Philippi Christian Church

An Unknown God (sermon for the sixth Sunday of Easter)

2011-05-29T03:37:00.000-07:00

James Limburg, a seminary professor, in an essay on today's psalm, reports that in his grandfather role he is sometimes required to tell his grandchildren stories. He has therefore written up a number of bible stories in short form that he can tell children. As part of making these stories more interesting, he sometimes includes his own grandchildren as characters in them. Once he asked his grandson if his grandson liked the stories. His grandson replied, "Yes I do." The child thought a moment and then went on: "But I like them best when they're about me!"

We all like stories about us, about ourselves or people we know. I often hear that people like my funeral sermons, and I think it's because they are stories about people they know. Sermons that are actually about Jesus are often less pleasant, and this is because, well, this is a person we don't really know very well.

It is the nature of the sinful world humankind has made for itself that other spirits take center stage and the spirit of the creator is exiled from human community. God has therefore called us, God's people, to make it our business to know God and to make God known again, in the hopes of reconciling the world to God.

But knowing God is a tricky business. One of our new members, Bill Luke, has said that God is slippery. I think God is slippery because God is alive.

A living God continues to respond to a living situation. No book or statue or creed can stand century after century as the last word, the sole idea, the unchanging identity of God. Jesus Christ, a very specific and particular person, is risen from the dead. He is alive.

And so Christ today is the same person who was born in the first century, who went about on foot in a relatively small geographical area, preaching and teaching and healing, the same person who was arrested and executed for insurrection, the same person who emerged transformed from the tomb on Easter Sunday.

But now he has lived through the fall of the Roman Empire. He has lived through the rise of the European feudal societies. He has lived through the Reformation. He has lived through the colonization of the American continents. He has lived through the American Revolution and the World Wars and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.

And Jesus is alive in all kinds of places, in China and Liberia and Indonesia. He's alive in Belize and Sumatra and Illinois.

And, like us, Jesus speaks and acts differently dependent on when and where he is. He doesn't become a different person, anymore than we become different people because we have aged twenty years or because we've moved to a different place. We behave differently in different places and times not because we are inconsistent or dishonest, but because we are alive. That's what being alive means.

At the same time, there is a core to each one of us, an unchanging identity, and this is equally important. The story of our lives, the succession of anecdotes we tell about what we did in different times and places, is about the only way we can really capture this core. This is what I try to do at funerals. One way we talk about this unchanging self is with the word "spirit."

Each person has a spirit, a characteristic center that doesn't change, even though it might manifest differently to different times and places. Nations and institutions have spirits as well. And the spirit enthroned above all these spirits is the God of Israel, the great "I Am."

But peculiar to Christian thought is the idea that this Spirit, the creator God, makes itself known through the human creature. So when we tell stories about this God, we are telling stories about God's people. And when we are telling stories about God's people, we are telling stories about Jesus. And when we are telling stories about Jesus and God's people, we are telling stories about us.

I think it awfully important that the church share some common ground with the place and time in which it finds itself, that it finds what recognizable landmarks it can so that people can feel some sense that the gospel is about them. But I think at this time and place in history we emphasize this too much. I think we have so identified the gospel with our preferences and opinions and culture that we have lost the core identity, the Spirit, of Christ.

A lot of my work over the past six years has been to teach and preach about this Spirit, to insist on telling the Old Testament stories, to insist on speaking about the particular person Jesus, to insist on disciples learning these stories and coming to know this Spirit, just as we come to know the story of some friend or family member with whom we live. Knowing these stories and poems and letters is the way we come to recognize the Spirit, a Spirit which is indeed alive and always responding as living persons do, uniquely to each unique situation.

These are my prayers of thanksgiving for you:

That Christ has so worked in you and among you over these past six years that many lives have been transformed, many who have lived in darkness have come out into the light, and many who have been imprisoned have come into freedom.

That Christ has worked through you to bless and grow and heal me.

That Christ has led you to become a disciple-forming church, one that welcomes and involves seekers in ministry.

That Christ has given you a sense of mission, so that you have begun to act with purpose and intention in your community.

That Christ has richly blessed you with the humble spirit of service.

And these are my prayers for your future:

That God's Spirit will open in all of you a deep wisdom in the stewardship of the gifts God has given each one of you, all the gifts, of time, talent and wealth, and that the bottomless generosity of God will richly flow through each one.

That God's Spirit will lead this congregation more deeply into a corporate life of prayer, that you together might pray without ceasing, giving thanks and pleading for the world every time you gather, so that the passion God has for this beautiful creation might be revealed in your worship.

That the Spirit might so richly dwell in each one of you that your story might become part of God's story, and that you might be able to boldly give account of your relationship to Christ, so that the community all around might hear the name of Jesus on your lips.

And finally, this is my benediction as I leave you:

May you tell the stories of God to each other so richly and so often that you will collectively come to know the God's Spirit with great clarity and certainty.

May you let go of your preferences and opinions and yield to the sure guidance of this Spirit, in peaceful unity.

May it be this Spirit, and not powerful or popular personalities, that will hold the church together, guide all its work and grow all its members.

May this Spirit knit you together with all the people of God everywhere, in this county, in this country, in all the world.

May it be this living Spirit, and not dead words or creeds or doctrines, that encounters each new moment and each new person both in this church and, through this church, in the community.

May you continue to make known the unknown God.

Amen.

Stones (sermon for the fifth Sunday of Easter)

2011-05-22T05:45:00.000-07:00

It couldn't have been easy to tear down the temple.

By the time John had written his gospel, by the time Luke had written Acts, and probably by the time this letter of Peter had been composed, the temple in which Jesus had been bar mitzvah-ed and circumcised, where he'd whipped the moneylenders and turned over their tables, and where the first disciples gathered after the gift of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, was nothing but a pile of great broken stones. One wall only was left, and it still stands today. It's called "the wailing wall."

The temple had been an imposing structure. This was the nature of temples in the ancient near east. Each nation, and particularly each large imperial city state like Memphis or Babylon or Rome or Athens, had its god or gods, and each one expressed its power and vitality by building impressive temples. The second temple in Jerusalem was no exception. It was there to express that this nation, Israel, was protected and secured by a powerful god.

And for this very reason, empires that wanted to really crush an opponent nation would not only murder and enslave as many of the nation's inhabitants as it could, but would deliver the most stinging blow by destroying the nation's temple or temples. For the inhabitants of the conquered land, this was a visible sign of hopelessness. It told them that their god or gods had been defeated, that the god or gods of their conquerors were victorious.

There can be little doubt that bin Laden and Al Qaeda had this kind of religious message in mind when they flew their planes into the twin towers. The towers were to them the temples of the United States. Of course bin Laden and his group are not real Muslims, nor were the towers temples to the American people. What Al Qaeda did was simply an act of mass murder. Nevertheless the act produced in us the kind of horror that the Jews must have felt watching the Romans tear down their temple.

Of course the Romans didn't have today's technology. One has to wonder what kind of machines they had to use to so completely destroy a huge stone building. I presume we're talking about catapults, battering rams, team of horses perhaps. I don't think it's easy to take down a monumental building, particularly without the use of explosives. It would have been a pretty significant project. It would probably not have been quick. It would have been slow, brutal.

Stoning a person to death is not quick either. There's a very good but really horrifying movie called The Stoning of Saroya M. that does a pretty good job of showing how slow and difficult it is to stone a person to death. People stand at a distance and hurl stones at the condemned person. Many miss. Many hit other parts of the body, merely causing severe pain but hardly contributing to actually killing the person. It's the stones that hit the head that do the most damage, and the head is a rather difficult target. And even if one hits the head, it's surprising how many parts of the head you can hit and damage without causing death.

From the passage we heard this morning we don't necessarily get that Stephen is being stoned to death here, or why. The people stoning Stephen were not Romans. They were upstanding religious folk. In fact the stoning itself was a biblically mandated punishment for blasphemy. Stephen, recently ordained by the apostles as one of the first deacons, was preaching to synagogue leaders and prominent religious persons about how they had murdered the son of God and how God didn't only dwell in the temple in Jerusalem. These were deeply blasphemous and offensive statements, and this may be a little mystifying to us.

For the good religious people who stoned Stephen to death, God belonged to Israel and Israel alone. God didn't do things like forgive sinners or give sight to the blind. And they certainly could not possibly admit that they could collectively be wrong about any important religious matter, like for example the Son of God.

The blasphemy of Stephen was to suggest that the religious leaders of Israel didn't have God under their control. Strangely enough, many Christians still have this problem.

There were some Christians yesterday who expected the end of the world. Their leader thought he had God under his control. He might have denied this, but having the capacity to predict what God is going to do and when God is going to do it comes down, I think, to having God under one's control.

Other Christians think there is some simple list of things one has to believe in order to be guaranteed life after death. And while there are certainly some truth claims that come with a vital faith, this I think amounts to thinking one has God under one's control.

Others think that piling up good deeds will obligate God to give them what they want, whether its healing or wealth or eternal life, and this comes down to trying to have God under one's control.

And so we build our great monuments, our edifices, be they of stone or of rules or of claims of truth, and we identify these things we have made with God. In so doing however we forget the second commandment: you shall not make a graven image of your God. Nevertheless, these edifices are terribly difficult to destroy.

But destroyed they all will be. Because no matter how big we build them, no matter how heavy the stones, and no matter how large the army we assemble to defend them, sooner or later some bigger army will come along or some machine or bomb powerful enough to tear them down, or some more persuasive idea will tear down all our best ideas.

But Stephen, like Jesus, is a part of a temple that has never been torn down, but has in fact grown bigger and bigger and bigger throughout all the years since. There are stones that make great buildings, there are stones that bring great buildings down, there are stones that bring great people down, there are stones that cover the tombs of the dead, but the living stones, the people who follow the risen Jesus, the cornerstone, are assembled into a great eternal temple that persists from generation to generation and grows and grows and grows. No army, no bomb, no angry mob can bring down this mighty temple.

For we belong not to a god of stone, but to the God of life.

Amen.

The Gate (sermon for the fourth Sunday of Easter)

2011-05-15T03:59:00.000-07:00

The rabbis tell a story about a tightrope walker who appeared in a little town and went about inviting everyone to come and see his act. The town had little to do in the way of entertainment, so everyone readily gathered near the two big trees he'd chosen for his performance.

He'd climbed to a dizzying height and attached a rope between the two trees. When the people saw how high he planned to go they were amazed. But when he said, "Do you all believe that I can make it across the rope?," the crowd, eager to see the performance, shouted as one, "Yes," and they all applauded loudly.

The tightrope walker then grabbed a nearby wheelbarrow and with the same excitement asked the crowd, "And who will let me push them across in this wheelbarrow?"

And all you could hear were the crickets.

We often hear people talking these days about the difference between spirituality and religion. The difference is between those who believed the tightrope walker could cross the rope and those who climbed into the wheelbarrow, which in this story and perhaps in many churches, are none at all.

Our passages today tell of a Jesus who practiced a spiritual path that he commends to us as a true and life-giving path. It's a path oriented to unending and depthless abundance and overflowing, eternal life, all flowing from the hand of the one God. It is one that is based on the expectation that all will be filled and satisfied and that true power is not in dominant control of the many by the few but in the liberating community of all for God and for each other.

It is above all a practice that Jesus offers. It is this practice that he described as the gate to eternal life, and he demonstrated by refusing to bow to Herod or Caiaphas or Caesar, by joyfully serving as a conduit of the awe-inspiring power of God to heal and forgive, by accepting the legal execution by torture that comes to all who buck the system, trusting in God to rescue and vindicate him, which God did by raising Jesus from the dead.

So assenting to a list of propositions, a bunch of doctrine, does nothing at all for any of us if it doesn't inform a practice. And I'm not talking about good deeds or adhering to a bunch of values, because in most cases systems of doctrinal belief are simply twisted around by the Caesars and the Caiaphases and the Herods of our time to bless and maintain the status quo. In fact, most people rightly sense that religion as we know it generally exists to prop up the dominant culture. Lots of people see going to church as submitting to the morals and rules of society, however this or that church defines those rules. But I don't think this is what being a disciple of Christ is about at all.

It is one thing to believe that God is going to make everything all right. It's another thing to be a part of what God is making right. It's one thing to wait passively for God to miraculously fix things. It's another to become God's instrument to do so. It's one thing to admire Jesus for forgiving those who colluded in his trial and execution, it's another to take up one's own cross in protest against the selfishness and violence of the world's false shepherds. It's one thing to stand in awe of God's generosity, it's another to be authentically generous oneself. It's one thing to hope for miracles, it's another to do them. It's one thing to pray for God's help, it's another to pray to help God.

Acts gives us a snapshot of the explosion that was the early church, the amazing new community that blossomed out of the resurrection of Jesus. Luke, who wrote Acts as a kind of sequel to his gospel, tells us about how people were living, not about what they believed. He talks about a community, koinonia, not just a potluck social club, but a communion that worships and studies in one accord. He talks about radical generosity, those who are wealthy voluntarily liquidating their resources and giving it to the church to redistribute. He talks about ongoing wonders done by the leaders of the community.

Acts and other sources from the period tell us that many early Christians called their movement "the Way." It was certainly not only about right thinking or believing or assenting to a list of impossible truths. It was a deeply communal practice of prayer and study and giving and serving that opened the way for the power of God to flow endlessly into the world. It was a way for people to enter the realm of God and a way for God to enter the realm of the world.

And Jesus tells us something about the differences between himself as the true shepherd and the false shepherds, the lords or the realm of the world. For one thing, the lords of the world are duplicitous. They don't come at you head-on, out in the open, above-board, but always sideways, with trickery, confusion, and spin.

Jesus tells us that there is a difference between where he leads and where the false shepherds lead. Invariably the false shepherds, the lords of the universe as some media pundits call them, want something from us, and almost always it will ultimately deplete us and enrich them, for their way is oriented to the fear of scarcity and death. They therefore chase wealth and control others with violence. Jesus, the true shepherd, on the other hand, is oriented toward faith in abundance and life. His way enriches us, but does not thereby deplete him. His way also calls forth our obedience with love and not with a club. Most of all, his way is blessed and accompanied at every step by the presence of God.

So it's one thing to stand on the sidelines and cheer God on. It's another to get on the playing field and get into God's team. It's one thing to believe that the tightrope guy will get across. It's another thing to follow him.

Amen.

Those Who Have Not Seen (sermon for the second Sunday of Easter)

2011-05-01T04:45:00.000-07:00

A reality check is rarely good news.

We use the words "reality" and "real" almost exclusively as correctives. We bring up reality when it seems that those around us are floating off into delusion or wishful thinking. Reality is often a counterpoint to a past or present viewed through rose-colored glasses, or an unreasonably hopeful outlook about the future.

The great reality check of the gospels comes in the aftermath of the triumphant procession into Jerusalem, when Jesus was celebrated as the Messiah ready to deliver Israel from its oppression and restore it to the glory of Solomon's day. Indeed Jesus had himself predicted this reality check and all but Thomas had refused to believe it. Indeed Thomas was always the one who seemed firmly connected to reality, who insisted on getting the real scoop. When Jesus plans to return to Jerusalem it's Thomas who fully expects and understands that Jesus will be arrested and executed. He's the one who says "Let's go die with him."

But Thomas' nerve, like the nerve of all of the disciples, fails him in the moment. This is his reality check, not so much the crucifixion, which he fully expected, but his own cowardice. Thomas abandons Jesus just like all the others.

And so we might say that the disciples are living in reality as the scene from John opens this morning. They understand that their movement is over, their leader dead, their own safety in serious jeopardy. They have heard the rumors that Jesus is not dead, that he's risen from the grave. But this news came from hysterical women. Certainly understandable that they would give into such a rosy picture. But the men, well, they face reality head-on. The dream is over. The best and wisest thing to do is to hide.

"He'll never change." "Those people will always be fighting." "We don't have enough." Reality checks. It's all well and good to talk about hope and goodness and changing the world. But it's also good to get a reality check now and again. Healthy.

People don't come back from the dead. People don't walk through walls. And most of all, people don't forgive betrayal and cowardice.

A number of preachers wonder about where Thomas was when Jesus arrived and appeared to the other disciples. John apparently doesn't think the reason is important enough to report and I trust John. The point was simply that Thomas wasn't there to see the risen Christ.

Thomas' own wounds can be heard in his anguished response about Jesus' wounds. His heart is broken. He is like the woman who has finally decided to divorce her husband but who is then confronted with some evidence that he has changed. Thomas had accepted the reality of what had happened. Jesus was defeated, and worse, Thomas himself had been unable to stand by the one he loved. Don't tell me that Jesus is risen from the dead. Don't say such things. When I can poke my fingers into the wounds of his crucifixion I'll believe it.

David Lose, a very good preacher, mentions Les Miserables in his sermon on this text. Hugo's hero, Jean Valjean, spends some nineteen years in a horrifying prison for a five-year sentence he got for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. During that nightmare, his degenerates morally and becomes a cynical and vicious criminal. Upon his release, he finds he can't get a job because of his record and he floats from town to town as a vagrant.

In one town a bishop invites him into his home for a meal and a night in a warm bed. Jean repays the bishop's kindness as all criminals do, by stealing some silver plates and running off. But he is caught by local police with the plates, which are recognized, and he is dragged back to the bishop's house.

When the police confront the bishop with the criminal, the bishop takes some candlesticks from the mantle, holds them out to Jean and says, "My friend! I'm glad to see you. You took the plates I gave you but forgot the candlesticks."

Jean is released and spends the night in tears, emerging a new person who goes on to do great good.

Many of us would say that getting robbed was the reality check the bishop needed to correct his silly interest in taking criminals into his home. But the reality check was not for him, but for Jean Valjean, confronted by the most shocking reality check of all: God's all-powerful grace.

"Peace be with you," Jesus says. You who hide, you who are disgusted by your own cowardice, your own inability to live into the hope that God has promised, you who hide in the dark because you fear the consequences of living in the light, because you fear the cost, you who think you understand reality, you who are sure that God really doesn't have the power to come through, you who betrayed and fled your God, to you God says, "My friend! You forgot your candlesticks!"

You will notice that Thomas doesn't have to put his fingers in any wounds. It is when Jesus offers Thomas forgiveness, when he says to Thomas as well, "Peace," that Thomas not only recognizes Jesus, but finally recognizes God.

And strangely, this very gift of grace, this offer to forgive the cowardice and betrayal, is the very power by which those disciples would go on to face their own trials and executions. It's by this power that the same Peter who denied Jesus three times to save his skin will boldly proclaim him right smack dab in the middle of the Jerusalem temple, and for Jesus will himself eventually die on a cross.

I am a little surprised myself by this. It would seem that forgiving such behavior would encourage it to continue. But this is not how it works at all. It is not indulgence we are talking about. The bishop that gave Jean the candlesticks buys Jean's soul back from hell with them, and so does the grace of Christ.

Tradition tells us that Thomas went into India with the gospel and eventually was executed there for Christ's sake.

