Amy's Sermons

The Heart of the Matter

2009-06-14T15:13:00.000-07:00

Scriptures: 1 Samuel 15:34 - 16:13, Mark 4:26-34

My next-door neighbor has a very large, very old maple tree in her back yard. It is all tangled up with the different phone and electrical wires on the corner, so every so often some repairman or other will come through and trim it back. But every trimming seems to cause more shoots to grow up. And every shoot seems to produce more little helicopter seeds, so when the time comes for the seeds to drop in the spring, our back yard, just a few yards from the old maple, gets hundreds and hundreds of seeds. Sometimes I think it’s more seeds in the spring than leaves in the fall.

The seeds mostly fall on concrete or into the grass, and we gather them up and put them with the rest of the yard waste. But some seeds sneak through, and get into my lettuce beds, or the tomato pot, or the other, unused pots that sometimes sit around with nice soft potting soil in them. The ones we collect from the parking pad always seem to be dried out and beaten up in the process, but somehow those ones that sneak through into the good spots turn green and grow like crazy. It makes me wish there were space in the yard for a maple tree. The shade in the summer would be great. But that’s how it goes, I guess.

In 2005, archeologists found some ancient date palm seeds, estimated to be about 2,000 years old, based on carbon dating. They decided to try to grow the seeds, and after carefully soaking and fertilizing them, a botanist was able to coax a new date palm to sprout. At first its leaves were a little unhealthy, but over the next few months, the palm grew and thrived, all from a seed that had lain dormant for centuries.

What is odd to me about seeds is that if you split them open – for example, if you split open a peanut – there are two smooth halves, and a little square nut binding them together. But where is the life? Where is the part of the seed that shows that this little thing could be planted in the ground and then grow? The scientists had to plant the seed to see if it would grow. It must be, then, something only God can see.

In our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophet Samuel is dealing with possibilities that only God can see. The first king of Israel, Saul, looked like a good prospect to start with – strong and tall, with plenty of courage – but as his reign wears on, the people discover the limits of his abilities. He’s impulsive, paranoid, and jealous of his power for its own sake. Eventually, God decides to intervene, and he sends Samuel to anoint a new king.

Now on the surface, Samuel taking a trip to Bethlehem to find a new king looks like treachery. Saul is the king – the established authority – and he has been put in place there by the will of the Israelite tribes, and a careful selection process. And yet, at the heart of it, Samuel’s motivation is a risky act of faithfulness. He has to go against the established human authority in faithfulness to God’s call.

So Samuel sets out, with an animal offering on hand as cover for the mission, and when he arrives, he calls all the village people together. They’re a little nervous – the country folk aren’t used to a prophet from the city. And a holy man doesn’t always bring good news. But they do as Samuel asks – they prepare for a ritual sacrifice – and as they gather, Samuel feels drawn to the local farmer Jesse. His sons are tall, strong, handsome. They look like natural leaders. He sees the oldest. “Surely it’s this one,” he thinks. But God has other ideas. He sees the next oldest – “Okay, it’s got to be him.” The answer: no. And so on, all the way to the youngest one there. On the outside, on the surface, each son could be a future king, but at the heart of the matter, God is the one who knows. Finally, out of options, Samuel asks Jesse, “Got any more sons?”

Jesse answers, “Well, there is one more, but he’s off tending sheep.”

“We’ll wait until he gets here, then,” says Samuel.

When David arrives, Samuel knows he has found the next king. “This is the one,” God confirms, “I’ve looked at his heart, and he’s the one I’ve chosen.” Samuel rises up and anoints David as the new king.

And yet, what happens next might not be what you’d expect. Instead of charging up to Jerusalem to take his rightful place as king by force, David stays where he is, and goes on with the thankless task of shepherding his father’s sheep. Samuel makes the promised sacrifice and returns to his work as prophet in the big city. And yet, something has changed. A seed has been planted.

When Jesus talks about the kingdom of God in our gospel lesson from this morning, in some ways he is describing the mystery of how God works in our lives. God’s realm doesn’t come about as a storm front so must as a tiny, pungent seed furrowing its roots into the ground and stretching its leaves into the sky. How does a seed 2,000 years old sprout and become a date plant? What is it in a young boy’s heart that makes him a king? When does a hard heart turn from stubborn anger to forgiving grace?

The heart of the matter is that God is the one who knows, and is the one who works these miracles. As followers of Jesus, it may seem sometimes like life is something that can be controlled, that we are the ones who will decide what is good and what is bad. But what Samuel shows us is that the first task of a faithful person is to look beyond the surface and listen carefully for God’s voice. As a community, we can choose to walk by sight, as Paul puts it. We can hold fast to logic, to tradition, to what appears right and authoritative on the surface. Or, we can choose to walk by faith – to step out in risky faithfulness, as Samuel did, always with our ears open, listening for God’s voice.

The good news for us today is that the seeds of God’s kingdom are springing up all around us, and learning to walk by faith is as much learning to see the sprouting seeds as it is learning to hear God’s sometimes subtle voice. Where do you see glimpses of God’s dream for the world coming true? Where is strong love helping people let go of addictions? Where is the stranger given a welcome? Where are hungry people given something to eat? Where are prisoners visited, attended to, and treated with dignity? Where do the poor have good news preached to them? At the heart of the matter, it is God’s will we seek to do on earth. May the seeds of the kingdom abound! Thanks be to God, Amen.

Born into the Kingdom

2009-06-07T15:24:00.000-07:00

Scripture: John 3:1-17, Romans 8:12-17

Our Gospel lesson for this morning pivots on a single word, which in the Greek has two meanings. The Greek word is anothen, which means both “from above,” and “again.” It’s like the word bow in English, which could mean “take a bow,” or “the bow of a ship” at the same time. It’s the context that helps you know what it means. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

Our story starts with Nicodemus, an important man – a teacher, a leader, an all-round well-respected guy, coming to Jesus at night, when people are less likely to notice. It’s not totally clear what he’s hoping for with this meeting – maybe to pick up a few tips on self-improvement, maybe to report back to his people about Jesus’ particular philosophical positions. He starts the conversation respectfully – Teacher, he says, we know you are the real thing – we can tell by the miracles you perform.

What Nicodemus gets, of course, (you know how Jesus is!) is something more than an intellection to-and-fro dialogue, or a set of five points for maximizing his personal potential. Instead, Jesus takes it way outside the realm of what Nicodemus was expecting. “Believe me, because it’s true,” he says, “No-one can see the kingdom of God without being born….” And here’s that word, “anothen.” When Jesus says anothen he means it both ways – being born again, AND being born from above. The new birth is from above – from God.

Nicodemus doesn’t get the pun Jesus is making though. And to be fair, who can blame him? So far, in the gospel of John’s telling of Jesus’ ministry, this idea of new birth or new life has not come up. In fact, the idea of the kingdom of God hasn’t come up in the gospel yet. The readers are learning about this for the first time, along with Nicodemus. So far, we’ve seen Jesus’ baptism, we’ve seen his miraculous changing of water into wine, and we’ve seen him clean out the temple of all its commercial activities. It’s clear from what he’s done so far that he’s a pretty important person to listen to, but it might not be totally clear just yet why he is important, or what his message is.

The kingdom of God is the message, but the way into it is a very strange and counter-intuitive one, especially for someone like Nicodemus who has some position, some power, some influence. Because the way into the kingdom for Nicodemus is, in a way, to humble himself, to become a child again, to start over, to be born all over again from above. Of course, if you’re already in the position of being humble and broken down, it’s a little easier to hear Jesus’ message of a new life, started over.

There’s something interesting to think about with the word “born,” too, which is that it’s not something we do for ourselves. Someone else bears us into the world – we are borne by our mothers. In the same way, entering the kingdom of God is something that God does. As Jesus puts it – you have to be born by water (that is, the regular way) and by the Spirit, to see the kingdom of God.

What does it mean to see the kingdom of God? Well, one traditional way of talking about the kingdom of God is as somewhere you go after you die. It’s God’s holy city, complete with clouds, St. Peter, angels and harps. That’s the picture you see in cartoons anyway. But Jesus was teaching about a kingdom of God that starts in this world. This new realm is spiritual, yes, but it’s also social – things like who we spend time with and eat with, it’s also political – how our leaders are expected to behave, and how each person is committed to service for one another’s’ good, and it’s also economic – what we receive belongs to God, and is due back to God as part of our way of life. In fact, to say the kingdom of God, in one way, is to say a way of life. It’s the way of life that as Christians we’ve been trying to live out – with varying degrees of success for about two thousand years now.

But Christ’s vision is still very much with us, and Jesus asks: what would the world be like if everyone lived according to God’s vision of peace and mutual care? But his vision is also one about seeing what is already there: Jesus asks: what would the world be like if everyone saw what God is already doing to bring about a reality of peace, beauty and love?

There’s another important way that we can talk about the kingdom of God, which is as the family of God. Just as in regular life, each of us is born into a family of some kind, being born again from above by the Spirit means being born into the family of God, with God as our adoptive parent. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, shares about the freedom and the beauty of living life as the children of God, born by God’s Spirit. He says, “you did not receive a spirit of slavery, to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father! It is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”

I realize that the phrase “children of God,” or “child of God,” can sometimes be used so many times that it starts to lose its meaning. But really it is a very radical statement. The word, “Abba,” which is closer to “Dad,” or “Papa” than “Father,” in English, shows a sense of familiarity and closeness between parent and child. If God is our parent, and adopts us into a new life, then we would hope to see the family resemblances as we grow up under God’s care and discipline. And really, it’s probably good to remember again that there are other ways an all-powerful being could treat its creations – as slaves, or playthings, or robots. But God regards us as beloved children.

Finally, the most important part of this metaphor about our relationship with God is the deep love it conveys. Sometimes you’ll hear parents say about their children, “It’s like my heart is on the outside of my body, walking around in the world.” If human beings feel this way, how much more does God, whose capacity for love is so much greater and purer than any human’s! As the gospel lesson puts it, “For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.”

Finally, as children of God, one of our joyful tasks is to invite new friends into the family, to encourage new birth into the kingdom of God. How is this done? Through love.

There is a story about two men riding on a train many years ago. At first, one of the men is very slow to talk about himself, but it’s a long train ride, so after many hours, he tells the other man his story. This young man has been away from home for many years, and has gotten into some trouble with the law. He hasn’t had the chance to write home very much, and he doesn’t know how his family will feel about his homecoming, so he tells them in a letter to make a sign for him that he can see from the train. If they want him to come home, they should tie a white ribbon around the apple tree in front of the house, and he’ll get off the train and come home. But if they are ashamed, and rather he stay away, they should just leave the tree empty, and he’ll know to stay on the train and find somewhere else to make a life.

As they get close to where the family home is, the young man is so nervous that he asks his new friend to look for him. They round the corner, one man looking out for the other whose eyes are closed in fear and hopefulness. “It’s all right,” the older man says, “you can look.” The young man opens his eyes in relief, but relief turns to joy when he sees not just one ribbon in the apple tree, but the whole tree, white with ribbons, fluttering in the wind and welcoming him home.

May our welcome on God’s behalf be as warm and as strong. Thanks be to God, Amen.

Commanded to Love

2009-05-17T15:23:00.000-07:00

Scripture: John 15:9-17

The verse that may sound the most familiar to you in today’s reading from the Gospel of John is when Jesus says, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” It has a nice sound, doesn’t it, and a pleasant message. Yes, yes, love each other as I have loved you. Wait a minute, what? Jesus says in today’s Gospel that, basically, we’re supposed to love each other the way he loves us. That is a pretty tall order. Jesus was an awfully nice guy, you know. And the next verse isn’t much more encouraging, “No-one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Okay, sure Jesus. Sounds great.

The truth is, if I’m honest about it, being like Jesus is something more of an aspiration than a day to day reality. It is helpful to remember that Jesus didn’t always show his love in nice, polite ways. Sometimes he got angry in defense of God. Sometimes he was playful and obscure in his teaching. But still, here is a person who dedicates his whole life to the people he loves, lays down his life for his friends, even to the point of a humiliating death. That is a pretty tall order, and for me at least, there is the potential for a side-serving of guilt, because there’s no way, really, to live up to that. So it can feel a little heavy to hear these words from Scripture: “love one another as I have loved you.”

And yet, reading through the whole passage, Jesus seems to be so sweet and sincere in giving this commandment, that it’s hard to hold onto the heaviness. “I’m giving you this command,” he says, “because I want you to have the joy that I have. I want your joy to be complete.” “I’m giving you this command,” he says, “So that you’ll be able to love each other. I love you, and I want you to love each other.” It’s like even this command is part of Jesus’ love for his disciples.

Our passage today comes from one of John’s farewell discourses, which is to say, one of the many speeches Jesus gives on his way to the cross. He is hoping to impart the most important parts of his wisdom to his disciples. One of Jesus’ key teachings was about the kingdom, or the sovereign realm of God. This is a new reality that God is bringing about – a social, political, cultural, and religious transformation to a world reigned, not by fear or greed, but by love, the deep and abiding love of God. And so, in a way, what Jesus seems to be saying is, here is a picture of what life in the realm of God looks like. You’ll be like branches, woven together, chosen by God, cared for and pruned by God, and bearing fruit that lasts. I’ve chosen you, you didn’t choose me. And this is the life I have for you – one marked by love, by joy, and by friendship with God.

You might be interested to know that in the Greek, even when Jesus is talking about the disciples as his friends, he is still talking about love. He uses the word “philos” to talk about friends, which basically means “one who is loved,” and has the same root as Philadelphia – the city of brotherly love, or philosophy – the love of wisdom.

Many years, someone I know – I’ll call him Paul – was having a difficult time, financially. He had enough to live on, but just barely, and sometimes there was food in the fridge, and sometimes, there wasn’t much. His friends decided, during this difficult time, that it would be a good idea to have a potluck party, and they invited themselves over to Paul’s house to enjoy their casseroles and salads, and the side dishes and whatever else you think of at a potluck. At the end of the meal, there were a lot of leftovers, and the friends left them behind for Paul to finish, which he was glad to do. Only years later, looking back, did he realize his friends’ hidden intention to make sure that he had enough to eat, at least for that week. Paul’s friends loved him, and they loved him in such a way that he wasn’t even aware of what they were really doing at the time.

I think sometimes, it’s easy to imagine our love as being like a bucket full of water – something to be carefully stewarded. To love with abandon, without boundaries is akin to throwing the bucket all at once. It makes a big splash, but then it’s over. By contrast, a slow trickle of love makes the bucket last longer, but in the meantime it’s not very life-giving.

I think what Jesus is calling us to in this passage is to fill our buckets, again and again, in the deep well of God’s love – the overflowing spring of Jesus’ love – the constantly renewed aquifers of the Holy Spirit. Instead of holding onto our bucket, and portioning out its contents carefully and precisely, let’s find a way, instead to keep drawing from God’s deep and infinite well, and distributing the cool, refreshing life we find there – wells and springs springing up to eternal life.

How do we do this? Abide in me, Jesus says. I am the vine, you are the branches. Live in my love, make it your home, just as I make my home in God, my loving Parent. Live in my love, and love each other. Don’t hold onto your little bucket, but pour and draw and pour again, and live in the joy of being the vessel of God’s light, the Christ-bearer, the source and receiver of love passing through you, the joy of bearing rich fruit, fruit that lasts.

In Reasons of the Heart, John S. Dunne writes, “Our minds’ desire is to know, to understand; but our hearts desire is intimacy, to be known, to be understood. To see God with our mind would be to know God, to understand God; but to see God with our heart would be to have a sense of being known by God, of being understood by God.”

God knows you, God understands you, God chooses you, God loves you. Abide in that love, now and always, that you may bear much fruit. Thanks be to God, Amen.

Sustained by God's Love

2009-05-03T15:00:00.000-07:00

Scriptures: John 10: 11-18, 1 John 3:16-24

Good morning, friends. Today we have the opportunity to reflect on Jesus as the Good Shepherd. In the United Church of Christ, we recognize our unity by agreeing together that Jesus Christ is the head of the church. Jesus is our leader and our organizer, our pastor and our guide through our life together as the gathered people of God. A very old metaphor for that leadership, dating even from the time of David in ancient Israel, is of the king and leader as shepherd of the people. I hope that today we will be able to reflect on what it means for Jesus to be our Good Shepherd. I’d like to begin with a sung prayer. If you know it, feel free to sing with me. Let us pray.

Open our Eyes, Lord

I have to admit at the outset that the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd is one that gives me some trouble. First of all, none of us here, so far as I know, have a lot of direct personal experience with sheep and shepherding. I went to the Maryland State Fair a few years ago and watched the 4-H kids present their sheep for judging. I had no idea how loudly and frequently sheep do their bleating. And it sounds just a little bit human. It’s weird. The kids were maybe 10 or 12 years old, and their sheep had a tendency to get away from them. So if you want to control a sheep, you kind of grab it around under its mouth, and then it gets real still. One boy in particular tried to do this with his sheep, but it ignored him, and wandered around, barely under control. When one of the judges came over, though, to grab the sheep under its chin, it stopped dead in its tracks. The judge was clearly experienced in dealing with sheep.

So I think that if we were rural folks, living day to day with sheep, knowing how much it costs to buy a sheep, or when they have their lambs, just like we know where the nearest Farm Store or Wal Mart or grocery store is to our house, or how to use the telephone, then I think the metaphor of a Good Shepherd would make a lot more sense, and help us understand intuitively what God is saying to us through the gospel lesson today.

I also don’t like the idea of being called a sheep. As I mentioned, the sheep I saw at the state fair were obnoxiously loud, not very disciplined, and jumpy. Rumor has it that sheep are kind of stupid, too. For example, they can’t drink water out of a running stream, and they follow the herd whether or not the herd is going in a good direction. They go wandering off, they get lost, and they can’t defend themselves against wolves. I know it’s Jesus saying it, but it’s kind of a blow to the ego to be identified with a sheep, even if they are kind of cute.

Finally, the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, in my mind, somehow seems to go hand in hand with tame, nice, white Jesus. This is the Jesus who never gets angry, never starts a fight, is always polite, and would be a good person to bring home to meet your mother. This is the Jesus of the What Would Jesus Do? bracelets, since I’m guessing that the answer to that question – What Would Jesus Do? – for those wearing the bracelets, isn’t usually to upset authorities, confront hypocrisy, or call for the inclusion of outcasts in society. The truth is, though, that if you read the Bible, there’s a lot more to Jesus than being nice. Jesus wasn’t white, he wasn’t always polite, and sometimes he even got angry. In the gospels, Jesus is full of life, filling the pages with his wisdom and his wittiness, and his spirit of BOTH love AND challenge.

So I think when our metaphors about Jesus as the Good Shepherd obscure Jesus and tame him, making him into a kind of a blank wall of niceness, then there is a problem. Jesus is more than that, and we lose out if we forget that.

We can see some more of what it means for Jesus to be our Good Shepherd in this morning’s gospel lesson from John. First of all, Jesus is the Good Shepherd as distinguished from a hired hand. The shepherd is the one who owns the sheep. The shepherd has skin in the game. The guy they hire to watch the sheep, on the other hand, doesn’t have the same investment. “Hey, I just work here,” he says as he runs away, leaving the sheep vulnerable to the attacking wolf. It’s the difference between a homeowner and a tenant, a business owner and an employee, a parent and a babysitter. “I am the good shepherd,” Jesus says, “and you belong to me.”

Second, as the good shepherd, Jesus knows his sheep. I don’t know about you, but when I’ve driven past a field of cows beside a highway, I wouldn’t have the first clue about telling them apart. They all look the same to me. And yet, I could pick my cat Tuesday out of a crowd any day. If you have a pet, you know – they have their own personalities, habits, and moods. In the same way, we’re not just part of an indistinguishable mass for Jesus. Jesus knows each one of us – our personalities, our fears and weaknesses, our hopes, strengths and joys.

Third, as the good shepherd, Jesus lays down his life for his sheep. And I think this gets at the idea of nice Jesus versus real Jesus pretty clearly. In verse 18, Jesus says, “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.” Jesus has power and strength to lay down his life for us, and to take it up again. Jesus is not tamed or cowed by the powers of the world. Instead, he is master of them and of us as well.

What does this mean for us today? Jesus as our Good Shepherd offers us both comfort and a challenge. In the epistle reading we heard from 1 John this morning, there is the comfort of knowing God’s tremendous love for us. It starts, “We know love by this, that Jesus laid down his life for us.” Jesus gave us everything – his ministry of teaching and healing, his message of the good news of the kingdom of God, and then in the end, his very life, his death, and his resurrection. This is the model of love for us.

And in our day to day lives, we continue to live sustained by God’s grace. God leads us into green pastures day after day in the food we eat, the friends and family we meet, in the rising sun and the falling rain. God calls us to still waters of rest and refreshment, and God walks with us through the dark and dangerous valleys of our lives.

At the same time, there is a challenge in the image of Jesus as the good shepherd. We are no longer our own – we belong to Jesus, and we’re called to follow where he leads. The full verse of 1 John goes on to say, “And we ought to lay down our lives for one another,” through the service and ministry God calls us to. This may feel like a tall order sometimes, to love not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And yet, even in this challenge, God is the source of our love. Love comes through us in response to God’s love. Like so much wool, from well-fed sheep, I suppose. It’s not like sheep sit around trying to grow out their wool: “Edna, I can feel it growing!” “Are you sure Angela?” “Yeah! I’ve been working really hard on my wool-growing exercises!” I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works.
That’s fun to imagine, actually. Anyway, my point is that the key to learning to live in God’s love and learning to share it is to abide in the graciousness of God’s gifts to us. Even the gift of human love is, ultimately, from God, our Good Shepherd, our Maker, and our Guiding Spirit. We are sustained, now and always, by God’s grace. Thanks be to God, Amen.

New Life in the Kingdom

2009-03-22T20:07:00.000-07:00

Scriptures: John 3:1-21, Ephesians 2:1-10

Nicodemus was kind of a big deal. He was a local religious leader – on all the important committees, with a good reputation for common sense, competence, and reliability. If you needed something done, he was a good guy to go to – he’d know the best approach, if it was a good idea, and he’d know how to break it to you easy if it wasn’t a good idea. People respected Nicodemus and looked up to him.

So in some ways it was a surprise that Nicodemus came to see Jesus and to learn from him. Here’s someone who’s supposed to have it all together, and he’s coming out to the edge of town to meet a radical new street-preacher, someone on the outside with nothing to lose, who’s making big promises and talking about God and God’s work in a new way. You can tell Nicodemus isn’t sure about it himself, because he comes to Jesus at night, instead of during the day when everyone would be able to see him going. This is a meeting he’d prefer to keep private.

With all that in mind, it’s understandable that Nicodemus starts out with a compliment, rather than a strong statement of what he’s hoping for or what he wants from Jesus. “We can tell,” he says, “that you are from God, Jesus. The signs that you do could only be done by God’s power.” You might think Jesus would respond with an answer affirming that assessment by Nicodemus. Something like – “Congratulations! You’re right! I am from God, and now I’ll give you all my wisdom so you can take it back to your people.” I imagine that’s something like what Nicodemus was hoping to hear.

Instead, Jesus comes right back to Nicodemus with some confusing ideas about the kingdom of God. “Truly I tell you,” he says, “You won’t be able to see the kingdom of God, unless you are born from above.” What’s particularly confusing about this is that in the original Greek writing, the word for “again,” and “from above” are the same. So Jesus could be saying, “until you are born all over again,” or “born according to the way of heaven above,” or both those things at the same time. It’s a kind of a clever word play. But Nicodemus hears it pretty literally as meaning that your mother has to give birth to you all over again. Which understandably sounds ridiculous, and which most mothers most likely wouldn’t be willing to go along with.

But what the church has understood for many years is that Jesus is talking about a different kind of rebirth. It is learning to let go of what was before – death in its many forms – in order to hold fast to the new life that Jesus promises us – eternal life, the life that lasts, new life in the eternal kingdom of God. Baptism is the sacrament that shows that change in a person’s life. One moment you were outside of the life God gives, now you are part of the family. One moment you were caught in traps of bitterness, hopelessness and despair, but now there is resurrection, redemption, a chance to begin again. One moment you were dead to the Holy Spirit, but now you are alive.

Jesus goes on to explain this new life and God’s hand in it, and we hear one of the most famous verses of Scripture: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.” Here is the heart of the gospel – death is not the final answer, eternal life through God’s love is.

What does eternal life look like? It starts on earth, with our baptism by the Holy Spirit. Our old life is washed away, and the new life begins. For some of us, we don’t necessarily remember our baptisms. I was baptized as a baby in my home church in Iowa. About a year ago, I was going through old papers at my dad’s house, and I found the bulletin from the Sunday I was baptized, along with my certificate of baptism. It was so exciting to find these artifacts from long, long ago! Well, maybe not THAT long ago. At any rate, it may seem strange for some of us to try to imagine a time before we were baptized, a time before we lived as part of God’s family in the church, a time when we didn’t know who Jesus was, a time when we didn’t pray. These are hard to imagine.

I certainly know people who have had dramatic experiences of God’s transforming power in their lives. When addiction claims a person’s life, for example, but through trust in Jesus’ healing power they find the strength to make a new life, we have seen a person escape death and receive life in the kingdom of God.

Our reading from Ephesians closes with this verse: “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” In The Message translation, the verse reads, “God does both the making and the saving. God creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.”

What this says to me is that whatever way God’s grace comes to us, whether through the church we grow up in as our extended family, through a slow change that takes months or years and that we may not notice ourselves, or through a long hard fall that forces us to make a hard choice to live in God’s presence, whether we come to God in any of these ways, it is really God coming to us, rather than the other way around. First there is God, sending the Son in love and catching us up in the divine embrace. Later, we respond as we are able, accepting the gift of new life.

So what does this new life look like? It is a life of both joy and service. The joy of it is learning to see, as Jesus did, the kingdom of God all around us here on earth. The service is in finding out what those good works are that God has prepared for us to be our way of life. Every baptized person has a calling. Some of us have gifts for compassion and understanding. Some of us have gifts for hospitality and friendliness. Some of us have gifts of wisdom and thoughtfulness. Some of us have good business sense, or good hands for fixing things. But all of us have gifts, and God calls each of us to use them to bring about the kingdom of God - day by day as our way of life. We are called to be Christians every day of the week, not just on Sundays.

There is a secret about following God’s call, which is that only by following Jesus and living out our ministries do we get better at seeing what Jesus was talking about. I know a man who for many years struggled with alcohol addiction. He got involved in Alcoholics Anonymous, but never seemed able to get past about a month of sobriety before he got drunk again. One time his sponsor said, “look, you’re not going to be able to really get better until you start helping someone else.” At first, the man thought, how can I help someone else when I can barely keep it together myself? But he tried, and started to support someone else who was in an even worse spot than he was. And it wasn’t the perfect solution, but it made a big difference, and now the man has been sober for many, many years, and he has started a non-profit agency that helps other people start their lives over in recovery. Who would think that a man who couldn’t stay sober for a month would now be doing God’s work to affect so many people? But his personal experiences with alcohol give him tools to help others that he never would have had otherwise. So God called him to this ministry, in spite of, and in fact because of his weaknesses. And answering that call helps him find the wholeness he could never find at the bottom of a bottle.

One last thought, which is this: baptism is, underneath it all, a sign of God’s love for us. God has created us for good. We face suffering, we face disappointment, and we face our own mistakes and wrongs. But through all of it, God is creating and re-creating us to be the people of the realm of God. This is the gift we celebrate today. God’s gift of love in Jesus to us, and God’s continuing call to us to live that new life, that eternal life, that deeper, truer, more beautiful life, in the kingdom of God. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Meal in the Kingdom

2009-03-08T18:47:00.000-07:00

Scriptures: Exodus 12:1-17, Mark 8:31-38

Good morning, friends. It is good to be here with you this morning. This morning, I’d like to take some time to reflect on the meal, the sacrament, the ritual that we’re about to take part in together – the service of Holy Communion. Communion is a gift to us handed down from the very earliest Christians, handed down from Jesus. What we actually do is very simple, but the meanings and the symbolism are very rich. I know I’ll only be able to touch on a few things today, but I hope it will be enough to spark your own reflections as well. I’d like to begin with a sung prayer. If you know the song, feel free to sing with me. Let us pray.

Open our eyes, Lord

Jesus leaned back from the table. He and the disciples had been celebrating the Passover together, here in Jerusalem, remembering the escape into freedom by Moses and the Israelites. They had passed around flat, unleavened bread, a reminder of how the Israelites had eaten that night – in a hurry, with sandals on and bags packed, ready to escape into freedom. They had shared roasted lamb in memory of the roasted lamb the Israelites had eaten on that last night, the lamb whose blood painted on the doorways kept Israelite children safe from the plague God was sending, the lamb whose blood marked them as Israelite and not Egyptian. And they had eaten bitter herbs, a reminder of the bitterness of slavery in Egypt.

The Passover meal Jesus ate with his disciples was a meal reminding them of how, a thousand years before, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Sarah, Rebekah, Leah and Rachel, had remembered the people of Israel, caught in slavery to the Egyptians, groaning under the weight of their oppression, their very existence threatened as the Egyptians tried to keep them from having sons. God remembered them, and staged a tremendous intervention, sending leaders – Moses and his brother Aaron – and plagues to convince the Egyptians to give up their power and their profits from the Israelites. And, once freed from slavery in Egypt, the Israelites lived in a new reality, one in which their allegiance belonged, not to a Pharoah, a human leader, but to God. They ate manna in the wilderness, and lived by trust in God.

All this, Jesus and his disciples remembered in their Passover Meal. And then Jesus added just one more thing. “Listen,” he said, “Tomorrow, I’m expecting trouble from the authorities. I’ve been teaching you about a peaceful kingdom, but what they’re hearing is war. I’ve been gathering the sick to heal them, but they see me gathering supporters for a violent revolution. I’ve been giving good news to the poor about God’s reign here on earth, but they’ve heard it as bad news for them. So, I’m expecting trouble tomorrow, and I don’t expect to make it out alive. And I want you to remember me whenever you eat together.

Look at this bread. It’s just regular bread. But now for you it will be my body when I’m not here. And when you eat it, I will be here. Thanks be to God! Look at this cup of wine. It’s just regular wine. But now for you, it will be my blood, my life which I’m giving up for you and for the sake of God’s kingdom on earth. Whenever you eat and drink, friends, remember me. I have tried to teach you about a new reality – about God’s reign here on earth – and I don’t want you to forget. Sometimes the world can look like just the regular world. But now for you it will be infused with God’s grace, God’s presence, and God’s beauty, just like the bread, just like the wine. Thanks be to God!”

Throughout his time in public ministry, Jesus taught about the kingdom of God. Sometimes we might think of this kingdom of God as being in heaven – something we don’t get to until after death. But what Jesus is talking about, this reign of God, is something that he saw the beginnings of here on earth. “The kingdom of God,” he teaches, “is like yeast that a woman hides in a bag of flour. It’s very small, but it makes loaves upon loaves of bread rise.” “The kingdom of God,” he teaches, “is like a mustard seed. It’s very small, but it grows into a tremendous, flavorful bush that the birds themselves rest in.”

And today, in our gospel reading, we get a taste of what that realm of God will look like, based on what Jesus, its anointed King – its Messiah – says and does. He has just asked the disciples who they say he is, and Peter gets it. “You are the Messiah,” he says. And then Jesus starts teaching that this will mean his suffering, death, and resurrection. Peter gets very upset, because to him Messiah means the guy in charge, the guy who gets waited on, who makes the important decisions, who commands the army, and, incidentally, whose friends get influential political appointments as well. But as soon as Jesus admits to being the Messiah, he gets it all wrong about what it means to BE the Messiah. “Not you, Lord, surely!” Peter rebukes. “Get in line, you tempter!” Jesus answers back. “You are thinking about human things, not divine things. You don’t have your eyes on what God is doing in the world now.”

In the United Church of Christ, we talk about communion as a symbol and as a sacrament. It’s a symbol in the sense that we recognize that the bread doesn’t literally become Jesus’ body, the wine is not somehow changed into blood, while still physically having the properties of wine. But at the same time, communion is one of our two sacraments, which is to say, we recognize that God is present in it in a special way. This is a place where we meet God, not just in our minds or our spirits, but physically, with the taste of the wafers on our tongues, and the wine in our mouths. Through communion, God feeds us a meal in the new world God is creating. This is a meal in the Kingdom of God.

Because of that, this is a meal that reminds us of what the realm of God is about. It is a meal that brings healing and forgiveness, as Jesus brought healing and forgiveness. It is a meal that brings a radical equality – people from all stations of life, men and women, young and old, powerful and weak: all are welcome at the table. This is a meal in which we remember that Jesus was our leader and our teacher, and he lived that out, not by taking advantage of his powerful position, but by serving his disciples, stooping to wash their feet, and stretching out his arms to conquer sin and death.

This is the meal we eat today, a gift from God to the people of God, thanks be to God. It is a meal that creates a new community – a new communion – connecting us to people all around the world, from the past up to the present and into the future, through Jesus. And it is this community, the church universal, created by God, that works together, first to see and then to encourage, the growth and indwelling of God’s holy and beautiful realm on earth.

There is another name for communion, which is Eucharist, and which means giving thanks. Let us give thanks today and every day for God’s gift to us in Jesus, and God’s vision for us which we remember in this meal eaten in the Kingdom of God.

Wrestling with God

2008-08-03T18:06:00.000-07:00

Genesis 32:22-31

In our reading from the book of Genesis, we hear about Jacob wrestling with a stranger, or an angel. This is a key moment in his life story. It is an experience that changes his body – he always walks with a limp, afterwards – and it is an experience that changes his very way of being a person. After this holy wrestling match, Jacob’s name changes to Israel.

To see the importance of this, I’d like to go back earlier in the story and remember what has happened to Jacob up until now. First of all, we have that name, “Jacob,” which means “heel” in Hebrew. Jacob gets this name because he his born grabbing onto the heel of his older twin brother, Esau. I don’t know if you can go so far as to say Jacob is a heel, but on the other hand, he’s pretty grabby, especially when it comes to things that by right and custom should belong to the oldest brother.

So for example, one day Esau is coming in from the field after a sweaty day of hunting. Jacob is there, simmering some lentil stew in a big pot. He’s just added a little more salt and cumin to bring out the flavor, when Esau tramps up, as impatient and impulsive as ever. “Gimme soup,” he says, in his charming caveman way.
Jacob has some choices here. He could just hand over a bowl of soup – be nice to his brother – and let the moment go. Or say no, and let Esau find his own food. But he knows that Esau thinks with his stomach, not with his head. So he offers up a well-timed trade. “I’ll give you soup,” he says, “If you’ll give me the privileges of being the oldest.”
“Okay,” says Esau, “Doesn’t help me if I starve to death.”
And so Esau gives away his rights for practically nothing, and Jacob helps him do it.

Later, as their father Isaac is dying, Jacob outmaneuvers Esau again. Blind old Isaac calls to Esau, asking him to bring some of his favorite wild game. Rebekah, the mother, hears this. Esau is Isaac’s favorite, but Jacob is hers, so she calls Jacob and tells him to hurry and cook up some goat for Isaac. On his deathbed, Jacob fools his father into giving him the best blessings. When Esau gets there, game in hand, Isaac has eaten already, and given the blessings he had to give. All Esau gets is the leftovers.

