Been a while...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.