I know it was my own understanding of Christ's forgiveness for my betrayal of God that opened my heart to the vision that redirected my life. I saw Christ on a cross suspended over a sea of tears. Like Thomas, I believed because I saw.

God has given me many reality checks ever since. And so I have learned that the reality checks that I hear most often from human beings are not reality checks at all, but are expressions of spiritual cowardice and betrayal. They are simply capitulations to the powers of the world, which are indeed impressive and frightening. And the kinds of reality checks most of us give into lead us into dark rooms where we can hide.

But Christ enters even there, and cannot be kept out. Christ comes, risen from the dead, with forgiveness for our cowardice, and with courage in his breath.

Amen.

The Spirit of Christ (sermon for the fifth Sunday of Lent)

2011-04-10T05:49:00.001-07:00

I remember once when a call came in from Donna Theimer. She was weeping, inconsolable. Lucille, her mother-in-law, was in her last hours.

"Please come," she said, "right away."

Lucille had suffered with the slow and terrible progression of Alzheimer's for years, was very advanced in age, confined to a wheelchair, living in a nursing home, the only place that could provide her with adequate care. Her son Joe, one of our elders here at Philippi, was a loving and devoted son, and his wife Donna adored Lucille as well.

Lucille was Roman Catholic, but Philippi sort of adopted her as one of our own, and I'd visited her quite a bit before that day. Like a lot of people with Alzheimer's, she couldn't remember what happened a moment ago, couldn't recognize people she'd known all her life, but she could remember many of the prayers and responses from the Catholic mass. For example when I would give her communion, she would always say, "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed."

I got the nursing home and Joe and Donna stood by Lucille's bed weeping. I myself felt very sad and already could sense the grief mounting in my heart. I had come to love Lucille as well. Donna and Joe spoke in hushed tones, choked with tears, about the illness that was taking Lucille's life and some of their hopes for the funeral. They wanted me to participate but they wanted to make sure a Roman Catholic priest would be there too. Lucille lay with her eyes closed, gasping slowly.

Finally, I invited Joe and Donna to pray with me. It is the work of the church to pray in the face of the hopeless, the despairing, to lift up our lamentations out of the depths. Remembering both Lucille's and Joe's background in Catholicism I began with the traditional address, "The Lord be with you."

And from the bed, in a loud clear voice, Lucille answered, "And also with you!"

Lucille lived another nine months.

Lucille's is a Lazarus story in more ways than one. Yes, it was funny in retrospect that we had written her off only to discover that God had a delicious surprise for us. But Lucille was Lazarus-like in other ways as well.

Lazarus, Mary and Martha were apparently well-loved people. John paints the picture of a pretty significant crowd gathering for the funeral. The crowd is positively distraught. This is not one of those deaths about which people say, "It was a mercy." No, this was a loss, a wrenching and painful loss.

The conversation at such funerals is often about the might-have-beens, the regrets, the missed opportunities, the guilt the survivors feel that maybe they hadn't done everything they could have.

"I wonder if I'd spoken to the doctor sooner..."

"If only I'd told her how I felt..."

"Do you think I did enough? Could I have done more?"

When Jesus finally arrives, Lazarus' sisters cry out to him, they lament very much in the same way as our psalmist this morning. "Out of the depths, I cry to you." When was the last time you lamented, when you complained bitterly, to God? It is a great tradition, a basic skill of those who practice Jewish and Christian faith.

"If you had been here," both of them say. "but you weren't." That is the essence of lament. "Where are you, God?" is the cry. "Why have you forsaken me?"

In the Haddasah Hospital chapel in Jerusalem, the pulpit is actually in a sunken place in the floor. If you ask the chaplain why, he will tell you it is because all real prayer begins in the depths. I think, as much as we might wish it were not so, that the realm of God is not visible to those who are not in the depths.

Lucille had Alzheimer's. She was very old and sick. She was confined to a chair and could barely move at all. She couldn't remember what was going on from moment to moment. She couldn't recognize her own son or daughter-in-law. She lived in a place of which many people have a real horror.

But Lucille was one of the most joyous people I knew. And not only that, she was a Christian through and through. She was so Christian she could remember the responses in the order of the mass when we celebrated communion. She was so Christian she quoted the bible.

In fact she quoted the bible every time I saw her. Always the same quote. She would ask me if I knew the shortest verse in the bible. I would ask her what it was, and she would respond, "Jesus wept."

Jesus wept. A quote from today's story, and perhaps the most mysterious and wondrous revelation of the gospel. God is with us, yes, but more amazing even than that, God grieves with us. God hears our lamentations. And God is powerful enough to respond.

We hear all the time about the great billionaire philanthropists of this generation and how they are giving so much back. I think this is wonderful and we should celebrate it and rejoice in it. One of the things about which much is being written is how Bill Gates and others like him are not simply giving money away, but are bringing their significant business skills to the task of evaluating the programs asking for funding. The question always is, will this really help? And will this really help for good? In other words, will giving this money really fix the problem? Will the program it funds work?

A lot of church people say, "Hey, we should do the same thing. We shouldn't keep pouring money into situations that are beyond help. We should redirect that money to do things that really will fix problems people are having."

It is good to evaluate programs, good to work on truly fixing issues in a permanent way. And wherever possible the church has always done that very thing. But the deepest and most important thing the church does is to show up and stay put in precisely those situations that are beyond human aid. Because the issue for the church is not what people can do, what I can do, what we can do. It is what the God who is with us can do, the God who weeps with us in the midst of our deepest, most irreparable tragedies.

And this is why the church of Jesus Christ has always preached to valleys full of nothing but dry bones, why it has always stood outside of tombs to call forth the dead.

This is why it watches at the entry points of the wall between Palestine and Israel, why it sits at the bedside of African people dying of AIDS, why it embraces beggars in the streets of Calcutta, why it marches for justice and languishes in prisons and dies on scaffolds for justice. Do any of these things really make a difference? Would they pass muster with Bill Gates' evaluation of non-profits? No, they certainly would not. Because they are not just about what people can do, but about what God can do.

Would anyone have thought in the early 19th century that all the preaching of the churches against slavery would have actually ended up stopping it? Would anyone have thought that all the churches preaching about the equality of women would actually have brought about a vote for them? Would anyone have thought that the martyrdom of countless Christians in South Africa would actually end the system of apartheid. Would anyone have thought that a fellowship of alcoholics and drug addicts could actually find the answer for the disease of addiction in the practice of prayer, meditation, self-evaluation and reconciliation?

This is the spirit of Christ, the fusion of God and humankind, standing in the midst of long-dead remains and preaching with a hope that will not give up. This is the spirit of Christ, the fusion of God and humankind, weeping in the midst of unredeemable tragedy, and calling out the dead from the darkness of the tomb. This is the spirit of Christ, the fusion of God and humankind, who is willing to change places with the dead, to offer its life for those who are beyond human aid.

Lucille was a person in whom the spirit of Christ dwelt, in which a shining light could not be extinguished by any combination of hopeless situations. Indeed it seemed that the more awfulness descended into her life, the more brightly she shined, the deeper into the depths she descended, the more clearly she rose from the dead.

God wants us to cry out to him from those dark depths. God wants us to open the tombs of our hearts, the cold dark places where we have buried all of our impossible hopes and dreams, and he wants to call them out.

And give them life.

Amen.

Christ Will Shine On You (sermon for the fourth Sunday in Lent)

2011-04-03T07:42:00.000-07:00

At one point in my earlier career, I had a favorite suit. In those days of course all my suits were black. I liked this suit because it was a nice flattering cut, the looser-fitting cut tailors call the American style. I'd had it a long time and I wore it a lot.

Liz and I were newlyweds and I suppose as a kind of newlywed thing she bought me a whole drawer full of boxer shorts with cute messages on them. One of the pairs was white with little red hearts and the words "I love you" printed all over them.

One afternoon I had lunch with the chairperson of the church board, wearing my favorite suit. After lunch I got up and dropped something, I think it might have been a napkin, on the floor. So I bent over to pick up the napkin only to hear the board chairperson giggling behind me.

Apparently the suit had worn out somewhat in the rear end, and the "I love you" shorts were clearly visible.

In the story of the man born blind, I see a guy whose blessing wore him a little bit thin. And I think it's the way the whole Christian life works.

First off, there's this rather dramatic encounter. We could go wandering off wondering about the whole reaction of the disciples to the man born blind, and the bookend comments of the religious leaders at the end of the story, the assumption that he or his parents had committed sin, and while that's a fruitful road for sure, we're not going there right now. Suffice to say that Jesus, in a gesture that stirs recollection of how God created the human creature out of mud, makes a little mud out of some dirt and his own spit and gives the man, who had never seen anything, his sight.

Then, as Fred Craddock pointed out in an article for the Christian Century, Jesus disappears for the bulk of the rest of the story. The poor man is left at the mercy of his home town folks and the leaders of his local synagogue. You'd think there'd be celebration and gladness about the good news. The poor man sees finally! Isn't that great?!

But no. Instead they doubt it's the same guy. Now isn't this something? And doesn't it tell us a lot about the ways of human community? Do we really want to fix things? Really? It's a funny thing, but to fix something you really have to face a loss. You have to face the loss of all the things you might have formerly hung your hat on. I'm sighted because I'm blessed, while that guy who was born blind was cursed. God is in his heaven and all's right with the world.

But now the guy comes around with no cane, looking around, seeing fine. Maybe he's applying for a job, offering to pitch in to help around the community. No no no. That's can't be. Something's wrong here.

"Who healed you?" they want to know, and probably not for a nice reason. "Where is he?"

The man born blind says, "I don't know."

He's not around at the moment, the man born blind says, I'm on my own with this new blessing of mine, this blessing that is turning out to be more complicated that I would ever have thought.

Off they whisk him to the local authorities, who happen also to run the synagogue. And you know they continue in this same vein, rubbing away at the man, rubbing away with their interrogation. How did he do it? Mud, spit? What? On the sabbath? Righteous people don't do things like that on the sabbath, do they? Controversy, fighting, all kinds of what we called up north "hate and discontent."

I'm reminded of people questioning me about my own healing. I call it healing, others call it getting my life together. I insist that I didn't get my life together. I insist that it was a miraculous healing by God in Jesus Christ. I had almost nothing to do with it. I don't remember making a decision, following any line of reason, exerting any particular willpower. I didn't do it, plain and simple. I'm not even sure I asked for it.

This apparently disconcerts people. Surely that can't be. Surely you did something. No. No. Really. I didn't. Really, it was all Jesus.

The parents, remember the parents of the man born blind? The disciples wonder if it was their sin that caused the man to be blind. They get called into face the interrogation squad, probably because they had been told all their lives, "Yes, you know, you must have done something to have a kid with that kind of problem. Notice our kids all can see. That's because God has blessed us."

Have you ever thought how it sounds to a person whose childhood or family was a disaster when you say things like "I was blessed with good parents. I was blessed to have good kids." So my kid, who had all kinds of problems, was my curse? My absent father who suffered with alcoholism and depression was my curse? I was his? Really?

I'm blessed to have a good wife or husband. I'm blessed to live in a good country. I'm blessed to have had nice opportunities. What are we really saying here?

The poor parents are terrified. They have to live in this town. The synagogue is the only one for miles around. "Who did this?" the authorities want to know. "We don't know," the parents carefully say. "We don't know how it happened. Ask him."

Back comes the man born blind, once more on the firing line, once more being worn down, worn down, worn down with the questions. "Who did this? Isn't he really a sinner, a blasphemer? Come on, admit it."

Amazingly, the man born blind doesn't back down. You could see it happening. "Oh, for crying out loud, whatever you say. Just leave me alone and stop making me account for it." But no. I rather like this man. I would like to be like him. He sticks to his story. And he finally even fights back a bit. Pretty clean logic, simple. "The way I figure it, someone who can make the blind see has got to come from God. And you guys, who teach the faith, don't know where he comes from?"

Ooooo. Them's fightin' words.

As Wallace Shawn wrote in his award winning play The Fever, "we need the poor." We don't want to fix poverty. We don't really want to fix addiction. We don't really want to fix anything, because our whole society is structured around these things. The problems of others are how we know we're blessed. Attending to the problems while secretly making sure they are never solved is how we make ourselves feel better about ourselves.

God is only God if God keeps the system working. It couldn't be God who comes along and actually fixes things. Those are just those dangerous revolutionary people, those troublemakers that mix things with religion that shouldn't be mixed, the way Jesus mixed healing the blind with the sabbath day.

The man born blind says, "I don't know about any of that. All I know is, I was blind but now I see."

Jesus finally shows up and he vindicates the poor guy. And we see in this story the only time that anyone kneels down to worship Jesus.

The man born blind, like my old suit, had been worn through, so you could see the Christ within.

Amen.

Poured into Our Hearts (sermon for the third Sunday in Lent)

2011-03-27T04:58:00.001-07:00

I don't drink beer anymore, but it's almost axiomatic that a cold beer after a hard day of hot work in the sun tastes pretty darn good. I myself prefer Pellegrino. It's a sparkling water from Italy. If you get it real cold and serve it in a cold glass with no ice, it's way better than any beer. When you are really thirsty, you gulp that baby, I'm telling you.

To wander in the wilderness is to become thirsty, just as Jesus got thirsty wandering from the north of what the Romans called Palestine down through Samaritan country toward Jerusalem. It's a dry place, the mission field. It is not comfortable. Fruit is not growing on the trees. There is no Walmart nearby.

In returning to this Exodus passage God knows how many times, I finally asked myself what exactly is so sinful about getting thirsty in the wilderness. And a closer reading of the story shows me no anger in God. God never says in this story that the Israelites were being unreasonable. He never says they have no faith. If anyone is being kind of ridiculous, it's Moses who is not so concerned about being thirsty as he is about being stoned by the people.

But God doesn't criticize the people. Instead he simply gives instructions to Moses about where to find water.

But it does say that God was "testing" the Hebrew ex-slaves. It becomes the name of the story. And later, the person who wrote the psalm will interpret the story as one about how faithless were the wanderers. But I think the Hebrews passed the test. The test was to see if they'd give up and go home in the midst of real difficulty or whether they'd stick it out and try to see what God had in mind for them. If anyone failed the test it was Moses. God's people turned to him, as they should. He was after all God's guy. But he was the one who really doubted. Hadn't God done everything through Moses that God had promised to do? In fact at the end of the journey God will punish Moses for his faithlessness, even as God hands the promised land over to Moses' followers.

Now our Moses today is not a pastor or an elder or the moderator of the board or the leader of our men's or women's groups. Our Moses is the Christ. The Christ is our only human authority. And for us, the Christ is Jesus, who rose from the dead and is eternally on the throne of our nation. Jesus Christ doesn't lose faith. Jesus Christ doesn't doubt God or worry about us stoning him. Worse has already happened and he's on the other side of it.

And even in his earthly ministry before his followers did exactly what Moses feared the most and rose up to crucify him, Jesus was the Christ. The world in the gospel of John might itself be seen as a kind of wilderness, and the mission of the Christ and the mission of all his followers might be seen as a sojourn in that wilderness.

From John's point of view, Jesus and those who follow Jesus come from heaven, and have descended into an alien and hostile world, a world ruled over by the devil, as the advance guard, as it were, of the realm of God, the marines of heaven, to use a rather unfortunate but apt metaphor.

And it's in this very sojourn that the Hebrew slaves and Jesus and we were and are transformed. It's in the dry and dusty wilderness of the mission field, the wild place free of the fleshpots of slavery, the place where there are no props and no anesthetic pleasures to dull our vision, the place where we are not quite sure of what to do, where we are uncomfortable in our ignorance, where we don't know really what is right, where the world is at its most damaged and hurt and broken, whether its in the ruins of Japan or in some backwater town where a lonely sinner waits for God. It's in those places, and those places alone, that God pours his Spirit into our hearts.

The psalm encourages us to see God in this way, as the all-sufficient king of our lives, to turn away from all the things the world gives us, the temporary pleasures of slavery to a dying culture, and risk the emptiness and the rare but deeply satisfying rewards of the wilderness.

Because what must it have been like to finally drink the water from the rock? Have you ever been really thirsty, really thirsty for a protracted period of time? How did that water taste when you finally got to gulp it down? That cold beer, that Pellegrino?

Wandering thirsty in the wilderness of our mission is in fact the way that God teaches us to see in God the true and lasting salvation, as Paul says. Paul is not talking about the routine suffering everyone endures. Nor is Paul talking about putting up with abuse or going without in an unjustly compensated job or tolerating active addiction in a family. He's not talking about getting our kicks from masochism or about making ourselves impressive to others by our willingness to be walked on.

Paul is talking about the suffering of following Christ, of entering into the mission, of becoming one sent from heaven. In this passage from Romans this morning he's talking about peace with God, being reconciled with God, and he's talking about suffering, incredible suffering, suffering that comes from the world rejecting and attacking the ones sent by God from heaven. And he says that this suffering, the suffering in the wilderness of mission, is part of what actually transforms us into the ones sent from heaven.

Indeed it is in the experience of rejection and hostility that we enter into God's own experience. As I have been preaching for the last six years, the world as we have made it is neither good nor just nor heading in a positive direction, and it hasn't been for the past ten thousand years. The only thing that has been very gradually changing over that time is that more and more people, through a variety of spiritual paths, are waking up to just how completely off the track humankind has been.

The world that most people still think of as fundamentally decent and good and just, the world people have made, is in fact a horrific and disastrous misuse of the good creation of God. We are making of that good and fruitful creation a desert, a wilderness with nothing to sustain us. God saw it coming a long time ago, and God still sees it coming. It's not getting better, it's getting worse. There are more and more people and the resources of the world are being shoveled up the food chain to a smaller and smaller percentage of the whole, so that humankind on a global level is getting steadily poorer and poorer.

This world is still very much in the business of rejecting and attacking the ambassadors of the realm of God. But strangely and marvelously, just as the cross of Jesus was the instrument of glorification, so the world's battering of the sons and daughters of heaven is itself the path to transformation.

For as we struggle to share the good news of Christ's rule, which is a rule of peace and reconciliation and humility, as we find ourselves going long distances in empty wastes, we will sooner or later find ourselves at Jacob's well, and that remarkable and surprising person will see us for who we really are, and will see themselves as well. And a little more of the world will be saved. One more child of heaven will be born.

And we will gulp that water down, and it will taste pretty darn good.

Amen.

Born from Above (sermon for the second Sunday in Lent)

2011-03-20T04:28:00.000-07:00

Almost everywhere else in the world, people drive on the right, so that when you step into the road you look left. It's the way things are everywhere.

But not in England. In England everyone drives on the left. This means that when you step off the curb you have to look right. The British has found that foreign travelers were getting hit by cars so often because of this problem that they finally put two words on the street just in front of the curb, so that when you look down to step off you can see them. "Look right."*

When one steps off a curb in England, one has to resist what one knows in one's very bones. One has to do the opposite of what makes perfect sense.

So it is with the realm of God.