Since Jacob has taken the blessings by trickery, and Esau can tend to have a temper, he decides its time to leave town. He flees to his mother’s brother in the East – his uncle Laban. On the way, he has a surprising experience. One night, he’s about to fall asleep, when he has a vision of angels climbing up and down a great ladder. Who remembers the song “Jacob’s Ladder?” On waking, Jacob says to himself, “God was here in this place, and I didn’t even know it.” He builds a pile of stones, and makes a deal with God. “If you bless me, I’ll worship you,” he says, intent to keep grabbing the heel of that thing he wants.

Jacob settles in to working for his uncle, and he makes the herds prosper. But Laban also gives Jacob a taste of his own medicine. After seven years of working to pay the bride-price for the beautiful younger sister he’s in love with – Rachel – Jacob wakes up in the morning to find that Laban has switched the older for the younger, and given him Leah as a bride instead. When Jacob confronts him, “Hey, we had an agreement!” Laban responds, “Oh, don’t you know our customs? The older daughter has to be married first before the younger one can marry. I can’t believe I forgot to mention it.” To marry the woman he originally wanted, Jacob has to agree to work for another seven years. Which he does. I would guess – not happily.

When we meet Jacob in today’s Bible reading, he has finally finished his fourteen years of service and has moved out of his uncle’s house. He is on his way back to face his brother, to face his past, and with a different perspective on what it’s like to be on the receiving end of switched siblings.

This time, on the return journey, Jacob doesn’t meet God as angels going up and down a ladder to heaven. Instead, he meets God as a man he wrestles with all night. Just as a side note – in Hebrew the word for angel and the word for messenger are the same. An angel would not necessarily be obvious, but could look like anyone, so Jacob might not know right away who it was who was wrestling with him. As they wrestle, the man realizes he’s losing and tries to get away, but Jacob is tenacious. He holds on until morning, demanding a blessing. “Tell me your name,” he says, but the messenger of God won’t do it. Finally, the man says, “your name will be Israel, not Jacob, because you have wrestled with God and humans, and have won.”

I think sometimes it’s easy to get caught in some of the traps that Jacob is caught in. When he is first on his ways to his uncle’s household, he thinks of God as being kind of like a divine Santa Claus, not that there was Santa Claus back then, but, he thinks of God as someone he can make a deal with, like Esau, or fool, like his father Isaac. I’ll give you an altar if you give me money and children. The ends justify the means for him a little bit. You may have heard the saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” Guess what? It’s not in the Bible. Benjamin Franklin said it. But if it were, it would be here, and it would be coming out of Jacob’s mouth.

In today’s story, when he’s at the river crossing, Jacob is left alone, without any of his accomplishments or possessions, and he has to come face to face with God. And he does pretty well. He doesn’t get overpowered by the angel, and he doesn’t let go, either. Instead, he wins a blessing from the man. But in the process he sustains a permanent leg injury. Jacob comes through the encounter changed, in other words. He has met God face to face, and it has altered him, body and soul. He has wrestled with God, and it has been costly, but it has brought him a blessing.

There are times in our lives when we might feel a need to wrestle with God. For Jacob, it comes when he is about to face his past and meet his brother for the first time in many years. For us, it may be something else that jolts us out of our sense of comfort with God, that God is someone that we can understand and make deals with. It might be a difficult loss that challenges our faith, a time when prayers seem to go unanswered, when a struggle lasts so long and we are not sure when the dawn will come. It could be an addiction, mistreatment of a loved one, or just a strange dry spell in our prayer lives. It could be a past that we would rather leave behind than face. There are times when God seems distant and unconcerned.

The question is, then, can we hold on to God as Jacob did? Can we hold on in the wrestling? Can we trust, when the evidence seems to stack up against it, that our God is a good God? Can we let that goodness shape us?

There are people out there who don’t realize that what they learned in Sunday School as children isn’t the whole picture of what it means to be a Christian. To be in a situation that causes us to question God, to wrestle with the meaning of God’s work in the world, can tear down a faith that is childish and brittle. Not that wrestling with God is easy. But sometimes that is what is required in a mature faith. The ability to challenge God, and to be ready to be changed by the experience, body and soul.

Hear this good news. God is not distant; God is near at hand. Even in those moments when having faith seems most foolish, God is with us, holding us close, ready to meet our challenges. Wrestling with God is part of the life of faith, and if we can hold on to God’s goodness, God will bless us. Today in our gospel lesson, Jesus feeds thousands with a few loaves and a few fish. The Son of God has come near and dwelt among us, bearing blessing upon blessing. We are not alone. We live in God’s world. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Seeds of the Kingdom

2008-07-27T12:00:00.000-07:00

Scripture: Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Opening Prayer:
Creative, Gracious, Blessing God, you call us over and over again to a new way of life in your Holy Spirit. Open our ears to hear your word, open our hearts to trust you, and open our hands to do your will, that we might see your kingdom in our own lives. Through the one that brings the good news
to us, Jesus Christ, Amen.

Our Gospel lesson today is taken from Jesus’ own teachings about the Kingdom of God. Jesus gives us a series of metaphors – here is what the kingdom of God is like: it’s like a small seed that is hidden, but then grows into a big bush. It’s like a single, valuable pearl that, once found, is bought with everything else the collector owns. It’s like yeast in flour – just a few scoops make loaves and loaves into soft, airy bread.

I should probably point out that even though the reading repeats the phrase “kingdom of heaven” several times, what we sometimes think of as the kingdom of heaven and what Jesus was talking about as the kingdom of heaven or of God are two different things. First, there’s the difficulty with the word heaven.

Heaven in our culture has often meant a people entering through golden gates kept by St. Peter, and then floating on clouds and playing harps all day like angels. Boring. Of course, even if you have a more interesting vision of what the afterlife might look like, the point is that kingdom of heaven frequently gets conflated with heaven, and therefore gets assigned to the file marked “Information I don’t plan to use for several years.”

Second, there’s the difficulty with the word kingdom. For me, “kingdom” conjures up Shakespeare or King Arthur, with castles and knights, and ramparts, whatever those are. It certainly doesn’t make me think of a current system of government, (except when I’m feeling very cynical about American democracy). Kingdoms are old-fashioned, and don’t have a whole lot to do with my daily life, the way they might have in Jesus’ day.

But the truth is, the news about the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, is Jesus’ good news for his day and for our day. The kingdom of heaven is breaking out here and now, in this place and this time. July 2008, Catonsville, MD, the kingdom is among us!

Brian McClaren writes about living as a Christian in a world with shifting values. In his book The Secret Message of Jesus he suggests some new metaphors for the kingdom of heaven that is breaking out among us. It’s difficult, because the basileia tou Theo – the kingdom of God – encompasses not just the political, but the social, economic, and religious aspects of the society. One of McClaren’s metaphors I like is of the kingdom as God’s economy of love. In God’s economy of love, we don’t measure things like Gross Domestic Product. Instead we measure Gross National Happiness, and the True Justice rate. What would it be like to measure and value things according to God’s scale, rather than according to the scale of the market?
Another McClaren metaphor that sticks with me is of the peaceful revolution of God. Revolutions are frequently violent. But what about a revolution that doesn’t force anyone to be converted, but simply commits acts of random kindness, goodness, and radical joy? Could a peaceful revolution be overtaking us?

Jesus teaches today about this kingdom of God, this economy of love, this peaceable revolution in other provocative ways. The peaceable revolution of God is like a boatful of fisherman who haul in a large net of fish. They sort through the whole net to find the good fish and throw the rest away. God’s economy of love is like a man who finds a treasure in a field, and sells everything else he owns to get it.

The God administration, in other words, is something both hidden and visible. Yeast hides in flour, good fish hide with bad, a beautiful pearl hides with other, less-worthy jewels. To see it, you have to be paying attention. But once you start looking, Jesus tells us, it can be seen and celebrated with joy. This is indeed good news.

Lutheran Volunteer Corps gives people an opportunity to spend a year exploring three core values, or tenets while serving as stipended volunteers at non-profit agencies. The tenets are Social Justice, Simple and Sustainable Living, and Intentional Community.

Social Justice comes in response to God’s call to seek justice for the poor, the widow, and the orphan, and as a way of following Jesus, whose ministry was not limited to the wealthy and respectable, but who instead spent most of his time among the lowly and outcast of society.

Simple and Sustainable Living means a commitment to slow the pace of our lives and the pace of our consumption, and to recognize the many ways in which we already have what we need, that we already have enough. Part of the challenge of the year is living on a limited budget – rent, utilities, and health care are included, but spending money is limited to $100 per month, and food to $90 per month.

Intentional Community, our third tenet, gives people an opportunity to cooperate with and support each other in simple, sustainable living and in social justice work. By living together and sharing food, chores, and community time, volunteers learn about each other and about themselves through the community-building process.

As the City Coordinator for Lutheran Volunteer Corps here in Baltimore and in Wilmington, Delaware, I help keep the administrative plates spinning, making sure that there are placements lined up, housing and support for volunteers coming in, and ongoing fundraising, recruiting and interviewing for future years of volunteers. I’m sure I’m the only one here who sometimes feels like their job is all flour and no yeast. But about two weeks ago, I was visiting our volunteers in Wilmington, and during a free moment, I noticed the map of their vegetable garden, which is a large-scale project up there. There were rows of tomatoes, of course, but also radishes, broccoli, squash, a variety of herbs, and I don’t know what else. It was impressive, and the little map guide was drawn with obvious love and a dash of flair.

In a few weeks, these volunteers and others like them across the country will finish their year of service and move on – to new cities, to back home, to graduate schools and seminaries, to new organizations, or even to new positions in their volunteering organization. But in that year, something has changed for them. Gardening has become a passion because it means eating healthy food that hasn’t traveled thousands of miles, or they’ve lost some of their fear of “the inner city,” and have met people who live courageously in the face of poverty and extreme adversity, and the volunteers learn about the joys and realities of working toward social justice – that it takes a long time, that choices aren’t always easy, that process matters. In the process, the volunteers, if they weren’t already, have become seeds of God’s kingdom, growing into mustard plants, sturdy and pungent. Or, they’ve become yeast, or that voice that says, “couldn’t we try it another way?”

Of course, this shouldn’t be a surprise, since that is the work that the church has always had – to spend time shaping people for the kingdom of God. LVC is continuing in a long line of tradition, just as you are here, at Salem. Our methods are different, but our goals are the same: to be watching, to be praying, to be waiting, to be encouraging those signs that the kingdom of God, God’s love economy, that peaceable revolution of God, is moving among us, transforming us and calling us to be transforming agents in the world. The kingdom of God is among us. It is hidden, it is a mystery, its work is not always obvious or straightforward, but it is among us.

I’d like to close with a story. Once there was a woman who was very, very careful. She trusted nobody. “They’re not going to get one over on me,” she said to herself as she argued her way out of extra charges on her grocery bills. When she was hit in a car accident, even though she wasn’t so hurt, she still sued for damages. “It’s just a big insurance company, they make too much money anyway,” she said to herself. And when she went to a hotel, she always took all the little soaps and bottles. “Everyone else does it,” she’d think. But as often as not, when she got home she’d throw the samples away, unopened, unused. She lived alone, because it was simpler that way. No need to worry about the door being left open, or about being left behind, empty and broken.

She lived in a small apartment building on the second floor. A family with a little girl lived on the first floor in an apartment with a window that faced the entryway. Every night, the little girl waited at the window and waved cheerfully to the woman as she came in the door. The woman rarely smiled, but sometimes if her hands weren’t full, she would wave back, as though to fulfill a necessary, but unpleasant duty. “Clare should be more careful,” she thought, “it’s not a good idea to be waving to everybody you see.”

One day, Clare knocked at the woman’s apartment.
“I brought you something, Miss Evans.” She was holding an inflatable purple brontosaurus. It was about three feet long.

Miss Evans hesitated. It was truly, spectacularly purple. But Clare was smiling as though she herself were receiving a long wished-for gift.

“It’s perfect for swimming!” she exclaimed.
“Oh, well then, thank you,” said Miss Evans. “Would you...like to come in?”
“I can’t,” said Clare, “it’s time for dinner. And she clattered back downstairs.
Miss Evans threw the toy on the couch. It sat there, gathering laundry for several weeks.

But one night, after Jane Evans turned off the TV to go to bed, she paused. “Hey, Mr. Pool Man,” she said to the dinosaur, “what are you doing here anyway? I didn’t ask for you and you don’t match. There’s no such think as a free lunch, you know.”
The brontosaurus looked back at her, saying nothing. But his painted smile reminded Jane of Clare’s open, wide grin. Suddenly she burst out laughing – at the sweetness, at her own silliness, at the outrageous purple-ness of Mr. Pool Man. She laughed and laughed, and for a moment she felt as though a gray cloud had lifted from around her heart.

In the morning, the gray cloud was back and Jane was back to her usual self. But on her lunch break, as she passed an expired parking meter with a beat-up old car in it, she paused. She could see the officer a few hundred feet away, writing a ticket. Normally, Jane would have chuckled to herself and walked away, checking over her shoulder to see if there would be any drama to watch. But today she dug around in her purse, pulled out a quarter, and slid it into the meter’s narrow slot.

May God be at work in our lives in ways that we can see, and in ways that we cannot. Amen.

And in Conclusion....

2008-06-01T19:33:00.000-07:00

Scripture: Matthew 7:21-29

Our assigned reading from the gospel of Matthew is an odd little bit of Scripture today. Last week, we got a chunk of the Sermon on the Mount, which is a two-chapter condensation of Jesus’ teachings. Jesus’ Greatest Hits, if you will. And then our assigned reading is basically the “and in conclusion” part of the sermon.

Have you ever been in the middle of a long, boring lecture – never here in this church, of course – but somewhere else, perhaps, and heard those three little words, “And In Conclusion?” Makes your ears perk up, doesn’t it? Well, that’s our scripture lesson for today: “And in conclusion,”

Jesus says, “I’ve told you some very important things, and now it’s important that you actually do them. If you do other things, but say that you’ve done them in my name, that won’t give you an entry into God’s true life. And if you don’t act on what I’ve said at all, it will be like you’ve built a house with no foundation. When the storms come, that house will fall.”

It might help at this point to backtrack a little and remind ourselves just what these things are that Jesus wants us to do. Because some of this stuff is just ridiculous. You may remember the beatitudes:

“Congratulations to you if you’re living in poverty! God’s true life belongs to you.

Way to go, you mourners! You’ll find comfort soon.

It is time to celebrate, all you quiet, unassuming types. Soon you’ll be running the world.

Good news for you, you people who are burning up for justice. Your thirst will be quenched.”

And so on. Really? You should be happy to be poor? In mourning? Really? A just world is around the corner? The meek are on the cusp of leadership?

And then there are some stories, analogies, and commandments that seem to have a similarly tenuous grasp on reality:

“You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world.” “Don’t murder, yes, but beyond that, don’t even get angry with a brother or sister.” Or, you may remember this classic: “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It’s better to lose your hand than it is to have your whole body go into hell.” A few prickly remarks against divorce here, a prohibition on swearing any oaths there, and then Jesus urges us to turn the other cheek when slapped, walk a second mile when forced to go one, and to give away all your clothes when someone sues you for your coat. Also we’re supposed to love our enemies, and be perfect like God is perfect.

There is some more approachable stuff in here: giving your offerings secretly, and praying in secret. The Lord’s Prayer is also in here, which is a good prayer, if a little short on ostentation. Check your own eye for logs before removing a little teeny sliver from somebody else’s eye. All right. And finally we come to our text from last week, which, after all this, tells us NOT to WORRY! The grass in the field has nice clothes, the birds in the air have enough to eat. Sounds good, but have you checked the price of gas lately?

And in conclusion, Jesus says, And in Conclusion, your job is not just to hear this, but to do it. Whew.

There’s a movie you may have seen called Cliffhanger. It’s a Sylvester Stalone flick from the early 90’s, and we saw the beginning of it while channel-surfing a few weeks ago. In the opening scene, Stalone’s girlfriend is climbing with him on some huge mountain, and a series of problems with her harness causes her to fall to her death. I think the first time I saw the movie, the Hollywood version of a fall from a cliff seemed pretty believable and scary. But Heather and I took up climbing a couple years ago, and this time the movie seemed totally unbelievable.

Basically, the principle with climbing is that when you’re getting into your gear, you make sure that there is a backup for every piece of safety equipment. If one thing breaks, the next thing should catch you. And the other principle is that that all the little straps and knots tighten when you put pressure on them – your weight actually makes you more secure in the equipment. Of course, in the movies all those straps are just waiting to slip loose and drop Sylvester Stalone’s girlfriend into a canyon. Sorry if I’ve just ruined the movie for anyone. I’m sure the rest of it is totally accurate and realistic.

What if Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is somehow more real and more true than our common sense notions of the right way to do things? Jesus says that hearing his words and doing them is like building a house on rock instead of on sand. Another way of saying it is, if you hear his words and act on them, it’s like someone who took the time to check their climbing gear, and made sure all their knots were made right, and that the rope wasn’t too old, and that it was secure at the top, and that all the harness straps were doubled over to prevent slipping, before they ever set foot on a climbing wall, much less a huge mountain cliff. If you hear his words and don’t act on them, it’s like climbing the Hollywood way, which means that when you fall – and that’s an inevitable reality with climbing – when you fall, you’ll keep falling. The ropes won’t hold you fast.

Doing what Jesus says, in other words, is of the essence. Hearing by itself will not get you where you want to go.

There is good news in our gospel reading for today. First of all is the center of the Good News (capital letters) – Jesus’ message about the kingdom of God. In our culture there’s a tendency to talk about the kingdom of God as something that happens in heaven, far away, when we die, with streets of gold and pearly gates. You know the drill. But that’s really not what Jesus is talking about. At least that’s not the bulk of it. The kingdom of God is HERE RIGHT NOW. The way in is to recognize it. It’s something unlike anything we’re used to.

The kingdom of God goes against most of our usual ways of being humans. God’s abundance for all, the poor and oppressed in the highest seats of honor, and a way of peace that is neither submission nor vengeance, but something else that illuminates without demanding eye for eye. The kingdom of God is a place where we pray for the people who are out to get us – for our mean boss, for that irresponsible neighbor, and even for Al Qaeda. This is not the usual human way of doing things. Jesus is giving us a new story about the world and everything in it. One that is bigger and more beautiful and more real than our usual stories about self-preservation, survival, and getting even. The good news is this: the kingdom of God, true life in God’s ecology, the sacred economy of love, the mercy and peacemaking complex, all this is here with us, among us, to be recognized and treasured.

The crowd is impressed with Jesus. He sounds like someone who knows what he’s talking about. As the scripture goes, “He spoke as one having authority.” So maybe he’s right. Maybe the truth of this new realm will become real to us in the acting. Maybe this upside-down muddle of teachings is really the best way into God’s territory of new life. Maybe it’s time to tighten our straps, tie our knots, and start climbing. Thanks be to God, Amen.

Prayers to an Unknown God

2008-04-27T20:39:00.000-07:00

Scriptures: Acts 17:22-31, John 14:15-21

Friends, it is good to be here today. It was such an enjoyable experience last week to visit with other UCC folks from across the city last week. If you missed it, the food was great, and it was so enjoyable to talk about the challenges our churches face. But more than that, I found it really encouraging to find out that there are exciting things happening in – believe it or not – small UCC churches here in Baltimore. Am I remembering right that it was Rev. Desiree who said, “Small but mighty?” I agree and I think it’s good to remember Phillipians 4:13 – I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. May Christ strengthen us indeed as we seek to follow him in our lives, as individuals and as churches. So, before I begin, I’d like to pray a sung prayer. If you know it, feel free to sing along. Let us pray.

“Open our eyes, Lord”

In our story from Acts today, the apostle Paul is in the Greek city of Athens, preaching to the Greeks about Jesus’ death and resurrection. It might surprise you to know that in terms of religious practice, the Roman Empire was a time of a great deal of upheaval, fermenting, and general mixing up of people. In fact, at its largest expanse the Roman Empire connected under one political power people all the way from India to Spain and from North Africa to the British Isles.
So it became easier – not easy, but easier – to travel between nations that formerly would have known nothing about each other, and to trade ideas, philosophies, and religions with each other. In other words, there were more ways to run into a religion you’d never heard of before. And for the Athenians, their approach was to 1. be interested in all kinds of new stuff, and 2. if it was a god somewhere, build a shrine to it. Might as well, just to be on the safe side.

So Paul comes to this hotbed of religious activity and starts preaching in the middle of the town square. In a way, it’s funny that Paul would be the one preaching to non-Jew Gentiles, since not so very long ago he was a rigid, zealous, strictly observant Jew. He still is a Jew, but one who also sees himself as a follower of Jesus. And where before he used to watch people’s coats at the stoning of a martyr, now he preaches in public to Gentiles to tell them about the work God has done for them through Jesus.

And when Paul speaks to the Athenians about that work – that gift of forgiveness, resurrection, new life, that kingdom of God – he doesn’t start out by explaining the whole history of Jewish law. He starts where the people are. He starts out by pointing out what the people are already doing. “I’ve been through your city,” he says, “and I see that you’re very religious. You even have an altar to an unknown God. Well. I’m here to tell you that I know who this unknown God is. This unknown God is the God of everything. The God who made heavens and earth, who defies and lives beyond shrines, and who is all around us, surrounding us at every moment. This God is the God revealed through Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. So, turn from your ways and believe in the goodness of God and the assurance that your mistakes will be forgiven.”

I was out walking in the neighborhood around our church a few weeks ago. And it was a more intentional walk than usual. I was praying, as I walked, for the people I saw. It was a very interesting spiritual exercise. I recommend it, if you’re the type of person who likes to walk. I saw people of different races and ages – young kids, young mothers, kids playing in the park down the street, older folks relaxing on their porches, young people moving some things into a house around the corner. People of Morrell Park, I wanted to say, like Paul does, God loves you. And God welcomes you.

It seems to me that we are living in a time much like Paul’s. There are a wide variety of beliefs, philosophies, religions, and practices that people can choose from. And, like the people of Athens, modern Americans can set up a shrine to any god. And we might think of those other gods as other religions, but I think the shrines that get the most attention these days are the ones built to the gods of power, security and American invincibility, gods of money, consumption and waste, gods of entertainment and addiction. Many of these things, in and of themselves, are not bad things. But ultimately, they are not God. Our God of peace and justice, our still-speaking God, our God of grace and forgiveness, that God Jesus reveals in human form, our God is still an unknown God to many people.

I don’t want to give the impression that all the answers about God are here in this room, and that no-one outside this room has any idea about who this God is that we name. But I think we miss the point if we try to tell our stories as if we have the corner on truth, or that another person must be compelled to think the way that we do because we have somehow wrestled them into it. Perhaps you’ve met someone with this approach before. Paul, for one, strikes me as a particularly bold character, at least at first. But really, he is just starting where the Athenians are, and telling his story about God with their worries, their interests, their perspectives and their culture in mind.

Do you have a story that you’ve been meaning to tell? A time when God was present to you, in the midst of crisis, or at the height of joy? Do you have a story about healing, about forgiveness, about persistent, faithful love? Is it possible that you know God a little better than you might ordinarily admit in public? And if you don’t have your own story to tell, what about our gospel lesson from today? Jesus tells his disciples – tells us! – that “I will not leave you orphaned, I will be with you. I give you my peace, not as the world gives, but freely, generously. My Spirit of love will be with you to guide you, to strengthen you, to comfort you.” This Jesus reveals a God worth knowing. And his stories are ours to hear and to know, and they are also ours to share.

There are people outside these four walls who are afraid to come to church, whether because they believe God will judge them harshly, or because they believe we will judge them harshly. Or maybe both. The God who embodies love, forgiveness, joy, and peace in Jesus, is an unknown God. And yet, there are those outside our walls who call out in prayer to an unknown God. Healing, love, and peace are in short supply in this world, but God is generous. May the Spirit of Jesus use us to answer those prayers to an unknown God. Amen.

What if?

2008-04-13T19:48:00.000-07:00

Scriptures: Psalm 23
John 10:1-10

Friends, it is good to be here with you today. In the past few weeks, with all the over-hyped and under-cooked negative media attention focused on Trinity UCC and their retired pastor, I have been feeling particularly strongly our connections to one another as members and congregations of the United Church of Christ. We are members of one body, and what affects one member affects us all. And at the same time, it is good to have a chance to visit another corner of the church and to see that, in fact, life goes on as well. We continue to gather in love and faithfulness to seek God’s face, and to listen for God’s word. So thank you for your witness, and for your hospitality. It is a pleasure to be here today. I’d like to open with a sung prayer. If you know the song, please feel free to sing with me.

“Spirit of the Living God”

Today I’d like to take some time to meditate on the twenty-third Psalm. I realize that this is a dangerous enterprise. In fact, it’s a little bit like trying to plant seeds in the ruts of a dry dirt road. After all, this is a favorite Scripture, not just in the church, but in the wider world, too. “The Lord is my shepherd…” Who here saw the movie Titanic? It’s okay, you can raise your hands. Do you remember the part where, as the ship is sinking, the pastor on the boat has a little crowd collected? What is he reading? The 23rd Psalm, of course! Hopefully, I didn’t just spoil the ending of the movie for those of you who haven’t seen it. But this is typical – Psalm 23 is usually the Scripture wafting gently, and ever-so-spiritually through the funeral scenes in movies. And it has a special place in many of our Christian hearts as well, being worn smooth and comfortable with use.
Which is all to the good. But it makes this a hard scripture to hear with new ears. It makes me want to try it out with other professions:

How about one in honor of being in a college town:

The Lord is my thesis advisor, I will get my degree
She makes me take the weekend off between drafts
She leads me to new primary sources
She restores my hope
And inspires me to do the important research
And do it the right way

Even though I hit writer’s block at three in the morning
I don’t fear failure
I can always call you
Your quick wit and your kind voice – they comfort me

You prepare a table before me
In the presence of my toughest graders
You keep me healthy and sane
My cup overflows
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life
And I shall write according to the Lord’s school of thought
My whole life long.

There might be other ways to rewrite the Psalm, too:

The Lord is my boss, I shall not want
He makes me take vacation when I’ve been putting it off
He leads me to new ideas that energize me
He reminds me why the work means so much to me.

Or:
The Lord is my day care provider, I have everything I need
She puts me down for naps when I am cranky
She gives me healthy snacks when I am hungry
Her hugs warm my heart.

It’s fun to explore, and at the same time the exercise makes me realize how hard it is to get at the power and beauty of the metaphor of shepherd and the sheep. After all, the shepherd cares for the sheep all the time – healing them, resting them, leading them to new food – and sheep, at least in cartoon and stuffed-animal form, have this very appealing vulnerable quality to them. In real life, of course, sheep are loud, dirty and dumb. This makes the kind patience of the shepherd all the more beautiful.

The question I am left with, though, after reading this Psalm, so well known and so often intoned is this: Why, if we have been reading this Psalm collectively, faithfully, memorizingly, repeatedly, why is it so hard to live accordingly? There’s a saying you may have heard once or twice: “Pray like everything depends on God; work like everything depends on you.” That quote might be the exact definition of what I’ve heard described as functional atheism. In other words, we say we believe in God, but our way of doing things assumes that God does not exist. At least not in a way that has practical implications. We keep working as if things really did depend on us, and not on our Good Shepherd. Why is it so hard to recognize God as our shepherd and ourselves as sheep? What if we could trust God like the author of Psalm 23 does?

What if we could say, “I trust God for my financial security, and I’m willing to practice stewardship accordingly?”

What if we could say, “I trust God to keep the world spinning, and I won’t do work of any kind for one day every week?”

What if we could say, “I trust God enough to make the right and ethical and good choice, even if sometimes it is also the most costly choice?

What if we could say, “I trust God even in the face of death?”

And what if we could live in gratitude like the Psalmist?

What if we gave thanks for the table of love, joy, and gratitude God sets for us?

What if we gave thanks for the healing God works on our hearts, our bodies, and our souls?

What if we gave thanks for God’s goodness and mercy?

What if we lived as a people dwelling in the house of God?

I realize those are a lot of what if’s. And I almost want to throw in a handful of caveats: don’t forget that you have a part in your healthiness; don’t forget that these things take thought and prayer and discipline, etc, etc. And those things would be true. But guess what? Today I think it’s enough to ask the question, what if? and to imagine what that might look like. Not as a list of shoulds for us to do. Because Psalm 23 isn’t about us and what we do, it is about God. As sheep, our job is pretty simple – to follow where God leads. Easier said than done, of course, but it gets easier the more we do it. The more we step out in faith, the more we will trust God. The more we listen for God’s voice, the more we will hear it. The more we speak our gratitude, the more we will find to be grateful for.

In our gospel lesson, Jesus, the Good Shepherd, explains why he has come to his disciples, and to us: I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. What if, we had that life of abundance? What if it is ours to receive even now?

May you be blessed today by the presence of The Good Shepherd. May your trust in God grow, may you hear Jesus’ voice and know it as his, and may your heart be filled with joyful gratitude of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Coming Down the Mountain

2008-02-03T19:57:00.000-08:00

Scriptures: Exodus 24:12-18, Matthew 17:1-9

When I was in seminary in Massachusetts, a couple friends of mine from New Hampshire invited me to go on an overnight hike with them in the White Mountains. I had done some hiking in the past, in the sense of going for a fairly long walk in the woods, but it would be my first time wearing a pack on my back, and my first time staying overnight in the woods in the during a hike.

So, the day of the hike we were dropped off about halfway up the mountain, and we started climbing. That day we hiked to the top of Mt. Jefferson, which is the second-tallest mountain on the entire East Coast. It was a fun day, with lots of great views and some challenging ascents up rocky parts of the path. Still, I was ready to stop hiking about 2 hours before we actually did stop.

The cabin we stayed at that night was super fun. There was no running water, and there was a man who lived there, tending the cabin in the summer, who had a beard and played guitar. What was really hard about the hike, though, was the climb down the next day. As it happened, it was pouring rain the next morning, and we had to get to the bottom by one in the afternoon. Climbing down, in fact, was a lot harder than climbing up, because you have to have a lot more strength in your legs, and lots of balance, and the big backpack (only 25 pounds) kept throwing me off. I was very sore afterwards, and couldn’t walk down stairs easily for at least a week.

In retrospect, as I painfully made my way down yet another flight of stairs, I thought the hike might have been a little too much for me, a soft and weak beginner. When I asked my friends why they had chosen to lead me to the top of the second-tallest mountain on the East Coast, they said that because I was starting out they wanted to pick a rewarding hike for me. As it turns out, rewarding and easy are not the same thing.

In our story from Scripture today, the disciples have been on a hike of their own. They come with Jesus to the top of a famous, sacred mountain. This is the one where Moses received the commandments of the law from God for the people of Israel, as we heard about in our lesson from the First Testament this morning. And this time, just as with Moses, the mountaintop is the site of a revelation from God. Suddenly, the three disciples with Jesus see him, not as he normally appears, but as he truly is – holy, in the company of the great prophets, beloved of God, God’s own Son. Jesus has been preaching the kingdom of God, and here on this mountaintop, the disciples see a sudden beautiful glimpse of that kingdom – the world as it truly is, and as it is meant to be. The already and the not yet.

Volunteers in Lutheran Volunteer Corps spend a year working for a more just society while living in intentional community with other volunteers and exploring a more simple and sustainable lifestyle. Not all of our volunteers are Lutheran, and not all of our volunteers are Christian, but I do think that all of our volunteers, like the disciples in this story, and like all of us disciples today here in this room, are somewhere on the mountain.

Some of us are working our way up the mountain. We are hoping to have that moment of clarity, that sudden contact with the divine, that will confirm our hunches and fill us with awe and wonder. Some of us are working our way back down the mountain. There has been a moment for us, or an experience, that is deeper than words. Like Peter, we may want to set up camp and stay with Jesus in the beauty of the kingdom. But we know that there is work to be done in the valley, and we are on our way back down, drawing on our patience, our sense of balance, our strength and commitment. We know now that rewarding is not the same thing as easy, but we climb down, down, and down. Back to the valley, but with our hearts in a new place because we have seen the world as it truly is and as it is meant to be.

What I appreciate about Lutheran Volunteer Corps and other organizations like it is that it is an introduction to a way of life. A way of mountain-climbing, if you will. Building community, working for justice, and living simply and sustainably are our spiritual practices. They are not the only way to encounter the kingdom of God, they are not the only way to bring God’s reign nearer, and they are not a guaranteed path to the top of the mountain. But it’s a good start.

So here’s your good news for today: the world that those three disciples saw on that mountaintop, and the one you may have encountered in your own way, in your own time, that world is real, and it is breaking into our own regular, secular, everyday, world, slowly, gently, and even secretly. There are people climbing up the mountain to see the face of God, and people climbing down the mountain transformed, renewed, and equipped to bring the world that is meant to be. There are signs of the kingdom around us, if we can find a way to pay attention and see them. And through it all, as we climb, we are not alone – Jesus our guide, our brother, and our friend is climbing with us. Thanks be to God, Amen.

A Sound is Heard in Ramah

2008-01-05T16:23:00.000-08:00

For those of us who keep track of these things, today is still a part of the Christmas season. I know, I know, the 25 Days of Christmas on ABC is over. Some of the more organized folks have already taken down the Christmas tree, but on the Christian calendar, Christmas doesn’t actually start until Christmas, or maybe the night before. And it goes until the traditional celebration of when the three wise men got to Bethlehem, January 6th, also known as Epiphany. But that’s not until next week.

Today, we get to be in the odd position of continuing to celebrate Jesus’ arrival after the non-churchgoing world has turned its attention elsewhere. And, to be honest, who can blame them? There’s the story on Christmas Eve – shepherds, angels, Silent Night, and a beautiful, mysterious birth. Plus, oh by the way, Santa, presents, and the Christmas Spirit. Something nice that everybody can kind of agree with. For the most part, anyway. But the Bible can sometimes be challenging, and the scripture lesson this evening/morning is a part of the Christmas story we don’t hear much about.

It starts like this: the three wise men, or scholars, as one translation puts it, after they saw that star in the west, set out in search of the great king. And so naturally, when they realized they were trying to find a king in Israel, they went to Jerusalem, the big city, the center of power. Jerusalem, sparkling with beautiful, tall office buildings, gorgeous cathedrals, a wonderful arts scene. Jerusalem, home to the who’s who of Israel, the power brokers, the academics and the best-known universities. Jerusalem. Of course any self-respecting professor of predictive astronomy would go to Jerusalem.

The wise men go to Jerusalem, and they go right to the governor’s mansion to get their answers. This is an incredibly important moment in the history of Israel, they say to themselves, so of course Herod’s people will be able to direct us to the new king. But when they get there, the governor’s bureaucracy is totally flummoxed. A king born here? Now? You can almost hear the air deaden at the question. Um do you have a form for that? Finally, somebody digs up an old sacred text: The next king will come from David’s home town: Bethlehem. And off the wise men go on their merry way, gifts in tow.

But Herod senses a threat. A new king born on his land? Not so much. Israel may not be the biggest colony in the Roman Empire, but still, it’s good to be the king. Herod has a lot to lose – a healthy salary, a good-sized pension, generous health care benefits, the shiny new Cadillac Escalade, and of course the prestige, the influence, and the respect of being Tetrarch in Israel. It’s good to be the king, and Herod isn’t about to give any of that up. He waits for the scholars to come back to him with a professional assessment. But they don’t. A month passes, then two months. Nothing.

