed,
these hymns,
this cross,
our new clothes,
this sacred text—
it all started for us with a word,
a summons into the light;
he was made known to her
in the breaking of her misery!

Many of you may be rejoicing today
that the season of Lent is over!
(Hooray!)
Many of you may be rejoicing today
at the reunion of family and loved ones.
Many of you may be rejoicing today
that Spring is upon us,
and yesterday was a perfect Spring day.
Mary rejoices today
because her story begins here:
in the garden,
at the sound of her name.

John is the only gospel to tell this story.
In it I hear a foretaste
of the Pentecost story
we’ll encounter in 50 days:
each one hearing the deeds of power
God has done
in a language she or he can understand.
A familiar voice to start a revolution:
“Mary!”

“Susan!”
“Kevin!”
“Brenda!”
“Teresa!”
“Lou!”
“Marcus!”
“Bryan!”
“Laura!”

It’s your story today:
of sorrow over what was in your life,
of despair over what your future appears to be,
of weeping over what you may have lost,
of anger over not knowing or being in control of
even the corpse
of what has gone wrong for you.

It’s you there in the garden,
with God’s witnesses bringing you hope—
what you have lost is not here.
Your life,
your hope,
your resurrection is here!
Because you have been here,
you have seen the body of Christ—
redeemed by his blood,
made known
as the body calls you out
to love and serve the Lord.

Go to our brothers and sisters,
and tell them that God has done this,
that the end you grieve for is not the end,
that there is hope alive in the world
beyond our understanding.

Christ is risen, he is risen indeed!

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Easter Sunrise

2008-03-30T19:58:00.000-04:00

Matthew 28:1-10
After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

The earth is fearfully and wonderfully made, at least we as people of faith believe that it is. We believe that these surroundings—dirt, grass, trees, flowers, bees, birds, sky, even pollen! —is made for us by God. And the movement and seasons of this earth are beyond our control, just as God is. So it makes sense to us that this ground on which we stand belongs not to us but to the God who made us, and it! At least, we proclaim that when we gather for worship. God is in control. God is all-powerful. God’s creation is our home, and God created it for us. Jesus came to be part of that creation so that we could intimately know God. The Holy Spirit of God continues to reside in, around, under, above, and through this creation we call home. And we are thankful for it.

But we may not have been so thankful just one week ago.

As I drove to church last Sunday, I came through from my home in Avondale Estates by way of Glenwood Avenue. I drove slowly so I could look at one house and then another, noticing which yards had trees down, near misses of trees lying inches away from cars and roofs. I had heard a local weather reporter say the night before something about the tornado that came through Atlanta and the subsequent tornadoes and storms that passed through Georgia all day last Saturday being some kind of “act of God”—a favorite phrase of insurance writers and storm reporters. Many people at the time were praising God’s providence over the fact that no lives were lost in the city of Atlanta until a body was discovered in rubble over the weekend. Many of our friends and neighbors’ lives have been changed dramatically because of the severe weather from last weekend. In some parts of the state, lives were lost who could not escape the tornadoes. What kind of act of God was this disruptive, destructive, terrifying blackness of wind and rain that led us into the early morning with questions like, “Was anyone hurt?” “Are my loved ones ok?” “Will I be able to survive the damage done to my home, business, cars, security?” Why today are we gathering in this setting, albeit beautiful in its own right, instead of in Oakland where trees and monuments have been uprooted and permanently damaged?

Last night, I ran an errand to the grocery store at about 9 pm. As I drove home on College Avenue from Decatur through Avondale Estates, I rounded a curve just as I came to the elementary school and caught my first glimpse of last night’s moon. Did you see it? It was one of those nights when your first glimpse of the moon from a moving vehicle is breathtakingly beautiful. The moon seemed to inhabit the entire sky. It was full, large, golden, looming heavily over the ground I covered on my way home. I could hardly take my eyes from it to watch the road I was driving.

But as I watched it, it became smaller and smaller. It was as if it were shrinking behind the trees on the horizon the closer I came to it. What once had looked as if it were the heaviest stone one could ever imagine got smaller and smaller until it was like a pebble. What had moments before loomed largely over the horizon as if to consume it completely now became nothing more than a disappearing dot falling underneath the tree line in the far distance away from where I was. What had been almost terrifying upon its initial entry into my line of vision was now just an ordinary moon in the early night sky.
Things can change in an instant. What once was safe and secure can become terrifying and intrusive. What once looms large on the horizon can become small and out of sight while you blink. Is not the power of God able to turn the world upside down in an instant, a moment, an incredible experience that comes and goes in a flash?

The angel who rolled the stone away at the tomb, who appeared as lightening and dressed in white clothes must have frightened the Marys as they came to the tomb expecting to find a dead body beginning to decompose. The probably expected a very large, looming stone to sit heavy on the ground in front of the tomb. Perhaps they had planned to ask a gardener for help removing it so they could enter the tomb. Maybe they just needed to be there, on the other side of the huge rock between them and Jesus. Imagine their surprise as they approached and the rock suddenly seemed to become light as a feather, not the looming, heavy presence they had expected. Imagine their eyes widening as the big ole stone sank away into the horizon, not even a player in the drama anymore as the angel invited them to come in where the body had been laid, only to find nothing decomposing, nothing rotting, nothing smelling foul, everything changed in an instant.

That’s what I call an act of God. That is the kind of life-changing moment that gives us hope in the midst of all the other disasters, destruction, and disarray life gets us into. That kind of change tells us that death is not the end. That kind of change tells us that God has the power to reverse the most horrible thing we can think of. That kind of change means that all the bad stuff we go through, the things which loom in our darkest nights like a big, fire-y moon that feels so heavy we could never roll it away into morning, are not the final word. For while we hide from the night, God overcomes it.

Last Saturday, we hid for a while in our basement as Dekalb County sat under a tornado warning for a couple of hours. This Saturday, people were out in broad daylight, picking up debris, beginning the reversal process on the fear and despair people felt last Saturday in Cabbagetown and East Atlanta as they came out from under the weight of the previous night’s storm. And life has begun again, with neighbor helping neighbor, hands joining together in a effort to bring new life to these damaged communities.

The refrain says, “Jesus Christ is the Light of the world; a light no darkness can extinguish.” No storm, no stone, no moon, no fear, no threat, no terror, no disbelief. Jesus lives. He reigns with God and the Holy Spirit. The heaviness is lifted forever if we will realize and accept it. Come and see, and then go and tell the world. Christ is risen; he is risen indeed.

Amen.