No, it doesn't have to do with driving right or left. Nor am I talking about political orientation. It has to do with a whole host of givens, a whole list of what the world takes as true, a whole system of what passes for wisdom that must be abandoned, left behind, even denied, when one is to enter the realm of God.

Now the way Nicodemus would tell his story is something like looking left when one crosses the street. It's the most natural story in the world. It makes perfect sense. It fits all the facts.

Nicodemus would say, probably in a kindly and self-deprecating way, but he would say it nevertheless, that he was a good Jew from a good family who worked hard all his life to do the right thing by God and neighbor. And because of all his hard work, God had rewarded him, he might say graciously and generously, but he'd still call it a reward, with a happy, prosperous life, and the opportunity, he would probably call it, to lead the Jewish people in a time of great trial and difficulty.

And Nicodemus would not be the only person who would tell that story. Probably most people in Jerusalem knew his name. In all likelihood everyone who was anyone would have heard Nicodemus preach at synagogue. They'd know about his achievements, his awards and honors. They'd know about his brilliantly shrewd business dealings and admire them. He was Joel Olsteen and Warren Buffet rolled into one.

The life of Nicodemus, his identity in the world, said a whole host of things about the world and about God. It said for example that God blessed the righteous. It said hard work pays off. It said that its entirely possible to be a shrewd and prosperous businessman in the Roman Empire and a blameless religious leader at the same time.

But that's the story if you're looking to the left. In the realm of the world, it's a true story. It's patently obvious that it's true. There's abundant evidence. There's a bank account with so much money. There's a curricula vitae with all the facts. There's family, friends, business associates, political leaders, who would all line up and give testimony.

But the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as it is told by John, doesn't look left, because it isn't told from the perspective of the world. The gospel looks right.

Looking right, we see a moral coward, a man who knows who Jesus is but is afraid to publicly acknowledge him, who sneaks off to see him by night. We see a man who has been made great not by God but by his own determined efforts. We see a man whose real motives are all caught up with how he looks and what religious piety gets him, namely importance, attention, and connections to all the right people.

Nicodemus was also almost certainly the kind of preacher who taught that Abraham was a hero because he had courage, because he was an adventurer. Abraham was the father of Israel because of what a great man he was. Why would Nicodemus preach thus? Because Nicodemus and those who followed him wanted to believe that their lives were really in their own hands, to do with as they pleased. And that made perfect sense, because it fit all the facts of the world as they knew it, and for that matter, as we do.

Of course, that's only if you are looking left. If you look right, Abraham was not a hero because of any innate specialness of his own. He was not particularly brave or noble or visionary. He had one thing that made him righteous in God's eyes, that made him worthy to be the father of Israel. And that was his faith in God's promises.

And at this juncture we need to remind ourselves that God called Abraham as the start of a project to save the world. He wasn't calling Abraham just to bless Abraham. He was calling Abraham to be the father of a people who would be God's instruments in saving a violent and bloody world. This is what Abraham believed in. This is what Abraham became passionate about. This is what we see if we look at Abraham from the perspective of the realm of God. Not a righteous man whom God was obligated to bless. But a blessed man whose faith earned him righteousness. This is what he looks like when we look right.

Abraham, as Paul says this morning, became the father of Israel because he believed God's promise, and decidedly not because he did anything. Whatever he did, he did through this remarkable power that comes through believing God's promises. Abraham didn't leave everything and go to this strange land because he was going to get a pot of gold, or even because he was going to get a son. He was going because he believed the vision of the great nation, the nation he would die without seeing himself, the nation that would redeem the world.

The faith that Jesus taught, the faith that Paul preached, was not something new. God's Spirit, God's wisdom and power, comes to those who believe in God's promises and enter into covenant relationship with God. All the blessing and protection and empowerment is not given in exchange for some goodness of ours. It is given to those who commit themselves to God's purposes with a passionate devotion.

But this is only if you look right.

The rest of the world looks left. And they see a God they can obligate to bless them with what they want. If I have this thing called faith, then God will protect me. And the faith I have is that God will. It's simple, obvious, straightforward. Anyone can understand it. Just like looking left.

The realm of the world is where we all live, and it has all kinds of rules, all kinds of basic principles, and for many people, religion is finding a way to conform to all these rules and principles, to accept reality on reality's terms, to live the way everyone else lives. To be respected in the community, to be healthy and prosperous, is the chief aim of religion. The values taught in the pulpit are of no use if they do not aid us to be happy and well.

We all want to believe we live in a just and moral world. And if we look to the left we do. But not if we look right. If we look right we see a depraved and dying world, cut off from God. But we also see Christ, and we see salvation from the realm of God.

Faith in God does not and cannot lead us to conforming to the world. To believe God's promise, to believe that God will inhabit us if we surrender ourselves to him, to believe that even as we emerge as children of the light we will be opposed and hated and persecuted, but that we will nevertheless participate in the realm of God, made real in the world, to trust in that promise, to rejoice in embracing it, well that doesn't make a lot of sense. That's, well, looking right, when everyone knows you have to look left.

Jesus, who lived out his ministry firmly on the basis of his trust in God's promises, will not end up looking good to his neighbors. He will end up looking like the worst kind of criminal, the most bankrupt kind of failure. But that's only if you keep looking left.

If you look right, he looks like a king.

Amen.

*I'm grateful to Lucy Lind Hogan, a professor at Wesley Seminary, who came up with this "look right" analogy in an essay on Paul's letter to the Romans.

One Man's Obedience (sermon for the first Sunday in Lent)

2011-03-13T05:00:00.001-07:00

What could be wrong with eating good food and becoming wise? What could be the problem with becoming more like God?

Our church's pulpits are full of people who promote the benefits to us of a relationship with God. How we can know what God knows, wield God's power, live forever, get rich, get healed. If we are good people who live responsible lives we get rewarded with well-being and prosperity. If we are lazy, irresponsible or immoral people, we get punished with poverty and illness. God is in his heaven, and this is how God operates.

Why wouldn't God want us to be prosperous and healthy? We say God loves us. That's what love is, isn't it? Wanting us to have what we want, to be what we want to be? When we go to war, wouldn't a loving God be on the side of the people who are moral and just and not on the side of people who are really hardly even people? Why wouldn't God back the right?

Eve doesn't take the fruit because she is lascivious or sociopathic or perverse or depraved. She takes the fruit because she's smart. She knows a good thing when she sees it. God must be mistaken, she thinks. The fruit is good to eat, it will make one wise, and it will bring one closer to God. How could it cause death?

No one likes to be fooled. And it would be easy to blame the serpent. But despite all the traditional interpretations, I have to say there is no evidence anywhere in the scriptures that the serpent is the devil. The serpent was in fact regarded as a wise animal in the ancient world, sort of how we think of an owl. Imagine if it was a wise old owl that said, "You won't die. It will make you wise; it will make you like God. Not to mention, one a day will keep the doctor away." The owl, or the serpent, is simply an symbol of the sharp thinking of the human creature.

God told me this was bad for me, but I know better. This isn't adultery, this is love. This isn't murder, this is peace-making. This isn't idolatry, this is self-esteem. This isn't gossip, it's a concerned discussion. This isn't stealing, it's a shrewd sales tactic. This isn't covetousness, it's the American dream.

Are we therefore to cultivate dull ignorance and stupidity to be right with God? Hardly. Jesus teaches us to be wise as serpents. We are not to make ignorance a virtue. Our intelligence is God's gift and like all gifts from God it is meant to be cultivated. But in the same breath, Jesus says we should be innocent as doves. Our intelligence must be put into the service of God.

Take Jesus for an example.

"Still wet from his baptism," as Fred Craddock puts it, Jesus is immediately led into the wilderness, not by the devil, but by the Spirit of God, and for the express purpose of being tested. The main message that came to Jesus when he was baptized is in fact the main message that should come to everyone who is baptized in his name.

God had said, "You are my Son, with whom I am well-pleased."

When Jesus meets the devil, he is not meeting a leather-faced, pointy-eared demon with a spiked tail. He is meeting a creature that God made expressly for the purpose of testing people. No temptation comes out and says, "I'm a temptation, boogah boogah!" No. Something beautiful and good presents itself. Something, yes, made by God.

"Well," the devil says, "God has said you are his Son. What do you think of that?"

While we're asking, what do we think of God calling us his sons and daughters? Do we believe it? Do we believe that God is inviting us to be divinely born? To be more than merely human? And if we believe that, what does it mean?

The devil asks us, "Doesn't that mean you should have whatever you want, whenever you want it?"

What do you think? Wouldn't that make sense? God has made you his children. What parent wouldn't give his children what they wanted?

The devil asks us, "Doesn't this mean that you will be protected from every danger, healed of every illness?" It makes sense, doesn't it?

The devil is quoting Psalm 91, one of the most popular psalms of the health-and-wealth gospel. The devil is suggesting we name it and claim it, and he's showing us scripture to back up his suggestion.

We're all tempted by various vices. We all think resisting those vices has to do with willpower, personal strength. We thrash ourselves when we can't resist. And our struggles with our vices tell us some important things about the nature of real temptation. We don't reach for the dessert when we are already overweight or diabetic because we are moved to do bad things. This isn't a slice of sickness and death, we tell ourselves, it's a slice of relief. How can something that works so well at relieving our inner pain be evil?

This is more than rationalization. It is a denial of truth. It's a denial that we are in pain, for one thing. It's a denial that there is something somewhere in our lives we have not dealt with honestly. The person who quits smoking with hardly a thought is a person who didn't need to smoke in the first place. The person who puffs away while lugging around an oxygen tank is someone who is denying a deeper issue, some inward suffering that the nicotine eases.

The temptation to use scripture to obligate God is not a question of wanting to do something bad. It is an expression of a denial born of inward fear. People in our pampered culture are terrified of poverty and death, so much so they want to deny its very existence. To such people, the appeal of a God who is obligated by God's word to keep one wealthy and healthy is irresistible. I'm not making an idol of God, I'm getting relief for my terror.

The devil asks us, "Doesn't being God's child mean you should be in charge of the world?" It's logical, isn't it? How are people going to obey God unless they are forced to? If we are the children of God, shouldn't we have our candidates in office and our judges on the Supreme Court? Shouldn't we be the people who tell the armies where to fight? Shouldn't it be our fingers on the big red button?

In the gospel of John, Pilate will ask Jesus if Jesus considers himself a king, and Jesus will tell him that he does. But he will add that the kingdom over which he rules in not the kind that will come and take Pilate's palace by storm in order to free its king. It's a different kind of power.

Our sin has two sides: on the one, it is a denial of our brokenness. On the other, it is a denial of our holiness. When confronted with our inward sickness, we deny it. We challenged to be holy, we claim imperfection.

Discipleship begins with honest self-assessment. It begins with admitting that inside, we are incomplete, we are diseased, we are not right.

But it also begins with simultaneously recognizing that you are called by God to be a child of the light, that God has offered you God's own power and wisdom.

These two truths must live in our hearts and minds all the time as God's people. Denying either renders us at best impotent to carry out God's will. At worst, such denial will lead us into the outer darkness.

But this obedience, this one man's obedience, the clear-eyed understanding of these two truths, opens for us the way of salvation and eternal life. For the end of our labor, the point of our struggle, is not to glorify ourselves, or even to save ourselves. It is not to impress people with what kind souls we are.

It is to become, truly and honestly, the vessels of God's presence in our world.

Amen.

I Have Set My King on Zion (sermon for Transfiguration 2011)

2011-03-06T05:08:00.000-08:00

In the sermon on the Mount, Jesus encourages people to go the extra mile, and most of us probably think he meant giving things the old college try, being persistent, and all that.

But he was actually referring to a Roman law requiring any subject of the Roman Empire to carry a Roman soldier's pack for one mile whenever asked. This was one of the many ways Romans exploited those over whom they ruled. It was profoundly inconvenient, not to mention humiliating, particularly if you were a conquered people and you were thereby made into a collaborator with the occupying forces.

So Jesus proposes this absurd idea. He suggests not only that we agree to carry the pack, but that we carry the pack an extra mile. What he is proposing is an exceedingly clever form of disobedience, a profoundly loving way of saying, "I am free."

He was proposing covert action.

I have to say I wonder about how much covert activity is going on around the world, encouraging these societies to rise up against despots and dictators. I'm sure some of you are wondering about that too. Is it the CIA, or some coalition of covert organizations, that has gotten all this going?

Or could it be that the covert activity is God's?

The church on earth, the whole church, is probably the healthiest its been in centuries. Worldwide, it is growing, though not in our back yard. The terrible corruption it suffered from about 1,000 AD into the 17th Century seems to have been largely cleared up. And of course, that corruption was really mainly in the Western Church. The Eastern Orthodox don't have such a nasty history.

Currently, the Pentecostal movement (you can't call it a denomination) is exploding in South America, Asia and Africa. The church that speaks Spanish, Korean, Chinese, and strange African tribal dialects is robust and vital. Did you know that many world-wide Pentecostals see the Cane Ridge Revival, which we Disciples claim as our founding moment, to also be their movement's birthplace?

I'm learning too that these congregations that are growing like wildfire all over the world, no matter what denomination may have founded them, are all pretty much cut from the same cloth doctrinally. If you were to hear their preaching you would think you were at a hard-core conservative Baptist revival, but if you looked at their social justice work you would think you were dealing with pacifist socialists. They are anti-war and they are anti-right, and at the same time they are preaching an old-fashioned hellfire and brimstone gospel.

I've heard from Lyle Predmore that he's baptizing a number of people in Bali today. He's written to me that these folks are so passionate about their faith, one is changing her name to Tabitha, after the little girl in Acts that Peter raised from the dead. Of course, in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation, Christianity may be technically legal, but evangelism isn't.

I observed in our newsletter this month how the church actually seems to be at its best when its being persecuted. No, that kind of church doesn't have much money, no, it isn't comfortable and encouraging, no it isn't socially advantageous, and no, it usually doesn't have pretty little buildings in the main part of town, but strangely enough, when the church is taking a stand with the weak and the poor, that's when people find it moving. That's when people find it compelling. That's when people start thinking God has something to do with it.

The great power of the church is the practice of witness, or in Greek martyria, which is transliterated martyrdom. Martyrdom is not the sick, masochistic behavior that the word has come to represent. Martyria, or witness, is about risking real danger and loss for the sake of telling the truth, whether it be about God's desire to restore the world to paradise, or whether it is about the human systems of domination and exploitation that are determined to keep that from happening, that indeed make the world a living hell for most of the living things that dwell in it, so that they can make a heaven for a privileged few.

Whenever someone says something true that is nevertheless dangerous to say, they are witnessing. Whenever anyone refuses to stop announcing God's word in the face of mainstream persecution, they are witnessing. Whenever anyone tells the story, as missionary Jon Barnes put it to me recently, "from below," that is, from the perspective of people on whose backs the rest of world rests, they are witnessing.

Moses witnessed in the face of Pharaoh on behalf of the slaves upon which Pharaoh had built his power. Elijah witnessed in the face of Ahab and Jezebel on behalf of the Israelites they were robbing and enslaving.

So when Jesus is revealed as standing with Elijah and Moses, he is being revealed as standing firmly in the Jewish tradition of going counter to the cultural norms of his day. Israel, God's people, God's nation, is supposed to stand against all the others, to go against the stream, to stand out as profoundly different.

But it failed its mission for a lot of its history. And Jesus therefore had to witness not only in the face of Caesar, but also in the faces of his fellow Jews, Herod and the high priests, on behalf not only of downtrodden Jews, but other peoples Caesar was treading on.

It seems to me that what some churches have done is to chop the biblical message down into a harmless, private, individualist message about self-actualization, when it is actually a grand message about a king who has come to transform the world, to defeat great and powerful despots, to set societies free. We are not a social service agency comprised of like-minded volunteers. We are covert operatives for the realm of God.

God says "I have set my king on Zion," and God says to that king: "You are my son."

I believe that Jesus is the king that God has set on Zion. I believe that Jesus is the one God called God's son. This Jesus is a superior force, the captain of the winning team, the holder of the iron rod that shatters the enemy like a piece of pottery into a thousand shards. Harsh images, true. But we're not talking about a general with billions of dollars worth of military hardware and hundreds of thousands of trained warriors. We're talking about the guy that general nailed to a cross. The rod of iron is an alloy of peace, grace, forgiveness and self-giving love. It is the power that shatters evil like a pot into a thousand meaningless shards. It's covert power that beats all overt power.

Jesus, after he was revealed as the glorious son of God, became again just himself, Jesus alone. And he walked down that mountain that day and across the plains to Jerusalem, where he climbed another mount called Golgotha. As he died on the cross, no one there could see that light any more. No one there knew who he really was.

Could it be that we are to be like him? Could it be that we are all secretly children of light, burning with the glorious power of the Spirit that the world can't see?

Could it be that we are the secret agents of the realm of God?

Amen.

A Weaned Child (sermon for the ninth Sunday after the Epiphany)

2011-02-27T04:51:00.000-08:00

Edna Shackleford, one of our oldest members, has reached that blessed stage in life when she vividly remembers details from her earliest childhood, even as more recent memory comes a little harder. She was telling me yesterday that she now knows, from her adult perspective, how little her family actually had when she was a small child. And yet she marvels at how well-off she felt, how abundant everything seemed to her then. She said she felt like royalty, always having more than she needed.

And while Edna certainly felt spoiled, just overwhelmed with the abundance in her life, she remembers at the same time that her parents were very strict, and how unquestioningly she obeyed them. Even though they never denied her any material thing she could have imagined wanting or needing, she could not have imagined ever defying them.

Though my history was very different than Edna's, I can identify with her memories. For what seemed like a lot of my early childhood, my mother worked all day and went to school at night, so I really rarely saw her. She couldn't afford a babysitter, so she taught me to be a latch-key kid. She'd give me detailed instructions, made me memorize the telephone numbers of the places she had to be all day, taught me how to cook TV dinners for myself, and gave me my list of chores to do.

At no time did I ever wonder if I would have enough to eat or a place to live or clothes to wear. I had absolutely no concerns about that. Of course, I saw things on TV and in the store that I wanted that Mom denied me, and I carried on about those things, but of course I can't remember any of them now. I knew on some level they weren't real needs, that Mom, after all, was right about them.

My point is that I never, ever worried about my safety or my health or basic well-being. I knew Mom would take care of me. It wasn't even a question.

At the same time, however, when she gave me my chore list, it never occurred to me that I might have simply said "No," or even that she had no way of knowing whether I'd done them or I hadn't. I didn't like doing most of them. I often felt that they were beyond my capability. I often muttered and sputtered the whole time I was doing them. But I did them, and I did them without question.

The short psalm we have this morning is thought by many to be the one psalm in the Old Testament that was likely written by a woman, and a mother at that. The mother sees that the kind of trust and willing obedience her weaned child has for her is an excellent metaphor for a right relationship with God. She would like to be to God as her child is to her.