It’s not like this is just a personal problem for Herod. Really, he’s there at the whim of the Romans. He knows how to wine and dine them, but still, those Romans are always breathing down his neck, making sure there are no insurrections in the works. Not that Herod would ever revolt. He’s seen Roman soldiers in action. It’s not worth the risk to life and limb.

So in the end, Herod does the regrettable, but unavoidable. He sends his soldiers to Bethlehem, to kill every baby boy under two years old. You can’t let these things get out of hand. There’s just too much to lose.

A sound is heard in Ramah, weeping and much lament
Rachel weeping for her children, Rachel refusing all solace,
Her children are gone, dead and buried.

Joseph wakes up from his dream in a cold sweat. They’re coming for him, for Mary, and for Jesus. Bethlehem isn’t safe any more. This isn’t like those other dreams, full of hope and promise and beauty. But it is like them, too, in the strange clarity that he knows can come only from God. “We’re leaving, Mary, to go to Egypt. We aren’t safe here.” He packs their things for yet another journey, this time to the land that once held his people captive. Just a few months ago, Joseph was a regular guy, just trying to have a nice, simple family life. But now Egypt’s power is now the least of his worries, with the petty tyrant Herod on the throne. And yet somehow Joseph wouldn’t trade anything for that strange and beautiful visit from the wise men. They’ll have to live in exile, but he’s promised God he’ll protect this baby.

A sound is heard in Ramah, weeping and much lament.

For the past several weeks, this church has focused on the ONE campaign, which addresses extreme poverty and the humanitarian crisis presented by HIV and AIDS worldwide. Nearly forty million people are infected around the world, with so many in Africa that it is tearing at the very roots of society. A generation is being lost to HIV/AIDS, and 12 million children in sub-Saharan Africa have lost one or both parents to the disease.

A sound is heard in Ramah,
Rachel weeping for her children, Rachel refusing solace.

Sometimes, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the staggering numbers of a tragedy like this. How many is 12 million orphans? Bigger than the city of Dayton. At least 12 times as big as the metropolitan area. But what does that really mean, spread over half a continent? How many people know an orphan? How many grandparents are raising their grandchildren? It gets to be a little hard to grasp after a certain point. No less tragic, but somehow the mind just doesn’t have the capacity to imagine it.

My ministry is with volunteers who spend a year in full-time service at non-profit organizations in Baltimore, Maryland and Wilmington, Delaware. Lutheran Volunteer Corps is also found in eight other cities in the United States. During the year of service, the volunteers live in intentional community and practice simplified living. I was a volunteer myself after college, and I think one of the most valuable parts of the experience is that it gives you a chance to learn, hands-on, the practical ways non-profit organizations serve the poor.

So for example, one of my volunteers this year works at a hospice for people with HIV and AIDS. Most of these folks are low-income people who have run out of family members who can care for them. They live in a house together, as a kind of surrogate family for each other, and people like my volunteer help out in practical ways: by cooking, cleaning, taking them to appointments, paying attention to medications. If there is change in the lives of these people, it is slow, and it comes through the accumulation of those small, practical acts of love and the relationships built through them.

In our Scripture lesson today, Joseph is the one who is able to see what God is doing, and to be a part of it through the practical acts of love that keep Jesus and his mother Mary safe and alive. Joseph isn’t rich or powerful, he’s just ready to listen to God, and to act. Herod, by contrast, has his ears stuffed close with all the things he’ll lose if he lets a new kind of king reign in Israel.

So where does that leave us? First, it presents an important question: Are you Herod in this story, or are you Joseph? Are you ready to hear God’s call and to act on behalf of those most in need of practical care? Or do the trappings of a comfortable life make it hard to hear that true word from God and to respond? Are you going to be a part of what God is doing? To be fair, most of us probably would answer both yes and no. Some days are easier than others when it comes to following our somewhat unpredictable God. Global poverty, HIV/AIDS – these are tough problems, not something easily or quickly addressed.

But what I’d like to close with is this: What God offers us in the arrival of Jesus, what God offers us by coming to earth as a little baby, what God offers us in this humble, practical, stunningly generous gift, is the good news of true freedom. Herod thought that he would be losing everything to let Jesus live, but the truth is that all the things that kept Herod from hearing God’s word are the things that trapped him and kept him captive. God comes to us as a baby, vulnerable, poor, and insignificant. And yet that birth is the one that matters most, the only thing of true value, and to follow Jesus is our true calling and our true freedom. Freedom from sin, from meaninglessness, and ultimately, freedom from death. May we hear the call and answer. A sound is heard in Ramah. Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Big Picture

2007-11-22T19:20:00.000-08:00

Scripture: Luke 21:5-19

Our gospel reading this morning is pretty dire. It starts out innocently enough. There are some people gathered around in the temple admiring it. “Look at all those beautiful, precious stones!” “Isn’t the architecture stunning!” “So many people donated wonderful gifts!” “This place is wonderful!” Have any of you been to the National Cathedral down in DC? Just think of the tourists there, wandering around to look at Woodrow Wilson’s tomb, or to ooh and ahh at the stained glass.

So Jesus’ response is a little bit of a downer, to say the least. “The temple might be impressive to you now,” he says, “but soon it’s going to be totally destroyed – not one stone is going to be left standing on another. This magnificent building is about to become rubble.” Not exactly the kind of thing you’d want to hear about your favorite house of worship, is it?

I think it will help us understand Jesus’ declarations for today if we take a look at what the original hearers of Luke would have heard. As you might or might not know, the book of Luke was not actually written down right at the time of Jesus’ ministry. In fact, although there was a strong oral tradition of Jesus’ saying and stories, many scholars believe Luke’s version of the gospel wasn’t written down until about 90 AD, sixty years after Jesus’ earthly ministry. Why is this important? Because in 70 AD, Jesus’ prediction about the temple came true. There was a rebellion in Jerusalem, and the Roman army swept down on the city, defeated the Jewish rebellion, razed the city, killed anyone who wasn’t able-bodied, and forced everyone else to leave. The temple, too, was destroyed, and all those stones and beautiful gifts were stolen or destroyed.

The people in Luke’s church were mostly Jewish. In the early church, many Christian went to synagogue on Saturday and celebrated the Lord’s day on Sunday. It wasn’t seen as a conflict. Jerusalem was home for many of these people, or the home of their ancestors, and the destruction of the Temple was a tremendous blow. Before it was destroyed, the Temple had been the center of worship life. Synagogues were helpful, but the Temple was the real deal, kind of like how Mecca is for Muslims – irreplaceable and unique. Now, without the Temple, it was as though Judaism’s heart had been cut out.

So imagine the people of Luke’s church, hearing this story read out loud. Teacher, they ask, won’t the world come to an end, now that the Temple has been destroyed? Isn’t it time for God to just bring everything to an end?

Jesus’ response, then, is: Don’t be led astray, don’t be afraid, don’t go after the ones who say, “the time is near!” There is still a lot to happen between now and the end of the world, so don’t be discouraged. God is looking out for you. Keep at it.

So, what does this mean for us? It has been a long time since most Christians waited anxiously for Jesus to return and for the world to end. Not that we don’t have folks today who say, “the time is near”, and others who go after them. But look at the descriptions Jesus gives of the signs that the end of the world is upon us. Nation will rise against nation. Check. Earthquakes, check. Famines and plagues, check. Wildfires in Southern California, check. Okay, that’s not really in there. But my point is, when in the history of the world have at least some of these things not been happening? Plagues, wars, earthquakes, catastrophes. It would probably be more of a sign of change if there weren’t any conflict going on.

The early Christians thought that Jesus was coming back right away, in a big cloud with lightning and plenty of judgment to hand out to everyone. Which doesn’t seem to be what ended up happening. At least so far.

So what are we supposed to make of this end of the world talk? For one thing, it helps us focus on the big picture – the scope of history, and our connection to Christians past, present and future. Along with that, I think the key to understanding the scripture for today is a question, more so than an answer. And that is: how does God really work in peoples’ lives? Is it catastrophic and sudden, with revenge on enemies and evildoers meted out? Or is God a beckoner, a seducer, a patient and confident pursuer?

My hunch is that the end of the world will come to us gradually, not suddenly. Not that we can’t have flashes of insight and sudden leaps forward, but that force and cataclysm will not ultimately be the source of God’s revelation.

In my work with Lutheran Volunteer Corps, the volunteers come to a city to spend a year in service working full-time at a social justice-oriented nonprofit organization. While they are learning about social justice work, the volunteers live in intentional community with each other and explore simple and sustainable living. For those of us with a heart and a calling for social justice work, it is often very difficult to deal with what often seems like the glacial pace of change. And in some cases it seems like we are moving backward, rather than forward, as political calculations strip away gains made in the past, and changes in the economy make life harder for those living at the bottom. “When will this be?” we wonder, “and what will be the sign that we will finally live in a just society?” Change comes slowly, with a letter written, a child encouraged, an addict staying clean one more day.

Simplicity is a way of caring for ourselves and the earth so that we can be about the business of God’s kingdom for the long haul. For many of our volunteers, I think they expect that living on a small stipend will be their greatest challenge. But truthfully, this is a temporary constraint. Learning how to simplify our time is a continuing struggle, one that doesn’t end after a year of service.

Intentional community is another source of strength in our journey to the end of the world. Through intentional community, volunteers seek to build relationships of trust, respect, and mutual support. This requires a set of skills that we don’t always learn in a larger culture of individualism and separation. Volunteers are challenged to learn how to deal with conflict constructively, to share decision-making among each other, and to respect difference without avoiding each other.

By following these three guiding principles, social justice, intentional community, and simplicity, many volunteers get to the end of the year realizing that their lives have changed. I know it can be a little bit of a cliché to say this is a life-changing experience, but it is. And it’s the whole experience, and the many small nudges and tugs, along with the sudden flashes of insight, that make it so.

God is out to get us all. There’s a reason why there hasn’t been a second coming yet. Because God wants all of us to experience love, to become everything we can be, and to learn to be the community of beloved followers that God knows we can become. My prayer for you today is that you will be blessed with wisdom to find the right path, endurance to follow it, and joy along the journey. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Heaven on Earth (and other important details)

2007-11-13T18:29:00.000-08:00

Scripture: Luke 20:27-40

Good morning. Friends, it is a pleasure to be here with you today. As the Baltimore and Wilmington Coordinator for Lutheran Volunteer Corps, I always enjoy the chance to meet the congregations who support us. Thank you for the ways that you have welcomed our volunteers coming in this year. It is also a special treat to be here with your pastor Kristi. As you may or may not know, she and I were both in Lutheran Volunteer Corps at the same time. I served in Washington, DC, and Kristi served here in Baltimore. It has been great fun renewing our relationship, and I should also say I’m very grateful that you loan her to us in her office as the chair of our Local Support Committee. Long story short – it’s good to be here with you, Our Savior Church, and to thank you for the many ways you support the volunteers and their work.

Will you pray with me? God, open our ears to your voice. Open our minds to your word. Open our hearts to your touch. Open our lives to your guidance. In the name of the one who spoke to us and speaks to us still, Amen.

I have to say, I feel some sympathy for the Sadducees from our gospel reading this morning. The passage we read this morning comes in the middle of a whole section of match-wits-with-Jesus contests, and as you heard, Jesus triumphs in this contest, too.

Which is probably hard for those ol’ Sadducees to take. After all, these guys are the establishment types. They go to wine-and-cheese receptions with the Jerusalem priests. They have the framed degrees and the fat Rolodexes. People look up to them and respect them. These guys run this town. And with that comes certain expectations. They’re supposed to know what they’re doing. They’re supposed to be the experts.

And as experts, they’re also supposed to keep the rabble-rousers in their place. So here comes this Jesus. I like to think that if I had been there, back then, I would’ve sided with Jesus from the beginning – throw down my nets and come running, you know the drill – but on the other hand, hindsight is 20/20. Because here’s this Jesus. He’s basically homeless, moving from couch to couch and teaching these radical new ideas. And the people he associates with! Some of them are respectable, but the bulk of them are just fishermen, or – worse – drug dealers, prostitutes, alchoholics, and other problem personalities.

So here comes this Jesus, acting like he knows what God is all about, when the Sadducees are pretty sure that Moses finished that book about 500 years ago. And you can’t just let somebody like that go unchallenged. So the Sadducees challenge Jesus on a particular point of doctrine: the resurrection. It seems perfectly ridiculous to them, so they come up with a question to expose Jesus’ ignorance.

Can you imagine the crowd of Sadducees gathered in a huddle? “Okay, Hal, ask him this” and then Hal gets up for the group, shifts his belt around his middle a bit, and then paints a scenario: “Let’s say there’s this woman who marries the oldest of seven brothers. But then he dies before they have children. According to the law, his brother is supposed to marry her so that she can have a child in his name. So the next brother marries her. But then he dies. So the next brother marries her, and then the next and the next, but they all die. And then she dies. If your resurrection is real, then you’ll have a simple answer for this question: which brother is the woman married to after the resurrection?”

Can you see how this might be a little bit of a smart-alec kind of a question? The scenario is outlandish, as if to say Jesus is a little outlandish, too. They’re pretty confident, at any rate. Confident but, as it turns out, wrong.

And yet, I can see in my own life how much easier it is to be a Sadducee than it is to be a follower of Jesus. The Sadducees have things mapped out logically. There is an order to the world – a set of rules that God has mapped out and that we can learn and follow. There are no surprises, and for the most part, if you do everything right, you have control of the situation.

Except! Except, that’s not really the way things are. Allow me to give a few examples from my work with Lutheran Volunteer Corps.

The way Lutheran Volunteer Corps works is this: volunteers come to a city to live with each other in intentional communities, practice simplified living, and work for social justice. Our three guiding principles, then, are community, simplicity, and social justice.

Intentional community means for us that the volunteers living together in a house aren’t just roommates. They agree to spend time with each other, getting to know each other and building relationships. They share their food money and cook for each other, and they meet at least weekly to spend time together. They also share chores. Now, I don’t know if it ever happens in this church, but at least in other churches there is the occasional disagreement about how things should be done. And the same is true for our intentional communities. People disagree. Each person has different needs and values. There is no set of rules that you can follow like a recipe, in order to get the desired results of a true community of people who support each other. It’s impossible for one person to truly control the process.

And yet, many people coming out of LVC after a year of intentional community find that they have been changed in important ways by that experience. I would say, God has used that experience to surprise and change them. There’s no formula for making it work, but when God gets involved, wonderful things happen.

Simplicity encompasses a lot of different things, from cutting down on time commitments to cooking from scratch. And related to it is sustainability, which means making decisions that are sustainable for the earth and for us as human beings. But one of the big challenges the year presents is our food stipend. Each volunteer gets $85 per month for their food. Which for many of the volunteers seems like a very small amount. Last weekend, at our fall retreat we were talking about hospitality, and one of the volunteers said, “You know, when Amy was getting ready to come over to our house for dinner, we were thinking about charging her for our food because we get so little money. So, 15 cents for the milk, a dollar for the enchilada, 20 cents for the rice. But you know, the stipend really is enough money for us to eat. And to have people over.” The volunteers are surprised to learn that there is enough for them and more than enough. (I should let you know that when I go over for dinner, I do usually bring a food contribution of some kind.) Living on limited funds helps the volunteers learn the difference between what they need and what they want. It is an opportunity to trust God to give us our daily bread and to let go of our need to be in control.

Finally, the volunteers’ placements are intended to give them an introduction to working for social justice. This is certainly an area that can be unpredictable. For many of the volunteers, this is their first year out of college. Not for everybody – in fact, we have a recently retired volunteer here in Baltimore this year – but for most people. And many times, they’ve done a lot of studying in school about how the world needs to change for there to be social justice. If you follow the rules laid out in your classes, you’ll be able to make a difference and change the establishment.

But it is a lot harder to achieve social justice than some of those textbooks might lead you to believe. And there are some problems that are so deep and so wide – poverty, racism, injustice – that to keep from being totally discouraged we have to recognize that change is beyond our own personal power and that it in fact belongs to God. Not that we don’t have responsibilities, just that we don’t have control.

And I think for folks who have been through deep tragedies, and somehow gotten over to the other side of them with our faith, somehow we know that it wasn’t us who got us there, it was the grace of God. As the hymn goes, “through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come. T’was grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.”

Jesus responds to the Sadducees by pointing out how narrow, unimaginative, and untrusting their question is. “God cannot be put in a box,” he reminds them. “The resurrection is not going to be like anything you’ve ever seen. People will be like angels, and the human institution of marriage will be a thing of the past.”

It might not seem like good news that God can’t be put in a box, and that there are some things that don’t have set rules, but I want to assure you that it is. Because when God is truly alive in our lives, when we are able to do our part and trust God with the rest, when it is possible for Jesus to surprise us, that is when we will know that we are on the right path – the path that leads us to heaven on earth. Amen.

Keep Knockin’

2007-10-21T18:21:00.000-07:00

Scriptures: Luke 18:1-8, Jeremiah 31:27-34

She was already at the end of her rope. Her husband had died two years earlier, and her oldest boy, at sixteen, wouldn’t listen to her anymore. He controlled the family property, and he wouldn’t give her what she needed to run the household and care for the little ones. His head was full of a girl, not his responsibilities. And now the neighbor on the eastern side was sidling his crops over onto what little land they had left. She felt old and worn as she knocked again at the judge’s door.

He was just sitting down to dinner when the knock came on his door – again. That widow. And what did she even want from him? Something about a piece of land. He sighed and got up from the table. If she was going to keep whining like this, he would have to do something. It would be a pain to sort it all out, but at some point these interruptions had stopped being worth the trouble. He trudged to the door – again.

Our parable from Luke today seems pretty much like an open-and-shut lesson: be persistent in prayer. Heck, it even says so in the intro to the story: “Dear readers, the lesson of this story is: be persistent in prayer.” Of course, what Jesus says afterwards isn’t the exact same point, but they fit together reasonably well. He says, “God is good – much better than a lazy, corrupt judge, so, be persistent in prayer. Keep knocking at the door.”

Well, this is all very nice, but I’m not ready for a pat answer and a pat on the head. The first question that comes to my mind is: how long are we supposed to keep knocking? Sometimes God just doesn’t answer prayer. Or, God does answer, and the answer is no: people live for years with painful sicknesses, or give their lives away for addictions. People we love die young. Broken relationships stay broken. Even the judge is not coming to the door.

And for many people in churches like our across the country, we feel a little like the widow, too. Church 50 years ago was part of the establishment. Anybody respectable was a church member, and the laws made it illegal to do almost anything on a Sunday other than go to church. So a lot of people came to church, with kids and energy and money. But that moment has passed, and it’s hard not to feel like a widow sometimes, standing outside and knocking, needing a response.

So how long are we supposed to keep knocking? And for that matter, how do we know we’re knocking on the right door? How do we know that what we’re asking for from God is justice we deserve and not just our own selfishness talking? I don’t know. This is NOT an easy parable.

In our reading from Jeremiah today, the prophet is speaking to a people living in exile. Their beautiful, historical, holy city, Jerusalem, had been raided and desecrated, and they had been marched away into the heart of enemy territory in Babylon. “How long, oh Lord?” they cried out to God, “How long must we suffer for our sins?”

God’s answer, in our passage from Jeremiah, is this:

The days are coming when I will stop being destructive, when I will have finished dismantling your dreams, like so many tinker-toy constructions.

The days are coming when I will build something new, like you’ve never seen before.

The days are coming when justice will be real. When people who do wrong will be punished, when the helpless and abandoned will have recourse to the powerful.

The days are coming when I will make a new covenant.

The days are coming, when I will shape a new people, and they will know me in their bones, and my dream will be written on their hearts.

The days are coming, says the Lord. The days are coming. So keep knocking.

It turned out that the Israelites had a long time to wait. They spent a total of seventy years in exile. But at the end of seventy years, miraculously, inexplicably, they were allowed to go back home, to reclaim and to rebuild their beautiful, holy city. It wasn’t the same as before, but neither were the people.

I see ways that this congregation keeps knocking at the door, from my limited view from the pew.

Week after week, this congregation welcomes people to use the building – Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Guardian Angels, the Wellness Center. And sometimes, it comes at a cost to offer this hospitality. But we do. Knock, knock.

Each month our parties and socials are a welcome to the whole neighborhood, a chance to share hospitality and build relationships. Knock, knock.

Bible Study on Wednesdays, new Bibles in the pew as of last Sunday. Knock, knock.

New art above the altar, new banners in the sanctuary. Knock, knock.

Weekly prayers for friends, for family, and for people we’ve never met and never will. A candle of hope to remind us of God’s enduring call for justice. Knock, knock.

And those are just the things that I, one person, see. Each of you knows ways that we are working together to seek God’s blessing, and not just a blessing for us, but a blessing for the people in our lives and people everywhere. A kind word, a card, a gift, a sacrifice, an invitation. Knock, knock.

It is easy sometimes to get discouraged. Even Jesus guessed so much in the parable today. At the end of it, he says, “God will quickly grant justice to his chosen ones. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

We don’t know what the future will look like. All we know is that it won’t look like the past, and that God will be there with us. Today, Jesus calls us to be faithful. May we find the courage, the love and the strength, to keep knocking by the grace of God. Amen.

Just Doin' My Job

2007-10-09T19:58:00.000-07:00

Scripture: Luke 17:5-10

Our scripture lesson this morning comes from the miscellaneous section in Luke. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, and on the road he takes a final opportunity to say all the things that he wants the disciples to know. So at first, the two sections of our readings may not seem to go together very well. First, we’re told, faith the size of a mustard seed is enough for us to uproot and replant a mulberry tree in the ocean. Second, we’re told a short parable about slaves having to eat last at the end of a long day. I’d like to start by talking about the second section.

First, a little context. Slavery in Jesus’ day was a very different institution from slavery in the United States 140 years age. For one thing, it was not based on race. Society was very stratified, with only 1 or 2% of the people holding most of the power and wealth, and with just about everyone else living in what we would consider poverty as peasants, slaves, or laborers. The boundary between becoming a slave or becoming free was more porous; it was possible to be freed, or to buy your own freedom from slavery, on the one hand, and people could become slaves by selling themselves in order to pay a debt or for other reasons on the other hand. Some experts estimate that 5/6ths of the people living in Rome during that time were either slaves or descended from people who had been slaves.[1]

So when Jesus is talking about the relationship between slaves and masters, he is talking about something that will be familiar to the disciples. I think for our day, something more familiar might be to talk about people working for minimum wage in retail or in food service. Obviously, this is not slavery – you can quit your job, and many people do – but the work is still tiring and the rewards are not all that great.

Here’s what the parable might sound like today: Who among you would say to your waiter, who has just finished waiting on a party of 20, “Come here and take a break, sit at our table”? Would you not rather say to him, “Bring us our food first, then you can rest and eat something in the kitchen.”

Or maybe we could try it in retail. Who among you would say to your cashier, who has been standing for 8 hours, “Go sit down, I’ll wait for you until you come back.” Would you not rather say to her, “Ring me up first, then you can take a break”?

Either way, it doesn’t seem like we’re asking something unusual. We just want people to do their jobs. But then Jesus turns the tables, and now we’re no longer the masters, but the workers. Jesus is telling the truth, whether we want to admit it or not, which is that being a slave is hard, thankless work. And if we’re going to be God’s slaves, or God’s servants, we shouldn’t expect sudden, easy rewards. Or praise and recognition.

This parable, in other words, is a reminder that serving God isn’t optional. It’s not another add-on to enhance our quality of life, or a way that we can persuade God to give us the things that we want. Ministry is service, and the service we do is what is expected of us as Christians, no more and no less. When we are serving others, we are just doing our job.

In some ways, I wish that our text today hadn’t been about downplaying the rewards of doing the work God calls us to do, because I really enjoy recognizing the work that volunteers in LVC do. If you missed our presentation downstairs this morning, I’ll summarize. Each year in August, a new group of 11 volunteers comes to Baltimore. They work full-time in different non-profits in the city, live in houses with each other practicing intentional community, and simplify their lives. And all of this can be challenging – hard work.

In terms of their work, volunteers are placed at non-profits dealing with social justice issues. They take on the interesting and the boring tasks that go with getting people who need it health care, or housing, or legal advice. This is good work and can be very satisfying, but it isn’t always. Sometimes it’s just hard work.

Intentional community is similarly a challenge at times. When we talk about intentional community, we mean more than simply occupying the same house. We ask volunteers to develop relationships with each other, and to work together to create a community of respect and caring. Which, depending on the mix of personalities, is easier for some than for others. Intentional community requires us to face ourselves and our own habits and to adjust in ways that we might otherwise not like. Hard work.

Simplicity presents a particular type of challenge, because it’s always possible to be more simple in your lifestyle. Or to put it another way, it’s easy to let things and activities clutter up your life, making it hard to focus on what really matters. Sustainability, which means making consumer choices that are friendly to the environment, is similarly an infinite project, if we so desire. And it often means doing things in slightly less convenient ways. Hard work.

So to my mind, this kind of thing is something I like to point out as a good example of living out our Christian faith. And it is a little jarring to have Jesus say, “No, there’s no awards ceremony for outstanding Christian service.” But on further reflection, I would also say that I don’t really hear from the volunteers that they want special recognition. When you feel a call into a particular ministry, it is always nice to be thanked for your work, but the being thanked part is not the main point. The main point is to follow the call. These volunteers are just doing their job.

To come back finally to the mustard seed of faith, our work is not, ultimately, what brings about change in the world. Our labor simply clears the way for God to work. That is the grace, the faith, that makes it possible for wild and unbelievable things to happen. Don’t ask how – I’m not really sure. But I think that’s what our good news is for today, that our labor is ours, and that our faith is what works the miracles.

I’ll close with a story. Once there was an old woman who lived in a small apartment in a great church. In exchange for her room, she cared for the building, sweeping up after worship, ironing the altar cloths, letting people in for meetings, and all those other little things that need taking care of.

After many years, the woman died, and at her funeral a young man stood up to speak. “I grew up in this neighborhood,” he said, “and things were rough for me at home when I was little. Once I was so desperate that I came to this church and I knocked on the door. This woman answered the door. She saw the sadness in my eyes, and let me in. We sat together in the back of the church, and I just cried and cried. When I was done, she gave me a hug and sent me on my way. After that, I somehow felt stronger, and I resolved to help other children when I grew up, which is what I do now. This woman changed my life, and I didn’t even know her name.

So a few months ago, I called the church to say thank you. She answered the phone, and I told her the story. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘What you did meant so much to me.’ ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ she said, ‘But there’s no need to thank me. I was just doing my job.’”

[1] Duling and Perrin, The New Testament

An Open Hand

2007-08-05T09:43:00.000-07:00

Scripture: Luke 12:13-21

Once upon a time, there was a man who won the lottery. And he won big, too. He won millions and millions of dollars, which he accepted in the form of a single large check. He deposited his money in an insured bank account, and then went about his business of avoiding the pitfalls of other lottery winners he'd read about. Other lottery winners bought big houses for their mothers, and made terrible investment decisions, and paid out millions in taxes, and got caught in confidence schemes. Other lottery winners just as poor a few years after their win, as they had been when they bought those winning tickets. Other lottery winners were, in fact, losers, and he didn't intend to be a loser.

So the man got caller ID on his phone and stopped answering it when he thought someone was calling who might want money from him. He stopped walking out his front door because the neighbors might see him and try to talk him into some kind of neighborhood improvement project. He stopped throwing parties because everyone would expected to buy all the food. Soon he stopped going to parties, altogether. He didn't even go to his family's reunions or his niece's birthday parties. And one day, sitting in his kitchen, eating a steak dinner alone, the man realized that no one had called or written to him in weeks and weeks and weeks.

"Be on your guard," Jesus warns, "against all kinds of greed." Which is easy enough for him to say. Jesus was one of those people, it appears, who didn't seem to worry to much about where his next meal was going to come from, or if he would have a kleenex available in case of emergencies. The rich man in today's parable, however, seems a little more down-to-earth. After all, aren't we supposed to be prudent with our resources? Good stewardship, savings, all of that? Surely Jesus can't be talking about my retirement fund!

The rich fool in our story today, it seems, is foolish enough that doesn't know what to do with a windfall. The abundance of the land is a gift from God, and it must have been a pretty good harvest to make it necessary to build new and better barns. Spinning through his mind are his possessions: my land, my grain, my barns, my soul, my relaxation, my salary, my pension, my savings. My, my, my. What he forgets is that all that he has, even his life, is really on loan from God. None of it is truly his.

But isn't it hard not to get caught up just a little bit in our stuff? The things we own, our accumulated wealth, all of that? After all, that's what we have to live on, right? What's funny, though, is how easily our possessions can become the things that possess us. Another way to translate God's warning to the rich fool "Even tonight your life is demanded of you," would be to say, "even tonight, they demand your life." If you don't believe me, then you've probably never owned - or been owned by - a house. Last week, I took a week off of work and spent almost the whole week working on my house. Painting, cleaning, fixing, sweeping, you name it. I am here for the care and guardianship of my house.

I think the key here is the second half of Jesus' admonition: “one’s life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” Often you will hear people who survive disasters – fires, floods, tornados – say that they don’t miss their furniture or their other household things. All that can be replaced. If they miss anything, it will be the pictures of their children. The true substance of life has a lot more to do with pictures of growing children than it does with a pool table or a china cabinet. The key is remembering how to focus on that.

So what are we supposed to do with the windfalls that may come our way? What’s so wrong with building a bigger barn, a bigger house, a bigger garage? I would say that each gift from God comes with a choice: will we chose gratitude, or will we choose greed? Will we close our hands tightly to keep what we have received, or will we open our hands, ready to give and to receive again. Oddly, living with an open hand often seems to be easier the less you have. Not so oddly, generosity takes practice. And so does gratitude.

I like to think that one of the things our volunteers learn during their year of practicing simplicity and living on a small budget is the lesson of how much is enough. A new group comes to Baltimore in two weeks, and I can imagine that many of them are thinking to themselves: “There’s no way that I can live on the stipend I’m going to get.” But about midway through the year they’ll realize that in fact it is enough. And maybe even more than enough.

Practicing gratitude and generosity with an open hand means recognizing and being thankful that the gifts God gives us are enough, and maybe even more than enough. For the rich fool, what he had wasn’t enough, and so he closed his hand around it. But living with an open hand means giving away to receive again and again that gift that is the true source of life: Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior of us all. May we all learn to live with an open hand. Amen.

God's Delight

2007-06-03T09:40:00.000-07:00

Scripture: Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

In the book of Proverbs, wisdom is personified as a woman who calls out to people on the street to follow her way – the way that leads to life. And in the passage that we read today, we learn the reason that wisdom is the key to abundant life. Wisdom has existed before the world was created. She was by God’s side as the sky was nailed into place, and she worked beside God as an artisan as the sea was set in place and living things were brought into being. If anyone can understand human life, it is wisdom.

But the verses that stand out to me most from our reading today are the ones that describe God’s delight in creation. “Day after day I was there,” reads one translation, “with my joyful applause, always enjoying God’s company, Delighted with the world of things and creatures, happily celebrating the human family.” God’s delight is in the creation. God’s delight is in us.

Our psalm today asks the question, “what are humans that you are mindful of them?” and it is a good question. Sometimes it is very hard to believe that God is delighted with humanity. War and greed keep us at each others’ throats. Apathy and selfishness weigh us down and keep us from treating each other as we should. Generosity and kindness are hard to find.

And yet, God is delighted with us. So maybe God’s delight is less about what we do and more about who we are. The organization I work for, the Lutheran Volunteer Corps, gives young adults the opportunity to serve others for a year while receiving a small living stipend. Another part of the program is that they live together in intentional community. Intentional community is a little different from just living in a house with housemates. We expect volunteers to spend time developing relationships with each other during weekly community nights, as well as in other ways. I was a volunteer several years ago, and I remember that by the time I finished my year, I knew my housemates very well. I knew their likes and dislikes, and their strange little habits. And it was really fun – a source of delight, if you will – to spend time with people I knew so well, and to catch each other just thoroughly being ourselves.

God’s delight could also be compared to an artist who thoroughly enjoys her creation. Although to be fair, many of the artists I know – musicians, actors, that kind of thing – tend to be very focused on always getting better. But still, imagine the joy a child takes in drawing a house. There is always a sense of balance in these drawings. Two windows on top, a door in the middle, a chimney with smoke coming out of the roof, a yellow sun in the sky. There is something joyful about the careful ordering and balance, and the beauty of making a new thing. And there is something joyful, too, about the details that go into that creation. Imagine God’s delight, then, in such complicated and varied creations as us!

In many Christian traditions, today is celebrated as Trinity Sunday. I know because I’ve been hanging around with a lot of Lutherans lately. The trinity, as a theological idea, tends to be something difficult to explain, and, as a result, even harder to preach. So I’m not going to spend too much time trying to explain it. Part of wisdom is being aware of your limitations. Not that we shouldn’t try to know and understand things, but it reminds me of an unanswered question I read recently that someone had sent in to a website, asking for an answer. The person wrote, “Can you explain how big infinity is? Because I’ve been trying and trying to wrap my mind around how big that would be, and I just can’t do it.” Similarly, the trinity is one God in three persons. Not one God with three faces, or three gods with a good homeowners’ association, but one God in essence and three persons we experience. How big, again, is infinity?

But there is an idea about the trinity that really appeals to me, and comes out of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, which is that God is, essentially, three persons engaged in a dance of joy and delight and love. Or, to think of it another way, relationship is essential to who God is. God is not alone, God is together, like a beating heart at the center of creation.

And the creation, while we’re at it, was created out of an overflowing of God’s delight. God’s love for us is written in the stars, and rumbled beneath the ocean’s depths. The trinity of God is ready to open and share that love, that relationship, that is essential to God’s being.

Abstract, I know. Fortunately, today is communion Sunday, so we’ll have the chance to experience concretely this good news of God, which is that God so loved the world that Jesus came to earth to be among us, and to draw us into that holy dance of love, joy, and delight. God’s delight. And so, with that in mind, I’d like to close with a story.

There was once a young man who wanted to know the Truth with a capital T. “The Truth is out there,” he said to himself, and he started on a long journey.

First he came to a renowned and well-respected teacher. “Respected teacher,” he asked, “what is the Truth?”

“Truth,” the teacher answered, “is what can be measured, recorded, and described.”

The young man went away, sad in his heart.

Next, the young man came to a wealthy and powerful ruler. “Great and honorable ruler,” he asked, “what is the Truth?”

“Truth,” the ruler answered, “is what I say it is. No more, no less.”

The young man went away, sad in his heart.

But as he was walking away from the ruler’s palace, through the streets of the city, the young man came upon an old, old woman sitting in front of a small stone house. “Can you tell me,” he asked, “who I should ask to find out what the Truth is?”

The woman looked deep into his eyes, and he saw that while her face was carved with lines, it was compellingly beautiful.

“I was born,” she said, “before a single ocean wave had washed over a single grain of sand. My hands have shaped the deep pillars of the earth. I have soared over mountain heights, and I have woven the delicate fibers of a tiny moth’s cocoon. I am God’s beloved child, and I am the artisan of God’s delight. Come inside, traveler, and I will give you what you seek.”

And when he came inside, the young man saw a meal laid out for him. It was a simple meal of bread and wine.

Doing is Believing

2007-04-15T09:35:00.000-07:00

Scripture - John 20:19-31

It’s kind of funny to me that, as a general rule, Easter Sunday has one of the highest attendances of the entire Christian year. And there are often many people in the congregation who only show up to church on Easter, and, possibly Christmas. The reason I think this is funny is because if I were going to pick a Sunday to introduce people to Christianity and what it’s all about, I certainly wouldn’t pick Easter. Sure, there are lots of beautiful flowers, and sometimes even a brass quartet, and the mood is certainly festive.

But let’s be honest. This whole story about Jesus rising from the dead is pretty hard to swallow. How often in our ordinary lives do we hear about people rising from the dead after three days in a tomb? And I’m not talking about a ten or fifteen-minute near-death experience. I’m talking about someone who was dead from Friday afternoon to the early morning hours on a Sunday. It just doesn’t happen. Jesus’ death is a once-in-human-history kind of event. It is unique, and seems totally alien to our everyday lives.

I think if I had a choice about when the Easter crowds were to arrive, I’d want to kind of ease people into Christian thinking – start with the Sunday when Jesus welcomes and blesses children, or maybe a nice Sunday on the golden rule – something inoffensive that everybody pretty much already agrees with, at least on an intellectual level.

Well, it’s a thought anyway. The truth is that at some point we’ll have to work around to the scandal of the resurrection, so we might as well stick with Easter Sunday. But the challenge of it is still there, and that’s what our gospel lesson from John is all about this morning.

The disciples are hanging out in somebody’s house, scared to death that the authorities who killed Jesus will come after them next. Hence, the locked door. There’s no reason to expect that they’ll see Jesus again. There’s no reason to be hopeful. There’s no reason to believe. There’s only fear, and so they cling to each other.

Suddenly, here’s Jesus standing among them. At first they’re frightened. He says, “Peace be with you.” But then they get it and they’re excited – full of joy! He says again, “Peace be with you.” And he breathes on them, very literally giving them the Holy Spirit. Next, he commissions them and says, “The people you forgive will be forgiven. The people you don’t forgive won’t be forgiven.”

This is all wonderful, but there’s one little thing: the disciple Thomas wasn’t there that night. He missed it. He missed seeing Jesus, missed receiving the Holy Spirit, missed the commissioning, missed the forgiveness. He missed it. And so, when the disciples tell him what happened, he doesn’t believe them. “I have to see this for myself. I don’t believe you guys. It was probably a mass hallucination or something,” he says.

Now, I have to admit that sometimes I’ve found Thomas’ words here to be very harsh. “I want to put my hand in Jesus’ side,” he says. “I want to touch the holes in his hands.” It just seems so graphic – who would really want to touch a dead person’s wounds? Clearly, Thomas doesn’t expect to be taken up on his offer.

But I hesitate to fault Thomas for wanting some solid proof of Jesus’ resurrection. Because how many of us are so sure of that resurrection ourselves? How many of us would appreciate instead an undeniable, incontrovertible, PERSONAL sign from God? And in contrast, how many of us really live trusting in God’s mercy at all times? How many of us act on our trust in the power of new life that God brings? There’s a little saying you may have heard that illustrates this hesitancy: “Pray like everything depends on God and work like everything depends on you.” What if we worked like everything depended on God, not us?

The next week, though, Thomas gets more than he bargained for. The disciples are together in their locked room and Thomas is with them this time. Jesus appears among them. “Thomas,” he says, “Come over here and touch me. I don’t want you to doubt; I want you to believe.” Thomas is overcome. “My Lord,” he says, “My Lord and my God.” Thomas has met the risen Christ and he believes.

There’s a word of comfort that comes next for the rest of us. Jesus says, “Do you believe now because you’ve seen me? Well, blessed are those who haven’t seen me, but have come to believe.” And suddenly the story is about us. You and me, here and now. And the blessing of that belief is a new life in Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God.

So where does this belief come from? Where do we find this new life? How are we going to meet the risen Christ?

I don’t have a perfect answer for that question, but there are some clues in our story today. Thomas missed Jesus the first time he came among the disciples. But the next week, Thomas was there. And that’s when Jesus met him. Encountering Jesus often requires that we put ourselves in places where he is likely to be. We need to figure out a way to get into that upper room, with those disciples. We need to find out where that room is for us, where we can meet the risen Christ, and come to believe.

I think the Lutheran Volunteer Corps is one way of getting into that upper room. The volunteers come to a city to live in intentional community, practice simplified living, and work for social justice. Each of our three tenets is a way of approaching Jesus – of trying to be open to his presence, another doorway into the upper room. In intentional community, volunteers don’t just share a house, but they covenant to build strong relationships with each other. Through those relationships, and through that cooperation and community, volunteers may learn to see the face of Christ in each other. The opportunity is there. No community is perfect, but it is a way of getting into that upper room.

With the tenet of simplified living, volunteers let go of some of their material comforts, and some of their time commitments. They learn to cook from scratch, to make wise buying decisions, and to spend their time wisely. In simplified living, volunteers learn the generosity of God. By paying attention to the difference between a want and a need, the volunteers can learn that they are provided for. The word of God to volunteers through simplified living is indeed, “Peace be with you.” And it is a way into that upper room.

In the work for social justice, volunteers put themselves at the margins of society, where Jesus lived and worked in his earthly life. As such it is another way into that upper room, because belief and action aren’t two separate things that somehow move independently of each other. When we act in opposition to the dehumanizing forces of injustice, it affects what we believe about them. And when we believe that God is greater than injustice, and when we believe that God desires peace and wholeness for all people, it affects how we act. Learning to serve God is a process of learning to take greater and greater risks, and in the process to meet Jesus where he is – among the poor, the oppressed, and those frightened disciples in that upper room. Work for social justice is a doorway into that upper room.

So where does that leave those of us who aren’t volunteers? Or who, for that matter, won’t be volunteers five years from now? These tenets, these approaches to Jesus are not the express copyrighted property of the Lutheran Volunteer Corps. They are gifts of and for the whole church. They are gifts of that Holy Spirit that Jesus breathed on his disciples.

So give them a try for yourselves – make your family and your neighborhood and your church more intentional about its relationships. Try paring down your time commitments, your purchases, your commute. Find a way to meet people at the margins, not out of a sense of your own power, your own ability to help, but with humility and an open heart.

My prayer for you today is that you will find a door into that upper room, and that you will meet the loving Lord, Jesus, who will welcome you to new life in his name. May it be so. Amen.

Hearing the Word

2007-01-21T18:30:00.000-08:00

Scripture: Luke 4:14-21, Psalm 19:7-14, Nehemiah 8:1-10

Our Scripture readings today give us the chance to reflect on God’s word. What does it mean for us to come together to hear what God has to say to us? The Psalmist speaks from the time when the first five books of our Bible today made up most of Holy Scripture. The author says, “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The decrees of the Lord are sure, making wise the simple…more to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and the dripping of the honeycomb.” Sounds pretty good, huh? When God speaks to us, it revives our souls. When God speaks to us, we become wise, not fixated on the temporary and the meaningless. When God speaks to us, it’s better than piles of money, or jewelry. It’s sweeter than candy. It tastes better than anything else you’ve ever tasted. Strong words, especially considering that the psalmist is talking about laws—about rules, even. But what those laws teach us is a whole new way of life. If we can truly hear it, the living word of God is all this, and much more.

In our story from the Old Testament today, we hear about the people of Israel after the Babylonian captivity. In the time after King David, Israel had progressively grown weaker and more divided while the great empire of Babylon grew stronger and stronger. Finally, Babylon got tired of Israel’s independence. It put Jerusalem under siege, captured it, killed the king and his relatives, and carted all the other leaders back to Babylon. But then, 70 years later, something almost unbelievable happened—the great empire decided to let the people go back. So the Israelites, a generation or two away from their homeland, pack their things and make their way back to the home country.

It was as difficult of a transition as you might expect. And when we meet the people today, they are listening to the book of the law – a book they’ve neglected in captivity. And the word of God to them is very powerful, indeed. The reading lasts for hours. (Remember, most people couldn’t read in those days, so this may be the first time they’ve heard these words in a long time). At the end of the reading, the people are upset. They’re crying and worried—there’s so much they didn’t know. They were doing so many things wrong! God must be so angry! In fact, the leaders are worried about them. Stay calm, they say. Don’t fret, it will be all right.

Could you imagine what church would be like if people cried after the scripture reading? I’m pretty sure attendance would be down the next week. Maybe that’s why we keep the readings down to five or ten minutes, rather than four hours. But in all seriousness, it is powerful to see in this story how much of an effect the reading of God’s word had. The people were in crisis, but wanted desperately to do what God wanted of them. The Word on that day took on life-changing power. And in the end it was these people who rebuilt the Temple to God, and who revived the worship of God in Israel, against impossible odds. When God speaks to us, that word is more precious than gold. When God speaks to us, it revives our souls.

Our reading from the gospel of Luke is another story of the word of God among the people of God. This time it’s a story about Jesus’ homecoming to Nazareth. He’s been out preaching in the countryside, and has started getting a good reputation. So folks in his home congregation are excited to hear what he has to say – to hear how clever he is, and how much of a credit he is to them. You know the story – local boy makes good.

I have to say that this story about homecoming is very near to my heart right now. I was just ordained this October into the United Church of Christ. Over Christmas I went home to Minnesota, and on Christmas Eve morning I went to my own home congregation and baptized my new nephew Diego. I was standing between the two very kind and generous pastors of the congregation who’d just come in the last few years, and in the congregation were people who’d known me since I was twelve, or, in the case of my family, since always. My pastor from when I was confirmed was there with his wife. And the baby, well, the baby was perfect. He just laid there smiling up at me the whole time, even when I put water on his head three times, and even when I took him around to show him to the congregation. This homecoming was full of joy, and pride, and a sense of the goodness of God over time.

So when I read about Jesus’ homecoming, there are some stark differences between his experience and mine. Not that there’s never a time for a joyful homecoming, but in Jesus’ case this homecoming in fact not that time, even though that’s what his home synagogue is expecting. Jesus takes what’s already a momentous occasion, and makes it bigger, real, concrete. Not only does he read from Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, to preach good news to the poor,” but he means it. “This Scripture is fulfilled today,” he announces. “The captives are released today. The blind are going to see. The oppressed are set free.” “In other words,” he says, “This is not a routine Saturday synagogue service. The Word of God is coming to life. I am announcing today the year of favor by God.”

Jesus is not satisfied with a clever interpretation of the reading. He’s not worried about whether the people will be happy with what he has to say. He’s not there to congratulate them for raising up a prophet. The word of God to them is that there is a new order and that Jesus is at the center of it. And perhaps the most offensive part of this message is that Jesus’ ministry is not going to be about bringing glory to his hometown, or affirming the common wisdom about what’s right and who’s in. Jesus announces that his mission is to the poor. His ministry is to the oppressed. His announcement is to the captives. His vision is for the blind. The word is alive and works among us. It is sweeter than honey. It revives our souls.

So what is God’s word to us today? First, truly hearing God’s word will demand a response from us. The Israelites of Nehemiah’s time felt deeply the difference between the way God planned for them, and the way they had been following. They responded with sorrow and fear at first, but in the end it revived their souls. Jesus in our gospel lesson both speaks and is the living word of God. He calls to us to follow him as his disciples.

For the Lutheran Volunteer Corps, following our three tenets is one way that we respond to God’s word to us. Volunteers work for a year at social service, advocacy and community organizing organizations. At the same time, they live in intentional communities and practice simplified living. Through our service to non-profit agencies, we respond to God’s call for justice in the world. Volunteers work with or on behalf of the homeless, the imprisoned, the vulnerable, the sick and the disabled. God’s word is at the foundation of our organization, and it is sweeter than honey.

Simplified living is the practice of giving our money, time and energy only to those things that are most important. It is a response to God’s call for wisdom and discernment, because the ongoing process of deciding, choosing, and following through on those decisions reshapes the soul. It turns us from the foolishness of obsession with our own wants and worries to the wisdom of trusting God for what’s important, to the wisdom of letting go, of knowing our limits, of knowing what is enough. This wisdom from God is more precious than gold. It revives our souls.

The practice of intentional community is a response to God’s call to love one another, not just with words, but concretely and in person. Living in intentional community, whether that be in a house of volunteers, or in a house of worship, brings the challenges of love into focus. It’s one thing to love people you never have to deal with. It’s another thing to love the person who always has to be reminded what their weekly chore is, or who sings off-key just a little louder than everyone else, or the preacher who doesn’t realize that she’s already gone on for almost fifteen minutes and doesn’t seem to be winding down anytime soon.

Don’t worry folks; I’ve only got another 14 pages to go.

Intentional community gives us the opportunity to practice our love skills – listening, forgiving, speaking up, supporting – and by doing that to go deeper into God’s own heart. In intentional community we learn from personal experience what it means to be loved deeply in spite of our faults, and to be challenged to grow—not because we have to earn that love, but because we want to respond to it. This love from God is sweeter than honey. It revives our souls.

My hope for you today is that you will truly hear the word of God and respond to it. The Lutheran Volunteer Corps, as an organization, responds to God’s word through our three tenets – simplified living, social justice, and intentional community. And I hope you will consider these practices as you listen for God’s word to you. These are not practices that belong just to us. They are for the whole church – a gift from God, a gift from God’s living word.

But there are other ways that we respond to God’s word as well. My prayer for us today is that we will not only hear the words from the Bible, but that more than that we will meet, we will encounter God through them. My prayer is that in meeting Jesus again, we will be transformed, and will be able to say and to know that the word of God, the Living Word of God, is indeed more precious than gold, sweeter than honey, our path into the very heart of God. May it be so. Amen.

Many Gifts, One Spirit

2007-01-14T18:41:00.000-08:00

Scriptures: 1 Corinthians 12:1-11
John 2:1-11

In our Scripture from 1 Corinthians today, Paul is writing to church members at one of his mission churches. They’ve written him asking different questions about faith, and he’s answering with instructions and perspective. In this section, Paul is explaining spiritual gifts. All these gifts, Paul says, are from God. The Spirit parcels out prophecy, faith, and wisdom where they are needed. The Spirit grants knowledge, discernment, and healing as it chooses. Each gift is from the Spirit, for the good of the whole. Many Gifts, One Spirit.

Since we are looking at spiritual gifts today, I’d like to take some time to tell you about the Lutheran Volunteer Corps from the perspective of our gifts. I’ll start with a short clip from our educational dvd.

[clip: beginning to 4:28]

As the video explains, the Lutheran Volunteer Corps gives people the opportunity to live out their commitments through a year of service. The three particular gifts we bring are our tenets: intentional community, simplified living, and social justice.

Intentional community is a gift of the Spirit because it is a way of learning to foster that greatest gift of all: love. Volunteers covenant with each other to live together, and not just in the sense of being roommates, and sharing space, but in the sense of sharing their lives with each other—supporting each other in their work and in their goals for the future. Of course, just as in any church, loving community is difficult to achieve.

It is often much easier to love people who live on the other side of the world than it is to love the man living next door who never mows, or the woman sitting in the committee meeting who keeps talking even though it’s already gone a half-hour over, and your favorite TV show starts in 15 minutes, or the housemate who forgets to clean out the refrigerator, even though it was their week to do it. Maybe none of you have ever faced this. Maybe it’s just me. But if you haven’t, well then, you’re missing out! You think I’m joking, but I’m not. The gift of intentional community is that it gives us the opportunity to learn to love real people – to learn to admit when we’re wrong, to learn to speak up when we’re hurt, to learn to face conflicts and work through them – to learn to love real people. And you can’t learn these things by reading them in a book. They are part of the gift of intentional community, and they are a gift of the Holy Spirit. Many gifts, One Spirit.

Simplified living is a second gift the Lutheran Volunteer Corps brings to the whole church. It is the practice of deciding what is truly of value, and letting the rest go. For example, our volunteers each get $85 per month to spend on their food. This means they’ll be able to get enough to eat, but they probably won’t be eating out very often, and you can certainly say goodbye to the daily latte from Starbucks.

But let me take a minute to share about my Wilmington volunteers. Even though they’re on a limited stipend for their food, these folks have decided that any meat or eggs they buy will be raised humanely, even though it will be more expensive than conventional meat. This is part of their care for God’s creation. As you can see from this example, living simply is not, in fact, simple. It means giving our time, energy and money only to what is most important to us. But that is what our whole faith journey is about as Christians – learning to pay attention to what is most important to God, and living accordingly. Many gifts, One Spirit.

Social justice is our third tenet. Through the work that each volunteer does, day in and day out during their year of service, we contribute to the struggle for better lives for all people – for the poor, the marginalized, and the powerless. And as an organization we are working toward becoming more just internally through our Journey to Inclusive Community. We welcome people of any sexual orientation to volunteer and serve on our staff, board, and support committees, and we are working to become a more welcoming place for people of color through ongoing education and relationship-building. Many gifts, One Spirit.

And this weekend is a particularly important weekend for us to reflect on the state of race relations in America, since tomorrow is Martin Luther King, Jr., day. The Civil Rights movement in the United States made for lasting change in the opportunities available to people of any race. And it was able to do so because of the many gifts of the Spirit given to the people of the time. The people of the movement brought wisdom to their struggle, exposing the hatred and oppressiveness behind the Jim Crow laws without responding in kind. They brought faith: faith in God, faith in justice, and faith that their struggle would bear fruit. They brought knowledge, not only about the truth of the black struggle, but about the truth of their strength, courage and perseverance. They brought healing—true healing—by refusing to hide those truths. They gave the nation a new vision – Martin Luther King, Jr., preached that new vision – a dream founded in the roots of our faith that God has created all people equal and free – a dream that all people would be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character – a dream that one day all God’s children, black and white, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing together,

Free at last, free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

Many gifts, indeed. One abiding Spirit.

So what about our gifts now? In his letter to a long-ago church Paul gives us some important instruction today on developing our gifts. First, because our gifts come from the Holy Spirit, we don’t get to brag. Paul was trying to get the Corinthians to stop playing power games with each other. “I can speak in tongues, so I’m better than you.” “Well, I’m really wise, so I should get the pew up front.” You get the picture. The Corinthians were caught up in what their status with each other was, and forgot about their status before God. The truth is, our gifts are not of our own making. They come from God. The most important gift is learning to love each other, even when our gifts differ. One-upsmanship does not lead to true community.

Second, Paul reminds us, the gifts that the Spirit gives to individuals are intended for the benefit of the entire church. As a part of the Lutheran Volunteer Corps, I don’t want us to be separated off from the church, going about our business in isolation. I hope that you as a congregation will join us in living out our tenets of simplified living, social justice, and intentional community. These are not gifts for our organization alone. They are gifts for the whole church.

Many gifts, One Spirit.

What was so radically amazing, in my mind, about the Civil Rights Movement, was not necessarily that it was a fight for the rights of a distinct group of people, but that its goals and its gifts were directed toward the transformation of all society. The freedom that Martin Luther King, Jr. preached about was freedom for white people as well as black, by returning America to its founding values, and by calling the nation to live out its ideals. Many gifts, One Spirit.
The gifts that you have as an individual are not for you alone. They are meant to be shared. Many gifts, One Spirit.

Finally, our gifts can be a source of joy. In our gospel reading from the lectionary today, Jesus begins his ministry at a wedding in Cana. Here is someone who has a few gifts of the Holy Spirit. And you would think that he would start flexing those spiritual muscles in a pretty serious way – with a healing, maybe, or even by raising someone from the dead. But that’s not what he does. Instead, Jesus transforms an incredible amount of water – six jars that probably held about nine gallons each – into really good wine. Jesus’ first gift is to keep the party going. When we think about giving our gifts, then, we should find the joy in the giving. We’ve been given many gifts by the one Spirit. Let us go now to enjoy them with humility and generosity. Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Sermon from my Ordination

2006-10-12T12:57:00.000-07:00

Hi folks,

Normally, I just post sermons I wrote, but this time, I'd like to share the sermon preached by my pastor, Mary Luti, at my ordination this Sunday, Oct. 8th. If you'd like to read more of her (wonderful!) sermons, go to First Church in Cambridge's website.

Enough For Me
By Rev. Dr. J. Mary Luti
Scriptures: Isaiah 55, Romans 8: 18-39, Matthew 28:5-10, 16-20

A little over seven years ago, I was jobless (I preferred to say that I was “unaffiliated”) and wrestling with whether to throw my hat in the ring for a denominational position or to apply for a local church pastorate. Both were scary possibilities, but the pastor thing was particularly scary. I’d spent years as a seminary teacher helping other people become ministers, yet I really didn’t know what it might mean to become one myself.

I consulted an old friend who’d been in pastoral ministry for forty years. Over crab cakes he lobbied hard for the parish. “Take a church,” he said. “You can get a denominational job down the road.” At first I thought he meant that I needed to pay my dues on the local level first before aspiring to a wider institutional ministry. But he wasn’t laying out a career strategy. “Take a church,” he said again, with real urgency. “You’d be a fool to pass up a chance to be loved like that.”

I was shocked, scandalized. I thought, “What an egotistical reason to become a minister!” It also seemed to ignore the evidence. Ministers irritate people. They disappoint at least one parishioner every day. They are always going too fast or too slow for congregational comfort. Not everybody loves their pastor. I was pretty peeved at my own pastor at the time.

“Don’t pass up a chance to be loved like that,” my friend pleaded. “Okay, I won’t,” I said to him. But to myself I said, “This is a problem. Because if he’s right, if being ‘loved like that’ is the reason you become a minister, I may not be suited for the parish. I have too many frailties and foibles to be the object of such affection. I’ll never be able to deserve it.”

It turns out that in the six years-plus that I have now been ordained and serving a local church, I have repeatedly experienced the love “like that” my friend was wishing for me. It’s hard to describe what it is, impossible to explain. It’s not as if these few short years on the job have been an uninterrupted love-fest in any ordinary sense. From time to time I have been either the true cause or the handy occasion of dust-ups and disagreements, anger and grievance, disappointment and frustration. Not everuone has loved this minister.

And yet, mysteriously, I can still say that my friend was right. From the very first day, when a church member who had just met me looked me in the eye and said, “My pastor,” I understood that this pastor-parish business was to be no ordinary relationship. How you can be “loved like that” even when not everyone likes you is a great mystery. A mystery akin to how much you love you parishioners even when you don’t always love them either. And I would indeed have been a total fool to pass on this experience.

If I had a confused soul in front of me vacillating about ordained pastoral ministry, I would say exactly what my friend told me. And if she should balk at such a venal, self-centered reason for becoming a minister, I would reply that in the most profound view, it is the only reason for becoming a minister. Mark Hollingsworth, who is now an Episcopal bishop in Ohio, was the deployment officer for the Massachusetts diocese. He used to tell the newly-ordained that God was sending them to the parish for their own salvation, not the salvation of the people they would serve. My old friend was right—you would be a fool to pass up the chance to be loved like that. And because love alone saves us, you would be a fool to pass up a chance to be saved like that.

But I was right too, about not being able to deserve it, I mean. Sometimes after a long day on the job, and not necessarily one of those “meaningful” days—it could even be a stupid day when I have lurched from meeting to meeting, attended too anxiously to too much petty congregational crapioca, and completely forgotten to pray—I feel inexplicably grateful, like you do when you witness an incredible sunset, or when you are out for a walk on the best fall day that ever was, and you pass a group of fellow strollers and exchange glances with them as if to say, “What did we do to deserve this?”
And the answer, of course, is nothing. You deserve it no more than you deserve the eyes of your child, or the rumble of the organ’s low notes, or a single moment of time in this fleeting life.

I do not deserve to be on the receiving end of the mysterious love that characterizes ministry in a community of faith. Neither do you, Amy. No one does. All you can do is be grateful.

“Ho! Come to the waters, everyone who thirsts,” we heard Isaiah say a few minutes ago. “Eat your fill of bread. Never mind about money. It’s free. You can’t buy what God alone can give. Don’t even try.”

“Can’t pray? Don’t know how?” we heard Paul ask in the second reading. “Not to worry. The Spirit is already in you, praying for you, a Word beyond your words, a gift beyond your efforts, a done deal before you can even ask.”

“Here is a mission impossible—go and transform the whole world simply by your testimony.” That’s Jesus talking in the gospel for today. And then he adds, “I’m going ahead of you; I’ll be with you to the end of the age.”

The readings Amy chose are luscious and lavish, but they barely scratch the surface of the biblical wonderland of grace, the divine economy in which everything is supplied, nothing is lacking, and all things are possible. Only inside this generous world does ministry make sense. And only when it operates by the mechanisms of grace is ministry worthy of the name.

Most people go into the ministry in order to help other people. Or to transform congregations. Or to heal a broken world. They intend to bring their gifts and training to bear on worthy projects, never suspecting that in the end they are the ones who will be helped, transformed, and healed. They set out to love, never suspecting that they will be the objects of inexplicable and undeserved affection.

We focus our attention—and rightly—on the proficiencies needed for effective ministry. Amy has just been through a long process of poking and prodding to be sure she has enough of them, and in high quality. We believe that she does, and that’s why we’re here ordaining her today. But I think it would be important in these long required discernment processes to give as much time to contemplating the gift of ministry as we give to scrutinizing gifts for ministry. Because even more than on character, knowledge, and know-how, ministry rises and falls on grace. Ministry is a grace, a divine gift. And if we can absorb that stubborn fact, we will not do our ministry with full and busy hands, we will receive our ministry with empty and open ones. Our confidence will reside not in knowledge, talent, method, and process, but in the gratitude, humility and amazement with which those gifts are employed.

Now, we know that Amy is not being called to a local parish like First Church. She won’t be a pastor in the typical sense. But her call to sustain and shape small communities of young adult volunteers is no less a mystery and a gift. She will spend countless hours bringing her best skills and knowledge to their service as they grow in the Christian life together. She will pastor them along the way, but as the old song says, it will be grace that brings them home. She will love them to pieces too, of that I’m sure, but what she herself will know of love when all is said and done is far too deep for words. She will be loved “like that,” and she won’t be able to explain it any more than I can. But it will be enough for her, and more than enough.

In the first part of the 16th century, St. Ignatius Loyola is said to have composed a prayer which later became the quintessential prayer of the Jesuits Order he founded. It is known as the Suscipe, after its first Latin word, “take,” or “receive.” It should also be the quintessential minister’s prayer, especially the last part which contains the phrase, et dives sum satis— “…and with these riches I am satisfied”—or more colloquially, “…they are enough for me.”

What are the riches the prayer speaks of? What is it that is enough for me, for my life, for my ministry? Listen. Here is the whole prayer, in my rough translation. A prayer for you, Amy, and a prayer with you on your ordination day—the best prayer I can offer.

TAKE, Lord, receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, my entire will. You have given all to me. Now I return it. Do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace. They are enough for me. Your love and your grace—and I am full of riches, wanting and needing nothing more.

And to that we say, Amen.

Ordination this Sunday

2006-10-04T13:35:00.000-07:00

Hey everybody--

I'm going up to Boston tomorrow for my ordination on Sunday. Wish me luck!

Best,

Amy

Worship from the Heart

2006-09-05T18:44:00.000-07:00

Scripture: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Friends, it is good to be here today, isn’t it? I am glad to be here again today to preach for you. I enjoyed our talk last week, and I am feeling very hopeful for St. Mark’s. I am excited to see what new adventures God has in store for this congregation. It seems to me that there is a strong desire among us to listen for God’s call and to be ready to follow. I hope that you are seeing these things, too. Will you pray with me?

Prayer: Gracious God, open our hearts to you, open our minds to you, open our lives to you. May your kingdom reclaim us, revitalize us, renew us, and reign through us. Amen.

Soon you get to decide if I’m the one called to be the preacher for this church for at least the next several months. So, to add a little intrigue to the proceedings, I’d like to make today the first day of a sermon series on the 5 marks of the church. You’ll just have to keep me on after a cliffhanger sermon like this one.

Well, it was worth a shot, anyway.

So what do I mean when I say the five marks of the church? In the early years of the church, there was a document written called the Didache, which means “Teaching.” It is a manual for early church people on how to do church—how to prepare people for baptism, how to handle wandering preachers, how to serve communion. It was written in the 200’s or 300’s, but has only recently been rediscovered and studied.

But even though the Didache was written 1700 years ago, the church of these early Christians had the same work, the same purposes, the same defining marks as churches alive today. These are the things that churches have done for thousands of years. Some churches are better than others at demonstrating these marks. Some like to emphasize one mark over another. But a healthy church will give good energy to all five marks of the church, and will allow them to be the focus of community life.

So, what are these five marks of the church? Well, what do you think they are? I’ll give you a hint – the one I’m going to talk about today is worship. One of the key things that a church does is worship. What else?
What do we do after worship?
What was our men's shelter director just talking about today?
What are all those Bible studies about?
The last one may be the one we’re least used to talking about here—when we invite friends to church with us, to see if God is calling them to be Christian. That’s right, the “E” word. Evangelism.

So the five marks of the church are: worship, fellowship, ministry, discipleship, and evangelism. Everything else needs to either be supporting one of these five purposes, or else the church becomes something other than what it is – the body of Christ, called together to serve God.

So, let’s talk about worship. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus is speaking to a crowd, when some Pharisees come up and challenge him on how he practices his religion. Now let me make a quick cautionary statement. Just because Mark says that the Jews have a particular way of practicing their faith doesn’t mean this is an accurate description of Judiasm today. Okay, had to get that in there.
But the way these particular Judeans were honoring God was by being very careful about the cleanliness of their bodies. They were washing their hands ritualistically, keeping the pots and pans they ate from sparkling clean, and otherwise observing a lot of laws. The idea, in case you’re interested was to make ordinary life holy by making it into an imitation of Temple worship. If the priests ate only from carefully cleaned platters in the Temple, then regular people in their ordinary lives could eat from carefully cleaned platters as part of living a holy life. So when the Pharisees meet Jesus, and he doesn’t do things their way, they challenge him. “Why don’t your disciples wash their hands? Don’t they know what the tradition is?”

Jesus answers them with a quote from the book of Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.” Jesus goes on to say, “Look, the things you eat and how you eat them aren’t what make you holy. What goes in isn’t what makes you unclean, because that doesn’t touch your heart. The real danger is what comes out of your heart. That’s what makes you unholy – the evil intentions of the heart. It’s from the heart that murder, theft, and adultery spring. It’s from the heart that envy, greed, carelessness, and hate come. What goes in doesn’t make you unclean, what comes out of you does.”

I have to admit that on first reading, this is a difficult text. Jesus is making a good point – outward rituals aren’t what make for true worship. And it’s true, too, that true worship is worship from the heart – devotion and dedication to God. But gee, wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier if we could just get something to do? Wouldn’t it be nice to get some failsafe traditions in place – a set path and a predictable routine? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go through the motions, but still hold onto some of those comforting little sins? I tell ya—God is so demanding sometimes.

So how can we make a start on this call from Jesus – this call to worship from the heart? In a way, I can’t really tell you something to do, because that’s the whole point. It’s not about what you do, it’s about how you do it. Are we worshipping traditions for their own sake, even if our hearts are far from God? Does observing the letter of the law—getting all the ceremony details right—give us an excuse for violating the spirit of it—the transformation of our lives through communion with the divine.

This is not an easy question at all. I think most of us have come to church at one time or another not ready to be there. Maybe we’re tired, or distracted by some other worries, or maybe there is something brewing in our hearts that we’re just not ready to let go of, even though we should. We’re human beings, and we can’t always be “on.”

It’s also not an easy question, for a community, because folks don’t always agree on what the spirit of the law is that we’re trying to observe. Let me give you an example – getting dressed for church. In some churches, it’s very important to dress nicely for church. But in other churches, people are expected to come as they are, in their regular clothes. For the folks who dress up, worship is about coming before God with reverence. Presenting your best self, including being dressed and cleaned up, is a way of showing God respect. For the folks who dress casually, comfortable clothes are a way of being comfortable with God. It’s a sign of wanting to be authentic before God – to demonstrate trust in God’s ability to love the worshipper as they are.

Which group is right? Ah ha! Trick question – I think they both are. But both groups can be wrong, too. Because the point is not what’s going on on the outside, the point is that we’re to worship from the heart.

So how do we do this? How do we worship from the heart? Tune in next week…

Just kidding. Although to be honest I can only give you a partial answer. First, we need to remember what worship is for: it is time spent together focused on God. When we worship God, we thank God, we honor God, we praise God, we look for God in our lives, and we do it together.

Second, we need to continually pay attention to whether our rituals serve the spirit of worship, or undermine it. This doesn’t mean we have to be changing things all the time, or keeping things the same all the time. But it does mean asking ourselves, “What does this mean to us as a community?” Does it help us honor God, praise God, and look for God in our lives?

Finally, worship happens on Sunday mornings, but it can’t stop there. If we are going to worship from the heart, then we have to be ready for our hearts to be changed. We have to be ready to give up those evil intentions that Jesus warns us about. To truly worship from the heart, we need to give our whole lives to God.

This is a tall order, but we’re not in it alone. For one thing, we have each other – for encouragement, for support, and for challenge. It’s not an accident that churches are communities, not individuals – we need each other to grow in our faith.

We also need God. And God is with us. God loves each of us, and is calling us to transformed lives. God is calling us to worship from our hearts with our whole lives. We are not alone. God goes with us.

May the kingdom of God, reclaim us, revitalize us, renew us, and reign through us. Amen.

Who are you gonna serve?

2006-08-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

When we meet Joshua in today’s first testament reading, he is an old man, on the verge of death. Joshua, if you remember, led the Israelite people into Canaan after Moses’ death. He was with the people during their time in the wilderness, and was chosen as a leader because of his bravery and his trust in God. When other Israelite scouts thought that it would be impossible to enter and take the land promised by God, Joshua believed. Joshua led the people into the promised land, led them through the battles to take it, and here, after many, many years as their trusted leader, as he feels the end of his life drawing near, Joshua brings to a close his term of leadership by calling them again to serve God.

‘People,’ Joshua says, ‘It’s time to make a decision. Who are you gonna serve? Your ancestors worshipped the gods across the river. Your neighbors worship other gods here in Canaan. But it was the Lord, our God, who brought you to where you are today. So who are you gonna serve?”

What we don’t hear in today’s reading is that Joshua takes a long time to remind the people of all the things that God had done for them: God brought Abraham into Canaan, and gave him children, God saved Jacob’s family by sending Joseph ahead of them into Egypt, God brought the Israelites back out of Egypt—out of slavery, God cared for the people for 40 years in the wilderness, and God gave them the land of Canaan, “a land,” he says, “on which you had not labored…vineyards and oliveyards that you did not plant.” Joshua reminds them of all this, and then he says, “So, who are you gonna serve? My family and I will serve the Lord our God. Who are you gonna serve?”

The Israelites promise to serve God. Not the gods of their ancestors, not the gods of their neighbors, but the Lord God, Yahweh, who has brought them this far already. The whole people answers as one, without so much as a single committee meeting. “Sure Joshua, we’ll serve the Lord. Absolutely.” Joshua says, “Are you sure? Because the Lord our God is great when you’re on his good side, but once you commit to this, there’s no going back.” “We’re sure, Joshua,” they answer. “We promise. After all God has done, how could we not?”