The scriptures often compare the creation to a household, with God imagined as the householder. Within the household, humankind is pictured as having the role of steward. God is the source of all that we have and enjoy. We are meant to care for it and nurture it and leave it better than we found it. The problem of sin is rooted precisely in our suspicion that God the householder is not fair and will not distribute the resources to all of us equally. The problem of sin is the problem of fearing that there will not be enough.

But the truth is that God provides enough for everyone, without any of us lifting a finger. If we convince ourselves there isn't enough, we will forget God and in panic go grabbing for everything we can get. In so doing, we take over work that is properly God's, we lift our eyes higher than we should, we concern ourselves with things that we don't understand.

And indeed, this is precisely how we fulfill our own prophecy; in grabbing more than our share, we ensure that there is not enough for everyone. This is an unsustainable path and it will eventually lead to disaster. Indeed, it already has, again and again and again. God's judgment is naturally woven into our choices. If we choose to trust God and share willingly, things work out well. If we choose to be afraid and grab and hoard and fight, things devolve into chaos.

The problem then that is presented to all of us who seek to serve the living God is, how do we behave in a world that is always more or less insane, a world that nevertheless believes its insanity is perfectly sane? How do we live in a world of people who really are living in a near panic all the time? How do we stay faithful in a world full of people battling constantly for more than their share?

Jesus deepens the image of the divine household by characterizing God as the parent and God's people as God's children. We are not poorly-paid servants burdened by our stern boss with an unpleasant job; we are loving and devoted children, blessed with abundance, who want more than anything else in the world to please their loving parent.

Jesus says, "today has troubles enough of its own." Jesus is not teaching us to be worry-free. He himself will worry pretty deeply about his mission to die on the cross. He will worry pretty deeply about the well-being of his disciples. He's will be sorely troubled about their unity and their faithfulness. He's not teaching us to stop worrying. He's teaching us to stop worrying about God's job and start worrying about ours.

Seeking the realm of God, working for reconciliation between God and people and between people and people, working to end violence and to care for those who are being deprived by the greedy, ministering to the sick and the imprisoned and the outcast, oh, yes, today has troubles enough of it's own.

The mission God has given us is the chore list for God's household, our living world, and it opens the way for humankind to persist in the living world for many generations to come. God is saving this crazy world, and using God's people to do it. In Christ he is saying, "Stop trying to do my job and start doing yours."

God works in and through the whole of the living creation, in and through every lily and every sparrow, sometimes bringing blessings and sometimes bringing judgment, sometimes pruning away at life and sometimes letting it grow wildly. This is a God like a perfect parent, who really does know what is best not just for us but for all of life, and really has a good idea about how we might stay here, not just us, but our children and our children's children.

Like the weaned child who carries out his household chores, trusting his parent to provide all that is needful, Jesus offered good for evil, love for hate, generosity for greed, trusting God would ultimately protect and vindicate him. And God did. Though they crucified and buried Jesus in a tomb, God raised him from the dead.

Jesus teaches us to become as he was and is, the weaned children of a divine parent, letting go of our mad anxiety-driven dash to get all we can grab, and embracing our simple household chores: reconciliation, humility and generosity.

And we will be all right.

Amen.

Life in Your Ways (sermon for the seventh Sunday after the Epiphany)

2011-02-20T05:15:00.000-08:00

Mom brought home a monkey.

Back in the early sixties, after she was divorced and had moved us in with her parents in Maryland, my mother got a job in veterinary clinic that doubled as a pet shop. Mom always had a soft spot for animals. Well, there was this wooly monkey named Gus who just wasn't attracting customers and the owners had pretty much decided to put it to sleep. Mom couldn't deal with that so she brought it home.

My grandmother Almedia was horrified. People in our little neighborhood didn't have monkeys for pets. They had dogs. They had cats. They might have a bird. But they didn't have monkeys. She pulled all the curtains and watched that monkey every minute.

The monkey was extremely well-behaved, one of the best types for pets, litter-trained and everything. But when it climbed up the picture window curtains and pulled them back with its little black hand and looked out into the neighborhood, that was the end of Gus. He had to go back.

It just wasn't normal.

After the terrible ordeal of World War II, most everyone just wanted to get back to normal. But this getting back to normal went to some real extremes. It became the byword of a whole generation. Leave It to Beaver is a great example of what the country wanted to be at that time. You just couldn't be odd. Having a monkey as a pet was odd. Odd was---well, bad.

This has led us to compare our time to the golden era of the late forties and early fifties. We remember, rather selectively I think, a time when everyone was polite, white, lived in the suburbs, drove a new car, had one income from dad, a stay-at-home mom, and two blonde kids whose biggest problem was whether or not to tell the truth about breaking the neighbor's window with a baseball. We told ourselves this was the way the world had always been, except for that--well you know--that war that killed millions of people.

Today, people are neither white nor polite, they don't have new cars, they have to have two incomes because many jobs can't support even one person, much less four, mom and dad aren't married, their kids are from multiple partners, and the problems their kids have include gun violence and drug dealers. What has happened? The world is going to hell in a hand basket!

And the churches are having the same kind of issue. After the effortless explosion of churches in the late forties and fifties as a part of the great national passion for normalcy. the decline of mainline denominations since the sixties seems like a terrible loss. Lots of people think Americans have always been in church. But this is not so. There have been many times in American history when hardly anybody was in church. We're still a pretty religious country comparatively speaking, but it's more accurate to say that we are simply returning to---well, normal.

A lot of us grew up with the idea that history was a progression of bad to good, a march into a bright future, but the reality is that, while times certainly change, the amounts of good and bad stuff going on really don't. They just move around. This is really what is normal. What's normal is that certain people get on top for a time and they see the world through rose-colored glasses while all the people on the lower rungs see it as a hard and difficult place. SSDD. Same stuff different day. All very normal.

Indeed, there have been some pretty significant studies of happiness and discontent over the last few decades and interestingly enough, as far as we can tell, no matter how far we advance technologically and no matter how much wealthier we become, we don't actually get a bit happier. Everyone's just about as happy as they ever were, and just about as unhappy. SNAFU, as the soldiers used to say. Situation normal, all messed up.

But... God is odd.

(I'm stealing a bit here. Some say Dorothy Parker, one of my favorite writers, penned the famous poem,

How odd of God
To choose the Jews

Though others attribute it to other poets...)

One of the preachers I've been reading this week said that when you're singing "Holy Holy Holy," you might just as well be singing is "Odd, Odd, Odd." Holy means utterly different, utterly separate, utterly unique, so "odd" kind of gets it.

God is odd. And if we substituted this word "odd" for the word "holy" we would have the command: "You shall be odd, as the LORD your God is odd."

God is odd like a family with a monkey in a neighborhood of dog-owners. God is odd like The Addams Family in a Leave It to Beaver neighborhood.

It's perfectly normal for the world to have a handful of haves and whole boatload of have-nots. But God's realm is about sharing God's gifts so that everyone has enough. God is odd.

The world is governed by an "only-the-strong-survive" ethos. This is perfectly normal. But the realm of God is governed by a "last-will-come-first" ethos. God is odd.

It is normal to love people who love you, and people you know. In the realm of God, people are to love people who hate them, and to see aliens as their neighbors. God is odd.

It is normal for nations to defend their interests with a form of mass murder called warfare. This is normal. But in God's odd realm, the command is "turn the other cheek." God is odd.

It is normal in business to take advantage of those who are in need for selfish gain. Perfectly appropriate, even moral. But not in God's realm. In God's realm, the point of business is the well-being of the whole social order, employer, employee and customer.

The people of God are called to be odd, as God is odd. So when the psalmist prays "give me life in your ways," he is asking to be made as odd as God.

When we let the monkey move into the house, when we embrace the oddness of God, we become odd ourselves. While the normalcy of our globe will take different shapes and forms depending on what nation happens to be on top, who happens to have all the marbles, and who is going to war with whom, God will always be odd, forever and ever, amen, and so will all those who seek life in God's ways.

You all know that I often criticize the health-and-wealth gospel that is so popular these days. The idea that the whole point of the gospel is my prosperity and well-being is so obviously wrong, so completely at odds with the scripture that it rather amazes me that so many intelligent and well-meaning people are buying into it. But it really shouldn't amaze me. It is such a worldly idea, so perfectly normal, really, the idea that my interests and God's interests are simply the same. That makes a lot more sense than God being odd. It seems genuinely wise and deep and profound. Whereas the idea that God is odd seems absurd and even foolish.

Nevertheless, God does promise a kind of prosperity and well-being to those who seek God's oddness. It's not the normal kind though, because nothing about God is normal. It's an odd kind of prosperity, an odd kind of health, the kind that hangs on a cross and suffers for others, the kind that lives forever. Odd, odd, odd.

If you went out of here and started telling your neighbors how you were going to love your enemies and help strangers you will never even meet they would probably nod and smile in that way people do toward people who are developmentally disabled. If you keep at it, they might actually get mad at you. If you really make a lot of noise about it, they might even find a way to tear you down, discredit you. And if you really wouldn't shut up, you might find yourself in real danger.

Whereas if you told them about how God was fighting on our side against the infidels and would give us the victory over our adversaries, and if you told them that you were going to help that old lady down the street that everyone loves, and if you proclaimed that everyone was on their own, to sink or swim, well, then they'd probably warm right up to you. You would be normal. Perfectly normal. They know wisdom when they hear it. Their mommas didn't raise no fools.

I'm grateful mine brought home a monkey.

Amen.

Blameless (sermon for the sixth Sunday after the Epiphany)

2011-02-13T04:01:00.001-08:00

Isn't it wonderful that the news media is finally covering something that matters? Isn't it wonderful that we are watching a story that inspires and ennobles us rather than terrifying and enraging us? And it seems that all the sources are pointing out many of the same things. One of these is the encouraging presentation of millions of Arabs demonstrating peacefully and thereby bringing about a new regime. This is in stark contrast to the portrayal of Arabs as a murderous, violent lot that might best be wiped off the face of the earth.

But what strikes me most about this amazing story is the power of groups of people. Great power, glorious power, wonder-working power. And of course, horrifying power, destructive power, world-destroying power.

The power of groups is great, and it's more or less the power of their combined numbers. No tyranny can survive without the submission of a great number of people to that tyranny. No great evil can be done without the collusion of large numbers of people. And no great good can be accomplished, no matter how impressive the leaders, without followers in numbers.

In fact, historians in the last century or so have been moving away from looking at history as the story of great individuals and toward history being about groups of people, who together call forth and shape great individuals. I think about Jesus this way, and honestly, I think the collection of scriptures we use are a great example of exactly this process. Thousands of people made Jesus who he was, and millions of people make him who he is today. Jesus was called forth by a great mass of people over the course of many generations, and Jesus continues to be called forth by the millions who call on his name today. Jesus is not simply a person. Jesus the individual is in reality lost to history, but Jesus the movement, a movement he himself called the reign of God, can never die.

One of the great struggles I think we all have with the scriptures we have heard this morning is how impossibly demanding they are, and I think the key to understanding them is in this principle. In Alcoholics Anonymous, there is a saying, "I get drunk, be we stay sober." Translating to the church, we might say, "I sin, but we are blameless."

Now there are two crucial levels I am talking about today. The first is that my salvation is dependent on my connection to a saved community. The second is that a community is saved or condemned not on the basis of what it does, but on what it wants.

The blamelessness, or sinlessness, or holiness of the church is not, thank God, dependent on my blamelessness or sinlessness or holiness. If it were it would be out of luck. Nor is my own blamelessness or holiness even dependent on me. As one of our elders asked yesterday, "What can one person do?" Really? Nothing.

The same, oddly enough, is true of condemnation. My condemnation, what is really wrong with me, is not really about me. It is about the we that works together against what is best for all of life on earth. What evil can one person really do? Certainly it seems that one might do a great deal of damage. But compared to the kinds of evil that really makes a difference to the whole world? Not much.

But the second important fact about both sin and holiness is that neither has as much to do with what we do together as it does with what we want together.

In other words, the world is saved or damned not by individuals, but by groups, and moreover, the world is saved or damned not by what these groups do, but by what they want.

Paul says today that the Corinthians cannot have advanced to spiritual maturity because they are too busy wrangling and arguing and being divisive. His point is that if they had advanced to spiritual maturity, they would be of the same mind, that is, the mind of Christ, which is one mind, at peace. They would want what God wants, and would therefore be working together so that God's will might be done on earth as it is in heaven. They claim to be struggling over issue of truth, but Paul sees in their actions the issue only of their desires. It's not what they are doing that's the problem. It's what they are wanting.

Paul loves the Corinthian church and believes in them, but he is making it clear that they are off the track, badly off the track. Faith is about wanting what God wants, and it's obvious from their actions that they are more concerned their preferences and opinions than they are with God's. Paul is making it clear that acting in concert has no meaning if the congregation is not also wanting in concert.

The congregation, the church, the people of God, are perfect to the extent that they are of one mind in Jesus Christ, however imperfect all the individuals may be. In this is my salvation.

The Old Testament, in a bit more subtle way admittedly, addresses the same issue in multitudinous ways. The kings of Israel, in a literary sense, represented the people of Israel, What made David a great king, and therefore made Israel a great nation, was not his brilliant military strategy or his good looks or his talent as a public speaker. What made him a great king was that he passionately wanted God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. And his failure had nothing to do with being a lousy leader. It had to do with allowing his own wants to become more important to him than the will of God.

What we want must be in concert, but what we want must be what God wants. Our salvation depends on our unity not only with each other, but with God.

The salvation of the world is not in doing the right thing, it's in wanting the right thing. This is the true distinction between works and faith. To do something that outwardly looks righteous, but which is inwardly motivated by selfishness or greed or a desire to dominate or control, is to become simply a part of the great waste that is sin and death.

The Greek word translated "hell" Jesus uses in today's passage is actually Gehenna, which was not an otherworldly, cosmic place, but a huge, perpetually burning garbage dump everyone Jesus was talking to knew about. Jesus was using extremely vivid language to talk about just how crucial it is to the reign of God for God's people not merely to do what God wants, but to want what God wants. Jesus is saying that the group that does what God wants but that doesn't actually want what God wants is a tragic waste, best thrown into the burn pile.

When a group of people want to control and dominate another group of people, they hide their evil under what appear to be good intentions. "We enslave you in order to civilize you. We throw you in prison to rehabilitate you. We point weapons of mass destruction at you in the name of peace. We oppress one class so the other classes can have a better life. We murder one of you for the sake of the rest of you."

There are plenty of groups out there that I can become a part of that will help me seek my selfish desires, will reward my deceit and will honor my cowardice with violent protection. I can become a part of a "we" that dominates and controls and exploits and violates, and which hides it all behind noble words and claims to the moral high ground.

But there is also the church, and all other groups of people that band together around what is truly best for humankind, and all living things, in honesty and courage. The scriptures frequently speak of foreigners and other groups that manifest the desire of God just as faithfully or more so than do the people God called. There is a single good that we can all want; that's the heart of true monotheism, and not exclusivism. The Egyptian people are an example of this kind of unity with each other and with God, the kind of power that saves the world.

I am a sinner, full of selfishness and deceit and cowardice, but we are the sinless body of Christ. I am a mortal doomed to die and pass from history forever. But we are the eternally living body of Christ. I want what I want, we want what God wants. I am lost and condemned, we are found and redeemed. I fumble in the dark, but we walk in the light.

Amen.

A Light in the Darkness (sermon for the fifth Sunday after the Epiphany)

2011-02-06T05:07:00.000-08:00

Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he was taken from his home to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He asked one man there why he prayed and the man replied, "I pray to the God within me that I will be given the strength to ask God the right questions."

We are part of a denomination that celebrates questions. We approve of them, we encourage them, we hope that our members think for themselves. This is an approach to the mission of sharing the gospel in the world, our approach, and the hope that is in it is not that everyone will think differently, but that everyone will come to the obedience of faith through their own authentic journey.

But the story from the prison camp is instructive. There are questions and then there are questions. Some questions are really about avoiding full commitment. We know if we ask certain unanswerable questions, we then have an excuse for holding back. "I would give myself entirely to discipleship, except I haven't gotten answers to the important questions yet."

Other questions are motivated by a desire to move closer to God, to deepen one's commitment, to have a greater understanding and appreciation of God's person and will. These, as Wiesel's fellow prisoner might say, are the right questions.

The great promise of the gospel is really serenity. The word "happy" we have in our psalm today is not the best translation. The Hebrew word translated "happy" might better be translated "serene." The psalm is about deep contentedness, freedom from anxiety, impartial graciousness. It is about the gift of God's Spirit to those who walk in God's ways. Impartial versus partial, whole versus incomplete, loving and gracious and generous to all without exception. This is God's nature, and God shares God's nature with those who walk in God's ways.

Many loving and spiritual people have a problem with the kind of biblical language that condemns. We like to think that God doesn't condemn anyone. We perhaps are thinking of the kind of bigoted Christian who assigned all those good people of other religions to hellfire. The scriptures, to my way of thinking, don't condemn such people. Nor, in the end, do they authorize our condemnation of anyone. They certainly do not authorize violence against anyone, including those whom the bible might declare wicked.

Elie Wiesel's fellow prisoner could have asked "Why do the Nazis prosper? Why do they have the victory?" But the God within him, the Spirit of God, knew that this was not the right question. He might have asked "How do I achieve victory over this powerful enemy?" But the God within him knew that was also the wrong question. Or he might have asked "How will you destroy these evil people?" Again, wrong question.

Certainly the Nazis are a good example of the kind of religion the bible condemns. False religion and evil from a biblical point of view has nothing to do with authentic alternative religions that lead people to loving and ethical lives. The bible regards as false religion and evil those religious and philosophical principles that lead people to oppress other people, to mistreat the planet, to execute people or to go to war. Now I know the Old Testament speaks of war and violence, but in the end, in understanding both Old and New Testaments, the final practice of those who seek the one living and true God is the practice of peace.

So there are persons whom God condemns, sad to say. There are persons God has no use for, as upsetting as that may be. Certainly, God does not expect, nor does he plan, for everyone on earth to become Christian; God is delighted by those who receive God's Spirit in whatever way they find it. But God does condemn the violent, the oppressive, the powerful ones who put on a show of religion but who do not seek justice for the powerless and who are not generous as God is generous. I don't believe God has in mind eternal torment for anyone. I do believe however that many of these useless lives simply snuff out and disappear, while the lives of those who are filled with God's Spirit never truly leave the living world.

God offers us a set of practices, religious and ethical, that in the end are not rational, not even very sensible. But these practices lead us to an openness to God's Spirit, and it's God's Spirit that is the light in the spiritual darkness of the world. Without God's Spirit, the scriptures will not finally make any sense. With it, they glow with holy light.

The fullness of human life, the completeness, the wholeness, and therefore true serenity, lies in the indwelling of God's Spirit. Without it, we are never at peace. Without it, we are not much use to God. Our lives are simply brief flickers that make almost no difference. The missing line in today's psalm has to do with the onlooking wicked person, who sees the one illumined by God's Spirit, was omitted, probably because of how disturbing it is:

The wicked will see it and be grieved;
He will gnash his teeth and melt away;
The desire of the wicked shall perish.