In our story from the gospel of John, it’s decision time for the disciples, too. Jesus has just explained to them what it means to follow him – to eat his flesh, to drink his blood, to share in his life, to be in deep relation to him, to ingest the words and the spirit he brings. Some of the people who had been following him protest: “This is too much!” they say. Jesus doesn’t try to spoon-feed them. Instead he issues another challenge: “Well then, what if you saw something really outlandish, like me rising up into heaven?” That’s the last straw, and a whole crowd leaves. But the 12 disciples remain. Jesus asks them, “Why did you stay?” Peter answers for everyone, “We’d leave if we could, but we can’t because we have come to believe and know that you are the one with the words of eternal life.” Jesus says, “That’s right, I chose you for this. But even so, you still had to choose me back.”

God is still asking us: Who are you gonna serve? Are we going to serve our ancestor’s gods? Are we going to serve the forces of comfort and tradition, even when it was God, not our familiar way of doing things that brought us to where we are today? Are we going to serve the past even though our God is the living God of today? Who are you gonna serve?

Or are we going to serve the gods of our neighbors? Are we going to give in to the culture’s obsession with money? Are we going to carry with us that fearfulness and constant search for security that dominates politics? Are we going to believe that earthly power is the only power that really matters? Who are you gonna serve?
Or are we going to serve the Lord our God? Are we going to serve the one who freed the Israelites from slavery, who cared for them in the wilderness, and who brought them into the Promised Land? Are we going to serve the God who came to us as word made flesh in Jesus? Who dwelt among us, knew our pain, our fear, and our sickness, and loved us anyway? Who died a humble, humiliating death, but conquered death in resurrection? Are we going to serve the God who has breathed the Holy Spirit into the church for two thousand years? Who has inspired worship and service and tremendous acts of love? Are we going to serve the living God of love? Who are you gonna serve? Who are you gonna serve?

Hopefully at this point you know which decision I want you to make. But don’t think it’s an easy choice. Joshua and Jesus in our stories today both challenge the people who say yes to God. Serving God is not easy. It demands a lot from us. We have to put aside our ancestors’ gods. We have to deny the temptations of our neighbors’ gods. But if we do choose God again, if we do decide to serve the living God, Creator, Savior and Indwelling Spirit, it will be because we have come to believe and know that we have found the source of eternal life. So how about it—who are you gonna serve?

The Jesus We Wish We Got

2006-07-09T16:54:00.000-07:00

Scripture: Mark 6:1-13

Please pray with me: God of all glory and strength, you come to us in strange and unexpected ways. Open our eyes to the fruits of your spirit, open our hearts to the beauty of your word, open our lives to your healing touch. We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.

I saw the latest Superman movie this week, and I wouldn’t normally bring that kind of thing up, except that that movie was chock full of Christological symbolism. In one of the opening scenes, Superman’s father speaks to him about how the Father and Son are one. It sounds like the prologue to the book of John. The Father, in a mysterious, solemn voice-over says, “You’ll see my life through your eyes, and I’ll see your life through my eyes.” Later the voice-over of “The Father” talks about why he has sent his only son to the people of Earth. When Lois Lane – who’s lost faith – explains why she doesn’t think the world needs Superman, she says in her best newspaper-woman voice, “We don’t need a Savior.”

Here’s the kicker: there’s one section toward the end – I hope this doesn’t spoil the movie for you – when Superman is pushing a huge Kryptonite rock out into space to get rid of it. Obviously, given his weakness, this is difficult for him. I don’t completely understand how he does it. But after the rock finally floats peacefully out of the Earth’s orbit, Superman falls back, exhausted, legs together, arms out, in a crucifix. That was the part of the movie where I got an elbow in the side for making a remark out loud.

You might think that this is an accident, or a coincidence, but I don’t. Because I think Superman is a symbol in our culture for the kind of Savior we wish we’d gotten—He’s the Jesus we wish we got. He’s strong, he’s handsome, he’s invulnerable to almost everything, he goes around doing obvious practical good things, he defeats villains, he hears everything going on in the world, and as a bonus he can fly, has x-ray vision, and can shoot lasers out of his eyes. It’s a pretty great package. If you wanted to sit around figuring out what we might expect the Son of God to look like, it’s not a bad start.

So what is this craziness that we read about in the book of Mark today? Not only is Jesus not shooting lasers out of his eyes to defeat his enemies, he’s in fact doing kind of a bad job at the healing miracles – the signs and wonders – that he usually excels at. And his excuse? Prophets never find a welcome in their hometown.

This might be kind of a surprising passage to some of us – especially if you hadn’t realized before that Jesus had brothers and sisters – but on the other hand, there’s a certain truth about human nature in Jesus’ words. I have to say that in my experience I almost always enjoy homecomings, but there sometimes is that note of condescension, or SOMETHING from the older relative who says, “I haven’t seen you since you were this tall.” Makes it hard to explain that you’ve got a master’s degree, are married, and are paying your own bills. And unfortunately, stomping on the ground and saying “I am TOO a grown-up” doesn’t really breed respect.

So for me anyway, it’s a little comforting to know that even Jesus got grief for being young, or forgetting where he came from, or for rising beyond the town’s expectations. But I also think there’s another lesson to be gleaned here. Throughout Mark Jesus’ power to heal comes not only from some kind of magic, super-power in Jesus, but from the belief of the person he was healing. Last week, when the woman touched Jesus’ cloak and was healed, Jesus told her, “Your faith has made you well.” So in today’s reading, when the people aren’t open to Jesus, when they can’t believe that he would be able to bring something more than the sum total of his life in Nazareth, they aren’t able to do their part in bringing about the healings and wonders that Jesus is capable of with their participation.

What does this tell us about God and about our salvation? Well, for one thing, it tells us that our salvation – our healing – is not something that is going to be forced upon us: we have to be open to accepting it and believing it. And believe it or not, I think this makes Jesus a better Savior than an imaginary superhero like Superman. Because while Superman flies around solving problems and setting a good example, but the recipients of his good works ultimately play only a passive role. Jesus, however, is much more demanding of us.

I was reading an article the other day about what leads to real happiness in life. I know you’ll be surprised to hear this in church, but the answer is not more money. Once you get to the point where your basic needs are covered, double your money does not equal double your happiness. What does bring happiness, according to the article, are long-lasting, rewarding relationships; a good balance of workflow – not too much, not too little; and a sense of control over your own life.

A Superman savior, as it turns out, can only give us salvation for a moment—a problem solved for us, a disaster averted. And don’t we all wish for that kind of salvation sometimes? To win the lottery, for the moving boxes to unpack themselves, for the miraculous cure. But God’s Spirit offers us eternal salvation – a chosen love, a healing through belief, a deep relationship that is ours to take, if we will.

God, in creating the world, and in giving us free will, did not want us to be puppets. We can choose for ourselves whether we will be open, whether we will be healed, whether we will love God. Clearly, belief and doubt are complex, and not a simple act of checking yes or no on a box, but God doesn’t come to us in superhuman form. God comes in human form.

This Jesus we meet in Mark, the one who can’t get his hometown to take him seriously, is real, is human. This may not always be the Jesus we wanted, but it is the Jesus we got—the Jesus who invites us, but never compels us, into a loving relationship with source and ground of life. The Jesus who heals with our active participation. The Jesus who offers us eternal life. Thanks be to God, Amen.

Peace and Chaos

2006-07-02T17:00:00.000-07:00

Scriptures: 2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27, Mark 5:21-43

Friends, it is a delight and an honor to be here with you to preach today. A lot has happened to me since the last time I had the opportunity to worship here with you. I’ve started working for a new employer, refinished floors, painted, packed, drove a 16-foot truck, went camping twice, unpacked, made some significant progress in my ordination process with your collective help, and went to the UCC’s conference’s annual meeting in Newark, Delaware, but not necessarily in that order. It’s been a busy few weeks. So I hope that since it’s early July, and since school’s been out a couple weeks, and since Beth isn’t here, that you’ll allow me a little more relaxed pace of organization today. Perhaps we could call it a “concept” sermon, rather than the more standard, highly-organized, regimented “three-point” sermon that you’re used to. Oh never mind.

But before I begin, let’s pray together: Loving God, who sees into our hearts, who blesses our lives, who enjoys our days, dwell with us now. Give us your wisdom, give us your kindness, give us your Spirit of peace and joy. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

So, I love my new job. I’m working for an organization called the Lutheran Volunteer Corps as a staff support person for the volunteers living in Baltimore and Wilmington. These volunteers come to live in the city in group houses, to live in intentional community with each other, to work at non-profits in social justice areas, and to practice simplified living. We’re open and welcoming of GLBT people, and in the middle of a process of becoming anti-racist.

What I love about it is working with young adults who are working out the big questions in life: Why are we here? How can we best serve God? Whose turn was it to do the dishes? It is a spiritually formative experience, helping people both encounter God’s grace in a different understanding of time, rest, and relation, and to encounter God’s call in the choices we make every day about how we’ll spend our efforts and money. It’s wonderful. If you want to know more about our work, I’m happy to chat after the service. I even have sign-up sheets.

What’s also wonderful and exciting about this new work is that my home association in Massachusetts has recognized it as an ordainable call. For those of you not familiar with the manual on ministry and the ordination process in the United Church of Christ, I could explain this, but we only have so much time. The upshot is that I have only a very few steps left until I’ll be ordained. Hooray! And this church is going to be a part of that, too, as a calling body. Which I am so grateful for. Thank you.

The other news is the new house. Heather and I moved into a rowhouse in southwest Baltimore this Wednesday. There are still some stall stacks of boxes in the office. And the bedroom. And the basement. The living room looks pretty good, though. And the kitchen is mostly done. Okay, I admit it, moving is crazy. It’s basically impossible to do alone. This time around, we hired Mike Elder and a couple of his Recovery Workers. They did a great job, and Mike was so cheerful. Even at 9:00 in the morning. Plus, one of them carried our 150lb dining room table top single-handedly. That was just stunning. It was about as good a move as you could expect. My favorite part, though, was at the end of the day. One of the guys says, “Do you ladies believe in God?” We said yes. He said, “Well, let’s have a prayer, then.” We stood in a circle in the new house, and this person who’s making his way out of a much rougher life than I can imagine, prayed for us, for the house, for our new life together. It was a tremendous blessing, and the prayer in my heart was simply, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

So what, you might ask, does all of this have to do with our scriptures for today? Good question. Let’s see if I get around to answering it. For one thing, both David and the woman with the hemorrhage come to the end of a long difficult struggle in the stories for today. Which brings a certain amount of upheaval. A little bit of chaos, if you will.

For David, the death of Saul is an ambiguous blessing. Since he was very young, David had been both Saul’s favorite and his nemesis. David was handsome and talented, and he had tremendous military skill. So Saul gave him his daughter to marry, but then later hunted after him to try to kill him. Plus, Saul had seizures of some kind that suggest to us now a mental disorder that might lead to paranoia. But David respected Saul, not only as someone he admired, but as the one God had anointed to be king.

In the passage before our reading today, David learns about Saul’s death from a foreign soldier. The soldier came upon Saul, mortally wounded on the field of battle, and killed him at Saul’s own. The soldier probably thinks that David will reward him for dispatching a dangerous enemy and a rival, but instead David kills him for killing “the Lord’s anointed.” What we hear next is David’s lament for Saul. “Oh how the mighty have fallen,” he sings.

Here’s something odd you might want to notice about this song: it’s all about how great a warrior Saul was. I know that we’re a peace-loving church here, and I think that’s a great thing, but this passage is not exactly a hymn to pacifism. What are we supposed to do with that? Especially on a 4th of July weekend when we’ll remember our independence with fireworks to remind us of cannons going off.
Especially when we’re still in the middle of a disastrous war in Iraq, one that, to be done properly would have taken far more troops than we sent. Especially when we’re a nation that seems to have a new foreign conflict to go into every 15 or 20 years: The Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Grenada, the Persian Gulf War, the War in Iraq, and for 50 years a Cold War that pumped us full of fear and suspicion toward an enemy that seems ragged and pitiful now. Oh how the mighty have fallen indeed. They have fallen and fallen and fallen.

The woman with the hemorrhage comes to Jesus with a different recurring problem. She’s got a gynecological problem that not only drains her energy and causes her physical pain, but that also makes her continually ritually unclean. She comes to Jesus after 12 years – Craig pointed out to me that this is the number of completeness – complete suffering – and believes that by touching him she’ll be made well. After all those doctors couldn’t do a thing, Jesus will be the one who heals her.

My question is: why on earth does she believe that? Why does she think that Jesus can heal her after all those others failed. Twelve years is a long time and a lot of doctors, and probably a lot of invasive, painful procedures. Why should Jesus be any different?

But she was right after all. She touches his garment, she’s healed, and he stops so she can tell her story: “I was outside society, I was sick and hurt, but now I’m with you again, not alone, but among you. And Jesus was the one who did it.” She is brought back to life, just as much as Jairus’ daughter. “Your faith,” Jesus says, “has made you well.”

I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think these things tie together as well as I would like them to. But there is a theme here about new circumstances and the end to old problems and dilemmas: David is on the verge of a different life. He’ll become king over all of Israel, but will it mean a change in his character? He will continue to be the charismatic military leader, only without Saul as his obstacle, rival, and object of admiration.

The woman with the hemorrhage will begin a different life. She is clean again and no longer owned by her disease. But will she begin a new life, inspired by the faith that made her well through Jesus? Or will she go back to her old ways, unchanged? Taking no lessons from her journey of suffering and healing?
And will each of us, when we begin a different life, find ways to grow deeper in our faith, to see where God is touching us, to give thanks for our many gifts? Will we allow our faith to make us well?

May it be so, Amen.

Prayer and Meditation

2006-04-05T19:30:00.000-07:00

Scripture: Matthew 6:5-15

This text from Matthew that we just read is part of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew’s collection of Jesus’ teachings. These are the words and the teachings that people remembered and held dear as Jesus’ special wisdom for his disciples. And let me tell you, Jesus is a hard act to follow. His teachings are full of insight into how we humans are—both how we want to be, and how we really are. And in this particular teaching on prayer, he gives us a few pithy instructions on how to pray and how not to. It’s very concentrated—the kind of teaching that can leave you pondering for hours, weeks, your whole lifetime.

In light of all that, I don’t think I’ll be able to cover all the ground that this wonderful passage covers. What I’d like to do instead is to start out with some practical instructions of my own, and then to give you a few thoughts on the disciples’ prayer. What I’m hoping for you is that when you leave here, you’ll have some new tools for beginning or refreshing your prayer life, and that you’ll find a little more meaning in the words when you pray the disciple’s prayer. All that in just one hour. It’s going to be great. Oh, and you do have permission to laugh, even though it’s Lent.

So, let’s talk about prayer first. What about prayer? Well, it’s one of those things, I think, that most of us would like to be good at. It may even be like flossing—something that we know we should do, but that somehow gets overlooked. I know lots of people and lots of situations that could really use some good prayer, and some good divine intervention, too. But prayer is a hard habit to cultivate. There is the problem of it being boring sometimes, and at the same time requiring focus. Finding the time, and the quiet and so on. But I believe that a good prayer life is as good for Christians as flossing is for gums. And if that analogy doesn’t totally turn you off to the idea of regular prayer, then here are my suggestions on beginning or renewing a spiritual discipline of prayer.

First, pick a regular time during the day to pray. In other parts of the gospels, we learn that Jesus went up to the mountains really early in the morning to pray. Similarly, I’ve heard legends about John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, arising at four in the morning to say his prayers. There may be some early risers in this crowd, too, and I think you know who you are. But that doesn’t mean that prayer has to happen before the crack of dawn. Each of us is different, and each of us feels alert and awake at different times. Maybe ten minutes sitting outside after lunch works best for you, or maybe at night before going to sleep. Try different things until you find something that works.

Second, choose a good place. Part of developing the habit of prayer is training your body for it. So find a comfortable position—although not too comfortable that you fall asleep—and a good quiet place. As Jesus puts it, go into your room alone to pray.

Third, you’re allowed to make mistakes. Let’s say you’ve gotten up every morning at four am for your prayers for the last three weeks, but after a night out on the town you sleep in until five am. Don’t worry—just pray at five, or else pick up your habit the next morning. The important thing is not to get perfect attendance, the important thing is to develop the habit of praying. Some days you may miss, but get back up on the horse. That’s all.

Fourth, set some reasonable expectations. If you’re the type who likes lists, write up a list of people to pray for and keep it handy. But one suggestion I’ve heard is to decide when you start praying for someone how long you’re going to pray—a week, a month, and so on. Of course, the things that stick in our hearts aren’t going to just go away, but don’t create a discouraging mountain of prayers that keeps you from wanting to pray at all.

And that leads me to my fifth point, which is: think of prayer as a conversation. Because after all my talk about lists and requests and picking a good place and time of day, what prayer really is, at its heart, is a conversation with God. It’s a time for listening to what God has to say to you, just as much as it’s a time for bringing your deeply felt needs to God. It’s a time for saying thank you, and I’m sorry, just as much as it’s a time for saying, I need.

What a humbling thought! You might be interested to know that in the original Aramaic version of the disciples’ prayer from our reading, the word that we usually translate as father – Abba – is actually closer to “Papa” or “Dad.” It’s a word used in an intimate relationship, not quite as formal as “Father” sometimes is. And this word, Abba, was distinctive to Jesus. And this is the relationship he makes possible between us and God—a loving, intimate, personal relationship. With the creator of the universe. It’s an amazing, shocking idea, really, if you can step back from it for a minute.

Given this, prayer is not something meant to be checked off our list of things to do. It’s not another task that God demands of us, something to be added to the daily schedule. Prayer is meant to infuse our whole lives. To become our way of living in the world—in constant conversation with God. And through this, prayer transforms us, and through us, the world. This doesn’t mean that you should be constantly muttering under your breath—conversation between good friends—even with God—often includes companionable silences. Rather, the goal is to be aware of God’s presence, and to enjoy it, and act in love on the strength of it.

Brother Lawrence was a monk who lived in the sixteen hundreds. He worked in the monastery kitchen, and people noticed that he almost always had a cheerful manner about him. A Cardinal who came to visit him and ask him about it writes that “with him the set times of prayer were no different than other times; that he retired to pray, according to the directions of his superior, but he did not want such retirement, nor ask for it, because his greatest business did not divert him from God.”1

So if you’re looking for a challenge tonight, there it is: to live each moment in God’s presence. I believe that developing this habit of dwelling in God’s presence will bring you a life of joy and contentment. Not that your life will be easy, necessarily, with no problems. Just that it will be marked by love—divine love. Not quite there yet? The first step is to make a habit of praying for a few minutes each day.

Meditation is not very different from prayer, and is another way that we can open ourselves up to God. I think if I were going to describe it, I’d say that it’s the practice of focusing your attention. Most of my suggestions for prayer apply to meditation, too—find a good place and time, and give yourself plenty of time to develop the habit. Meditation in Eastern traditions is also very strongly connected to breath. Paying attention to how you’re breathing is connected to what your mind is doing. If your breath is fast and uncontrolled, then your mind is also going to go in a thousand directions at once. But if the breath is slow and deliberate, it allows the mind to focus in on something important.

So, since we’re here, let’s give some meditation a try. Don’t worry—it’s only for a minute—nothing big. We’ll take some breaths together and then meditate on a Bible verse from the reading. So, please close your eyes, get comfortable, and take a deep breath, then let it out. Now another breath, and let it out. Now another breath, and let it out. Pay attention to your breathing for a minute and let your mind calm down. Now focus with me for a minute. Give us this day our daily bread. Give us this day our daily bread. What does bread look like? What does it taste like? Give us this day our daily bread. What does bread feel like? What does it mean to ask for bread each day? To rely on God for each day’s nourishment? Give us this day our daily bread. What other ways does God nourish you? Give us this day our daily bread.

All right, take a few more breaths and when you’re ready you can open your eyes. How did that feel? Hopefully, you were able to get past those nagging questions—what is Amy doing? Or, what dish am I bringing next Wednesday? And to find a new picture or idea in the verse, maybe even a new understanding about God or your relationship. Thank you for taking part in the experiment.

So, I’ve talked some about prayer and ways to get started in the habit of it, or goals for improving your prayer life. And you’ve gotten a short introduction to meditation. So what I’d like to do now, is just spend a little time with the prayer we heard in the sermon today—the prayer Jesus taught to his disciples, and the one most of us say at least once a week at church.

The first thing to notice about this prayer is that it’s very short. Earlier in the passage, Jesus tells the disciples not to show off their prayer skills on the street corners or to use a lot of words to try to manipulate God into doing what they want by sheer force of annoyance. This prayer is an example of that modesty of expression. It’s just a few lines long, and gets right to the point:

-Our Father—a relationship of trust and closeness

-Who art in heaven—so we know we’re talking about God

-Hallowed be thy name—a prayer of respect and praise—a prayer for God’s name to always be honored.

-Thy kingdom come—a prayer for God’s plan for the whole world to come into being.

-Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. —and in the interim, a prayer that what God wants to have happen will happen on earth

-Give us this day our daily bread—please give us what we need each day.

-And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us—Forgive us for the wrong we do, so long as we forgive others the wrongs they do us. There’s a sticky one, something to consider—do I forgive people the way that I hope God will forgive me?

-And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one—and help us stay out of trouble, rather than testing our limits of resistance.

-For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever, Amen.

Can you think of anything that’s missing? I’m sure there’s always more to be said, but Jesus has given us a beautiful, simple prayer that honors God, and that covers all the important points in just a few lines. Amazing. Sometimes faith seems very complicated, but the heart of it is simple. Hard to live out, but simple.

This is also a demanding prayer. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. You can’t pray those prayers and truly mean them and not be compelled to action. This is a prayer that inspires and changes us. A prayer that calls us to trust God and imagine a new future under God’s government.

Finally, this is a prayer with many layers. It is the kind of prayer that should be repeated often, not just as something known and familiar, but as something to learn again and again—to drink in and feel. Because we may not always understand it the first time we pray it, or the hundredth time, or the thousandth time.

There’s a story about a little boy whose Sunday school teacher asked him if he knew what God’s name was. “Sure,” he said, “it’s Howard.” “Howard?” said the teacher, “Where do you get that?” “You know,” he said, “from the prayer—Our father, who art in heaven, Howard be thy name….”

We can laugh, since we know what hallowed means, more or less, or at least that it’s not the same thing as Howard. But there is a deep mystery in prayer. Because God hears every prayer we pray, even the ones we don’t know how to pray. As Paul puts it, the Spirit prays on our behalf in groans too deep for words. We may not know yet, what this prayer of Jesus really means. In other words, we don’t know, really, that we aren’t saying Howard be thy name, in some other way, whether through our words or our deeds. We are works in progress. But God is present to us—comes down to our level—and knows what we mean, and what we don’t even know we want to say. This is the grace of prayer, and the astonishing gift of it. May you accept this gift and be strengthened through it this Lent. Amen.

Foolishness

2006-04-01T17:30:00.000-08:00

Scriptures: 1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Jonah 2:1-9

Here's what you would expect: You would expect the creator of the universe to have some real power, some real heft. You would expect that the God who tore the oceans apart, who created the sun with a word, who brought life out of nothing, to be able to keep things under control.

And if that God ever came to earth, you would expect somebody powerful. An emperor--or at least a king--someone with some strength. Someone who could command powerful armies, get the world organized right, and then rule forever, or at least for many many years before leaving again, gracefully and mysteriously.

That's what you would expect. But that's not what we got.

In our lesson from Paul's letter to the Corinthians, Paul tells us about Jesus. The Jesus who was God among us -- humble, ordinary, but a teacher and a healer. The Jesus who died on a cross. What people expected, according to the wisdom of the world, was not what they got. Instead, we got God's Foolishness.

You see, anymore you and I are used to seeing the cross. They're in this sanctuary, on top of every church, and I'm even wearing one around my neck as we speak. But the cross is not a pretty decoration. It's an ancient torture device. Can you imagine having electric chairs or nooses where we have crosses now? It's hard to even imagine. But for the early churches, that was the message. God's Foolishness, come to earth in a poor man from the back hills of nowhere, who collected a ragged following of nobodies, and then died an embarrassing death on the cross at the hands of the Roman Empire. God's Foolishness, transformed into the salvation of the world, the path to new life, the welcome back.

Paul's point, of course, writing to a bunch of contentious church folks, is that what looks like wisdom to people is in fact totally ridiculous in God's eyes. What seems powerful to humans is in fact useless and futile.

Which brings us to our story from Jonah.

When we meet Jonah, he is in the belly of a big fish, which is swimming down deep to the bottom of the ocean. How did he get here, you might ask? Well, it all begins with the Ninevites.

Nineveh, in those days, was the capital of a huge empire. An empire that had conquered Israel on more than one occasion. And God was getting ready to do what they call some smiting. Nineveh was wicked, and God had had enough. It was time for punishment.

But first! But first--God wants to give Nineveh one more chance. One more chance to turn back, one more chance to change its ways. So God tells Jonah to go and preach to them. And Jonah hears God's message and promptly turns around and runs in the other direction. This is our first hint that the book of Jonah is satire. Most prophets object when God calls them--Jeremiah: "I'm too young." Isaiah: "I'm not holy enough." Moses: "I'm afraid of public speaking." But Jonah doesn't bother with formalities because what he objects to is God's Foolishness--God's crazy wish to save the Ninevites, even if they are enemies to both God and Israel. Jonah doesn't argue; he runs.

Jonah travels by foot to the Mediterranean, goes to the nearest port, and buys a ticket on a ship to go as far west as he can. But as soon as they're out to sea a couple of days, the water starts to churn and a terrible storm comes up. The sailors are a god-fearing lot, in the sense that they know a storm like this is the result of somebody's god being very, very angry. They draw straws to figure out who's the guilty party. Jonah's straw comes up short. He admits to being the problem. "Yep, it's my God who's mad. He's pretty powerful. I guess you better throw me overboard, then." The sailors hesitate to do this. But even with throwing all the extra cargo overboard, the ship is still in danger. So they chuck Jonah over the side of the ship.

The storm clears immediately. Jonah gets swallowed by a whale.

And this is the point in our story where we know for sure that the writer of Jonah is having a little fun with us. Because as the fish is swimming down, down, down, Jonah is praying up, up, up. As if he weren't in the strangest and most dangerous position. As if he weren't on the run from God.

The fish vomits Jonah up on the beach. He's alive, but slimy. Resigned to his fate, he goes to Ninevah. Ninevah is a huge city--it takes three days to walk all the way across it. Jonah does the absolute minimum of what he's been told. He walks in for one day, stops on the street corner, clears his throat, and utters one sentence: "Repent now, or else God will destroy you!"

One of the Ninevites hears him and tells somebody else, who tells somebody else, who tells somebody else, until the king of the whole city gets word and declares a citywide day of repentance. Everybody dresses in ugly, uncomfortable clothes--even the animals--and they sit around fasting and begging God to forgive them.

Which God does.

Which makes Jonah really mad.

Jonah's human wisdom was that a show of power was needed--maybe a hard flooding rain, or even some fire and brimstone out of the sky. But God's Foolishness, wiser than Jonah's wisdom, is to save the Ninevites, to give them a chance to repent, to reach out to them one last time.

Why does God do this? One simple reason: love. God loves those Ninevites. The men and women, the boys and the girls, and even the animals all dressed up in sackcloth and ashes. God loves them like crazy. Foolishly, even.

Maybe we're a little like the Ninevites. We've been working very hard at being God's enemy in one way or another--with self-destructive lives, with harm to our neighbors, with abuse of the nations outside our empire.
And maybe we're like those early Corinthian Christians--trying to win at impressing God, trying to outdo everybody else. Or maybe we're like those ragtag disciples--trying our hardest, but pretty sure we're not really good enough.

But God's Foolishness is like no human wisdom at all. We are loved, as we are, with no respect to how we look, our race or age, who we love, what our mistakes and missteps are. We are loved. And the cross is the reminder of that. The paradox of God's power, dwelling humbly among us in a way that human wisdom would never expect. God is crazy, foolish even, with love for us. I'll trade human wisdom for that any day. Amen.

Coming in From the Cold

2006-03-02T18:36:00.000-08:00

Scripture: Luke 15:11-32

I was in warm, sunny Florida last week. In fact, just last Saturday I was in short sleeves, driving with the A/C on, and going to a tour of a working cattle ranch. The crescent-B happens to have cypress swamps, saw-palmettos, and alligators, along with its herd of cracker-cattle. They're historic cows, descended from the cattle of early Spanish settlers.

But before a nice weekend spent hitting the tourists spots, I spent a week in the sun working on a house damaged by Hurricane Charley. Hurricane Charley was a year and a half ago, and the fellow whose house we worked on--Dave--had been living in a FEMA trailer while the roof had big holes in it. There were remains of a blue roof--a tarp nailed over the top as a temporary measure--but it had mostly blown away. So we started working on his roof.

It was warm. It was very warm, in fact, especially on the roof. Coming back north to Baltimore this week has been a stark reminder of how warm it really was down there.

Have you ever misjudged how cold it was going to be and left the house without that extra jacket or sweater or long underwear? This happens to me fairly often--I get cold easily. I'll leave the house thinking, "Oh, it'll be all right," and then have my doubts as I walk down the steps, but I think "well, it's too late to turn around now...." and of course after that I'll have to stand outside shivering and wishing I'd just grabbed the sweatshirt on the way out the door--wishing I'd thought ahead a little before I left home.

I think the younger son in today's Bible story finds himself in a similar, although much more serious, situation. He left home thinking that he had everything he needed. His half of the inheritance was, after all, a good chunk of money. But by taking the property and selling it, he was acting as if his father were already dead--a hurtful, awful thing to communicate. He severed his ties with his family, leaving behind a broken relationship, a burnt bridge. But he takes the money and thinks it will be enough. It's not.

In fact, the money goes pretty fast. And just as the younger, wayward son is coming to the end of it, a famine settles on the land. And that wayward child starts feeling very cold. The only job he can get is a pure humiliation--feeding pigs--and it doesn't even pay him enough to get some food. He settles into a shivering, hungry existence, with no family and no means of his own.

Before we ever got to Dave's house to work on it, before he ever agreed to let a crowd of strangers descend on his house, Dave was living in the cold in a different way. Here was, almost 70 and with health problems, saddled with an unlivable house and no insurance money to fix it up. When Chuck from the interfaith organization came knocking on his door, though, Dave wasn't real sure he wanted any help. I don't know about you, but I don't like asking for help, even when I need it. For one thing, it usually means having to change.

I didn't mention this before, but Dave is one of those folks who likes to hold onto things. A lot of things.

For a long time. I know I have these tendencies myself when it comes to pieces of paper. I think, "I'll need this later," or "this is something I could use" and then the little pieces of paper kind of grow and multiply and build on each other. And then there are little piles, and then bigger piles, all around the house. Books seem to do the same thing for me, too. But Dave didn't have someone living with him to lovingly remind him to throw some of it out. So he had a house full of stuff when the hurricane hit. And the stuff got wet and a lot of it got moldy.

So I think when Dave agreed to accept a work crew at his house, he was probably hoping we could fix the roof and let the insides alone. But that's not how it worked.

Along with the roof team, Dave also got a kitchen crew--4 or 5 mothers with strong stomachs and a sense of order. They started in the kitchen, shoveling out old newspapers and mystery food jars, and by the end of the week, Carol was helping Dave go through old pictures and throw out costume jewelry.

And I'm sure it was hard for Dave to let go of each thing, even if a lot of it was ruined. Don't you have a few moldy things of your own that have been kicking around in a closet somewhere? Things you'd like to hold onto, even though you know they're really not doing anybody any good? Maybe some old anger and resentment? a paralyzing burden of guilt? Greed or arrogance? or some of those ugly fears that keep you comfortably rooted in place?

The problem is, getting help sometimes means changes that we aren't always ready to make. But for the younger son in our story, when he realizes what his options really are, he decides that the change his worth it. His situation is, after all, pretty desperate. He knows he's lost the right to be called a son, he feels his pride crushed having to crawl back to his father. And his father has every right to say no. But the son is hoping for just a little mercy--to be a servant with enough to eat and a roof over his head. No honors, no special treatment. He's ready to give it all up, to make a change. He's ready to come in from the cold.

What happens when he gets home is totally unexpected. His father does not stand on ceremony. There are no cold silences, demands for an explanation or cutting words. The father runs, totally undignified, totally joyful, runs to the younger son. "Father," the younger son starts to confess, "I've sinned against heaven and before you." But that's about all he can get out before his father starts shouting instructions--get the robe, get the ring, get the barbeque started. It's time to party!

Not only is the younger son welcomed home, not only does he come in from the cold, but the one who rejected his father is welcomed as a son, a much-beloved, long-desired child. This is how God is with us. God loves us and longs to welcome us home, to welcome us in from the cold, to bless us and enjoy us.

For Dave I think coming in from the cold was slower, and maybe isn't done quite yet. When I first met him he was quiet, and mostly worried about whether we were going to throw away the rusty tools on his back porch. But as the week wore on, we warmed up to us--started telling us stories--about the hurricane, about his life--and I think that we encouraged each other. I saw the hands of God that week in those half-dozen professional and not-so-professional roofers, in the determined cleaners, and heck, even in the garbage guys who had to be specially requested to take away a pile of black bags and old furniture. My favorite moment, though, was when, after the back yard was cleared Dave went out on his riding lawnmower. I will never forget those joyful, spinning figure-eights. Sure he was just going over the work. Sure.

In all those moments of grace, God was there, laughing and joyful, inviting all of us back home. And we were coming in from the cold together.

________________________________________________________________

The epilogue is this: There are still people left out in the cold. Some are like the younger brother. They're afraid they've strayed too far, that there won't be a welcome for them. But some are like that stubborn older brother. They just want what's fair, and they don't think it's right to be so extravagant, so welcoming. And we don't know from the story if the older brother comes in from the cold or not. It's up to us to decide. But I'll say this: if he stays out, he's going to miss a great party. So what's it going to be? Where are you standing now? And are you ready to come in from the cold?

Love and Relationships: What's God got to do with it?

2006-02-02T07:04:00.000-08:00

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13

Before I begin the sermon, I want to start by saying thank you. Thank you to everybody for being here. If you are newer here, or here for the first time, thanks. I know it's not alway easy to walk into a new church, but it is good to have you here with us. Thank you, too, to the tried and true folks for being here. Your support is important. I don't know if I've said this before, but I do believe that God is still speaking, and I just want to say that I think God is going to do something special in this congregation, so I'm here, and I'm excited to be a part of it. So thank you.

And in the spirit of God still speaking to us, please pray with me.

Prayer for guidance

Now, if anyone has been to a wedding, you may be familiar with the passage I just read. In it Paul writes what you could call a beautiful hymn to love. And it sounds so nice, doesn't it? As Lynn mentioned before, this is her favorite scripture. And it's easy to understand why. Love is patient, love is kind, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. It just sounds wonderful and inspiring. And that's nice.

But why is it so hard to live it out sometimes? Why is it so hard to be loving and kind, patient and enduring like that? Why can't we be that way with each other? What gets in the way?

I want to tell you a story from when I was in seminary. My first year of seminary I lived in student housing, and met some friends there. We supported each other and had a lot of fun together--lots of times making fun of Feminist Theology. (Not that I have anything against Feminist Theology, it's just easy to make fun of, I guess). Anyway, after we got kicked out our second year--not for making fun of Feminist Theology, just because they only had enough housing for first-year students--after that, we decided to get an apartment together. Unfortunately, it didn't work out so well. Let me put it this way--there were 5 women and one bathroom.

When little things would come up, I tried to follow Paul's advice, at least as I'd always understood it. Which was to have the kind of love that doesn't bring up these things, but endures them. That this love was the kind of thing that would, if you did it right, keep you from ever disagreeing or being in a conflict with someone else.

Toward the end of the year, I came home--wait, let me back up a minute. My pet peeve was actually to do with the dishes and the kitchen. I liked to be able to have the dishes clean before I started cooking so that I wouldn't have to either do someone else's dishes or else pile mine on top of theirs and make a big mess. So, I come home one day about 11 months in, and someone had spilled an entire small bottle of juice all over the floor. So, I was trying to be patient and kind, and I kind of walked around the big spot on the floor. "Maybe they just haven't noticed it yet," I was thinking to myself.

But this made my one roomate really mad--she yelled "Stop doing that! I've already cleaned the floor, and I even used hot water!"

Well, I was totally upset by this. I went and got a bucket and soap, and I cleaned up the floor, but I didn't want to talk to those roommates again. And we haven't really talked since them. Which is a real shame. It really is.

So, when I was re-reading the passage from Corinthians, it was jarring for me, because I was thinking to myself: well, I tried to do that, I tried to be patient and kind, to not bring things up, you know? But there's a line in there that I hadn't really noticed before, which is this one about the truth. Love doesn't rejoice in wrongdoing, it rejoices in the truth. Or as we heard it tonight, "Love rejoices in the flowering of truth." And I think that for there to be a good love, a good relationship, that honesty needs to be there, too.

Because the truth is, Paul wasn't writing to a couple that was about to get married. He was writing to a church in the midst of conflict. Where people were saying "My ministry is more important than your ministry," or "I should be able to choose the music for worship," or whatever. He was writing to people in the middle of their disagreements with each other.

So this passage is really about how to be loving in the middle of disagreements, so that afterwards, we can still come back together with that love intact. Which is easier said than done.

What I think helps me, in the middle of difficulties, and when I'm trying to be loving and honest at the same time, is this: to remember God's love for me. To remember that I'm cared for and loved no matter what I do. It makes it easier to let go a little, to be more patient, knowing how patient God is with me.

So I have for you tonight some small tokens of God's affection. Please take one red heart, which has a small love-note from God on it, and a pink or white heart as a reminder about someone who needs to know they are loved. And while the hearts are being passed, I'd like to listen to a song by Kirk Franklin and God's Property. It's called "Love."

Love
Kirk Franklin & God's Property

Love, a word that comes and goes, but few people really know
what it means to really Love somebody
Love, though the tears may fade away
I'm so glad Your love will stay
'Cause I love you and you've shown me, Jesus
What it really means to love

The nights that I cried you loved me
When I should've died you loved me
It's a mystery to me now I'm glad to see, Jesus

When all hope was gone you loved me
You gave me a song that you love me
Now I can go on 'cause you love me
It's a mystery to me now I'm glad to see, Jesus

Now I know what it really means, what it really means,
What it really means, to love....

Patient, kind...that's love.

May you be blessed with the knowledge of God's love that helps you be patient, kind, and loving, even during the most difficult times. Amen.

Jesus is Coming - Look Busy!

2005-12-05T08:51:00.000-08:00

(Practical Tips for Surviving the Holidays)
Scripture: Luke 1:26-38

Before I begin tonight, I want to say thank you to all of you for being here. I really enjoy this time of worship, and it's good to have your support and your presence. Especially for people who are here for the first time, I know it's not always easy to walk into a new church for the first time, so thank you. Thank you to everybody.

My hope with this service is that already have or you will be able to encounter God in new and life-changing ways. Which is a tall order, and one that I'm not going to be able to deliver on myself. We'll need to rely on the grace of God for that. So with that in mind, will you pray with me?

Prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, oh God, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

So how many of you have seen the Charlie Brown Christmas special? Raise your hands. Okay, good. And do you remember how it ends? Charlie goes and buys this pathetic little tree--it can barely hold up a single ornament--and he brings it back to the other kids, and they all laugh at it. But then Linus steps in and recites a whole section of the book of Luke, which is impressive, considering that he's a grade-schooler, but he does it. He tells the story with the angels and the shepherds, and he closes with this line--"on earth, peace and good will toward men" Peace on Earth, good will toward men. And all the kids snap out of it, and they fix up the tree and sing a little carol around it.

So when I was thinking about what the true meaning of Christmas is--yes? You in the back?

(from the last few pews in the back) "The birth of Christ!"

That's right, the birth of Christ, and the peace, the peace that Christ brings to us. Thank you. I guess I don't need to give a sermon now.

But when we think about Christmas, it's strange because it seems like this season is one of the most hectic. It seems in some ways like it's the opposite of peaceful. Like there's so much going on it's even more stress than the rest of the year. So tonight I'd like to go through what I'd like to call four pitfalls of the holiday season--four things that seem to draw us further away from God rather than closer to God.

The first one of these is busyness. This is the time of year when we have extra things--I've got friends with tons of shopping to do--and the parties and putting up decorations, there's so much to do. So the first pitfall is busyness.

The second so-called pitfall is conflicts. During this time of year, we spend a lot more time with families, and sometimes that can bring up old patterns and hurts, and make our lives less peaceful, not more so. So the second is conflicts.

The third pitfall is materialism. During this time of year we're under a lot of pressure to believe that if we buy the right present or receive the right present, we'll be happy. But that's just not true.

Finally, and I think this may be the hardest pitfall to deal with, is loneliness and grief. For many people, this time of year is supposed to be joyful, but it reminds them of lost loved ones who aren't with them any more. So loneliness and grief.

Now I've got a couple pieces of general, practical advice for dealing with all of these issues. The first one is probably what your doctor would tell you -- make sure you're eating right, getting enough sleep, not overindulging too much, getting your exercise, and sticking to your prayer habits. Well, the doctor might not recommend daily prayer, but you know what I'm saying. When our bodies are well cared-for, we will be that much more ready for the season.

Second, pay attention to what your expectations are. This time of year is what I think of as the most human time of year. We're having parties, we're spending lots of time with family and friends. And since we're all human, things aren't going to be perfect. If you're expecting perfection, you won't get it. So pay attention to what your expectations are.

Now, those are both good pieces of advice, but they're probably ones you could hear from Dr. Phil or a good advice columnist. But I think the Christian tradition has some wisdom for us for the holidays that is worth paying attention to. So I'd like to turn now to our Bible reading for tonight.

In this story we learn about how Mary got the news that she would be giving birth to Jesus. It starts with an angel who comes to her and says "Greetings, favored one!" Which is an unusual way to greet somebody. And Mary is a little anxious when she hears it, thinking "What kind of a greeting is that?" It reminds me of when I was a kid and my dad used to say, "Hey kids, you want to have some fun?" It always meant chores! Moving the furniture or collecting the trash--never anything I actually thought was fun.

And Mary's right to be a little suspicious. Because while in the long run the coming of Jesus will be a good thing for Mary and for everyone, finding out that she's going to be pregnant in some ways puts Mary in a dangerous position. Women of that time didn't have the means or the economic independence to care for themselves the way that they do now. We learn later that Joseph accepts Mary, and adopts Jesus as his own, but when Mary first gets this message it may have seemed like an announcement that she would be destitute. She has to wait and see what will happen.

Which brings us to our first pitfall of the season - busyness. For a lot of us with so much going on, it's hard to remember that Christian wisdom has a different view of Advent--that it's really a time of waiting and preparing our souls, not just our social life. And waiting and preparing are not the same thing. The busyness of the season is a contrast with the quiet hoping we see with Mary. So when you're at your busiest, see if you can't find a little time to prepare your mind and soul, and to simply wait.

Our second pitfall was conflicts. And I think the first thing we want to notice from this story is that God goes about easing his difficulties with the Israelite people in a gentle way--not with thunderbolts or earthquakes or strong wings--but with a baby. So when we have our disagreements, we should imitate God in making an effort to approach them in a gentle way.

Second, the wisdom from the Christian tradition is this: Pray the hardest for the people who drive you the craziest. Now maybe none of you have someone who makes you crazy. Maybe I'm the only one who does. But in those situations and with those people, the important thing to do is to be praying for them. And not prayers that they'll agree with you, but prayers for their wholeness and well-being. Pray the hardest for the people that drive you the craziest.

Our third pitfall of the season was materialism. This idea that the things we buy will be able to make us happy, when, in fact the things should reflect our feelings, not generate them. The Christian wisdom on this piece is gratitude. We just had Thanksgiving last week, and it was a good time to eat some turkey and enjoy time with family. But gratitude needs to be practiced on a regular basis. Not just once a year. So count your blessings often, and you may find that what you thought you needed you only wanted, and maybe didn't need so much after all. So gratitude.

Finally, we come to the loneliness and grief of the holiday season. This is a hard one, and not something that we can necessarily solve, but may need to be lived with. But from our Christmas story we learn that God's first Christmas gift to us was presence--was reaching out to us and coming to live with us as a human being. If you don't take anything else from tonight, I hope you'll remember this: That there is someone who loves you very much, and that you are not alone. We are not alone. God is with us. Thanks be to God.

Now I have one last piece of what I hope will be practical assistance to you. When you are feeling a need to be near God, whether because of busyness or conflicts or loneliness, it's sometimes hard to work up a whole prayer. But sometimes a song will help. I'd like to teach you a song called Dona Nobis Pacem. The words mean "Give us Peace." I hope it will contribute to your peacefulness during the season.

Why I am a Christian

2005-10-28T12:53:00.000-07:00

I thought that since last month I covered something very broad -- Finding Meaning in Life -- that this month I'd go with something narrower, and a little easier to fit into 8-10 minutes: Why I am a Christian. Nothing? Okay, stick with me here, folks.

Now if you happen to drift off during the sermon, I'd like you to take the time to think about what your stories are--why you're a Christian, if you are, and if you're not, whether this might be the right path for you, whether God might be calling you to be a Christian.

And when I say "Christian" I mean by that someone who is committed to serving God, who tries to put at the center of their lives living out Christian values and doing what they believe God's will is.

So, I think the first and easiest answer to the question of why I am a Christian is this: I was born a Christian. I was born to two Methodists and was baptized as an infant; before I can remember. And I remember from when I was very young going to communion at the church. The church looked a lot like this one, with a center aisle. And we'd walk down the aisle in two rows, and then kneel at the front altar. They'd hand out this wafers--which are like no other food I've seen anywhere--and next would be the grape juice in trays. Do you guys have them here? It came in these--what looked like little shot glasses. And I thought, being so small, that those glasses were just my size. I loved it.

Now just because I grew up in the church isn't the only reason that I'm a Christian. There are plenty of people who grow up but leave later. I think the reason for me that I stayed with it is that I made a decision to do that--to commit my life to God.

The summer I was 13 or 14, I went with my church to a place called Heart Butte, Montana. We were on a mission trip and we were helping add on to a community center on a reservation. It rained A LOT that week. I remember us going out in the rain to hammer together tresses for the addition. Toward the end of the week we finally got most of them up, in spite of the rain.

And I remember during that time really feeling like part of a community--feeling loved and seeing God's love in action in the work we were doing. One woman in particular - her name was Robin - was very kind to me. And so at the end of the week we had this sweetgrass ceremony, where we were burning sweetgrass and receiving a kind of blessing from the pastor with it. And we were singing "Surely, the presence of our God is in this place, I can feel God's mighty power and grace." And I could feel it, that God was present, and I said yes. Come what may, I promised to follow where God might call me to go, follow where Jesus would lead me.

Now that wasn't the end of the story. I had what some folks would think of as a test of my faith. About a year later my mom, who had gone into remission, got cancer for a second time. That was the beginning of a very difficult time in my life. It was like being on a roller coaster. There would be bad news, and things would be really bad, but then we'd get used to them or they'd get better, and then it would start all over again--Mom might go into the hospital again or something like that.

And then the summer after my freshman year of college, Mom got the bad news from the doctors--there were no more treatments for her, she should get ready to die. So I came home from college and took turns with my dad watching her--the morphine sometimes made her not realize where she was or forget that she couldn't do things she thought she could. And finally, in August she died.

Now for some folks suffering is an argument against believing in God. Why would God allow things like Hurricane Katrina, or the earthquakes in Pakistan, or something closer to home like the sickness and suffering of a loved one, like my mom? And I don't mean to say that I wasn't angry with God. I was. But being angry with someone is still having a relationship with them. I didn't turn away, though, and I didn't stop believing.

And I think the reason for that was that I saw God and felt God present with us through the people of our church. When Mom was in the hospital, we'd find lasagnas left on our front porch so that we'd have something to eat. The church prayed for us every Sunday, and when she was in her last sickness people would come to visit her. Some of them didn't necessarily say the most sensitive things, but they were there. I remember three women in particular who came together and just sat around laughing and chatting with Mom in her room. They showed their support, and through them I felt God's presence.

I think what motivated the people of our church to show such love was at least partly the big dream that Jesus talks about in our gospel lesson from John tonight. In the Scripture passage, Nicodemus, who's a big shot--an elder in the community, someone with a reputation for good judgement--hears about Jesus, and he decides that Jesus has something he wants, that Jesus has an "in" with God, and knows something that he wants to know. But he still has a reputation to uphold, so he sneaks out in the middle of the night, when no-one's around, to go and talk to Jesus.

"Jesus," he says, "What do I have to do to have what you have? How can I get this eternal life you're talking about?"

At this point Jesus tells him "You have to be born all over again." Now, most of us have an idea of what it means to be a born-again Christian - that it's a particular type of Christian - and this passage is where that image comes from. But imagine for a minute that you're like Nicodemus, who was the first person to hear this idea, that we know of. What would it be like if your life became a blank slate, and you lost all your memories and your bad habits and your ways of doing things? Or what if you were to rewind your life all the way back to when you were born? What would that be like?

Nicodemus doesn't get it at first--what a strange idea! Is he supposed to somehow crawl back into his mother's womb? It's ridiculous. Jesus can't help giving him a hard time: "Stop taking me so literally," is his first response, and then he says, "You're a big shot and you don't understand how this works?"

The thing is, Jesus is not looking for some minor adjustments in our lives, that we try a little harder, or change our plans for Sunday mornings. Jesus is talking to Nicodemus about a big dream, a total transformation. A time when the world is marked by justice and love, when everyone is included and accepted, when love is the rule and not the exception. That is Jesus' big dream. That is the dream that motivated my church to care for us in our time of need. That is the big dream that inspires me, and Jesus' big dream is, ultimately, the reason why I am a Christian.

Finding Meaning in Life

2005-09-30T11:09:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid growing up in Iowa, we went on a lot of car trips. The grandparents lived far away, and my parents liked camping. So there were often times that we'd be on the road for 6 or 8 hours in a day. And I remember being really impressed to be able to sit still for that long. One time, though, and I can't remember if I said it as a joke or not, but... We got everything packed into the car, and we got out onto the main road, and then we headed out of town, and then we got on the highway, and we had been on the highway for about 5 minutes when I said those four terrible words....

You know what I'm talking about--

Are we there yet?

I think what makes it so tough for kids going on car trips to sit still for that long, besides a general lack of patience, is that you don't really have a sense of where you're going. The road signs don't help you, and so in some ways you're just sitting in the back waiting for something to happen. And, honestly, you don't pick where you get to go, either.

When we thinking about finding meaning in life, then, we can think about it in terms of a journey. Finding meaning means choosing a destination for your journey. Which, of course, makes a big difference in how the journey goes, doesn't it?

Another way to think about this search for meaning in our lives is to draw from Jesus' analogy of finding a treasure. I'd like to tell you about two parables Jesus used to describe the kingdom of God. In the first one, he tells a story about a pearl. This pearl was so beautiful, and perfect, that it was extremely valuable. Maybe it was the size of a basketball and that's how people could tell it was valuable, but my guess is that it wasn't, but that there was something else about its beauty that drew people. And a man who had been a merchant of precious stones and precious metals and gemstones and jewelry of all kinds his whole life, found this pearl at a sellers market. And the price was outrageous, but he knew that this pearl was what he'd been looking for his whole life, so he sold everything and bought that single, perfect pearl.

Or there's a story Jesus tells about a man who was walking out in someone else's field and he found a treasure. And when he opened up the chest, it was filled with wonderful things. So he ran home and sold everything he had so he could buy that field and own that treasure.

When we think about meaning in our lives, then, we can think about where our treasure is--where we put our time and our energy and our money.

So, if I were you, I might be saying to myself right now, "All right, Amy, what's the most meaningful destination a person can choose?"

Now, seeing that we're in a church, I have to admit a certain bias, which is that as church people, as people who have committed their lives to God, whether through a time of personal prayer, or through our confirmation or our baptism, we believe that a life lived in service to God is the most meaningful possible way to live. Because it encompasses more than the self, more than family and friends, more than our nation. It encompasses the entire creation, this life lived in service to God. This is our chosen destination.

I have another traveling story for you. When I was older, we moved to the suburbs of Minneapolis. And one of those suburbs, Minnetonka, has some beautiful winding roads that wind through some beautiful wooded areas. And the reason I know that is this. I went one time to visit a friend who lived in Minnetonka. And on my way back, I came to a particular intersection where I could either go to the right, which was the way I had come, and then I'd have to go over a highway and around a complicated exit ramp, and kind of loop out of my way to get back on the highway, or I could go to my left. I decided that I'd go to the left, and just take turns in the direction of home as I went, and that way I'd eventually get home.

So I did that. And about 45 minutes later, I found myself back at the exact same intersection facing the same direction. I had gone in a long circle of winding wooded roads. This time I took the way I knew to get home.

There are some things we can draw from this story as we think about journey and meaning. First off, it's sometimes a good idea to go with the path that's already known, even if it seems a little out of the way, at first. But I think this story can also be an encouragement for joining up with others along the journey. Joining with others through regular worship, Bible study, prayer groups, and other ways of taking part in church life, means having travel companions, a road map or sorts, and plenty of examples of both how and how not to act.

Now the Christian tradition has plenty of examples of people who live amazing lives, but there are also those who lacked humility, love, kindness. It’s true, of course, that it’s easy to get distracted along the way, even for well-intentioned people. We may be distracted by wanting to have a sense of control over what happens in our lives or in the lives of other people. We may want to have a sense of financial security, or to have others' respect and admiration--a sense of accomplishment. We may just want people to like us and to have a good reputation. And I don't want to say that any of these things are bad, in and of themselves, but if they pull us away from moving toward God, toward a life of serving God & neighbor, toward our chosen destination, then they are distractions, and we need to let go of them.

I'm going to play a song for you in a minute, and while you're listening, I'd like you to meditate on a couple of questions. The first one is this: if we're going to decide to go in a particular direction, we need to first know where it is we're going now. So I'd like you to ask yourself, what direction am I headed now? Where amd I going? Where do I put my treasure - my time, my energy, my money, my love? What is my destination?

The second question is this: Are you ready to move in a new direction? Are you ready to commit or to re-commit yourself to a life lived in service to God? Are you ready to step out in a new way? Are you ready to commit to something larger than self, family, friends, community, nation, humanity?

I hope you will say yes, because while we are all journeying, while you are searching for meaning, for that sense of something larger than yourself, something deeper, rooted, grounded, God in all God's mystery, in all God's glory, in all God's beauty, is lovingly searching for you. Thanks be to God.

The song is by a band called U2. It's called "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," and is about someone who is searching and is on a journey.

I have climbed highest mountain
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you

I have run
I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

I have kissed honey lips
Felt the healing in her fingertips
It burned like fire
This burning desire

I have spoke with the tongue of angels
I have held the hand of a devil
It was warm in the night
I was cold as a stone

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

I believe in the kingdom come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one
Well yes I'm still running

You broke the bonds and you
Loosed the chains
Carried the cross
Of my shame
Of my shame
You know I believe it

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for...

Side by Side, OR What is the Point of Coming to Church?

2005-09-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

Scriptures: Matthew 20:1-16
Philippians 1:21-30

The workers in today’s gospel story both do and do not get what they expect. The owner of the farm comes to them and promises a day’s wages for a day’s work, and in the end that is what he gives them. But in the meantime he exhibits some strange behavior. Every few hours throughout the day, he goes back to the marketplace. Hey you, slacker! Why don’t you come and do some honest work. And you, over there—you look bored. Come and work for me. It’s the dream of every temp worker—to unexpectedly get work in the middle of the day. And what’s even better about it, at the end of the day the ones who didn’t work the whole time still get a full day’s wages.

I imagine that the first workers in the fields were paying attention when the owner of the farm drove up in his pickup to drop off a new set of workers. “He’ll probably pay by the hour,” they say to each other. When they watch him pay the newcomers a full day’s wage, I’m sure one turned to the other with a wink and said, “A little extra for us, then, eh?” So when they get to the front of the line, they get both what they expected and not what they expected: a single day’s wage for a single day’s work.

It is easy sometimes to think of time spent in ministry as a kind of labor for a wage. Some of us start young, from our first years in Sunday school, to pray to God, to serve others, to follow Jesus as best we can. There are also late bloomers, who come to God and a life of service after many years of wandering in the wilderness.

So if today’s parable leads us to expect that both the early birds and the slowpokes will get the same reward after all is said and done, then what is the point of starting early? Why go to church? Why work so hard? What’s the point of it all? Why not wait until the last possible minute, and then get a quickie baptism at the end, so that you can sail away into the sunset, gloriously sin-free?
Well, I think the short answer that Jesus is alluding to in his parable is this: living as a Christian, in some ways, doesn’t affect what happens after you die. Living as a Christian means paying attention to how you live your life now. That’s what Paul is talking about in today’s reading from the letter to the Philippians.

Paul is in jail, to be put on trial soon enough, for his so-called crimes against the empire. We know from church tradition that Paul was in fact later to be executed. And in this letter he knows that his death is near. Within a few months or maybe even a year or two, he will be reunited with Christ, whom he loves.
He writes to the church at Philippi from imprisonment, and talks movingly about what it means to be between conversion to Christ, and death in Christ. “For to me,” he says, “living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which I prefer. I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you.”

And this gets at something that I believe most of you already know, but that we can all stand to be reminded of, which is this: The life of faith is not a solitary exercise in working out our own personal salvation. The life of faith is one that must be lived in community, because our goal, ultimately, is not to derive personal satisfaction and fulfillment from our faith, but to participate in the salvation of the world. To do this, we need companions along the way. As Paul puts it, he’s ready to face his own death, but he’s glad to be alive because then he can help the Philippians and by extension the whole church. Part of the joy of being a faithful follower of Jesus is helping others grow in that faith.

Anne Lamott, a learner herself, writes about why she makes her son go with her to church: “Most of the people I know who have what I want—which is to say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy—are people with a deep sense of spirituality. They are people in community, who pray, or practice their faith; they are Buddhists, Jews, Christians—people banding together to work on themselves and for human rights. They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle; they are part of something beautiful.”

This is not to say that living together in community is always easy. Community makes demands on us that we don’t always want to bear. It’s easy in churches, too, to lose sight of what’s most important and get caught in conflicts over both fundamental and petty differences, caught in cycles of over-working ourselves, or caught in confusion or plain old boredom. So it’s important to step back and remember why we come together each week—why corporate worship is vital to a healthy prayer life, why service alongside our brothers and sisters is both nourishing and necessary.

The truth is that, like those laborers in the field, we do not have a monopoly on God’s grace, instead, God calls us to share the good news of the gospel, and to help each other live into it. Paul encourages the Philippians, writing, “Only, live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that, whether I come and see you or am absent and hear about you, I will know that you are standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel.”

My secondary title for this sermon is, you may have noticed, “What is the Point of Coming to Church?” For most of you, since you’re here, it’s pretty obvious you have at least some idea of your own. But let me share with you a final image of the church that I hope will be both an encouragement and a reminder. Sometimes people think of church as a big washbasin—a place to go and wash off their souls before going back to living their regular lives. Far be it from me to disapprove of a clean soul.

But I think a better analogy is that of a base camp for mountain climbers—we come back here from our hard labors for rest and nourishment, to trade stories, get better tools, and learn new techniques. But ultimately the purpose of the base camp is to help us go back up the mountain—to do the ministry we’re called to do.

In the next few weeks and months, the visioning team will be helping our church as a whole do an inventory of the base camp. We’ll check our supplies, see if some tents need to be moved around, determine if everyone has warm jackets to wear, and listen for God’s word on what mountain we’ll be climbing next. While the official kick-off isn’t for a few weeks yet, I invite you to begin your reflections now on the particular gifts of this particular base camp. What makes this church a particularly good jumping-off point for ministry? How might we challenge ourselves to grow deeper in our love for God and neighbor? Where is God calling us to next?

As I said in the beginning, the day laborers who began their work for the owner of the farm both got and did not get what they expected. When their focus was on outdoing each other and receiving more pay than a fellow worker, they were disappointed. But each of us has been given many gifts and more through God’s generosity. Let us share with each other, then, the joy of working for the coming reign of God. We may be surprised to receive much more than we could ever expect. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Gifts and Graces

2005-08-20T15:00:00.000-07:00

Scripture: Romans 12:1-8

A couple of months ago, I was lifting a bicycle up and down the stairs to my apartment, and I aggravated an old back injury. Now for those of you who have had back injuries know, “aggravated” is a total understatement for the pain and frustration this kind of injury causes. I had to sit on the bed to tie my shoes. I couldn’t lean over to pick anything up. I had to breathe very carefully or I’d get shooting pains around the back of my rib cage. Driving was hard because I couldn’t turn my neck around to see without those shooting pains again. I couldn’t really even sit still for long periods of time, because I’d eventually start to ache. And the weird acrobatics I had to go through to get an ice pack to stay in place would probably be funny to me now, if they didn’t start making me feel a little of that old discomfort.

In short, I learned that the two inches of muscle and tendon on the right side of my back, below my shoulder bone, are much more important than I had remembered. Those two inches of muscle and sinew literally keep me functioning as a normal human being.
In our reading from Romans this morning, Paul talks about a different kind of body: the church. Like a human body, the church has many different parts that all need to be working for it to function like it should. Each of us, as members of a faith community, has our own place and our own function in the church and in our lives.

Each of us, Paul writes, has a different gift to share with the church and the world.
Paul goes on to give a list of possible gifts each of us might have. We might have the gift of prophesy, making us able to put into words the message God has for the community. We might have the gift of ministry, being able to serve people in the way the need most. We might be gifted at teaching, helping people learn new things. We might be gifted at exhorting, which is to say that we are good at really getting people excited, encouraging them and inspiring them to action. We might be good givers, who do without so that we’ll be able to make a difference to others. We might have gifts for leadership, helping people get organized and on track to meet their goals. Or we might have gifts for compassion—being able to sympathize and comfort people in their difficult times. All these could be things we’re good at.

So which gifts do you have? Are you a kind ear? A piercing eye? A strong calf muscle? Are you a hard-working stomach, or maybe two inches of muscle right under the shoulder blade, keeping everything together?

This body image works for people in a congregation—we try to work with each other as best we can, and we need each other to do God’s work in the world. But it also applies to each congregation as a whole, including this one. Congregations are like body parts in the universal Christian church. Each congregation has its own gifts that the whole church needs and that the world needs, too. Just like a person, every church has its own history, favorite ways of doing things, quirks, and special gifts. What are this church’s gifts? If this church were a single person, what would that person be like? What would that person be good at?

There is a second layer to what Paul is saying about gifts, which is this: when you use your gifts, the way you go about it is important, too. If your gift is to give, be cheerful as you do it. If you’re a compassionate type, have integrity and keep people’s confidences. If you’re a leader, do a thorough job. Teach with passion, because you love what you’re doing. Minister joyfully because you are ready to share what you have.

And this brings us back to how Paul frames this section of his letter to the Romans: he surrounds it with grace. By God’s mercies, he says, you’ll be able to do this. And I think that grace is really what’s at the center of this passage. Because grace is what makes our service possible.

I recently read this story about a little boy whose mother wanted him to clean his room. “Go clean your room now, please,” she said. He went to his room, but when she went to check on him, he was playing in a corner, the bed wasn’t made, and the room was still scattered with toys. The mother said, “What were you supposed to be doing in here?” The boy answered, “Cleaning my room.” “Did you do it?” she asked. “No…” “Well then,” she said, “let’s have a prayer, so that you can apologize for not obeying, and can ask Jesus to help you do what you should.” They had their prayer, and the little boy seemed encouraged and ready to clean his room. The mother, encouraged as well, left him to his work. But when she came back to check in again, the little boy was sitting in the middle of the floor. His room still wasn’t clean. She said “What happened?” He answered, “I’m waiting for Jesus to come help me clean my room!”

While I don’t think that Jesus is going to come help any of us clean our rooms, at least not in the way our little boy was expecting, I do believe that we can rely on God for a different kind of help in giving our gifts to one another. The way we can be ready to receive that help is through a regimen of regular rest, gratitude, and listening. This will allow us, over time, to present our whole lives to God as something sacred, what Paul calls a holy and living sacrifice. These practices allow God to renew our minds and transform us.

First, then, is regular rest. Human beings need sleep and good food and exercise. Our bodies aren’t just machines that carry our heads around like robots, they’re part of our whole self—who God created us to be, and taking good care of them allows us to be graceful servants to God.

As important as resting our bodies is resting our souls. This means taking time to unwind and enjoy being with family and friends. Taking time to sit and do nothing, or enjoy a hobby, or watch a sunset. God created us for work, but God also created us for pleasure. I think our Jewish friends have a good idea when it comes to keeping a Sabbath. One day out of seven, Jews who observe the Sabbath don’t do any work. They enjoy God and God’s creation, and rest their souls as well as their bodies.

The second practice for connecting to God’s grace is gratitude. God already gives us so many gifts. When we take time to rest, we can also take time to be thankful for those gifts. It might be something as simple as a beautiful garden, or a fun potluck dinner, or it might be something as long-lasting as family or friendships. We can also be thankful for the gifts God gives us, both as individuals and as the church, to share with the world. God gives all of us a great deal, and remembering that is our path toward connecting again to that sense of grace.

The third practice is listening. God will help us, but we need to make sure we’re headed in the right direction. Listen for what God has to say to you. Pause to spend time in prayer, read the Bible with an open heart, pay attention to what you’re passionate about. Sometimes our gifts are as much about what we really care about as they are about where we have skills or abilities. If you really care about something, if you really enjoy working on it, if you really hear God calling you to it, then you will go about that service as Paul describes: with passion and a joyful heart.

Like with giftedness itself, these practices are not just for people—they’re for churches who want to connect with God’s grace. Regular rest, gratitude, and listening help the church stay on track and present itself as a holy and living sacrifice to God. They help God renew the church and transform, or, if you will, reform it.

The good news for today, then, is this: God gives us many gifts, but does not expect us to use them without help. Instead, our gifts are a way to take part in a strange and mysterious circle of love, joy, and grace. Through God’s grace we receive and give those gifts. Through God’s grace, our minds are renewed and our lives are transformed. Through God’s love, we are called both to rest and enjoy, and to share that love with the world.

Let us go out into the world, then, to share that love in our own particular ways. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Conversation with God

2005-08-10T10:55:00.000-07:00

Scripture: Matthew 15:10-28

This morning’s Gospel reading is not my favorite story about Jesus. As he is walking down the road with the disciples, a Canaanite woman comes running, calling out to Jesus for help. She’s noisy, pushy, knows what she wants, and won’t let up. The disciples, in typical style, try to make her go away.

Now this is where I start to wish there were a different reading for this Sunday. In many other stories, Jesus is much nicer. In the story of the children who want to meet Jesus, he tells the disciples, “Let the children come to me.” In the story of the paraplegic, Jesus sees the man being lowered through the roof and shouts his approval right away. In the story of Zaccheus the tax collector, Jesus looks into the sycamore tree and calls Zaccheus to him. And not only that, he goes to Zaccheus’ place for dinner!

So the first disturbing moment for me is when Jesus ignores the woman. Her daughter is sick! She’s shouting after him! But Jesus ignores her. And when she keeps persisting, it gets worse. Jesus insults her: “The bread I have is for the children, not for the dogs.” Jesus calls this woman a dog. We’ve just heard Jesus dismiss the Pharisees as “the blind leading the blind” and he’s often blunt—rarely pulling his punches, but still: it kind of ties a knot in the old “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelet, if you know what I mean.

So as I say, this is not an easy text. But I think there are two things going on in the story that we should examine.

The first thing to think about is this: Jesus had a way of meeting people where they are. If a man’s riches were getting in the way of a relationship with God, Jesus would tell him to sell them. If a woman needed to tell her story of long illness and pain, Jesus was ready to listen. If a person was thinking about following Jesus, but wasn’t ready to make a final decision, Jesus simply said, “Come and see.” For the Canaanite woman, then, I wonder if Jesus saw in her a real need to wrestle with him before she could receive a blessing. Sometimes we don’t want things handed to us on a plate. Sometimes we need to feel like the good things are worth struggling for. And sometimes we need to have a good matching of wits—a personal connection—before we’re ready to accept healing.

I went to my first visit with a new doctor a few months ago. And I left not wanting to go back again. It’s not that the doctor didn’t take my temperature, or listen to my heart or ask me if I had particular complaints. It was that she seemed rushed. She didn’t want to chat things over—she wanted to either get me the right pill or get me out of there.

Now it’s entirely possible that my doctor was having a bad day, and it’s also possible that Jesus was having a bad day, but I think by the time Jesus tells the woman not to expect any bread from him, she has his full attention.

And this may be where the real moment of healing is found in the story. Not when the little girl recovers from her demons and is free to be healthy and normal again, but when Jesus looks the Canaanite woman in the eye and sees her—really sees her. The healing is not only in the recovery of the little girl, but also in the conversation Jesus has with her mother. Jesus hears her, and it changes his mind.

This is the second important moment in the story. Granted, I’ve just said that Jesus may be pushing on this woman because he knows she is up to the fight. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t affect him. She makes a real change in his attitude.

Jesus focused most of his ministry on a specific group of people—what he calls “the lost sheep of Israel.” This group of people had its own vagaries, its own foibles, its own flaws. It included traitors, prostitutes, drunkards, and other sinners who were not accepted in polite society. These were the lost sheep, and Jesus felt called to be with them. He said, “Well people don’t need a doctor. It’s the sick who do!”

This drove the Pharisees nuts. Here is someone going around the countryside as a teacher, healing people and making strange pronouncements about God and God’s work in the world, yet he eats with sinners all the time! He wears the wrong clothes, talks to the wrong people, and doesn’t respect tradition.

Jesus fires back in the first section of our reading from Matthew: Respecting tradition isn’t the same thing as respecting God. When it comes to who’s in and who’s out of God’s kingdom, you don’t have any idea. Washing your hands is no good if your heart isn’t clean.

So Jesus had a very clear picture about what his mission was: to reach out to those lost sheep. And he also believed that his mission was limited to the people of Israel. This is not a new theme. Much of the Old Testament tracks what looks like divine favoritism—choosing Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, David. Choosing Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Ruth. The people of Israel for many years had a particular covenant with God, a relationship that was different from anyone else’s. Jesus’ mission statement read: “Bring the kingdom of God to the lost sheep of Israel.” No need to go further.