The translation of the Hebrew in the psalm in line four should read more like "there is a light in the darkness for the upright." This is the light of God's Spirit, God's personality, God's perspective. God's nature, God's Spirit, is like water that quenches thirst forever, or food that feeds once and for all. It is like light in a great darkness, and it is like salt in tasteless or bad tasting food.

We sometimes have good reason to get lost in our anxiety or grief. Wiesel's anonymous fellow prisoner certainly had reason to be deeply afraid, didn't he? Of course, our reasons for giving into anger or fear are often much, much less than his.

Nevertheless, there are often times when something truly is being taken from us, or something we need is being kept from us. These are real situations, situations when we are being hurt in one way or another. At such times, we are in profound danger of slipping into the eternal and meaningless nothingness, the spiritual darkness that encompasses much of humanity.

But we have the assurance that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness shall not overcome it. Jesus invites us to accept a majestic and terribly demanding mantle, the mantle of the fullness of our humanity. We are to be a tiny and by most worldly measures an inconsequential light, a bit of crystalline spice, small things that are nevertheless remarkably powerful. And we are to have the courage of being whole despite the great darkness that demands that we cut off pieces of ourselves, that we live incomplete lives, blind, deaf, mute, lame. We are to be uncompromising in our obedience to God in the midst of a world that demands compromise. And we are to trust that the light cannot in the end be overcome, no matter what victories the darkness might seem to accomplish.

This is why Jesus teaches us not to hide God's light. He knows that the darkness will try to overcome it, and that we might in our fear therefore hide it away for safety. But we mustn't hide it. No matter how desperately the world wants to put it out, we mustn't hide it.

There's the story about the cave and the sun. The sun invited the cave to come up and see it's light, but the cave said, "All I see is darkness." But the sun invited the cave to come up again and finally the cave came up and saw the light of the sun. So then the cave said, "come down and see my darkness." But when the sun went down into the cave, the darkness was gone.

Amen.

You Holy Hill (sermon for the fourth Sunday after the Epiphany)

2011-01-30T04:52:00.000-08:00

The Rappahannock River starts about 1800 feet up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Someone has climbed up there and found the precise point where it pops out of a hole in the ground. How many millions of living things take their life from that particular mountain?

We know that the mountaintop or even hilltop can be thought of as a holy place because its high. Most of us still imagine, no matter how hard we might try to avoid it, that heaven is up in the sky. So a hill or a mountain, logically, would be closer to heaven.

But mountains and hills are also where water comes from. Fresh water, in most parts of the world, comes to communities from high ground, where weather systems form and ice freezes and then melts down through soil and rock into dark underground streams which then emerges somewhere and flows down into rivers and streams to wash things clean and quench thirst and water crops.

Thousands of years ago when the God of our bible was an idea being formed among a people in what is now Iraq, it is thought that Yahweh was originally worshipped as a mountain god. And later when Abraham and Jacob were sojourning in what is now Israel, the places they established for worship and sacrifice were the tops of mountains, the so-called high places. And even later, when Solomon had established the center of worship to be Jerusalem, the city itself was set up on what we would probably call a hill, the "holy hill" mentioned in today's psalm, which is also known as Mount Zion.

Our psalm this morning is an entrance hymn, meant to be sung by the congregation as it enters the temple, or when gathering in synagogue. The opening question uses two images, the first is the tabernacle tent that the wandering Hebrews used for worship during the Exodus before they reached the promised land. The other is the holy hill where the temple was finally established, Mount Zion. And the question is not just who can enter, but who can stay.

The psalm is an entrance hymn for worship, and yet, interestingly enough it doesn't say that worship qualifies one to live in the temple. Worship, the psalmist seems to be saying, doesn't qualify us for fellowship with God. Then and now, some of us might equate closeness to God with spending lots of time doing church stuff. We might see, as do many church teachers, the sacraments as making us worthy of fellowship with God. Getting baptized, taking the Lord's Supper.

Back then, many Jews had the idea that one had to live in the profane world and that made it necessary and unavoidable that one had to get dirty. Going to the temple was a way of getting clean again. You went in, prayed the right prayer, did the right ritual, made the right offering, and walked out right with God. I think lots of us Christians think of worship that way today.

But this psalmist is on to us, as indeed are many of the prophets. He answers his opening question with a list of qualifications for fellowship with God. It's not what we do in the temple, he says, that makes us right with God; it's what we do before we get there.

Put another way, the blessing of God, like the Rappahannock River, begins far up there in the darkness and heights, but it makes itself known out here, on the plains, in the low places, where it spreads out and gives life to millions of creatures. We can call the mountain of God home when we are doing what God is doing in creation. We can live with God up there if we are joining with God down here.

The psalmist asks "Who may dwell on your holy hill?" And one of his answers is "Those who stand by their oath even to their hurt."

God stands by God's oath even to God's hurt. Paul talks about the cross, about the lowliness of God's revelation. God chose the execution of a pretender to the throne, the legal punishment of an insurrectionist, the crucifixion, as the supreme revelation of God's presence in the world. Think of this now.

Many people see this as simple self-sacrifice, a sin offering for humankind, and there is perhaps an element of that. But the reason Jesus was crucified was that he insisted in worshiping God rather than Caesar. He was crucified because he accepted the royal title God gave him and honored his promise to God to be God's servant, no matter what human authority came along and demanded he give it up. He stood by his oath even to his hurt.

He did not accept the widely-held wisdom that you have to get dirty to make it in the world, that you have to sometimes give up your pie-in-the-sky dreams of the kingdom of heaven for the practical challenges of survival. He gave himself to the dream with a passion. We even call his trial and his death his passion, because that's what it was.

The cross is a revelation not only of the fullness of being truly human, but it is also the fullest revelation of who God is, the God who blesses all of creation, even when those God made to be God's image ignore and reject God. The body of Jesus hanging on the cross as a pretender to the throne of the world is the perfect image of how humankind treats God.

When Jesus calls his inner circle to join him higher up on the mountain, he is not sharing a general blessing with the crowds who are following him. He is blessing his disciples decision to follow him, their passion, their great hunger for fellowship with God, their offering of their lives to stand by their covenant oaths. They are entering the new covenant, which calls disciples to do as Jesus did, to receive God's Spirit, to embody God in the world, even though it might cost them their reputations, their security and even their safety.

It is a foolish and a stupid thing to keep one's promise even when it brings one ruin. It is ridiculous to love and honor and bless people that just keep disappointing you. It defies common sense to stand by your oath when it gets you nowhere but a cross. It is the height of idiocy to love people who hate you.

It is, for example, a foolish and ridiculous thing to send thousands of gallons of fresh water down from the Blue Ridge Mountains to give life to thousands of people who never even thank you, who indeed grab your resources, hoard them, and take them away from those who really need them. Nevertheless, you keep on sending this blessing to those who ungratefully misuse it.

But that's who you are, God. Ridiculous.

Who may abide on God's holy hill?

Only the ridiculous.

Amen.

Seek His Face (sermon for the third Sunday after the Epiphany)

2011-01-23T04:59:00.000-08:00

Who are the faces you see in your heart?

The lines we've skipped in the psalm tell us the issue for the psalmist was that false witnesses had risen up against him. When someone tells a lie about us, they invade our minds with force. They violate our boundaries. They take center stage in our spirits and they tend to hold it, particularly if the lie is being believed, and particularly if any of our own inner voices believe it. We might have a whole host of people who have entered our minds in the past with accusations and judgments and they may have been put away somewhere, but when a lie is told about us, these accusers come swarming into our consciousness and raise their voices as well.

Our inner lives might very well be described as a community of people we have let into our minds and hearts. I know some folks who have struggled with various forms of mental illness who describe this very well. I've heard some call the negative, diseased voices in the mind "the committee." They're going along, trying to do something positive, and the committee speaks up and starts telling them all the reasons they won't be able to do that, and all the reasons they really need to do something self-defeating and hopeless.

Depending on our life experiences, we each have in our minds a whole community of people. Our inner lives is really like a nation, filled with territories and the people who live in them, and who we are and how we feel and what we do is then conditioned and shaped by this community of people who are speaking to us in our minds.

These people tell us what is right and what is wrong, where we belong and where we don't belong, whom we can trust and whom we can't, what is our concern and what isn't. You can imagine if you like a crowd around you, a sea of faces, all of them representing someone you have known, someone who has made an impression on you, positive or negative.

Isaiah was writing about two territories at the northern boundary of what had been Israel, Zebulun and Naphtali, the names of which were simply synonymous in most people's minds with danger and turmoil and violence and oppression. Bad neighborhoods you might say. I suppose to this day if we hear "South Bronx" or "Harlem" or "Watts" we automatically see in our minds riots and slums and scary people of dark complexion, even though those neighborhoods may have changed a great deal since the sixties.

Zebulun and Naphtali were like that. The people of those lands saw nothing around them but the evil leering faces of powerful nations lusting to take them into captivity.

But on them, Isaiah says, a light has shined. A new face is in the picture, one much greater and more powerful than any of the evil faces, the face of the Lord, who breaks the rod of their oppression. Those evil faces are scattered like birds before a running child.

In Paul's letter, he spoke about the factions in the Corinthian church, naming even himself as having been identified as a faction leader. Apollos, Peter, Paul, the faces of great spiritual leaders, wonderful people who must certainly have really changed a lot of lives. Apollos was known primarily for his eloquence, his power as a speaker. Peter was known for his profoundly Jewish perspective and his intense personal history with Jesus himself, and finally Paul was known as the fiery and innovative ex-Pharisee with strange ideas about reaching out to the Gentiles. Their faces were powerfully present in the minds of the new Christians they'd inspired.

Even today, depending on the denomination you're talking about, this or that biblical author will take precedence. I kid my Southern Baptist colleagues that all they preach on is John and Proverbs, and I can do that because there's sadly a lot of truth to it. But they can also kid those of us who were trained by the Lutherans, that we can't find our way out of Paul.

The diversity of the biblical witness is itself saying a lot about Christian community. Paul puts it very well: "Did John the evangelist die for you? Were you baptized into the name of Proverbs? Did Paul save you from your sins?" The people who put the bible together wanted us, I think, to see that there are and will always be diverse witnesses, but they want to assert at the same time that there is really only one Christ.

Of course we know even in congregations certain individuals become popular. It's not surprising. Christians in many cases are pretty amazing and admirable people. But it is a short step to these folks getting claimed by scrapping factions as leaders, even when they themselves have no interest in being claimed as such,.

These also are those faces that float around in our hearts, those influential persons who tell us who we are, who we belong to. Paul reminds us that the biblical author or church leader we like is not the person who truly tells us who we are, and is not the face in our hearts we can really trust. That face is the face of Christ.

The fishers Jesus called in our story from Matthew this morning are defined by their jobs and their place in society. They work the water. They pay their taxes. They have relationships with family, parents, wives, children, all of which identify them as sons, fathers, husbands. And they are citizens of those troubled, turmoil-filled places lots of people had given up on. The faces in their heads no doubt told them, "stay where you are, there's no hope, settle for the difficult lives you lead, settle for the early deaths of your parents, the dashing of your children's joy, because that's the way things are, that's the way you are, and that's all you are."

But Jesus comes along and says, "the kingdom of God has come near; you are more than they say. Come follow me."

The psalmist's heart says "seek his face." Out of all the voices, the voices of our parents, our teachers, our friends, our spouses, our siblings, all these faces we see in our mind's eye, the face of Christ alone will tell us the truth, the face of Christ alone will tell us who we really are.

The face of Christ by itself unites us. I know many people are troubled by what sounds to them like exclusivity, like a rude claim that Jesus is the only way. But the exclusivity, if there is any, in the notion of "Christ alone," is not oriented toward dividing people, but is instead focused on this peculiar notion of oneness.

There is no other religion I'm aware of that focuses on the idea that human society can and should be concretely and visibly healed of divisions and can and should be united under the rule of a loving God. There are ideas like that in other religions, but the prayer of Jesus from the gospel of John was that we might be one, one with each other and one with God.

Seek his face, our hearts tell us. Among all the faces in our hearts and minds and souls, among all the voices telling us who we are and who we aren't, seek his face, listen for his voice, for he alone sees us and knows us in spirit and in truth.

Amen.

The Glad News (sermon for the second Sunday in Epiphany)

2011-01-19T03:29:00.000-08:00

Adults, we know, don't like doing things at which they feel no competence. That's why every church has a well staffed fellowship and property ministry and has to pull teeth to get people for evangelism, education, membership, worship, stewardship and outreach. Sometimes if you change the name of stewardship to finance, you can get a big committee, but money and business management is actually a very small part of Christian stewardship.

But the skill we're talking about here, the skill of inviting, welcoming and assimilating new people to Christian faith, this skill, like all the others, can be learned, and it can be learned from a person who is present and ready to teach us, right here in our midst. His name is Jesus Christ, and he is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, he is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit, and if we are humble and willing and go to him ready to be true and diligent disciples, he will train us.

The psalm this mornings is a good teaching example of this skill. The psalmist is declaring the glad news of his experience with God to what he calls the great congregation, a great gathering of people. He is, in other words, shouting from the rooftops, not about theology, not about miracles, not about moral codes, but about what God has done for him.

He talks about being mired in some kind of bog, and about how God lifted him out of that bog and set him on solid ground. He talks about God hearing when he, an ordinary person, cried out to God. What God has delivered is safety and security.

The rest of the psalm is proclamation and indeed about proclamation. The psalmist is saying that testimony is the chief thing we do in serving God. We might do all kinds of other good things in obedience to God, make all the requisite offerings of time and talent and money, but the main thing God wants of us is our testimony.

The psalmist is confident that because of his testimony others will come to believe in God. Indeed, the psalmist understands that this is the chief reason God is active in his life, to be glorified through the psalmist.

The psalmist makes an observation about testimony; he seems to suggest that some people hide what God has done for them, that they conceal it from others. He assures God he will not be like them. He will make God's love for him known. And he then asks God to continue to be a saving presence in his life.

Apparently this problem with giving testimony is not new. Even in ancient times, people were reticent about talking about what God had done for them.

I know for my part of it is that God has rescued me from my own sinfulness. In order to testify about what God has done, I have to reveal my sinfulness. The psalmist had to admit that he ended up in a miry bog somehow. Maybe we don't like people to know about the miry bogs in our lives. We don't like people to know that we really don't know how to live in the world, that we fall into traps and can't find our way out of them. I think I know why. I know why because I've been one of those people who very publicly and disastrously screwed up. Other people love to have a screw-up around. It gives them something to focus on outside of their own problems. For many people it becomes the way they avoid facing their own less obvious struggles.

But most of us find, when we finally stop caring about showing our warts, that we feel much better. We are oddly much happier if we open up about our blindness, our shortcomings, our defects. I think Mark Twain said that the truth is easier to remember.

But it's not only easier to remember, it also makes it easier to enter into relationship with God.

Jesus asks "What do you seek?" If we have nothing we need, no trouble to be saved from, no sin to be taken away, then our answer is "Nothing, thank you." But most of us have any number of answers to such a question. And the answer to those questions, the salvation we seek, the freedom we long for, is in going to see Jesus.

And in going to see Jesus, in encountering him in a direct way, so that we can each say "I have seen for myself," may be something that we have never done before. But what is life for if it isn't to take a new journey now and again?

It will require of us the courage to do something that doesn't come naturally, that we haven't already had a lifetime of practice to do. But that's the very essence of discipleship, working hard at doing something we haven't ever done before, practicing a way we don't already know, going down a path we've never trod before.

What we are seeking is our own glad news. At the end of the day, when you talk about our business, the business of ministering to the broken world, the business of bringing people back into relationship with God and one another, we are talking about telling people our own glad news. It can't be some canned theological statement, some set of evangelical buzz words. It has to be our glad news. It has to be about our particular miry bog, and about how our God plucked us from it. It has to be our own solid ground, the ground that God found for us. It has to be our particular glad news.

Don't be afraid to go where you haven't yet been.

Come and see.

Amen.

The Voice of the Lord (sermon for the first Sunday in Epiphany Year A)

2011-01-10T04:16:00.000-08:00

When I was dating, I remember one of the things I learned from the various woman I dated was that public attention, particular in front of other women, was very powerful. If I held hands with, or praised, or declared my love for a woman in front of others, and particularly in front of her female circles, well, that woman would just adore me, as would all her girlfriends. Sending flowers to the woman at work, for example, where all the women she worked with would see it, declared that the is woman was truly special to me.

Public praise is powerful. It gets people's attention. It says something both about the one being praised and the one doing the praising.

We don't often hear sermons preached on the psalms, and for this reason I thought for the season of Epiphany I'd draw your attention to these ancient songs.

And songs are what they are. The psalms were written to be sung, and to this day in Jewish worship, they are. The psalms were written to be sung when the people of God were gathered together. Even though many of the songs use the first person voice, they were all intended to be sung by a congregation, they are all of them meant to be acts of public worship carried out by the gathered people of God.

I think it's always important to pay attention to the original purpose of a biblical writing. While we may use the psalms for all kinds of purposes, the original purpose of the psalms was to be sung in the context of public worship. Some psalms were entrance rites, some were for the occasion of a new king's coronation, some were laments, some were confessional. This psalm's purpose was very simple. It is a call to worship and praise God.

God requires us, commands us really, to praise him. It's part of our job as God's people, part of the way that we make God known in the world. In praising God right out in public, or as the saying goes, in front of God and everybody, we are carrying out a part of the mission God has given us. This practice has tremendous power, not only for the world who hears us praise God, but for us who do the praising.

In this psalm we begin by calling the heavenly beings to join us in bowing down to God and ascribing to God all power and majesty and glory, forsaking all other gods. We then go on to sing in praise of God's voice.

In the psalm, we declare that voice of God is in the howling of a storm. Now I don't think the original psalmist actually thought that God had vocal cords. He is using a metaphor and since he is using a metaphor we know that he is trying to say something even more profound.

The psalmist has given us a way to make a surprising, even shocking announcement. The whole congregation, the church all over the world, says at one time and in one voice that God, the creator of the universe, deigns to be present to ordinary people, that the eternal deity chooses to enter into the fleeting moments of history, that the one who could with a word destroy all that is broken and imperfect chooses instead to love it and gently nurture it into wholeness.

Now, I'm reminded of a very funny sermon Fred Craddock preached about people's terror of saying anything. Some of us were talking about it the other day with regard to our early service here at Philippi. It seems that certain people always do the talking. The rest keep their mouths shut. Some of this is due to the fear of being expected to say something.

"I can do anything you ask me, preacher, but for God's sake don't ask me to say anything."

And yet when we are truly devoted to someone, when we really care about someone, when we really admire someone, we seem to have no difficulty carrying on at length about our admiration or love, don't we? The person who was commenting that the same people always spoke during early service also was terrified of saying anything during the service about God, but in our conversation went on at some length telling about a friend. Now if we can talk at length about a friend, why is it we can't talk at all about God?

References are powerful. They get people jobs. Recommendations are powerful. They get people to visit businesses. Good reviews are powerful. They get people to go to movies or watch TV shows. And the praise of God by a human being is powerful. It gets people to believe.

And if the voices of people are powerful, how much more so is the voice of God. And the voice of God almost always comes to us through the vocal chords of people. The words of holy scripture, the inspired words of a preacher, the testimony of a believer, all become in some way the voice of the Lord. What is awe-inspiring is not simply how far beyond us God is, but that the God that is so far beyond us nevertheless chooses us ordinary folk to speak with God's voice, and to do what God wants done in the world.

Did the voice of the Lord actually speak supernaturally at Jesus' baptism? Perhaps it did, but even if it did not, it was clear from Christ's life and teaching that he was indeed the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, that these writings, these words, this voice of God throughout history, endorsed Jesus as the Christ, the son of the living God, not merely begotten of flesh but actually begotten of God.

Do we send flowers to God at work? Do we hold hands with God in front of our friends? Do we declare our love for God in front of other people? In our baptisms, God declared for us, right in front of everyone. He said, "This one will do great things for me." God put trust in us, and at the same time gave us a mission to carry out. Every Christian that gives up on that mission or only carries it out half-heartedly contributes to the growing faithlessness of our culture. And everyone who testifies to God with real words is like the mighty wind that strips the bark off oaks and makes mountains jump, but which nevertheless chooses to move with gentleness and peace among the beloved people.

In the coming week, make note of how many times you give testimony. How many times do you recommend a product, how many times do you speak highly of your spouse, how many times do you commend a friend or acquaintance? And how many times do you in your speech tear someone down, ruin their reputation, undermine them in their pursuits? How many times do you listen to others speaking well or harshly about others? And most importantly, when do you give testimony to Jesus Christ? When do you encourage others to have faith in him? When do you discourage faith? When do you remove the stumbling blocks for others and when do you put them out there like booby traps for others to fall over?

In our baptism, God has offered us God's own mighty voice. It's not for nothing that there are not one but two commandments regarding speech. One is to be careful not to use the name of God wrongly. The other is to be careful not to use anyone else's name wrongly. What we say is powerful, and as God's people, what we say can take the bark off trees.

In praising God's great power, we receive it. In declaring for God, God declares for us.

Amen.

Grace Upon Grace (sermon for the second Sunday of Christmas)

2011-01-08T08:42:00.000-08:00

(By guest preacher the Rev. William Palmer during Mike's vacation)

Invariably during the holiday season, when my wife and daughters get together, someone turns the TV or the VCR to a movie they all regard as a favorite: “The Sound of Music.” As most of you know, there’s a place in the movie where the stern Captain Von Trapp and his children’s governess, Maria, discover their love for each other. They sing a lilting duet, repeating to one another the words, “For here you are, standing there loving me, whether or not you should. So somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.” As a romantic song, it’s wonderful; as theology, it’s terrible. No wonder Maria never was able to make it as a nun!

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with the idea of doing something good, whether it is in our youth, our childhood, or our mature years. But if something else that’s good—such as finding the love of our life—should happen to us later on, it does not come as a reward for having done something good in the past. It is a gift, not some kind of divine repayment for services rendered. It is grace.

The prophet Jeremiah appears at first glance to be the unlikeliest spokesperson for grace. Yet in the passage read for us this morning, this “weeping prophet” who had been reviled, jailed, and generally ignored because of his critique of king and clergy, proclaims a God who is remarkably generous in forgiving Judah’s sins and promising their restoration.

The residents of Judah in Jeremiah’s time were people we might recognize today. They had been blinded by their prosperity to the threats all around them. They had abandoned the faith of their fathers and mothers for faith in military alliances, an economy that favored the wealthy and despised the poor, and the pursuit of their own selfish pleasures. Jeremiah’s lone voice warned that a day of reckoning was about to come. The prophet would live to see his warnings go unheeded and the awful consequences descend upon his homeland. The cities of Judah would be razed by enemy armies, the great temple of Solomon would be left in ashes, and the survivors of this war and destruction would be marched off as slaves to faraway Babylon.

Nevertheless in the midst of all this Jeremiah not only produces a dirge that we call today the Book of Lamentations but also the wonderful passage read for us today. It is a passage reminding us that God is faithful even when we are unfaithful. It is a message of forgiveness: “With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back, I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble; for I have become a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn.” It is a message that predicts a complete reversal of fortune: “I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.” Those who were driven from the smoking ruins of Jerusalem in a procession akin to the Bataan Death March are assured that their return to that place will come under completely different circumstances.

Did they deserve it? Did they deserve to be forgiven after they had abandoned belief in God, treated the neediest among them with disdain, and ignored the prophet sent by the Lord to set them straight? No, they didn’t deserve it. Had they done something in their youth or childhood that was called up by the Lord to somehow balance out their more recent bad behavior? No, nothing they ever had done would have served to balance out the indictment lodged against them. Had they done anything during their enslavement to make sufficient amends for the sins that had put them in chains? There’s no indication that this was the case. It never was a matter of their making some kind of atonement for their sins. Their restoration simply was a matter of God exercising the mysterious action of grace.

Grace is a concept that doesn’t come easily to us. We prefer that people pay for their sins. We want to see evildoers punished to the fullest extent of the law. Drunk drivers who kill people in highway accidents, child abusers, those who prey upon the elderly—“Throw the book at them!” “Lock them up and throw away the key!” In fact, why should we expect society to worry about feeding and clothing them for life in some maximum-security prison? Why not just give them the chair!

The problem with our high dudgeon, of course, is the old adage about pointing the finger. When I point my finger at you, it’s hard to ignore the fact that four fingers are pointing back at me. Paul reminds us that “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Jesus put it another way. He said something like, “While you’re stressing out over the speck in another person’s eye, you somehow manage to ignore the telephone pole in your own.” Could it be that our offense at the darkness in others is a means of avoiding the fact of our own darkness? Are we so out of touch with our interior lives that we no longer acknowledge the truth about ourselves?

Until we come to the place where we can acknowledge the truth about ourselves, grace will be only a word—an old-fashioned name for a girl, an attribute with which we may describe the skill of a dancer or an ice skater. Its greater meaning will be lost on us.

Yet the remarkable thing about grace is that its operation is in no way dependent on our understanding of it or even our awareness that it exists. Grace is not restricted to the theologically literate or to the experientially desperate. It falls like the rain; it baptizes everyone who is touched by it equally, whether they know it or not.

Our gospel reading provides us with a different perspective on the coming of Jesus into the world. Unlike Matthew and Luke, John tells us nothing about the taxes levied by Caesar Augustus, a crowded inn at Bethlehem, a wondering band of shepherds, or wise men bearing gifts. He simply says that the Word arrived in a world that had come into being through him, and the world did not recognize him. This Word in the flesh tented among us, and for those to whom the gift was given, there was a glimmer of recognition—the ability to see his glory, full of grace and truth.

And there of course, right at the beginning, occurs that operative word—grace. Indeed, John goes on to say that “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” Grace upon grace—not just grace by itself but some extension, some expansion, some amplification of grace that makes it even more that we ever could have imagined. As difficult as it might be for us to grasp the concept of grace by itself, how much harder is it even to wrap our minds or our souls around the phrase, “grace upon grace.”

The law—that’s what we all know about, the law that metes out justice for those who break it—came, according to John, through Moses. But grace and truth come through Jesus Christ. Grace and truth embodied in the child of Bethlehem, the baby in the manger. Grace and truth, tenting among us, hiking along the hilly, dusty roads of Galilee. Grace and truth, offering bread and wine in such a way that we could never again look at them simply as bread and wine. Grace and truth, nailed to a cross, for the sins of the world, for your sins, for my sins. Grace upon grace, active at this very moment, in your life, in my life, in every life—working in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. Grace upon grace, which we are free to despise and ignore or embrace and celebrate, even now, as we stand and as we sing.

God Is With Us (sermon for Christmas Eve based on Matthew's Gospel)

2010-12-24T04:14:00.000-08:00

A whisper: "God is with us."

When I imagine this story I hear the angel whispering. It's the middle of the night, and Joseph is rolling around in bed in a troubled sleep, when somewhere behind him in the dream, something great and terrible whispers: "God is with us."

Before he takes us to Bethlehem, Matthew takes us to a cemetery. It's the family plot and the tombstones go back to the beginning of the human race. There are all the ancestors. Adam, Abraham, the first dreamer Joseph who went to Egypt as a slave, King David and any number of other kings, and then finally down to, well, Joseph.

Except there's a curve ball, a kind of a mess. Today, we wouldn't give Jesus all these ancestors. Jesus couldn't claim to be a descendent from any of them. Because, from our point of view, Joseph wasn't really Jesus' father.

Yes, then as now, this situation was a mess. It was even more of a mess back then. In those days, getting betrothed really was just the first stage of marriage. It was a real contract, legally binding. If the bride got pregnant during the betrothal period, that was adultery. And according to Leviticus the punishment for adultery was death.

Mary was pregnant. And it wasn't because she'd had relations with Joseph. There was only one explanation as far as Joseph could tell. It was a mess. And it had to be cleaned up somehow.

You know, I truly rejoice with those I know who grew up in wholesome, happy families, where everyone kept their promises, where moms were self-sacrificing saints and dads were all-knowing heroes of strength and character. There really are families like that, you know. Families that are more or less sane, that gather for Christmas in peace and happiness, that get through the whole holiday without anyone getting drunk or making a scene or announcing that they were leaving and would never see any of the family again.

But my family wasn't like that, and there are many, many people I know who didn't have families like that, and don't have families like that today. Most of those people, sad to say, aren't in church. They assume church is for those people who have it all together, whose families are strong and sane and stable. And Christmas, strangely enough, is that time of year when it really comes home just what kind of family you really have, for better or for worse. For a lot of us, Christmas as it's celebrated reminds us how messed up our families were or are.

Why do we celebrate Christmas in this way? Matthew tells us that Jesus' life begins with a messy family problem. And even before he does that, Matthew makes sure to point out the gravestones of only three women in Jesus' family cemetery: Tamar, Ruth and the wife of Uriah, or Bathsheba, all three of whom represent messy situations. Tamar was Judah's daughter in law, but also bore him a son. Ruth was a non-Jewish foreigner who seduced Boaz. Bathsheba was of course the wife David stole from Uriah, his neighbor. Messy stuff.

Of course there's nothing wrong with having a sane and healthy and stable family. Nothing wrong with all the children being born in wedlock and mom and dad staying together for sixty years and everyone being responsible and slim and prosperous and popular. There's every reason to be grateful for such good people and to celebrate them.

But for the rest of us, who went through divorces and failures and poverty, who experienced bouncing Christmas checks and broken Christmas promises, it is a wonder and a grace and a joy to welcome the savior into our messy lives in the way that old Joseph welcomed him.

First of all, it's important to note that Joseph, even without the angel's intervention, decides to protect Mary from the harsh law of Israel. Separate from her quietly, let her go off somewhere where no one knows her to have the baby, and her family would then put the kid up in someone's house. In the male-dominated world of Joseph's day, this constituted amazing grace. Joseph, we learn right away, is a good, good man.

But Joseph is also like that old Joseph in the family cemetery, the one who had all the dreams from heaven, for in the darkness of the night the angel visits him and tells him a wonder. The child in Mary's womb is from the Holy Spirit, and he is to be called by two names.

Names were very important to Jews in ancient times. Every name was a sentence that said something about the person. Jesus means "God saves." And Emmanuel, as Matthew tells us, means "God is with us."

"Joseph," the angel whispers, "God is with us." And to all of us who notice at this time of year how imperfect are our lives, how messy are our families, how short we fall of wholesomeness, the angel whispers in this dark night, "God is with us."

Where did we get the idea that Christmas is up to us? Where did we get the idea that holiness, goodness, righteousness or justice is up to us? Where did we get the idea that what we do or fail to do has anything to do with how God feels about us? It's all part of our perverse and sinful pride, isn't it? The angel slips past our defenses, comes to us in the dark, in the dream, and reminds us, "God is with us."

My family and many others are full of messes, but strangely and marvelously and shockingly, they are also full of grace. There are many broken hearts in my history, many messes that have never really been cleaned up, but strangely and marvelously and shockingly, there is also forgiveness and mercy. And these things, these marvelous and lovely things, did not come from earthly sources, anymore than did that baby in Mary's womb.

(Whispered) God is with us.

Amen.

The Least in the Kingdom (sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent Year A 2010)

2010-12-12T05:09:00.001-08:00

What do you expect of Jesus?

There are some very successful preachers out there, much more polished and sharp than me, that promote a view of Jesus as a kind of magical helper. And so someone gets sick in the family and the family gets together and prays and they collect all those tracts and pamphlets out there that say if you visualize healing and your faith is strong then Jesus will heal your family member. But the person isn't healed. The family is offended. What kind of Christ is this?

"Are you the one, or are we to expect another?"

Others might think of Jesus as the power that could stop natural disasters or who could miraculously give food to the hungry or who could prevent terrible dictators from rising to power. But we see in the news all the time about disasters that happen and thousands die or lose their homes. We hear about the millions who go to bed hungry every day. We know there are vicious and sadistic despots in power all over the world. Those who expect an all-powerful ruler over history are offended. What kind of Christ is this?

"Are you the one, or are we to expect another?"

Others think of Jesus as the king of niceness, the Lord of good manners, a deity for the cultivated. And when they come across a church where people are shouting or dancing or where everyone isn't wearing nice clothes, they are deeply offended. What kind of Christ is this?

"Are you the one, or are we to expect another?"

There are still others who think that Jesus is the Lord of some other world, and not of this one, and who expect see him only after death. So when they hear about people who follow him in their business practices or in their political activities, they are shocked. What kind of Christ is this?

"Are you the one, or are we to expect another?"

There are a few who think of Jesus as a kind of guru of happiness. They think of Jesus as a way to deny the pain and suffering of life and just float along on a pink cloud of peace and joy. And then, inevitably, some trial comes along, something that just can't possibly be denied, and they are shocked and offended. What kind of Christ is this?

"Are you the one, or are we to expect another?"

In Jesus' time, people had just as many expectations of the Messiah. Some thought he should have taken a vow of poverty, lived in a hovel in the desert and talked about letting go of material things. Others thought he should have been a fiery rebel organizing a bloody revolution to cast the Romans out of Israel once and for all. Others thought he should have been a noble political genius who might even have taken over the Roman Empire. Others thought he should have been a kind of super-Moses, waving a staff that brought floods and famines and plagues on all those who had ever offended or oppressed Israel.

Jesus, in his own teaching, seems most indebted to the prophet Isaiah's vision, and we hear today some of Isaiah's expectations. Isaiah painted a picture of a road leading home, a clear and straight path through hazardous and desolate wilderness, a wilderness now miraculously blooming into a verdant garden and protected from all predators. Isaiah was almost certainly talking about the return of the exiles from Babylon to Israel. This miraculous return home was metaphorically compared to the blind gaining sight, the deaf gaining their hearing and the dead being raised back into life.

Five hundred years later, Jesus takes up Isaiah's words and applies them to himself, and to John. Now Israel was not in exile, but was again at home in the land. Now Israel was occupied by the Romans. Now Israel was led by powerful Jews who collaborated with the oppressor. In Jesus' take on Isaiah, John the Baptist was the one who prepared the way in the wilderness for the people of God to go home.

Home, however, was a different place now. Home now was the realm of God, and the realm of God was no longer a geographical location, a particular hill, a certain country. The realm of God was a way of seeing, a way of hearing, a way of walking, a way of living.

The realm of God was no longer dependent on the actual conditions or locations in which people were living, but rather on the living they did in the places and conditions in which they found themselves.

It was no longer about whether John the Baptist got out of prison. It was now about how John understood his prison, and what his imprisonment would accomplish. It was no longer about whether Jesus would be defeated by the powerful Jews and their Roman friends, but how Jesus would understand what that defeat might accomplish. It was no longer about what would actually happen. It was now about how--first Jesus, and then we--would see, hear, walk and live through it. This is the realm of God.

So what kind of Christ is this? This Christ would give sight to the blind, so that they could see the truth. This Christ would unstop the ears of the deaf, so that they could hear God's word. This Christ would give mobility to the paralyzed, so that they could go where God was leading them. This Christ would give eternal life to the dead, so that they could take part in what God had been doing before they were born and what God would continue to do long after they died.

Christ didn't come to transform conditions; Christ came to transform people.

Jesus points out to the crowds that in John the Baptist they might have expected the kind of prophet that moved in the high circles, who had influence with the big cheeses. Even old Isaiah had been a priest in the temple and would have had the ear of the king. The Jewish king of Jesus' day, Herod, put out a coin with a reed blown by the wind on one side and Herod's face on the other. But John the Baptist was not a temple priest and clearly didn't impress Herod, who had arrested and imprisoned him, and would eventually execute him. Nevertheless, Jesus says, John is greater than any human being born of woman up until that time.

But Jesus doesn't stop there. He goes on to say that "the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he."

The Christmas miracle is the miracle of the Spirit of God taking residence in a living human being in such a way that a human being becomes the living embodiment of God in the real world. We celebrate Christmas not because 2,000 years ago something happened that would never happen again. In Jesus, God came to live among people. In us, God continues to do so.

We are invited through this Christ to become Christmas miracles. We are invited into the realm of God, which is not a place or a set of conditions. It is what we ourselves become when we open ourselves to God's Spirit, when we remove all the obstacles to God's coming into our bodies, when we gladly and joyfully invite God to use us, when we let go of all our desires and dreams so that the greater desire and dream of God might come true in us. When we are able to do this, everything becomes possible.

So when someone is sick, they are blessed if one of us is around, who can without fear or anger attend to them. And when a natural disaster strikes, the victims are blessed if we are around to respond with care and support. And when some awful despot rises, the oppressed are blessed if some of us are there to speak the truth to power, no matter what it costs us. And if someone, anyone, is caught in the dark valley of despair, they are blessed if we, the least in the kingdom of heaven, are there to give them hope.

And blessed are they who take no offense at us.

Amen.

Good Fruit (sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent Year A 2010)

2010-12-06T03:06:00.000-08:00

I did a little reading about the miners that got trapped in Chile. I don't know all the details, but I'm sure someone is going to write the book, because it's really an amazing story.

It appears that they were without light or any sign that anyone knew they were there for some seventeen days. During that time, there was a very good chance that they would have despaired or turned against one another. It's what groups of people do oftentimes in crisis. Panicky people often struggle with one another for power, and while they're doing that, nothing productive is really getting done. It's the way of the world, I guess.

But not for the miners. They apparently made a decision that they would neither succumb to despair nor turn on one another. Instead they made--and lived out--a covenant.

Now, for those of you who haven't been with us for long, I'll say a few words about covenant. The Hebrew word we translate covenant most simply means contract. But the word eventually came to have a deeper connotation. A covenant is a free acceptance of a binding agreement between parties who love one another. A covenant most of us are aware of is a marriage. Certainly we would say that the binding promises people make to each other in marriage is more than a contract.