And this is where the conversation becomes so important. The Canaanite woman, ready to go to the mat for her daughter, opens Jesus’ eyes. She knows without question that he can heal her daughter, so she uses his own words against him. He says: dogs don’t get to eat the children’s bread. She says: yes, but they still get the scraps.

Because we don’t normally think of Jesus having his mind changed or learning something new, this story is shocking. Shouldn’t Jesus already know everything? But the Canaanite woman challenges him and wins—his ministry is not, after all, only for Israel, but for the lost sheep everywhere.

Prayer at its best is conversation with God. And what are we hoping to do when we pray, if not change God’s mind? The Canaanite woman is clever and courageous in her encounter with Jesus. He treats her as his equal and concedes her point. This is the good news for us today: God does not come to us as someone who is higher than the rest of us, as someone who never makes mistakes, as someone who has all the answers. God comes to us as a human being and listens to us—both our protests and our praises. God is ready to have a conversation with us.

This moment of grace in Jesus’ ministry is important for all of us in this sanctuary, because it marks Jesus’ willingness to not only minister to the Jews but also to the Gentiles. It is hurtful, at first, to hear the sting in the words—that we are the dogs and they are the children. But our salvation hangs in the balance, and without the persistence of the Gentile woman on her daughter’s behalf we might not be in the same place we are today. Jesus might not have seen through the false division between Jew and Gentile. Jesus might not have recognized that faith can be found in unexpected places.

We, then, were outcasts at first, but we’ve been welcomed into the sheepfold. We’ve been healed because of a change of God’s heart. We are the ones who stood outside and who have only belatedly been let in. God’s great gift of mercy is ours. And it is just that—a gift, not a birthright.

What does this story mean for our own ministries? For our own lives?

First, it means that as recently-welcomed sheep, we should always be wary about trying to decide who’s in and who’s out. Jesus’ warning to the Pharisees holds true today: washing your hands doesn’t mean your heart is clean, and respecting tradition is not the same thing as respecting God.

Second, instead of trying to decide who’s in and who’s out, let’s see if we can’t do what Jesus did: bring love and healing into the world through our everyday lives. There are people of great faith in unexpected places, and the Holy Spirit is stirring in hearts you might never suspect. Let’s not only stay open to that Spirit; let’s do all we can to help it.

Finally, in our personal time with God, the good news is this: God welcomes our conversation. God loves us as we are, not because we were born into the right family or because we say the right things, or even because we come to church. So tell God the truth. Strive for honesty. Because God is still speaking and God is ready to listen. Thanks be to God, Amen.

Through the Deep Waters

2005-08-07T13:24:00.000-07:00

Scriptures: Matthew 14:22-33
Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28

My brother got back from a trip to Scotland a few weeks ago. He showed me his pictures of Loch Ness this weekend. The water, he said, was very dark and it looked deep. And in the pictures, the water certainly looks forbidding. It was a grey color, like iron, with only a hint of dark blue in it. Looking at the water, and recognizing how deep the lake is, it doesn’t surprise me that this is the legendary home of a certain fabled water monster named Nessie. Even on the mild day my brother was there, the water seemed to hold secrets.

The Sea of Galilee, where the disciples find themselves in our story today, could easily be compared to Loch Ness. It’s wider than the Scottish lake, but only about 20 miles long. When I was comparing them very scientifically in my college geography textbook, they seemed to be roughly the same size. Which is to say, large enough to be many fathoms deep with dark, murky waters.

The setting, then, for reading from Matthew, is an ominous one. Not only are the waters deep and dark, not only have the disciples have been sent out into the middle of it alone, without Jesus, but night is falling and a storm is rising. The little boat begins to rock and crash as the waves get higher and the rain is falling down. The disciples batten down the hatches. There are experienced fishermen among them who know what trouble looks like. The forces of chaos, the unknown, and destruction surround them.

In the middle of what must at least be considered a tense situation, Jesus decides to walk out to the disciples huddled together in the dinghy. Peter looks out on the water and sees him. Now, the last thing Peter saw Jesus do was to feed 5,000 people with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. That was pretty impressive. But it’s the kind of thing that’s sort of not breaking the rules, if you know what I mean. More bread can be made, more fish can be caught. It’s just that this time they appeared without anyone knowing exactly how. But walking on the water is another story. In fact, this is the kind of thing that only the creator can do—tame the wild waters of chaos and disorder. So when he thinks he sees Jesus on the water (and remember that they didn’t have semaphores or fog lights in those days) Peter hesitates:

“Is that you, Jesus? Really you?”

Jesus says, “Yes, I am who I am.”

“If it’s really you, tell me to walk on the water with you.”

Jesus answers, “Come.”

Peter gets out of the boat, and at first he succeeds, but his success is short-lived and he sinks into the crashing waves.

“Save me!” he cries out.

Jesus runs up to him, lifts him back into the boat, saying, “Oh Peter, why did you doubt? Why did you vacillate?”

And as the disciples fall down worshipping Jesus, the waters of the sea smooth and settle into gentle ripples.

The ancient Israelites, who lived more than 1000 years before Jesus, did not imagine the act of creating the world, as we sometimes do, as one of bringing something out of nothing. Instead, God’s work was to bring order to the chaos of what already existed—water. In the beginning, Genesis tells us, God’s Spirit hovered over the waters. Later God begins to form the world by splitting the water to make sky and ocean, and then commanding the ocean to draw back, revealing land below. Water, in the creation stories, is unformed, chaotic raw material.

For the early Christians in Matthew’s community, who felt like they were out in the middle of the lake alone, the chaotic waters of our gospel story take on the added dimensions of persecution, helplessness, and loneliness. Numbers have already left because the going was too rough, and God seems very distant. They are in danger, with no help in sight, and they can’t see the shoreline.

How many of us have been in a similar situation, with the waves crashing ominously against the sides of our boat, and with no land in sight? The deep waters could be many things to us—grief and illness that threaten to drown us in pain, or a long-standing, deep-seated stuckness in the form of spiritual dryness, unemployment, or relationship problems that keep resurfacing.

And then there are the times when we are very conscious of our own deaths. In the church I grew up in, it is common to baptize babies, but it is important to remember that for both infants and grown-ups, the time spent underwater is symbolic of death. Joseph, in our story from Genesis today is in such a life-threatening situation when his jealous brothers throw him into a waterless pit. He will die quickly if they decide to leave him there in the desert heat. The waves crash hard against his boat. It’s not much of an improvement when the brothers pull him out of the pit so they can sell him into slavery. Joseph is going through the deep waters, with no shore in sight.

Of course, the fact that Joseph could die for lack of water may give us a different perspective on water as a symbol. That is, we need it to really live. Chaos and the unknown, persecution and difficulty, are baptisms that help us die to the old so that we can live to the new. Without water, I will die, but through the deep waters I will die and live again.

So what do we do in a situation like this? When the boat is rocking and the deep waters threaten to drown us? What do we do? Watch for Jesus. When Peter saw Jesus walking toward them across the water, as only the Creator-God can do, when Peter saw Jesus taming the waves and confidently striding toward the boat, he was, to say the least, surprised. More to the point, he did not believe his eyes. “Is that you, Master?” He called out. Jesus answered, “Yes,” but it a particularly meaningful way. He echoes God’s words to Moses on Mt. Sinai from more than a thousand years before: “I am who I am,” I am, in other words, your teacher and your God. I am the one who created you, and who walks beside you. I am the one who can tame the waters. I am.

And then comes the most critical moment in this story. For some of us hearing this story, we think it is a story about Peter being able to walk on the water with Jesus. If only—we think—if only we had enough faith to get out of the boat and start walking on the water. Peter almost did it, but then failed. But maybe with enough faith we can make the seas smooth and placid, walk over the water like it doesn’t affect us, calm the storms and stop the waves that are crashing against our boats.

But Peter walking on the water and then sinking into it is not the most important moment in the story. The most critical moment for us boat-dwellers comes now: Peter says, “If it is really you…” If it is really you, Jesus, show me a sign. If you are really God, prove it to me. If it is really you, make it possible for me to get out of this boat and walk on the waters with you.

This time Jesus gives Peter the sign he’s looking for, and Peter walks on the water, however briefly. And I think many of us have had those brief experiences that feel like walking on water—we are above and beyond the troubles of the world, and we feel the perfect love of God for the world, or the unity of all creation. But those are moments God gives to us as a gift. They are an encouragement for our faith, but what takes faith—real faithfulness—is for us to stay in the boat. To watch for Jesus coming across the water when we feel most alone. To feel the waves and know they are real and that we are in danger. To be ready to die to the old so that we can live again the new life that Jesus promises us.

For many people a hard question about religion is this: how can you believe in God when there is so much suffering in the world? And the question is often asked with a sense of incredulity, as in, “How can you possibly do such a thing?” But I think for today there is an answer for how we can keep the faith. It’s not by avoiding the deep waters, and it’s not by calming the waves crashing against our boat, and it’s not by walking on the water like gods. We can only do it—we can only remain faithful—if we are watching for Jesus.

Please pray with me:

Loving God, when it feels like we’re on the boat, with the storm coming up hard, be present with us. When we go through deep waters, comfort us. When we have to die to our old life, raise us up to new life in you. We pray, trusting in your Son Jesus, who walks with us now. Amen.

The Holy Mustard Empire

2005-07-24T12:30:00.000-07:00

Scriptures: Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

About two years ago, I tried to grow a tomato plant in a pot on a fire escape. I bought a tomato plant from the local nursery. It was about 4 inches high and was a promising true green color. As I carted it home, along with the pot and several bags of potting soil, I was full of tomato-visions. I imagined tomatoes on toast with cheese; tomatoes eaten raw like apples; tomatoes slices on a plate at dinner, lightly salted; and even tomatoes being turned into homemade spaghetti sauce—if I got ambitious.

I took the little plant home, planted it in the huge pot, and put it out on the fire escape to begin its sure-to-be-prodigious growing season. Two days later, though, I looked out the window and all that was left of what had been my plant was a thin green twig. A squirrel had eaten my plant like so much tender, delicious, tomato salad.

Disaster! I bought another plant, this time keeping the tender shoot inside until it would be bitter enough to defend itself from squirrels. When I finally put it outside, though, it died from the heat. I decided to put my gardening aspirations on hold.

I am guessing that a few of you are thinking to yourselves, “Aha! Another hapless soul I can give my extra tomatoes to,” and you’d be right. But keep in mind that I am the only person in my household who can eat tomatoes. And that I have never actually canned spaghetti sauce in my life.

Jesus talks about a different garden plant in today’s first parable: the mustard plant. As Jesus says, mustard seeds are indeed very small, but the mustard plant is not really a tree. Mustard grows to be a pretty big plant, as far as gardens go, sometimes getting to be 6 to 8 feet tall. At the most, 10 feet. But it’s not a tree, by any means. So what is Jesus doing here?

In Jesus’ time, trees were used as symbols of an empire. A mighty oak went with a mighty nation. Strength and power symbolized by a dignified, majestic tree. So when Jesus calls the mustard plant, he’s having a little fun with us. It would be as if he compared the noble bald eagle of the United States to the mighty pigeon as the imperial bird of the Holy Mustard Empire.

Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God, an empire under God’s domain—this Holy Mustard Empire—is very different from the empire he knew: the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire lasted for hundreds of years before and after Jesus’ life. It conquered most of the Western world in its day, encircling the Mediterranean Sea during Jesus’ lifetime.

Economically, the Roman Empire was starkly unequal. One percent of the people lived in lavish wealth while most of the remaining 99 percent lived in harsh poverty, mostly because of an overwhelming tax burden. Roman citizens, by contrast, didn’t pay taxes. The Empire punished rebels harshly, setting an example with brutality and wholesale destruction. Continual wars on the borders kept the Romans safe and happy at home while destroying the lives of the conquered. Life under Roman rule in Judea during Jesus’ lifetime was life under foreign military occupation.

Jesus’ Holy Mustard Empire is a very different empire, indeed. It’s something that starts out very small and unassuming, and then grows to be far more than is natural, normal, or expected. For a mustard plant to become a tree that birds can nest in is far beyond what anyone could ever expect. It would be as though my ill-fated tomato plants, instead of dying, had yielded a thousand tomatoes each.

Why this matters, what Jesus is trying to tell us is this: this is how God works. God is not an occupier, an emperor, a destroyer. God turns small things into unexpected avenues of extravagant love. God is the one that turns an ordinary mustard plant into a gigantic tree. God is the one that turns a little bit of yeast into enough for 150 people. God is the one who turns a sickly tomato plant into a thousand tomatoes. God is the one who builds a Holy Mustard Empire. But it starts small. Consider these examples:

Montgomery Alabama, 1955. A mustard seed is planted when a woman decides she’s not going to sit in the back of the bus anymore. 50 years later, their struggle is not over, but African Americans have won the rights of full citizenship denied to them since before the Revolutionary War.

New York City, 1969. A mustard seed is planted when a drag queen at a gay bar decides she’s not going along quietly with the police raid this time. A riot breaks out, and 35 years later gays have the right to marry in Massachusetts.
Judea, late 20’s and early 30’s. A mustard seed is planted when a dirt-poor carpenter collects twelve friends and starts teaching them what he knows about God. 2000 years later, millions upon millions upon millions have met God in Jesus and have dedicated their lives to the greater purpose of following him.

In your life, a long time ago, or maybe just recently. A mustard seed is planted with an unexpected kind word, or with a voice speaking to you deeply and mysteriously, or with a little thought in the back of your mind that says: “I want my life to MEAN something.” And now, through many dangers, toils and snares, your life is totally different from what you could have ever expected or imagined.

This is how God works. This is what God does. This is how The Holy Mustard Empire comes into being. From tiny seeds that yield a thousand tomatoes.
This is not the only way God works, of course. Sometimes God is more like a gentle rain that softens the soil. Sometimes God is like hidden yeast that makes the dough rise again, even after it’s pounded down. Sometimes God is like a thunderbolt that cracks and sends us running in the opposite direction. And sometimes God is even a sorter of hearts and deeds, throwing the bad fish out and keeping the good.

But I think the mustard seed approach is one of God’s favorites.

So what do we do with this vision from Jesus? I have, true to the preaching art, developed a three-point plan for you. It is this: notice, be grateful, and spread the word.

Let’s start with noticing. How might things be different for you if every night you asked yourself this question: Where did I see something extraordinary today? Where did I hear God speaking to me? When was that Holy Mustard Empire particularly close by?

What might you notice if you really started paying attention to the present moment, rather than being wrapped up in the past or the future?

Next, be grateful. This goes hand in hand with noticing, but I think it should be separated out because it’s so important and so easy to forget about. Gratitude is, I believe, the key to happiness in life. To quote Sheryl Crow: “It’s not having what you want; it’s wanting what you’ve got.” Gratitude, on a material level, lets us off the consumerist merry-go-round. We appreciate the things we have and don’t feel the constant need to buy more and more and more. Gratitude in terms of our personal lives lets us accept people for who they are and the gifts they bring. It allows us to be more accepting, more forgiving, more joyful.

Gratitude, in terms of the Holy Mustard Empire, is our opportunity to connect with God and to rest in God’s presence. It’s what worship is all about—praising and thanking God for all that God gives us. Praising and thanking God for this Holy Mustard Empire.

Granted, there are times for dissatisfaction, for hunger, for vision, for long journeys. But even in those instances we can be grateful to God. Grateful for the desire, grateful for the direction, grateful for the call, grateful for the accompaniment along the way. So be grateful. Start counting your blessings and your mustard seeds.

Finally, spread the word. This past year, the United Church of Christ has started casting out some mustard seeds through the God is Still Speaking campaign. An advertisement on TV, a banner in front of a church, a nice website, are each ways of getting the word out, that we have a lot to be grateful for. That God is doing unexpected things in our lives in unexpected ways. That all are welcome in the Holy Mustard Empire.

But this is not a job just for our denominational executives in Cleveland. Or even for an ad agency that believes in our vision of extravagant welcome. Spreading the word is our job, and our joy, too. The Holy Mustard Empire might touch our lives sometimes, but it does not belong to us—it is God’s alone and is meant to be shared.

So see if you can’t start noticing, and then start being grateful, and then start telling other people. It might be good to start small, if you’re out of practice. Make a date for coffee with someone else from church to sit down and tell each other your stories. Tell children where you’ve seen mustard growing in their gardens. Let your good friends in on the secret of the hidden yeast. And then let it grow into something you never expected.

Because, as you will continue to find out, God is Still Speaking, God is Still Planting Seeds, and God is Still Growing this Holy Mustard Empire. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hospitality to Strangers

2005-06-10T06:01:00.000-07:00

Scriptures: Genesis 18:1-15
Matthew 9:35-10:23

The last time I was here, I heard a very interesting story over coffee between services. It was about one of your former pastors. In the evenings, he would often take his dog out for a walk in the neighborhood, and while they were walking he would stop to chat with people they met, and to encourage them to come to church. And people would come, thanks to some friendly conversation and a dog.

This morning, I think the example this pastor set ties in very well with our reading from the gospel of Matthew in which Jesus sends the 12 apostles out walking to talk with the people of Judea. And I’ll tip my hand a little bit and give you the main point of the sermon right up front. I’d like you to reflect on this question: where and how is Jesus sending you to spread the word of God?

In the early days of the church, especially during the time that the gospel of Matthew was being written, churches were organized very differently from the way they are now. First of all, families were different. A household was often made up of a head of the household, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, married children, grandchildren, and servants. Christian churches back then were more like households than the churches we know with now. People lived together and took care of each other like in other households, but weren’t necessarily related to each other.

Along with the stationary households where people supported each other in their day-to-day lives, there were also wandering teachers, who would come to a new town for a few days, stay with local Christians, and preach about the kingdom of God. They carried nothing with them, and relied on the householders along the way. These were the people bringing the good news of God to the people, both to the ones who were already Christian and the ones they converted. If you read about the Apostle Paul’s journey, you’ll learn about the life one wandering teacher.

When we listen to this story, there is insight for us both as apostles—ones who are sent—and as householders receiving their good news.

First, we should notice that what motivates Jesus to send out the disciples is that he sees many people in need of their care. “They were like sheep without a shepherd,” the Scripture tells us, “harassed and helpless, and he was filled with compassion for them.” [inexact quote] The same is true today. For many young people, for example, it’s not uncommon to change homes every year or two, or to move to a different part of the country every three or four years. Many people spend so much time in front of the television that they don’t have time to make a meaningful connection with others, and our loneliness is pooling and expanding as each year goes by.

Jesus speaks about these people as a harvest, and that leads to our second piece of advice: Harvest what is ripe. Not everyone is in the right place in their lives to hear and accept a message of love and a call to discipleship, so don’t harp on people who aren’t ready.

The third bit of wisdom is this: offer everyone a blessing. If they welcome you, they’ll be blessed, but if they reject you, the blessing comes back to you. I’ve been in many situations where I felt like someone was working hard to convert me to something, and I felt like they were angry, which made me want to push away even harder. Instead, use a light touch—plan to bless people, and then let them make decisions for themselves.

Finally, Jesus counsels the disciples to heal and preach and perform miracles without expecting to be paid back. You have received freely from God, now it’s your turn to give freely. The work of evangelism is not about getting something from someone, or tricking them into something. At its heart, evangelism is about giving freely and openly of the blessings we ourselves have been given. Nothing more, and nothing less.

The instructions Jesus has for the householders are simpler, but still difficult. He is telling them to welcome these messengers, to support and care for them, and to be open to what God has to say through them! The consequences for disobedience are dire: Sodom and Gomorrah, which were destroyed in a rain of fire and hot sulfur, will have had it better than any householder who turns away a wandering teacher.

As we can see here, contrary to what you may have heard in the past about Sodom and Gomorrah, their chief crime was violent hostility toward strangers, and by extension to any new word of life coming from God. Let me review the story briefly: When angel messengers arrive in town bringing the warning that God is about to destroy it, the only person to welcome them in is a man named Lot. The town is already breaking the code of desert hospitality. In those days, not welcoming travelers could mean not just inconvenience, but death. Much worse, however, is that when night falls, the townspeople mob Lot’s house planning to brutally attack and humiliate the travelers. In the end, the angel messengers stop them, the town is destroyed and only Lot and his daughters escape.

Because the people of Sodom and Gomorrah were so wickedly abusive of any outsiders, they effectively condemned themselves to death at God’s hands. They attack the messengers who could have saved them and die a fiery death as a result. Clearly, none of us would ever commit such evil acts, but the story of Sodom and Gomorrah does raise a pointed question: Are we paying attention to the messengers God sends to us? Are we truly open to the word of God?

In today’s reading from Genesis, by stark contrast, Abraham gives us an example of perfect desert hospitality. He sees three strangers near his camp, and runs to them bowing and scraping, “Will you please do me the honor of being my guests?” “Will you please allow me to feed you?” When they consent he runs off again to make sure that the guests get the best possible food. He hand-chooses a perfect, tender calf to slaughter, and then tells Sarah to bake three cakes of bread out of approximately 20 quarts of flour. And the way the story tells it, all of this takes about ten minutes, although I find it hard to believe that a calf could be slaughtered and cooked whole in less than an hour. And I don’t think the leftovers would have fit in my refrigerator. At any rate, Abraham welcomes the guests extravagantly, as he was in the habit of doing, and on this occasion he gets a great blessing from them—the promise of a son. “We’ll be back next year,” they say, “and by that time Sarai your wife will be holding her own baby in her arms.”

Sarai is eavesdropping on the men. She laughs when she hears this. She’s an old woman who was never able to have children before. She went through menopause years ago, and even now she can feel in her bones that her death is coming closer. Would really be possible for her, old as she is, to be like a young woman again, heavy with a child, pink-cheeked and round, giving birth so late in her life? It seems improbable at best, crazy at worst.

But that is the news and the blessing from these strangers. It’s an unbelievable, crazy, almost embarrassing miracle—a baby. A longed for, hoped for, desperately wanted baby. What would that be like, to have lost hope, thinking it’s too late now, and to get the news that God is starting something new?

What if I told you that this congregation was going to have a baby? Not a literal baby, necessarily, but something new and unexpected and miraculous? Would you laugh like Sarah did? Well, I believe that this is the word that God has for this church today, June 12th, 2005: Start getting ready for the baby. Get your nurseries painted, get the baby clothes in order, get a new bassinette, and prepare yourselves for a lot of work and a lot of joy. Because the baby is coming. So start getting ready. Start getting ready for the baby.

The kingdom of God has come near. It is a kingdom where a woman who anyone would think is too old gets pregnant and has a baby. It is a kingdom where strangers come bearing strange and wonderful gifts. It is a kingdom of hope and healing, joy and love beyond our wildest imaginings and in spite of all evidence to the contrary. And it is near us now. So start getting ready. Thanks be to God! Thanks be to God, indeed!

Ordinary Places

2005-04-10T11:20:00.000-07:00

Scripture: Luke 24:13-35

Our gospel lesson this morning requires us to rewind back to the very first Easter. This Easter was a little bit different from the Easter we had two weeks ago. If your Easter two weeks ago was like mine, there was a lot of celebration time, a lot of worship, and a lot of food. And when I say a lot of food, I mean just that—A LOT of food. I still felt full two days later. And while two weeks ago was a kind of cloudy, rainy day, I usually associate Easter weather with the kind of weather we had yesterday—bright and sunny, warm, but with just a touch of a chill in the air still. Gorgeous weather, green grass, and beautiful spring flowers everywhere.

But that first Easter, when this morning’s gospel story takes place, there was no ham waiting at home to be popped into the oven for the big family dinner. (As an aside, does anyone else think it’s funny that ham is the traditional meal for Easter, when Jesus was a Judean and probably never ate ham in his life?) The mood for Jesus’ followers could be more easily compared to this country a few hours after the planes crashed into the towers on September 11th. We were confused, upset, grieving, and not sure what to do with ourselves. The disciples had lost their leader, and he had died a particularly humiliating death at the hands of the Roman occupiers. Now all the disciples were in retreat, with no leader, no center, and no direction, and on top of that grieving and possibly fearing for their own lives.

The two disciples, who are most likely a husband and wife, are on their way home to Emmaus, which is about a two-hour walk from Jerusalem. It’s getting on toward evening, and the light is dim, and they’re talking to each other in hushed voices: “What are we going to do now? I already miss him so much! Are they going to come after us?” Into the middle of this a stranger walks up from behind them.
“Why the long faces?” he says. “Did something happen?”
They respond, “Are you kidding? Haven’t you heard what everyone in Jerusalem has been talking about? We were following this great young guy—Jesus of Nazareth—and he was teaching us all these amazing things, and then on Friday the Romans grabbed him and crucified him, practically for no reason, and all of us who were hoping he could really make a difference are totally in the dark about what to do next. Now that Jesus is dead, it’s over. But some of our women are saying they saw Jesus alive in the garden this morning. We’re not sure what to make of it, and we’re tired. We’re going home now.”

The stranger answers them: “Listen, I don’t think you’ve been paying close enough attention to the scriptures.” (By this he means the Old Testament) And he goes on to point out all these different ways that Moses and the prophets predicted what Jesus would do, and how the one anointed by God would have to suffer as part of his mission. It was a Bible study on the road.

So they’re about to the disciples’ house, and the stranger makes as if to keep going on down the road, but the couple insists that he come to stay with them. Finally he relents and they bring him home to share dinner with them and to put him up for the night. At the dinner table, they’re about to eat, when the stranger does something they don’t expect. He takes the bread and blesses it in a certain way that they recognize from somewhere. Then he takes the wine they’ve put in front of him and he blesses that, too, and suddenly they realize: They’ve been talking to Jesus for the last hour and a half! And then, all of a sudden, the stranger, who they now realize is Jesus, vanishes into thin air. The one disciple turns to the other and says, “No wonder my heart was burning inside me while we were walking down the road!”

I’ve just finished reading a book you may know called Life of Pi. When the main character, Pi Patel, is in his early teens, he discovers Christianity. Raised by his parents as a Hindu, Pi is unimpressed when he first learns about Jesus. Compared to other incarnations of gods, Jesus can hardly do anything. He never grows to 40 feet tall or wages war with tremendous powers, and other gods would never, ever endure a humiliating death on the cross. Pi is irritated and under whelmed. But soon he discovers that he is fascinated by Jesus, in spite of this initial reaction. Somehow the very humanness of Jesus makes him compelling in a way Pi never initially imagined could be true. Soon he has decided to follow Jesus himself and becomes a Christian. There is more to the story, but I’ll let you read it for yourself.

The walk to Emmaus raises many mysterious questions: Why don’t the disciples recognize Jesus right away? How is it possible for Jesus to appear and speak and break bread one moment, and then to disappear the next? What is the mysterious power the disciples felt in their hearts as he spoke to them? But what is most mysterious, and perhaps most characteristic of Jesus in this story is that even while he’s doing something so outside of nature and our usual experience, he still does it in an ordinary way: by walking with the disciples, by teaching them about the scriptures, and by blessing wine and breaking bread. And I think this simplicity can teach us something about God.

This week, I’ve seen many images of people who do not always do things simply and humbly the way Jesus did. I don’t know if many of you follow the British royals. I don’t usually, but I’ve been interested in watching the lead-up to the marriage of Charles and Camilla in the last few weeks. Here are two people who made a tremendous mistake over 25 years ago, when they decided not to marry each other. And behaved badly as a result of it. And yet there they are in the church, with the priest asking them, “Will you be faithful?” as part of their vows, but also as an understated rebuke, and they answer with feeling: “That is my resolution, with God’s help.” England’s heir to the throne, with all his titles and inherited respect, still has to stand before God to confess his weaknesses.

The pope’s funeral also comes to mind. Thousands of people stream by to pay respects to this man in the gorgeous setting of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The pope is laid out in fine robes, with two deep red pillows under his head. Here is the man who has headed the Catholic Church and its 1 billion adherents for over a quarter of a century. He’s like the Christian Bill Gates. But if you look at the picture closely you’ll see that death is the great leveler for him, too. Beneath all the velvet, and behind the tremendous role of being Pope John Paul II, this man named Karol was just a man like any other, and now he has died. His small frail body is all that remains.

I think it is meaningful that the disciples don’t recognize Jesus until he breaks the bread and blesses it in front of them. For them, that is the essence of who Jesus is, and it reminds them of his total humanity when even his teaching did not. If you have ever been in the presence of a loved one who is terminally ill, you may have an idea of what I mean about this essence of a person. When I was an intern as a hospital chaplain, I met a man who I remember very clearly even now. I met him when he had already been sick for a long time, and had lost most of his hair. He was usually heavily drugged, but I could still see what his essential personality was like—loving, giving, funny and caring. And I could tell what expressions were his—what habits of speech and eyebrow raises that made him distinctively himself. And this is, I believe, the person that God loved in him. Not necessarily my friend when he was well and healthy and capable, although of course God loved him then too, but not because of his accomplishments or his abilities, but because of who he is in his essence—that distinct personality. I think what the disciples saw when they recognized Jesus all of a sudden: that particular, strange habit of his—blessing the bread and the wine the way he always did—that is what opened their eyes to the person sitting in front of them. The essential Jesus.

The good news in this story is twofold. First, God loves us for our essence, not for our accomplishments, whether we are a pope in Rome, a prince in England, or someone a little less famous in Baltimore, Maryland. Jesus speaks to us in simple ways through bread and juice and dinner with a wise stranger, and God loves us deeply and richly without our ever having reached our or responded to God.

Second, Jesus can still speak to us in the everyday and the ordinary. This story is often considered a text about communion, but I think that for Jesus communion and a common meal shared with friends were one and the same. So we can also interpret this text as an encouragement to remember and be thankful for the many gifts that God gives us—the promise of resurrection, companionship in our spiritual journeys, and on a more basic level, the food we eat every day. This is a foundational story about saying grace before a meal.

If you aren’t already in the habit of saying grace before meals, I suggest that you remember this story and give it a try. Too often today, many of us are rushed in our daily lives. We want to accomplish so much and so much more, and we barely have time to eat, much less to prepare a meal for ourselves. And really, wouldn’t it be more convenient if we didn’t have to eat so much or so often? It would so much easier to get things done. But God didn’t build us that way. Our bodies have limits. So let grace before your meal be a reminder of your own limits and the fact that God loves you as you are, and provides for you as you are. The prayers don’t have to be complicated: a simple, heartfelt “thank-you” is enough to start. But the moment of quiet and contemplation—time to slow down, however briefly—is something nearly all of us can use more than once in our days.

My hope for all of you, as you go out into the world today, is that you will begin to encounter Jesus in unexpectedly ordinary places. May you be blessed in the nourishment of your bodies and in the nourishment of your souls. And may you encounter, too, that strange power those disciples felt on their walk home, that your hearts will burn within you with love and with hope. Amen.

I'll Sing On

2005-03-14T17:05:00.000-08:00

Scripture: John 11:1-45, Ezekiel 37:1-14

There is at least as much drama in today’s reading from the gospel of John as you will find in an episode of America’s next Top Model. Maybe not quite as many fabulous clothes, but at least as much drama.

The story starts like this: Lazarus, Jesus’ much-loved friend, is sick to the point of death. So Mary and Martha, who live in the suburbs of Jerusalem, send out a messenger to Jesus hiding out in the backwoods. “Jesus!” The message pleads, “Come quickly! Your dear friend is about to die!”

And then here’s the first twist: instead of jumping up and getting on the road right away, Jesus stays where he is for two whole days. What is he doing? What is going on here? It seems like a pretty straightforward decision—get moving as soon as you get the news. But there is this one problem: Jesus has recently had a run-in with the authorities in Jerusalem. And they want to kill him. And so the plot thickens—will he go to Bethany, practically under the noses of the people who are looking for him, to save his friend? Or will he stay in the hinterlands, away from the establishment’s watchful eye? One option could lead to his own death, the other will lead to his friend’s certain death.

Jesus opts for a grand entrance. He waits two days to make the day-long journey to Bethany, arriving on the fourth day after Lazarus’ death. This fourth day is significant because it’s the day that Lazarus’ death become most final. You see, in that time and place people believed that the spirit of the person hovered around the body for three days before leaving. So by the fourth day Lazarus was not just dead, he was really dead.

As he arrives, Jesus meets Martha first. Martha is the tough, stand-up, responsible sister. She is upset that her brother has died, but respects Jesus as her teacher and looks to him for meaning even now. In an understated way, she confronts Jesus, and he tests her belief—do you believe that the resurrection comes through me, Martha? And she answers: “I believe that you are the Messiah, the very Son of God.” In the midst of terrific grief, blinking through her tears, Martha stands strong in faith.

Mary is the more expressive sister. When she sees Jesus, all she can do is tell him about her pain: “If you had been here, Jesus, my brother would still be alive!” You can hear the tears of accusation and pain in her voice, saying “Why didn’t you come? How will I live without him?” And in response to her, Jesus starts weeping—deep sobs of grief. Her pain triggers his own. This isn’t some kind of trick to him. Lazarus isn’t a rabbit Jesus is planning to pull out of a hat. Mary, Martha and Lazarus are all people Jesus deeply loves, and the death pains him deeply.

But then it’s time to get down to business. Jesus makes a speech about how this sign is a miracle from God, and how he’s grateful for the chance to demonstrate God’s power. A very confident move, if you ask me. And then he tells the mourners to roll away the stone. Martha, a little too practical, points out that Lazarus’ dead body is going to smell pretty bad. Jesus ignores her, and shouts, “Lazarus, Come Out!”

If Jesus had just been a two-bit healer with some magic tricks up his sleeve, if Jesus had just been an interesting teacher who overreached his grasp, if Jesus had been some kind of a lunatic with a God-complex, nothing would have come out of the cave except the smell of a rotting corpse. The watching crowd holds its breath in suspense.

And then, a little awkwardly, Lazarus comes walking out of the grave. His hands and feet are still bound up but he’s alive. “Unbind him,” Jesus says, “and let him go.”

In many ways a story like this speaks for itself. Tonight I’d like to explore with you just three issues it raises: first the question of belief, second, experiencing resurrection, and third, eternal life.

In the past few months I have been wandering in and out of a few religion and spirituality message boards on the internet. These are places where complete strangers, almost inexplicably, are able to discuss their treasured beliefs and struggles very honestly. Some sites are better than others, of course, and there are always people more interested in provoking arguments than they are in having a real conversation, but this week I read a thread of conversation that gave me a lot to think about.

It started in the atheism section of the board. I’m curious, okay? I want to know what other people are thinking! The original post was written by a Christian who asked why the atheists were atheists, and what would convince them to believe in God. He got quite a few responses, some more thoughtful than others, and several people, when asked said that they would need a personal visit from God or something similar—and in their minds, impossible—before they would believe. Then someone else pointed out that even if they were to have something like that happen, they wouldn’t necessarily believe in God, because maybe what they experienced—what their senses told them—was wrong too. They would doubt their perceptions before believing in God.

And I think this problem is at the heart of what the gospel of John is trying to communicate about Jesus in our reading today. While the whole story is building up to Lazarus’ resurrection, what really gets the attention is Martha’s confession of faith in Jesus. Jesus delays for two days to make the resurrection more miraculous, and before he actually has Lazarus come out of the tomb, he makes a public prayer/slash/speech thanking God for the opportunity to demonstrate that he is the Son of God and to allow the people who witness this sign, this miracle to believe.

With this focus on belief, John is trying to tell people who Jesus really was, and what he really meant, to help them believe it too. But belief is a funny thing. A lot of my fellow internet posters like to wage long arguments with each other over who is right and who is wrong—to prove through logic or sheer force of rhetoric that Jesus is the person Martha believes him to be—the resurrection and the life, the way and the truth. But that’s not how belief works. Belief develops over time, not all at once, and doubt and uncertainty are valuable tools for developing a strong foundation of belief.

Learning to believe is like putting a puzzle together to see what fits. We try a piece, see if it fits with the others, see if it fits in with the whole, and then when it seems to work, leave the piece there and move on to the next one, knowing we may have to move it again later. Belief develops over time as what we experience and what we learn affects how we see the world.

This brings me to my second point and the first piece of good news in today’s story: Experiencing resurrection. There are two types of resurrection that creep into our earthly lives. One is what I might call an everyday resurrection: it’s an event that heals us, and breathes new life into us. An encounter with God’s presence that leaves us changed. A small movement of growth inspired by divine love and made possible through divine courage.

For example, I know I’m probably taking this a little too literally, but I love it that Jesus heals Lazarus by shouting “Come out, Lazarus!” How many of us have heard that call on our lives? A few weeks ago, after many years of not being out to my older brother, I finally came out, and it was a small moment of grace for me. I wrote him an e-mail that said, “my PARTNER Heather and I moved to Maryland, SHE has a great job she loves…” and so on. He wrote a simple reply catching me up on his family, with a blessing at the end. No words of condemnation, just a wish for my good guidance. I felt freed, like a final bit of cloth had been unwound from a sore and shaking hand.

There are moments in our lives that constitute larger and more dramatic resurrections. When we realize that the puzzle we’ve been putting together has different borders than we expected. When God reaches into the deadness of our hearts, whether the deadness comes from grief, old wounds, or our own hurtful mistakes, and transforms the whole thing into something beautiful and unexpected. When, like in the story of Lazarus, the death of a friend becomes an occasion for wide-eyed celebration. It might happen only once or twice in a lifetime, but when it does the world changes completely. These are the events that our baptism or its reaffirmation commemorates—our death in the water, and our rising to new life in Christ.

The dry bones in our story from Ezekiel receive the promise of a community-wide resurrection. I mentioned before that Lazarus in John’s story is not just dead, but really dead, right? Well, the people in Ezekiel’s vision are not just dead, not just really dead, but all that is left of them is an undifferentiated field of dead dry bones. But Ezekiel preaches to them, and they are built again from scratch. New muscles, new sinews, new skins, new hearts, new minds, new eyes. They are completely redone and made new, given new life at God’s word.

This, Ezekiel promises, is what will come true for the people of Israel who have been worn down to the bones by their occupation and exile at the hands of greater powers. New life, new strength and new hope given to them by God.

Finally, with all this talk of rising from the dead my second piece of good news is about eternal life. Because while our experiences of healing and resurrection make a difference in this life, the question remains, Will life continue in the face of death? Will what is real persist?

Lazarus’ resurrection is the final healing that Jesus does in the book of John before he goes to Jerusalem to die. And this is not a healing like any other—this healing demonstrates God’s power to give life through Jesus even when death appears to have the last word. The answer the story gives us to that question of eternal life is yes. Yes, God is stronger than death. Yes, eternal life is real and available to us. Yes, we will be free from death.

What can we do to accept this reality--to believe it--and to thank God for it and enjoy it? First, by paying attention to all the signs of God’s healing work in our lives. The resurrection of baptism, the moments that change our lives on a grand scale as well as on a small scale are each puzzle pieces in a larger picture of eternal life. We can find the larger meaning in the events of our lives.

Second, we can take from this message God’s promise to bring us new life in this lifetime. We may feel as if we are huddled in the grave on the third day, dead and alone, but God is able and willing to make our lives new again—whole and clean and pure. And so today’s story is not only one about death and resurrection, but also about our lives lived today.

During communion tonight, we’ll be singing the song What Wondrous Love is This. And I’d like to close by singing for you the last verse of the hymn:

And, when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on
And when from death I’m free I’ll sing on
And when from death I’m free I’ll sing and joyful be,
and through eternity I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on,
And through eternity I’ll sing on.

The good news is this: today we are freed from death, and today is the day our singing begins. Thanks be to God, Amen.

Come and See

2005-01-30T13:29:00.000-08:00

Bible Text: John 1:29-42

The gospel of John is always a little weird to me. It’s very abstract. Our reading today comes from the first chapter, which starts out, if you can believe it, with poetry. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” It’s beautiful, yes, but it doesn’t lend itself to stories told around a campfire. And Jesus in the book of John tends to go off on these long monologues, to the point where the scene usually ends because he stops talking, not because there’s a resolution to the encounter.

In this reading, Jesus is fairly quiet and John is the one giving us a long speech. So maybe what will help with this is a little background on who John is and what he has to do with Jesus.

Earlier in the chapter, John quotes Isaiah to describe his role. He is the voice of one crying in the wilderness, making the way straight for the coming of the Lord. In other gospels, we get a little more detail about John. As the baptizer, John has gone out into the wilderness and started living a bare bones existence (all he eats are locusts and wild honey, and his clothes are equally rustic). He preaches to the crowds about the coming end of the world, and curses out the people he sees as hypocrites.

John is what you might call an extreme personality.

But he’s managed to get peoples’ attention, and he has some followers who are interested in what he has to say, including the two disciples we hear about today who go on to discover Jesus.

Now, why is Jesus out in the middle of the desert in the dry scorched land with John? And more to the point, why is he there several days in a row so that John can see him, point him out and then later the two soon-to-be disciples can follow him home? Because Jesus, when he was starting to get into his ministry, came to John for baptism and wanted to hear what John had to say. He was one of John’s disciples.

Of course, if you’re writing the gospel of John and trying to show that Jesus was divine, this is kind of an inconvenient fact. After all, if Jesus is divine, could he really have been someone else’s student? I like to think that Jesus was able to learn from other people. But the writer glosses over Jesus as a disciple just a little bit and has John become the one destined to reveal Jesus’ identity: “I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.” And it does seem likely that someone familiar with him, like John was, would have recognized Jesus’ unique abilities, and maybe something of his calling.

But in this story, we’re both seeing the end of Jesus’ time as a disciple and the beginning of his time as a teacher. And here’s where I’d like to focus today: on how the disciples begin their journey with Jesus. First John tells them about Jesus, they respond, and then Jesus invites them to simply, Come and See.

In other gospels, Jesus tells some of the disciples to follow him and he will teach them to fish for people. Does that ring a bell for any of you? Okay, good.

When I was little my dad, my sister and I would go fishing for bluegills. We would put a worm on the hook, and a bobber on the fishing line, and cast the line out. Then we’d watch patiently to see if the bobber dipped down into the water, which meant that a fish had taken the bait. Well sometimes. Sometimes it meant the hook had caught on a rock.

In this story, though, the fishing method used is a little more like something I remember from my days of watching Sesame Street. (I know what some of you are thinking, and it really was a while ago folks, okay?) Anyway, Bert and Ernie are out in the boat, and Bert asks Ernie where the fishing poles and the tackle are, and Ernie says, “Oh we don’t need that,” and he puts his hand to the side of his face and calls out, “HERE Fishy Fishy Fishy, HERE Fishy Fishy Fishy.” And then the fish jump in the boat. No need for bait or a bobber, or a special reeling technique—just call to them and they jump in the boat.

In this case it’s John putting out the call—the “Here fishy fishy fishy” of the story, if you will. And then the two disciples jump in the boat. They come up to Jesus and say, “Teacher, where are you staying?”

If any of you have every met a celebrity or have had a teacher you really like but are afraid to approach, or maybe have ever had a crush on someone, I think you’ll have an idea of what the disciples are going through here. John has told them that Jesus is the one he’s been talking about, the one they have all been waiting for—the one chosen by God to free Israel—and they’re just a little nervous.

I had a professor in seminary who was really a very nice person, and very approachable and committed to teaching, but also relatively well-known. In fact, I saw her in a CNN special a few weeks ago talking about Mary Magdalene. Her name is Karen King. And I would be shocked if any of you knew who she was, because she’s kind of in a specialized field, but she’s, like, a big celebrity in the field of New Testament studies. I promise. My first year, I was taking a class from her and I made an appointment and went to her office hours, and really just wanted to ask her smart questions and have a conversation and make friends and have her like me, but with all that pressure, I don’t think I asked very good questions, even though I wanted to. I think I asked her what she liked about her job. She was very nice about it, and told me some interesting things about what it’s like to be a seminary professor, but still, by the time I left my hands were all sweaty and I was feeling a little shaky. I know, it might be a little bit of an extreme reaction, but that’s how it goes sometimes.

So the two disciples of John (soon to be former disciples) walk up to Jesus. And if I was nervous about my professor, how do you think they felt about meeting the Messiah? I mean really, what do you say to the Messiah? So, they came up with a question, and it might not have been the best one for showing off their smarts, but it seemed to do the trick: “Teacher, where are you staying?”

And Jesus smiles at them and says, “Come and see.” So they go over to where he’s staying and hang out for the rest of the afternoon. We don’t get to know what they talked about—I’d be interested to hear what the conversation was like—but the point is from that day onward they began to follow Jesus around and learn about his life. It was the start of their careers as disciples of Jesus.

I think we can learn a few things from this story today. There are some important tips here on how people can meet and start to follow Jesus. First, someone has to tell them about Jesus and second someone needs to invite them and allow them to Come and See what it’s like to live life as a Christian. The introductions are a two-part process.

While I’m up here, I might as well point out that some churches and some Christians are better at one or the other of these two things. Some people are very good at telling you all about Jesus, but maybe aren’t so good at living out the particular lifestyle they believe Jesus calls them to. Others of us, and I think this is more my area of weakness, are pretty good when it comes to organizing our lives around God, helping others, and trying to make a difference in the world, but when it comes to talking about Jesus, well, uh, that’s not so easy.

But it’s important to do, because part of our job in following Jesus is sharing with others that possibility of living it out. And I think it’s also important to notice that in our story, John doesn’t try to mount an argument or overpower the disciples. He just tells them what he’s seen God do in Jesus.

What have you seen God do in Jesus? I have seen God in Jesus working through the church on many occasions. I’ve seen sick people prayed for, mourning people comforted, food and laughter shared, and hearts healed. I’ve seen Jesus in the church in people working for justice, hammering away year after year at the seemingly intractable—homelessness and poverty, or like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the evils of racism. I’ve seen roofs re-shingled, walls painted, and hope restored. And I’ve seen God in Jesus in the tremendous response to the horrific devastation of the tsunamis in Asian. Jesus, son of God, is working in the world and I am a witness to it.

The first piece of the disciples’ call, then, was John being a witness to who Jesus is. Once they responded, the second piece was Jesus’ simple invitation: Come and see for yourself. Come and see what I’m like as a person. Come see how I live out my beliefs. Come and see what God is doing in my life. Come and see for yourself.

And this is really the best way for the disciples to learn about Jesus. Because following Jesus isn’t just an intellectual pursuit. You can’t read his complete works and comprehend them, and be done with it. Jesus is teaching us a way of life. And to learn a way of life you have to watch as well as to listen. Come and see whether it can be done. Come and see what it means to live it out. Come and learn how to do it. Growing in faith means being exposed to both the telling and the doing of following Jesus.

What does this mean for us today?

Well, for those of us who are ready to welcome others into the church, it is a reminder of two things. First, people are eager to meet someone like Jesus who can really make a difference in their lives. I know that I want to be in touch with something larger than myself, and to have a life with meaning and purpose. That’s true for people outside the church, too. Second, it’s a reminder that our role is not to coerce or convince or badger people. Our role is simply to tell them what we’ve seen and invite them to come and see for ourselves.

For those of us who are growing and searching, which I hope is everyone here, it is also an ongoing invitation to come and see. Jesus is still at work in the world so watch out! Keep your eyes peeled for the workings of the Holy Spirit. Pay attention to what God has been dreaming up. There is so much beauty and love to be witnessed to in the world. Don’t let it pass by unnoticed. Come and see for yourself what Jesus is about to do!

Jesus' Wisdom

2005-01-30T11:23:00.000-08:00

Scripture: Matthew 5:1-12, 1 Corinthians 1:18-24

Our gospel passage today is one that you may be familiar with. It is famous enough that it has its own name—the Beatitudes. If you were wondering what they all are, now you know--you’ve heard them here today. They are the opening to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. But before we get into the text too much, I want to point out that calling the beatitudes and the body of teachings that follow it “The Sermon on the Mount” could be a little misleading. This is not something that Jesus preached once, with Matthew the scribe jotting everything down. This is a compilation of what Jesus was teaching throughout his three years of public ministry. The Sermon on the Mount is what he was teaching on an ongoing basis. It is the heart, the meat of his teachings. And the Beatitudes are the opening flourishes, the beginning master strokes, the all important lead paragraph to this.

Which is why it’s so surprising to realize how weird they are. Or at least how counter-intuitive. The word translated as “blessed” in the NRSV is the same word often used in Jesus’ day to describe kings, nobility, and other powerful people. I’ve also seen it translated as “You’re blessed” and “Congratulations!” But when I think of someone being blessed or feeling blessed, I don’t think of what Jesus thinks of.
· Blessed are the poor in spirit. John Dominic Crossan, who studies the historical Jesus, suggests that Jesus’ original meaning was “Blessed are the poor, the homeless, the destitute.” I don’t know about you but when I see someone homeless my first thought isn’t: “How blessed that person must be!”
· Congratulations to people who are grieving! Huh?
· You’re blessed if you’re a gentle person
· Blessed are the people who are aching for justice
· Congratulations to people who show mercy
· You’re blessed if your heart is pure
· Blessed are those who work for peace – the peacemakers
· And finally the kicker—A big congratulations to you if you are suffering persecution for the sake of justice.

These are not the usual things our society associates with blessings. The way people normally talk about blessings, they usually consist of having enough to eat and a place to sleep, not of being destitute and homeless. Or they consist of having loving family and friends, not of grieving. They consist of having peace, mercy and justice, not of constantly working for it.

If I were going to come up with a list of modern-day beatitudes based on the values in our society, it might read something more like this:
· Blessed are the celebrities—they get all the attention
· Blessed are the rich—they can buy whatever they want
· Blessed are the powerful—the world is at their mercy

But this isn’t what Jesus is preaching. This isn’t Jesus’ wisdom. Jesus is preaching something radical and unexpected, and in the process telling us something about God—that God is constantly reversing our expectations. And Jesus doesn’t present them as what could be or what should be. These aren’t a set of Ten Commandments or even ten easy steps to a successful life/career/marriage whatever. Jesus is stating facts. Congratulations to the poor, to the grieving, the gentle. You are blessed. Congratulations to those who show mercy, who hunger and thirst for justice, whose hearts are pure, who work for peace. You are blessed. Congratulations to those persecuted for the sake of justice. You are blessed.

In our reading from Corinthians today, Paul is trying to justify the reason for an embarrassing fact about the developing Jesus movement—that the Roman state murdered its founder by crucifying him as a common criminal. How is it possible to consider Jesus specially blessed, when he died such a humiliating death? Paul’s answer applies to both his situation and Jesus’ own declarations of blessing. I’ll read it again:

“Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.”

In the movie I suggested for this week, Saved, Mary is a student at a conservative Christian high school. When she finds out that her boyfriend is gay, she tries to cure him of it, but winds up pregnant instead. Her best friend, Hilary Faye, is very good at using the language and the appearance of piety, but under the surface her real interest is controlling her friends and getting her parents to buy her a Lexus. In the realm of the high school world, Hillary Faye is influential and popular. By contrast another student, Cassandra, looks like a total mess. She smokes, she’s disrespectful, she refuses to commit her life to Jesus. But in this scene with Mary, Cassandra, not Hilary Faye, is the one who brings the blessing of friendship and understanding.

[Clip]

Here is a reversal of the expected order: the one who is an outcast, who refuses to participate in the hierarchy, becomes an agent of blessing. Did you notice the beatitudes playing over the beginning of the scene? Mary, too, who has departed from the rigid rules of her world is blessed anyway.

Here is the crux of the matter: for both Paul and Jesus, true wisdom at first appears foolish. But this is only to a world that does not recognize God’s active presence. God makes the difference between who appears to be blessed and who is really blessed.

How can we apply this to our lives today? I don’t think the intention of Jesus’ teaching is necessarily to convince us to go out and become the people he declares blessed, although that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing —the world is severely in need of mercy, humility, peace, and justice. I think what Jesus is looking for here, rather, is a conversion to seeing things the way God sees them, and then to act accordingly. A total soul makeover. And this is why I think these beatitudes are so central to Jesus’ core teachings. Because to be a Christian—to live out that life of following Jesus—means exchanging the world’s priorities for God’s priorities. And Jesus’ wisdom is in showing us what those priorities are: the poor, the grieving, the helpless, and for all people mercy, justice, peace.

What would living this out look like? Rather than praying like it all depends on God and then working like it all depends on us, we could work like it all depends on God, too, which is to say, by dreaming big. By expecting more than what at first appears possible. By counting on God when counting our resources. This applies to our personal lives, and to our community life—a good reminder for Annual Meeting. Second, by setting our sights on God’s priorities: justice, peace, mercy, the poor and the suffering. What we do with our time, our mental and physical energy, our financial resources, these can be directed toward God’s priorities or toward our own. Good stewardship is making the choice to live for God’s desires so that they will become our own.

This is, of course, a life-long project. But I heard something this week that I found very encouraging and I’d like to share it with you: Don’t strive for perfection—strive for progress. Make improvement your goal. And we can expect in our journeys unexpected blessings. Because God is present, God is active, and God’s grand project is worth our effort, our strength and our devotion.

May we all be blessed in the journey. Amen

The Jesus Thing

2004-07-18T13:23:00.000-07:00

Bible Text: Colossians 1:15-20, Luke 10:38-42

I have recently moved down here from the Boston area, where most of the UCC churches have a Congregationalist history, and where most of them also have a Unitarian church right down the street from them. This is generally because of a church split that happened about 170 years ago. So I’m not sure if it holds down here, but the joke in New England is that UCC doesn’t really stand for United Church of Christ, it stands for Unitarians Considering Christ!

While this not entirely accurate I think there is also a grain of truth in the statement, which is that it is not immediately obvious to many of us what Jesus should mean for us, how Christ should be a part of our faith picture, what he means in the larger context. In other words, we’re still working on the Jesus thing.

And it’s not like there aren’t competing visions out there for us to choose from. If you remember, there was the What Would Jesus Do phenomenon. Somehow I don’t think Jesus would have worn those bracelets, but we’ll move on from that. More recently, we had Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ show us images of a Jesus tough enough to take whatever inhuman suffering the Romans could dish out. And of course one of my favorite oddities comes from the movie Dogma. If you haven’t seen it, it’s something of a satire on religion in America. There’s a part in the movie where the Catholic Church decides on a new kind of an image for Jesus. Instead of the sacred heart of Jesus, for example, which is very serious, and something of a downer, they were rolling out the new, updated Buddy Christ, who is always ready with a thumbs up, like so. Okay so it’s only a movie—I don’t think we’ll be seeing statues like that in our neighbors’ churches anytime soon.

But when I think about it in my own faith life, Jesus has been something of a puzzle to me, too. Here is a human being that we worship, but in the Old Testament we hear that we’re not supposed to worship anyone but God. And how is it really possible for a human being to be born from the union of God and a woman? In other words, how can Jesus be both divine and human at the same time?

This is not a new question. Today we might have trouble with the divinity of Jesus, and want to think of him as only a human, but one who was very wise. But in the 3rd or 4th centuries, AD, the problem was often that people didn’t believe he was human. And further back, around the time of our readings from Colossians and Luke, people had plenty to say about who Jesus was and what he meant for the movement that followed him.

The writer of Colossians addresses the Jesus controversy of his own day. He writes against people who didn’t think that Jesus had made salvation possible, and who taught that believers needed to do other things, like worship other beings, for that salvation. So, central to this debate is who Jesus is, and the writer draws from an older text: an early hymn about Jesus. There are many images of the Christ in this hymn. In it, he is the visible image of the invisible God, first-born from the dead, the means by which God created the world, the head of the church, and the source of its life. And finally, through the blood of the cross God reconciled the world to God’s self.

All right, I’ll admit that I have a problem with this last image of Jesus as the one who saves by suffering and dying—the blood of the cross. Going back to Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ, if we focus only on this way of seeing Jesus, we are only seeing part of who he is, to begin with, and can lose sight of the resurrection. While there is a power in thinking of love in terms of the amount of suffering a person will do—it is very humbling to consider it, thinking of Jesus suffering for me, this is not a healthy basis for good relationships. Let me explain.

After I graduated from college, I spent a year as a volunteer in Washington, DC, working with immigrant survivors of domestic violence. I took a lot of phone calls from people who were suffering and in danger. I was shocked to learn in my work that sometimes members of the clergy were an impediment rather than a help in these types of situations, recommending that the person suffering the abuse continue to endure it as a way of participating in the suffering of Christ.

Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross, caused by an oppressive Roman empire, is a tragedy and not something good, in and of itself. What makes the death of Jesus anything more than the silencing of yet another outspoken leader is this: what God does with it. God takes rejection, torture, and killing, and turns it into reconciliation for the whole world. Jesus becomes the firstborn from the dead—the first one to be resurrected—which makes it possible for us to experience that same resurrection, and that same experience of eternal life. That eternal life is life lived in the presence of God, free from the barriers of sin and guilt. Reconciliation

In our gospel lesson, Mary sits with Jesus and listens to him. Her relationship with Jesus is personal and affectionate. She can speak to him, ask him questions, and hear what he has to say. As the Colossians reading suggests, Jesus is for her the visible image of the invisible God. She is in the presence of God, without barriers. This relationship, this dwelling in God’s presence, is that better part that Jesus refers to.

Which brings us back to my question from before: how can Jesus be both human and divine? I admit that how this actually works is beyond me. But here’s my attempt at explaining why it’s important: Jesus is both human and divine because salvation is this relationship between people and God. But it’s hard to have a relationship with a symbol or an idea. Jesus is a human being who is also divine. A relationship with him is the substance of salvation. And because of the transformation of Jesus’ death, God has made it possible for us to have a relationship like Mary’s and Jesus’: one with both the intimacy of friendship and the freedom required for love. We can have this kind of a relationship with God, and in this way find our salvation.

This is indeed good news, and cause for celebration—that the creator of the whole universe is not only open to a relationship with us, but has already made the path open to us. What a gracious and tremendous gift!

Let me finish with a few suggestions of how to accept this gift friendship with God. First, recognize that like any friendship, it requires time and attention. If you haven’t been much of one for prayer, start small so that you’ll be able to keep it up for the long haul. Second, strive for honesty. God already knows everything about you, so there’s no use pretending something isn’t true. If you’re angry, say so. If you’re grateful, say so. If you’re worried, say so. If you’re elated, say so. The point is not to be perfect. The point is to be in a close relationship. Finally, listen as well as speak. Spend some of your prayer time in silence and waiting. Listen to the people around you who love you. Listen to the circumstances of your life and what they may be telling you about God’s will for you. And in all these things trust in the deep and abiding love of God. I’ll close with a part of a hymn you may know:

What a friend we have in Jesus
All our sins and griefs to bear
What a privilege to carry
Everything to God in prayer

Please pray with me: God, you have sent Jesus to us, fully human and fully divine. And by transforming his death and resurrecting him from the grave, you’ve made it possible for us to have a life-giving relationship with you. Help us to trust in your love for us and accept your invitation to friendship. We pray in Jesus’ holy name. Amen.

Ignorant Love

2004-07-11T13:20:00.000-07:00

Bible Text: Luke 10:25-37

My in-laws are originally from the rural Northeast corner of Pennsylvania, and while they don’t have any kind of strong accent—just regular Midwest—there are a few things they say that I’ve never heard from anybody else. One of these is the word ignorant. Okay, I’ve heard the word before, but in Northeast Pennsylvania, it takes on a whole new meaning—something like, big, over the top, ridiculous. As in, that ice cream sundae you’ve got there is ignorant. Or, Bill Gates’ 40 building estate is ignorant. Or, the rain on the afternoon of the 4th last week was ignorant. Or at least it was in Columbia, anyway.
And when we talk about the behavior of the Samaritan in Jesus’ parable today, I think we could also consider it ignorant. Not ONLY does the Samaritan stop to help the guy, not ONLY does he nurse his
wounds, not ONLY does he put him on his own donkey, and not ONLY does he leave an extravagant amount of money with the innkeeper to care for the man, but he does it for someone who normally wouldn’t give him the time of day. Ignorant.
So what’s Jesus going for here? What’s this story all about? The introduction we get from Luke tells us that Jesus uses this story to teach an expert in the law. He reminds me of a few of my fellow classmates in graduate school. They wanted to be in on the debate, and had a kind of glow of triumph whenever they asked a question that could stump the teacher. Or at least make her pause. In the mini-scene that leads into the parable, the expert asks Jesus “What do I have to do to get eternal life?” Jesus answers the question with another question and the expert comes up with his own answer. Love God with all your heart, mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. Then Jesus says, “that’s the right answer,” and so the guy realizes that he missed the chance to ask the smart question after all, and he’s not going to get a good grade in participation. So he comes up with a definition question: Who is my neighbor?
I actually feel kind of sorry for the guy at this point, because what he’s hoping for, it seems to me, is a good discussion: which people are neighbors? Which ones can be excluded? He wants some parameters. You can’t just love everybody, but then it probably also means more than the people living right next door. So what are the limits? What are the parameters? But Jesus takes things to a whole different level. He won’t draw the lines. He tells a shocking story about two people whose religious codes keep them from showing mercy, and an outcast who goes beyond the pale.
Indulge me for a minute. I’d like to retell this story with some more modern characters to try and communicate some of the feel of it for that first audience.
A businessman was walking down the street when he was mugged and beaten up by some thugs who left him on the sidewalk, thinking he was dead. A minister drove past, saw the man, and kept driving. In the same way a church deacon drove up, saw the man, and kept driving. But a drug dealer was passing by and saw the man and felt terribly sorry for him. He tore up his designer shirt to bind the man’s wounds. Then he put the man in his own car and drove him to the hospital. At the hospital he went to the front desk and said, “This is my good friend. I want him to get the best possible care. Please send all the hospital bills to my address. I’ll pay whatever you spend.”
Crazy, huh? Doesn’t make the religious leaders look good, that’s for sure. Now granted, in Jesus’ day the religious laws for priests and Levites included prohibitions on touching dead bodies, so if they thought the man was dead, then it would make sense for them to go around to the other side. And it’s true, too, that a Samaritan wasn’t automatically a criminal, like a drug dealer, but the Judeans did think of the Samaritans with contempt and spite.
So given that the Samaritan in the parable is someone that the man who was robbed would normally despise and avoid, his actions are that much more surprising. Especially compared to the religious officials, who carefully follow the rules that have been laid down for them. I mean, he LAVISHES his attention, time and money on this man. It’s downright ignorant.
And then the clincher is: Jesus turns to the expert in law and says, “go and do likewise.” What? I don’t know about you, but this is hard stuff for me. Go out there and find the really needy people, whether they might normally be your enemies or your friends, and spend ignorant amounts of time and money and heartache on them. That kind of a commitment might mean changing your whole life around.
My temptation here is to qualify this a little bit. Maybe find some of my own parameters, right? Figure out who is the most needy, or who will be most grateful, or who I like best. Figure out a way to screen some people out. But that’s just what the legal expert wanted to do with his question: have a set answer for who is included and who is excluded.
To be fair it’s hard to tell if Jesus is being entirely serious in this story. I think there may be a glint of humor in the whole confrontation. The legal expert, seems a little uptight. And then Jesus gives him this story, just piling it on—how great that Samaritan is, what generous things the Samaritan does, what a nice man the Samaritan is—and at the end, if you’ll notice, the expert still can’t even say the word “Samaritan” out loud. “The… the… the… one who showed him mercy,” he stutters out. Talk about rendering someone speechless!
So maybe Jesus is trying to get at a new kind of attitude. An attitude that expects anything to happen, and doesn’t try to hedge God in with rules. An attitude of mercy toward even our enemies. And maybe to loosen up a little and not worry some much about whether we’re being graded, or if we’ve got the answer right, or if our parameters are laid out correctly.
That being said, however, there is a deeper call here. A life-changing call, if we can figure out how to answer it. To find a way to love unreasonably, impractically, and to love people who might otherwise be our enemies.
How on earth could this be possible? I’ll tell you. It’s not something we can do alone. It’s not by our own power, but by trusting in God’s love that we can learn to give this ignorant love. I don’t know about you, but I am most kind-hearted and ready to serve when I myself feel loved. When I have felt that brush of the holy, that unexpected abundance, that surprising joy that is the reign of God in the world.
And if you’ll let me flip the parable over one more time, I’ll say this: the Samaritan in the story may be an example to us of how we should behave, but he is also an example to us of how God does behave. God’s love is downright ignorant. God’s love is LAVISHED on us every day. The whole of creation is given to us to care for and live from. The body of Christ is a gift to us for fellowship, learning, care and love. God is present with each of us, rejoices with us, challenges us, suffers with us. God’s love is ignorant. What a blessing.
May we be so blessed that we find a way to share that blessing with all our neighbors. Amen.

Don’t look at me, I did my part!

2004-06-20T13:11:00.000-07:00

Bible text: 1 Kings 19:1-15a

This might not be the sermon you’re expecting. It’s not the sermon I expected. When I first read this story about Elijah, the sermon I thought of right away was about how Elijah was so clever at recognizing what was God and what was not: God is not in the rushing wind, God is not in the shattering earthquake, God is not in the roaring fire. God is in that “still small voice.” There’s your moral, right there: listen for God to be quiet and subtle, not loud and obvious. End of story.

Except! Except for Elijah. Even after fire, wind, earthquake, and EVEN AFTER HEARING THE STILL SMALL VOICE, he doesn’t change his tune one bit. What he says before is the same as what he says after: “I’ve been doing the right thing, but those people are disobeying you and trying to kill me.”

So what’s going on with Elijah? To understand this story, it will be helpful to have a little bit of background. Because Elijah is a prophet, and a major one at that, he gets compared to that greatest prophet of all: Moses. Moses is to Old Testament prophecy what George Washington is to American democracy. So when the story about Elijah overlaps with Moses’ story, the storytellers are trying to tell us something about Elijah and how he does or does not measure up to Moses’ example.

Think of it this way. The story about George Washington is that he chopped down a cherry tree, and when his father angrily confronted him, he said “I cannot tell a lie. I did chop down that cherry tree.” But by comparison Bill Clinton might say, “I did not chop down that cherry tree,” or George Bush might say, “That cherry tree had direct Al Quaida ties.” That’s what the Bible story is doing with Elijah and Moses.

Elijah goes to the same mountain Moses went to. He hides in the same crack in the mountain as God passes by in glory. And as in Moses’ day, the Israelites are wayward and thoughtless and basically don’t treat God right.

But the time comes for Elijah to do what Moses did—to talk God out of horrible punishments, to sway God from righteous wrath, to prevent a smiting, and what does Elijah do? He eggs God on! He says, “the Israelites have forsaken YOUR covenant, thrown down YOUR altars, and killed YOUR prophets with the sword.” He goes on: I’m the only one left who’s faithful to you and they’re trying to kill me!

I have a hard time liking Elijah right here. Mostly because he reminds me of myself as a kid, on a bad day of course—the tattletale, the one who can’t let anyone make a mistake. When I was in elementary school, it used to make me so angry when other kids would misbehave, but the teacher would punish everybody. It wasn’t fair! I never understood it, and always thought that the only reason the teachers did that was because they couldn’t figure out who was guilty. So imagine my surprise a few months ago when a friend of mine who teaches fourth graders explained her reasoning.

What happened was this: a couple of the kids in her class were being disruptive, so she punished the whole group that was sitting there. One kid protested that he hadn’t been participating but she said, “You didn’t do anything to stop it. Keeping the class in order is everyone’s responsibility.”

So Elijah is a little like that kid here—he’s perfectly happy to let the Israelites suffer their fate. You might say his attitude was—“Don’t look at me, I did my part.” He says this before God goes by, and he says it after God goes by. He doesn’t change his tune. God’s very presence doesn’t affect him—give him a sense of awe, or human frailty, for example.

So what is God’s response? God sends Elijah back to the people. “They are your responsibility, Elijah.” Elijah hasn’t finished doing his part. There is more work left for him to do.

What does this say to us in the here and now? I didn’t say this before, but Elijah also reminds me a little of how I am now when it comes to church. Not that I try to be this way, but sometimes I think, “Those people out there, they can figure it out for themselves. I go to church, I do my part.” But the truth is, there are people who are spiritually lost who won’t be able to find God without help.

In our gospel story this morning, we find Jesus reaching out to such a person. The possessed man from Gerasene, who everybody was afraid of, and nobody seems to be able or willing to help, finally finds peace because Jesus sees him, reaches out to him, heals him. Jesus does not avoid him or say, “Hey, look, I’ve been doing my teaching thing, all right? I’ve done my part.”

Who are our lost Israelites? The United States is a changing nation, religiously speaking. The number of people in mainline denominational churches like the United Church of Christ has dropped steadily for many years, as the average age has risen. Most people I know in their 20s and 30s (assuming I don’t know them through church) don’t go to church. People like to refer to themselves as “spiritual, but not religious.” The thing is, though, it’s hard to build up your spirituality without a faith community to help you do it.

I’m preaching to the choir here (ha ha), but this is something important to repeat: It is good to be in church. It is good that we are here. Church is a gift from God, meant to be cherished and shared.

Here are some suggestions for sharing these gifts, for reaching out to today’s lost Israelites.
First, invite people you know and care about to come to church. For a class I took recently, one of the requirements was that I attend worship services somewhere besides my usual place, and preferably somewhere that had a very different musical style. I thought about trying to find a synagogue, or a charismatic church, but realized that I wouldn’t feel comfortable somewhere so new and different unless I had someone with me who could help me fit in a little. Knowing someone can make all the difference for a new person.

Second, invite people because you have a gift to share. This church has gifts. I know, I know, you’re thinking—“she’s only been here for one Sunday” but it’s true. Every church has gifts—you know what gifts this particular church has. Consider it.

And what could those gifts mean to someone new, coming in uncertain, but thinking “maybe, just maybe, I’ll find what I need here.” What could a new friendship mean to someone who is lonely? What could a heartfelt welcome mean to someone who feels excluded? What could a prayer mean to someone who has felt distant from God? We have gifts to share.

Finally, trust God. I admit this is the hardest part for me, but the most important. In the last couple weeks I’ve started up a small group at my home church to teach beginning guitar. My idea was this—it would be much easier for someone new coming into church to meet people in a smaller group and get to know them while having a common task. Maybe something not quite so heavy as Bible study or Reformation theology. So I think it’s a good idea, but I need to figure out a way to ask some non-churchgoers. That’s hard for me. It makes me nervous. What if they’re put off? What if they think I’m pushy or fanatical?

But there’s where God comes in. We’re not doing this unaided. In today’s story, Elijah is in the desert alone and helpless on his journey and God feeds him. God makes sure that Elijah is equipped for the labor. God will not abandon us, either. The bread and water will be there. We only need to take that first step.