But the world covenant also bears the dimension of a contract that equalizes an unequal relationship, as with the covenant between God and Israel, and the covenantal social contract God required of Israel, in which the strong are obliged to care for the weak, the rich for the poor, the healthy for the sick, the righteous for the sinful, and so on. This is the peaceable kingdom that Isaiah paints a picture of in our first lesson: a society in which the predator peacefully coexists with its prey.

The miners established a covenant of hope, a promise they made to each other to believe that God had not abandoned them and that they would not give into despair. They got to know one another and probed one another for gifts and graces, just as they took stock of what meager supplies they had. They identified leadership, they appointed a chaplain to keep them in fellowship with God, they discovered who knew something about first aid and made that person the medic, someone who was a creative cook and put him in charge of the rations.

They made a covenant with each other to focus not on what they didn't have, but on what they did. They made a covenant to focus not on what danger they were in, but on what hope they had. They made a covenant to set aside their individual opinions and preferences to become one body, each one giving everything to the common good of all.

They became a church.

When they were finally rescued, the medical personnel on site were amazed at how little they had to do. A month later one of the miners ran a marathon.

What is the the good fruit that is worthy of repentance? The biblical word we translate repentance simply means a change of mind. But in the context of Jewish and Christian spiritual life, repentance has to do with covenant. It is a decision to enter covenant, to freely bind oneself to God and to God's people for the sake of the world God loves.

The Ten Commandments together comprise a covenant. They are not simply a law code. They are the way of life for a people in covenant with God. God says, I shall be your God and you shall be my people. By "you," God means Israel and the church. You shall not have any other gods, you shall remember and keep sabbath, you shall not misuse God's name, you shall honor your parents, you shall not murder, steal, commit adultery, or bear false witness, and you shall not covet your neighbor's possessions or relationships. If you are a Christian, you have accepted these commandments as your way of life.

But as subjects of Christ and children of God, you have also accepted the New Covenant, which Jesus mentioned on the night in which he was betrayed. Jesus described the blood he was to spill the next day as the new blood of the covenant. He was referring to the practice of sacrifice as a way of sealing a covenant between God and God's people. Jesus' blood sealed a new covenant, a way of life now defined by Jesus. This is the reign of God Jesus spent his entire ministry teaching about, and that John was announcing before him. When we repent, we are repenting of our way of life, we are letting go of our learned ways of thinking and seeing and doing, in order to bear the good fruit of covenant faithfulness, of working for the purposes Christ has defined

The Pharisees come to John the Baptist to be baptized. John has some choice words for them.

John proclaims to them that repentance is a real change of heart and mind. He suggests to them that their ethnicity is not an entitlement but a responsibility. To be Jewish no longer means to be privileged. In the coming kingdom, it means to be responsible. It means to be bound to God and to God's people. It means to be committed to the peaceable kingdom of which Isaiah dreamed, where predators give up their predatory ways and become friends to the prey, and where the prey risk relationship with the predator, trusting that on God's holy mountain, none will hurt or destroy.

There are so many things we say we can't do. So many situations and challenges we evaluate as hopeless, both in our personal and in our world wide ministry. And yet it never ceases to amaze me how easily we find solutions and how quickly we can organize and how powerfully we can act, both as individuals and a congregation, when we have simply agreed to do so. And the reign of God, the covenantal life Jesus wants to bring to all of us, is pretty simple. It's the faith that God is still with us and that God can do what we can't. God who makes the sun burn, God who swings the planets in their orbits, God who whispered over the seas and life came into being, God can do what we cannot, God can make of us what we are not, God can accomplish what the most powerful and wise and rich cannot, God can do in us and through us things we could never do without God.

I was a part of a church-based organization in Boston over the years I was serving churches there. One year, six of our churches located in the poorest neighborhood in the city got their youth together, who then covenanted to work for the common good. The youth decided that they wanted to have a safe and wholesome place to go to have fun. They found out about an old skating rink that had been closed for some years. They got to work in the community raising money to get the rink going again. When they had over half of the money they needed, they arranged a public meeting with the city council members responsible for their neighborhood to ask the city to fund the rest of the project. They planned the meeting and set the agenda and ran the meeting entirely on their own. Not one adult did a thing except advise them in the process.

The meeting went smoothly, and the council was prepared to say yes. It was after all a political coup for them. After this part of the meeting, one of the council members got up and approached a microphone and started to say something.

The chairwoman, a seventeen year old girl, had been trained to stick to the agenda agreed upon. She told the council member that he'd already had his chance to speak and to please sit down. And he sat down.

Many of us in the aftermath of the event talked about that moment, when someone who had formerly been powerless and unknown told a powerful and influential politician what to do, and he did it. That young lady would never have risen to such heights without the covenant of the organization behind her. Good fruit indeed.

As we await the coming of Jesus, we are invited to open ourselves to God's Spirit. Essential to that opening is a decision to bind ourselves to God and to God's people, which for us is the church. This decision means nothing if we don't really intend to carry it out. If what we really mean when we repent is that we're a little bit sorry about being bad actors sometimes and would like a free pass so we can keep on doing what we've always done, then old John the Baptist is telling us not to bother repenting at all. He's suggesting we step away from the water if we don't really want to get clean.

But if we are willing to commit ourselves to God and to one another, if we are willing to set aside our private agendas, to let go of our old ideas, and commit ourselves together to the hope of the Messiah, Jesus, we might just find out way out of the darkness and the depths, and up to that magnificent and holy mountain.

Amen.

An Unexpected Hour (sermon for the 1st Sunday in Advent 2010)

2010-11-28T04:57:00.000-08:00

She whispered to me, "Do you know where I belong?"

I was in my early months at Philippi. I had gone to Mizpah Nursing Home to visit Cornelia Kennard. That was what was on my to-do list. I had a bunch of other names on that list, people I aimed to visit, and I had finished with Cornelia and was walking down the hall toward the door and my car.

For some reason there seemed to be a good bit of shadow in the hallway that day. And standing before me in the darkness was a tall woman, a very beautiful woman. Have you noticed how the very old often become strikingly beautiful? As I hurried by her, the new young pastor on the very important mission, she whispered, "Do you know where I belong?"

I was rather undone. I looked around for staff, but saw none. I felt a little panicky, truth be told. I told the woman to stay where she was and I ran back to the nurse's station and told them about her. I'm not sure why I felt there was such an emergency. People call out to you at nursing homes all the time. Often they themselves don't realize what they are doing. But with her I felt sure that she really needed help.

Her words began to haunt me as a drove to my next visit. And that haunting sense grew and grew. It finally dawned on me that I had missed a reign of God moment.

What's a reign of God moment? I'm glad you asked.

Years before the Mizpah incident, I was dating Liz, I was a divorced dad and there came a time one Advent season when Liz finally met my daughter Hilary, who was then nine years old. I believe it was at a Christmas party at Faith Lutheran Church, where I was pastor. In that setting Liz could meet Hilary without necessarily announcing that she was my girlfriend. In the course of chatting, Hilary, who was beginning to go through a pretty hard time, mentioned to Liz that she had begun to doubt that Santa Claus was real.

I suppose it was the next weekend, pretty close to Christmas, and I had Hilary with me. We'd gone to the movies. I don't remember what we had gone to see, but we'd planned it earlier that week. When we returned to the car we discovered that it was filled with Christmas presents. We could hardly get into the car. The first thing we checked were the little cards attached to each one. They were all meant for Hilary, and they were all, every one, signed "Santa."

Even I at that point had no idea where the presents had come from and I have to say I was awed. It was only later I learned about Liz' conversation with Hilary. But at that moment I was as stunned as Hilary and of course she was watching me carefully for signs of sneakiness, but couldn't find a drop.

In the course of prior conversations, Liz had gotten the scoop about where Hilary and I were going that day, without letting on her purpose. And then, while we were in the movie, she'd driven around the parking lot until she found my car. She had a spare key and put the presents in there. At least that's what I finally figured out. She never did admit it.

A reign of God moment had come for Liz, and she had been ready.

I've made up this term, "a reign of God moment." First off, I need to tell you that the word is "reign" as in "rule" rather than "rain" as in "water falling from the sky." The reign of God sounds less masculine and exclusive than "kingdom of God" but that's pretty much what it means.

There are three elements to a reign of God moment, and all three have to be present in order for the moment to be a true reign of God moment.

The first element is surprise. A true reign of God moment always defies expectation. You know, I've known people in the course of my life who think that such moments are their entitlement, and they become resentful of people around them for not providing them. This rather amazes me. If you expect it, it can't be a reign of God moment. It's not something people can do without divine inspiration. You can't expect people to have divine revelation whenever you want them to. A reign of God moment is always a surprise.

The second element of a reign of God moment is that it always summons to mind, immediately and undeniably, God. There are plenty of nice things people do for each other, all kinds of loving and sweet things, and some of them are surprising. But a reign of God moment is never about how wonderful a person is. It's always about how wonderful God is.

The third crucial element of a reign of God moment is that, despite the moment pointing to God, it is a moment brought about through a human being. I suppose there are some miracles that are simply the invisible hand of God reaching into a situation and doing something, and those are certainly wonderful. But a reign of God moment is when God takes over a human being and does something through that human being, something surprising and something that glorifies God. A reign of God moment is always carried out by a human being.

So a reign of God moment is when God uses an ordinary human being to bring about a surprising and wonderful moment that glorifies God. The key issue then is not how we do such things, but how we become ready to let God come into our bodies and take over whenever he wants to.

In the case of the poor woman in the nursing home hallway, it seemed to me there was an opportunity to really comfort that woman in a way she might never have expected, in a way that might have made God present to her right then. I was being offered the opportunity to be God's presence to her and I missed it. I wasn't ready. I was asleep.

Jesus teaches us quite a bit about readiness, about staying awake. And many people understand this to mean being ready for death, and many people understand this as being ready for the rapture, but I believe those things are bigger things than Jesus wants us to be concerned about, the wars and rumors of wars and the nations rising up against nations. Certainly we should work for justice and speak out about what we believe is right. But the reign of God moments are much more spontaneous and unpredictable than that.

An example can be taken from the civil rights movement in the sixties. I believe it was a white preacher who was marching with the blacks in Selma or someplace. One of the outraged bystanders walked up to him and spit in his face.

Now the issue of the day was the great issue, the issue of equal rights under the law, and that is certainly a good issue and it was a great thing that all those folks were there marching about it. But the reign of God moment was right there, right there when a violently angry person spit into a minister's face, the opportunity was right there for God to take over that minister's body. And the divine grace was there, and the minister was ready.

He said, "Do you have a handkerchief?"

And his enemy, without thinking, reached into his back pocket and pulled one out and gave it to the minister before he could even think about what he was doing. A perfect reign of God moment.

Christmas was the first reign of God moment, and the perfect epitome of all the others after it. It is the unexpected and glorious entrance of God into the troubled world in the form of an ordinary human being. God came in Jesus, and God wants to come in each one of us. I wasn't ready that day in Mizpah. But years before, when a troubled little girl confessed her dying faith, Liz had been ready, ready to receive the spirit of God, ready to become God's physical presence in the troubled world.

That's what discipleship is, friends. It's all about getting ready and staying ready, about watching and waiting for the unexpected hour. It's about longing to be filled with God's Spirit, to be the instrument of the surprising and glorious moment of God's coming. It's about becoming the Son of Man for that very special and healing moment.

It's about Christmas.

Amen.

The Food That Endures (sermon for Thanksgiving Sunday)

2010-11-21T05:04:00.000-08:00

I went rock fishing with my wife yesterday during the short 36 hour visit she had down here before returning this morning to care for her mother in Boston. Our 10 hour trip yielded exactly three fish.

The ways of fish are impenetrable. Our captain, whose apt nickname is "Pudd'n," assured us that there were many fish, but that they simply weren't acting right. To bring home his point we were usually surrounded by large numbers of other vessels, their hind ends bristling with trolling lines, implying that like Pudd'n, the captains thereof were convinced of the immanence of fish.

For a time we were in the Piankatank, right where the river bends sharply northward toward the bridge. We circled there so many times, and passed the same homes so often, one of our group commented that we might send those folks Christmas cards this year. But while we were there, we did have the privilege of riding through one of those fascinating moments in the great cycle of nature, of which, of course, we were a part.

Waiting patiently on various docks around this particular stretch of water was a large flock of seagulls. At one point they rose as a body into the air and fell like kamakaze fighter planes on a little area just off our bow. This was one of those feeding frenzies brought on by the bait fish rising close to the surface, where the seagulls could get at them.

We rode right through it, our eyes fixed on our lines. Why? Because the rise of the baitfish to the surface most likely had been caused by the rock fish hunting them. Did we catch one? No, we did not.

Like I said, the ways of fish are impenetrable. My point here is that we were there and the baitfish were there, and the seagulls were there, all involved in the amazing dance that has gone on for lo, these many millennia. I have no doubt that native american indians had for hundreds if not thousands of years also been out there in their canoes doing just the same thing, albeit probably with greater success.

And at the same time, you know, we in the boat sidled back and forth, from port to starboard, following the sun on that crisp fall day. Whenever the boat would turn, the roof over the deck would cast its shadow and we would be too cold. A move to the other side put us in the sun, which quickly warmed us. I am sure there were any number of other living creatures, all around us out there, plants and animals of all kinds, that were similarly turning themselves to receive the warmth of the fall sun.

We caught three fish, but I also caught a powerful, almost overwhelming sense of the huge and loving and impartial generosity of God. The world was filled with light and air and warmth and food. Who did it all belong to? Certainly not me. And yet it was all there before me, like the table of a feast.

Much of the industrial food production system that we have created in this modern world is turning out to be not so good for us, if not positively bad for us. One of our party remarked that few rural people starved during the depression because the country was accustomed to growing and trading local foods, a practice that required no cash. Before the advent of the single-planting seed, seeds could be harvested and saved and planted again. When only local populations were eating the produce of the bay, fish and oyster and crab populations could easily stay large and vital. God provided pretty much all that was needed for life. Now, when very few people grow their own food, and even farmers have to purchase seed every year anew, and when seafood is shipped in great quantities all around the world, an economic crisis might very well leave people hungry.

In North America we produce enough food to feed the world, but how it is distributed and marketed somehow ends up leaving huge populations hungry. The weight loss industry in our country alone is worth about 45 billion dollars a year, and the impact on the health care system of obesity-related disease is in the billions as well. It seems every time we turn around there is another outbreak of some infection spread all over the country by industrial food production.

I believe it is a tenet of the Jewish and Christian tradition that scarcity is caused by human beings. And by scarcity I don't mean some spiritualized idea of poverty, but the kind of scarcity that actually causes people to starve or to die of diseases for which there is a simple cure. Scarcity is caused by fear.

Jesus invites his followers to stop orienting their lives and the morals and their choices around their fears of not having enough, and begin to live into the generosity of God. He'd just finished multiplying the loaves and fishes. The people were chasing him because it seemed to them that he could continue to feed them. Of course, Jesus feeding the five thousand was a concrete example of the power of God and of God's abundant provision for everyone. That was the lesson it was to teach, but the people were still being motivated by their fear.

Jesus is hoping that we might hear about the deeper significance of the feeding miracle. Jesus is hoping that we might see that the world as God has created it is a place of abundance and plenty for all of God's creatures, including humankind. Jesus is hoping that we might take in that the problem of scarcity is not caused by God not providing enough, but by the inequities of human systems of sharing.

Thanksgiving is one of the basic practices of Jewish and Christian people. Indeed one of the traditional Greek names for the ritual of the Lord's Supper means "thanksgiving." It's interesting to me that one of the levels of our Thanksgiving tradition is the remembrance of the ways native people helped the Pilgrims to make use of local foods, thus saving them from starvation. For the native people of the Americas, a person could no more own the land than own the sea or sky. Everything was there by the generosity of their idea of God. If the Pilgrims had been open to the native's beliefs, they might soon have discovered some real similarities to their own.

Thanksgiving is the way that God's generosity becomes ours. This story we heard this morning comes to us from the gospel of John, in which is written many a Christian's favorite verse. Say it with me now: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son." God loved, and God gave.

In our gratitude for God's provision is the seed of our own generosity. As we gather with our families, and give thanks for food and love and life and sun and children and old people, let's open our hearts to the marvelous truth of Christ: God provides enough for all.

Amen.

A New Earth (a sermon for the 25th Sunday After Pentecost Year C, 2010)

2010-11-14T04:51:00.000-08:00

Did you ever wonder exactly why early Christians got in trouble so much?

Most Jews were made very angry by Christians. They barred them from synagogue worship, they sometimes whipped them and even murdered them as blasphemers, and they also did what they could to get Christians in trouble with the Romans. What do you suppose made the Jews so angry?

And what was it about the Christians that made the Romans so nervous? They were more or less constantly hounding them, arresting them, torturing them and even killing them.

In the early years of Christianity, the religion was officially pacifist. Soldiers, if they wanted to be Christian, had to resign from soldiering. You couldn't even hold office in the Roman government because the government engaged in warfare and a violent system of punishment for crime. The point here is that Christians were utterly unarmed and were strictly constrained from doing violence for any reason. What therefore was threatening about them?

We know that many Christians came together to live in community. We know all of them that were wealthy voluntarily liquidated much of their property and contributed it to the community to be redistributed. We know that the church sought out and supported widows and orphans, people too old or too young to work and who were not being cared for by their families.

We know these communities had rich worship and prayer lives and that from the very beginning they celebrated baptism and the Lord's Supper. We know they didn't have buildings, but met in people's homes. We know they were egalitarian, mixing many ethnic groups and classes together, and empowering leadership regardless of ethnicity or gender or class, at least until late in Paul's life, perhaps even later, when women's equality was again brought into question.

We know that evangelists, deacons and apostles travelled far and wide and that they performed miracles not unlike the ones Jesus had done before the resurrection. They healed the sick, raised the dead, fed multitudes, travelled supernaturally, stilled storms, and cast out spirits and demons that possessed people.

What is it in any of this that might have caused the Romans or the Jews so much anxiety?

It appears in Acts that the Jewish authorities were really angry that the Christians kept saying that Jesus wasn't dead, even though everyone had seen him get crucified on Good Friday. The Jewish authorities kept telling the Christians to stop saying that, but the Christians wouldn't listen. The reason the Christians gave for bucking the Jewish authorities? They had to obey God rather than people. God apparently had commanded them to announce that Jesus was alive, and to keep announcing it.

Why was this so upsetting?

In Acts, it appears that there were economic consequences to this message. Paul healed the slave girl with the demon and deprived her owners of the rich income she brought. Paul got everyone to denounce idols and the city's lucrative idol factories died for want of customers.

But this wasn't all. In this same letter of Paul to the Thessalonians we heard this morning, Paul goes to some length speaking about the "man of lawlessness," which modern Christians maybe think of as the devil. But many of us believe it much more likely that Paul was talking about the emperor of Rome.

A very small percentage of the people living under the Roman Empire lived well. That being said, there were a lot of people living under the Roman Empire. So that small percentage of wealthy people made up a pretty big number. Merchants, politicians, officers in the military, tax collectors, local royalty, priests of various religious sects, these were the people who had the resources to live what must have been pretty delightful lives. But the vast majority of peoples living under the Romans lived miserable, short and desperate lives, because the fruits of their labor and toil mostly went to the delightful lives of the relatively few.

The promise of Isaiah, that laborers would not have to give up the fruits of their labors to oppressors, came to pass, but in a strange and miraculous way.

The Christian communities, at least at the beginning, really seemed to bring about justice. The few who were well-to-do used their resources to re-endow those who had been robbed of theirs. We have evidence also in Paul's letters that resources also flowed from well-to-do congregations to those suffering want.

Now it's important here to recognize that there is no evidence that the Christians had any agenda to get the Romans to adopt the Christian way of life. They certainly were not a political party. But it was obvious to many of the poor just whose side the Christians were on. And I suspect it was obvious to the Romans as well.

It's also obvious that then as now, some folks sought to take advantage of the Christians. They probably were pretending to be teachers like Paul and demanding that they be taken care of. We think this because Paul calls them "busybodies," presumably because they were sticking their noses in everyone's business instead of actually preaching and teaching the gospel. Jesus warns about them in his sermon today, saying that many will come claiming to be him, but not to believe them. Paul doesn't deny that apostles and teachers should be cared for by the congregation, but he has the number of those idlers who were using the churches as a means to an easy life.

The Romans and their local minions were constantly pouring out propaganda to the poor about how Roman exploitation of the poor was actually good for everyone, and every once in a while the Romans would stage big impressive entertainments and pass out free bread to convince the poor they actually were taking care of them. It was very important for the Romans and the Jews who were getting rich and powerful under Roman rule that the poor never wake up to their majority, and never recognize what was really being done to them.

The Christians were gaining supporters for themselves from among the poor, who were very very many, and these poor people, because of the concrete generosity of the church, began to believe in Jesus and not in Herod or Caesar or the rest of the ruling class, who were rather few, comparatively speaking.

And so it was that Christians were turning the world upside down. Making a new earth is a tumultuous and rowdy business. When God raised Jesus from the dead, God threw down a glove. God announced in Jesus that God's kingdom was henceforth impossible to keep out, impossible to knock down, impossible to reject, no matter how powerful the human kingdom that tries to knock it down, keep it out, or reject it.

Philippi is a warm and lovable bunch of people. Almost all of them are involved in the community, doing all kinds of loving service. Indeed, many of our members are greatly admired and loved by their neighbors.

What, I wonder, might we do to get in trouble?

Amen.

The Hope To Which He Has Called You (sermon for All Saints 2010

2010-11-07T09:50:00.000-08:00

The Hope To Which He Has Called You

The story is told of a Sunday school class of children. The teacher asked, "What do you have to do to be a saint?"

Of course, none of the children said anything. So the teacher said, "If I sold everything I had and gave it to the poor would that make me a saint?"

And the children said, "No."

So the teacher said, "What if I went around always being nice to everyone all the time, would that make me a saint?"

And the children said, "No."

"What if I were able to change the world and make it a peaceful and happy place, would that make me a saint?"

And the children said, "No."

So finally, the teacher asked, "OK, then, tell me, what would I have to do to be a saint?"

And one of the children said, "You have to die!"

Of course, All Saints Day has traditionally been about honoring those who have died. But in the protestant tradition, we have rediscovered the word in both the old and new testaments, and we see that a saint is not just those who have died, but also those whom God has made saints.

So let's ask, what do you have to do to be a saint?

St. Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, said that there are three gifts of the Holy Spirit that are eternal, that never pass away, faith, hope and love. And he said, the greatest of these is love. And certainly, we would say, one has to love to be a saint. And not just any love, as Jesus himself pointed out in this lesson from Luke. We'll talk about that later.

Today, I think the focus is on the second of St. Paul's three eternal spiritual gifts, that of hope.

A saint is a person who hopes.

The hope is not just any hope, but the hope to which God has called you.

Hope, according to Webster's, is a desire with an expectation of fulfillment. We're not talking about pipe dreams or wishful thinking or even optimism. We're talking about honestly taking stock of the real world and expecting confidently that God can and will transform that world from the inside out, starting with us.

Do we have this confidence? I don't know. When I listen to people in my daily rounds, I don't hear the beatitudes of Jesus. I hear a different set. It goes something like this:

"Blessed are the rich, for they have earned it.

"Woe to the poor, for they are lazy and irresponsible.

"Blessed are you when people speak well of you, because reputation is everything,

"Woe to you if they revile you, because you are an annoying troublemaker and deserve everything you get.

"Hate you enemies, and do not bless them. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, shoot them in the head.

"Love those you love you, and ignore the rest."

The world's beatitudes have not really changed since Jesus' day. They are still just as central to the way lots of people think. The beatitudes of Jesus are not difficult to understand, but they fly so much in face of the wisdom of the world as to simply be unacceptable. The good news is that Jesus is not pronouncing a final judgment. He's pronouncing hope. Hope for all of us.

The hope to which God has called us is the hope that the poor will inherit the kingdom, the sorrowful will be comforted, and those persecuted for declaring that hope will be vindicated. It is the hope that the humble people of God, the ones who practice love for their enemies, will triumph over the much more impressive powers that practice domination and vengeance.

All Saints began as a day to remember those who were martyred in the early years after Jesus' resurrection. The people of God from the very beginning strove to keep in remembrance those who refused both to obey the law that said they had to worship anyone other than Christ, and more importantly, refused to hate or to even resist those who badmouthed, persecuted, tortured and even murdered them. Many of these people they knew, but there were many more who simply disappeared, anonymous Christians who were chewed up in the maul of the Roman machine. Early Christians established All Saints Day in special remembrance of those nameless witnesses, who forgave the crowds that cheered for their blood and died praying for them.

They did these things because they practiced the hope to which God had called them. They sold off possession to give them to the poor in order to practice this hope. They gave up their homes to be used as places of gathering and worship as a way of practicing the hope to which God had called them. They prayed for people that hated them, hoping as God had called them to hope. They gave to everyone who begged from them, no questions asked, because they hoped as God asked them to. If someone stole from them, they offered the thief more of their possessions in the hope that their generosity would inspire him, as God had called them to hope. They responded to evil with good, in the hope to which God had called them.

The love, the eternal and unstoppable love which Paul said was the greatest of all God's spiritual gifts, is very specific and amazing: it is love for one's enemies. It is this love, above all others, that saves the world.

So let's take some time right now, friends, to remember any and all who have gone on before us into the heavenly places that practiced this hope for God's kingdom, and love for their enemies.

(Candle lighting ceremony.)

The Righteous Live by Their Faith (sermon for the 23rd Sunday After Pentecost)

2010-10-31T05:00:00.000-07:00

"God, I have a problem with you."

So begins a conversation between a prophet and the God of Israel.

We can see in scripture that there are no illegal prayers. Here Habakkuk asks "Why?Why must I endure all this injustice, all this mistreatment of the poor, all this corruption in both government and temple? Why, God, aren't you doing anything about these things?"

Now you'll notice that we skip over the rest of chapter one in this morning's readings, and since we won't get another chance to read Habakkuk together for another three years, I'll tell you what God said to Habakkuk.

God said, "Don't worry. I'm going to do something about this situation. I'm going to send the Babylonians to destroy Judah."

Well, this horrified Habakkuk even more. The Babylonians were everything God despised in human society! They were violent, godless, oppressive. To Habakkuk it was bad enough that God's people had become corrupt, but it was completely unacceptable that a nation like Babylon should have its way with them.

In fact, the whole situation was unacceptable. Centuries before, God had promised Abraham that God would make of Abraham a great nation and give him a land flowing with milk and honey. And only a few hundred years ago, God had told David that God would establish David's royal line forever. And all along, God had promised to protect and defend God's people forever.

But nothing was working out the way God had promised. God wasn't keeping any of these promises. Soon, the nation would fall completely to foreign invaders. No land, no son of David, no defense.

All the prophets wrestled with this same question. When God doesn't appear to be keeping God's promises, there are only a few possibilities:

Either God had been lying, or we hadn't understood what God had promised to begin with.

The prophets answered the question the second way. God had not been lying when God promised all these things. God had intended to keep all these promises. But we didn't understand at that time exactly what God had meant.

In the black church we sometimes say, "God doesn't always come when you want him, but he always comes on time." Habakkuk understood this and metaphorically put himself on the watchtower, like the guard of an ancient city, who might watch for years before seeing any threats. This is called in some circles "keeping vigil."

Habakkuk was waiting for this transcendent vision, this deepened understanding of the promises of God. I encourage you to go home and read Habakkuk. God told him to write it so that people could read it on the run, and he did that. Just three chapters. But since we won't get another chance to talk about him, I'll tell you what God gave to Habakkuk.

Habakkuk was given a vision of a transcendent God, one that worked under the radar, one that infiltrated and subverted cultures with a strange and powerful gentleness, rather than one that rose up like a storm to burn or drown or destroy. Destruction and bloodshed would henceforth be the work of humans, not of God. Unjust cultures would bring about their own demise. Indeed that had been true from the beginning. The proud and all who trust in them always bring about their own punishment.

But the righteous, Habakkuk says, live by their faith.

The salvation of God is not in the facts but in the faith. The salvation of God is not in how God loves us, but in how we love God. We are saved in loving God for who God is. We are saved in believing in his transcendent presence. A saving faith is a faith that finds God particularly in those places everyone knows he could never be. In the midst of disease and death and disaster, in the hearts of the worst sinners, in the middle of a barren wilderness, in the stranger, in the alien, or in the worst failures.

God might even be at work in the oppressor. Let's take a look at Zaccheaus the tax collector.

Today I didn't read the NRSV translation word for word. I translated it differently from the Greek. If you consult your bibles you will see that Zacchaeus, when he welcomes Jesus into his home, says, "Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much."

But what the Greek actually says is "Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I pay back four times as much." For all you King James Version people out there, take heart. This is one time when the King James has it right.

The NRSV, and other translations as well, put the tax collector's words into the future tense, as if this is something that Zacchaeus will do now that he has met Jesus. But in the Greek, the verbs are present tense. Why did the translators change the tense? Because the story didn't seem to make sense to them. The tax collector is by definition an evil man. He couldn't possible already be doing good before Jesus comes along. That's not how it works. This must be a story about repentance.

But it isn't. It's really a story about how Jesus reveals God working even in the midst of evil. This tax collector is like Schindler during World War II, the supposedly cold-hearted Nazi businessman who used Jews in his factories. He appeared to be a vicious Jew-hating German, but in fact, he was using the evil system itself to save Jews from the death camps. The short tax collector who goes to the extreme of climbing above the heads of the crowd just to lay eyes on his savior was a man hated and despised by all, a sinner of the worst order. Who else do we know who was up on a tree whom many despised as sinner?

Zacchaeus was using the tax collection system set up by the Romans to funnel large amounts of money back to the poor. Whatever fraud he may have practiced toward the rich, he paid back fourfold to the poor. Zacchaeus was a man with no friends off his own class, who was barred from the temple, called a traitor to his people, and cast out of both Jewish and Roman circles. But there were poor people who knew who he was. Oh yes. I suspect that Jesus had heard of him before he even got there.

The righteous live by their faith, says Habakkuk. Faith saw Zacchaeus for what he really was, not just what he appeared to be. Though he appeared to be the most evil of men, yet he was truly a child of Abraham. This is the salvation of God.

Let's hear what a saving faith really means, in the last verses of old Habakkuk's prophecy:

Though the fig tree does not blossom,
and no fruit is on the vines;
though the produce of the olive fails,
and the fields yield no food;
though the flock is cut off from the fold,
and there is no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will exult in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
and makes me tread upon the heights.

Amen.

I Will Pour Out My Spirit: sermon for the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost

2010-10-24T04:18:00.000-07:00

When I was in college I wanted to be a rock star. Of course I was in the wrong business really. I was studying to be an actor. But that was the time of the great glam rockers, the hugely concerts, the incredible seemingly world-shaking events, and I loved to imagine being the guy who made such things happen.

One of my roommates taught me how to play a few chords on a beat up old guitar and I started dutifully practicing. The guitar was a cheap acoustic/electric model, kind of tinny and stiff. I started sounding pretty good, or so I thought.

Sooner or later I got my own guitar, a pretty expensive Fender Stratocaster, the guitar of choice for such blues-based rockers as Jimi Hendrix. That guitar was beautiful. Very very sensitive. You could touch a string in a thousand ways and get a thousand sounds.

What this amounted to for me however was that I could hear every single mistake just as loud as you please. Apparently, the better the guitar, the worse I sounded.

It seems almost like an act of God that I lost that guitar in a fire.

Joel preaches a God who will do two things that appear to be tightly intertwined in Joel's vision: first, God will restore the desolate and wasted land to the paradise of plenty it had once been. Closely connected to this restoration, God will make God's people whole by pouring out the Holy Spirit.

The gift is somewhat strange, It is first of all egalitarian; it's not just for certain classes or ages or genders. Second, it appears mainly to enable a kind of prophetic sight, a God's-eye view if you will. Third, it seems to be connected to a kind of world-shaking cosmic disturbance, darkness and blood and so on. Finally, it seems to enable God's people to escape this disturbance.

Why is it that this gift, which we might expect would lead us to happiness and fulfillment, is connected to this cosmic disturbance?

I think it has to do with the Stratocaster principle. By having our eyes opened to the amazing providence and grace of God, by seeing clearly how little we have to do with the blessings we receive, by understanding on a deep level how abundant God's creation is for all, we are automatically and inescapably confronted by the terrible conspiracy among the human race to pervert and twist and deny and reject that spirit of abundant grace.

Barbara Brown Taylor writes about the six stage pain scale in use in some places, and how she had used it during a hip replacement experience. She reported that she had often used the highest levels of the pain scale to describe her pain. But then she read that level five was supposed to be the kind of pain that might actually drive you to suicide, while level six was simply and utterly unbearable for even a second. It led her to think about about how many people in the world endure various kinds of agony without a single pain medication, not because they choose to but because the world marketplace denies them any mercy.

And the sky grows dark and the moon turns to to blood before the great and terrible day of the Lord. The grating and sour notes of our self-deception ring out starkly in the brilliant glare of God's Holy Spirit.

It's my belief that a deep involvement in the bible, a regular and disciplined life of prayer and study, leads us above all other things to an understanding and recognition of God's Holy Spirit. God's Holy Spirit is more than conscience. It is a living and real being, outside of us, or perhaps buried or locked deep within us, that we are trained by our culture to reject or perhaps suppress. It is indeed a supernatural being. It is not simply to be identified with the wonders of nature, but the wonders of nature are indeed good indicators, good descriptors, as Joel himself points out: the fall of rain that nourishes our crops and feeds and washes our bodies is a wonderful metaphor for the supernatural spirit that nourishes our community and feeds and washes our souls.

God's Holy Spirit is also a spirit of wisdom; it allows us to sit, as it were, on God's shoulder, and see what God sees. Because the human condition is what it is, that is, because we suppress or reject the spirit of God, we commit ourselves to all sorts of rash and disastrous decisions, and those who receive the Spirit of God see from God's perspective the disasters that are here, and the disasters that are coming. And those who are sitting on God's shoulder are also enabled to call upon God for salvation, while those who are perishing in the midst of the disaster know of no God they can call.

The Spirit of God is also a Spirit of deep darkness and cosmic disturbance inasmuch as it reveals to us how deeply and helplessly we are caught up in the web of the world's sin, how completely we collaborate with demons out of self-centered fear, self-deception and self-justification. And this is not, friends, God putting his seal of approval on our weakness. The tax collector doesn't go home with God's approval for his vicious betrayal of his countrymen, but rather God's acceptance of his simple honesty. God can work with tax collector's honesty, but he can't work with the Pharisee's blindness.

The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is a trap, and a very efficient one. Jesus leads us into a comparison between two people and just as we identify ourselves with the humility of the tax collector, we are caught, for we have become the Pharisee. The impulse for self-justification is perhaps the most damning of sins and the most difficult to escape.

God pours out his Spirit, and it is like trading one's cheap and tinny instrument for a finely tuned and sensitive masterpiece. It's first gift to us is the harsh light of truth, so necessary for us to even be able to see the disasters that are unfolding, much less to be saved from them. With enough practice, with enough familiarity with that beautiful Strat, I might someday play very well. But I will first have to face my mistakes every time I touch its strings.

God will pour out his Spirit, but this is not the Spirit of positive thinking or of health and wealth. It is the Spirit of truth, unvarnished and naked. Our motives are false, our desires are selfish, we have just enough faith, as one preacher has said, to hate, but not enough to love. To paraphrase Mark Twain, we're good people in the worst sense of the word. God's Spirit gives us the wisdom to see our own desperate need of him.

God will pour out his spirit on all flesh, no matter what age or station or race or gender, no matter whether blameless or willfully sinful. In Jesus Christ, God opened the path for all of us to receive or reveal the Holy Spirit within us. And for us and for our world, this reception or revelation is like a birth, beautiful and dangerous and hopeful and painful and bloody and messy and awe-inspiring.

The humble are exalted and the exalted are humbled. Salvation is at hand. The kingdom has come near.

Amen.

A New Covenant: a sermon for the twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

2010-10-17T05:16:00.000-07:00

...I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
---Deuteronomy 5:9-10

So here you are, raising your children in Babylon, where there's a different god on every corner, where your kids play with idol-worshippers all day and come home and ask why it is they can't go to temple with their friends, and why they can't eat the pork that smells so good in their friend's homes.

"Well, you see, honey, we live in covenant with our very special God, so we don't eat certain foods and we certainly don't worship any other gods but ours." And our kids, being the above-average young folks they are, are curious. "Well, what has our God done for us lately?"

"Well, honey, lately we had this wonderful fertile land God had given us, but we were disobedient, so God sent the Babylonians to conquer us and take us into exile."

"Well, I didn't live there and I didn't disobey, so why do I have to suffer?"

"Well, honey, back when our people were at Mount Sinai, God said he would punish to the third and fourth generation those who rejected him."

"That's not fair!"

The new covenant that Jeremiah announces this morning had to do with this experience of the children in Babylon, who suffered exile without enjoying the sins for which it was punishment. God was saying, "You will no longer suffer for what your parents and grandparents did; I will forget their sins and no longer charge them to your account. And out of this forgiveness I will build a different kind of relationship with my people than I had with them since Mount Sinai."

Now before we jump forward to Jesus, which we will certainly do, let's make sure we understand Jeremiah, who was not actually thinking of Jesus when he wrote this. Jeremiah was not outside of the realm of Judaism at all, as we see this morning in Psalm 119. God's goal had always been that God's people would gratefully embrace the way of life God offered them at Sinai, that they would love it and cherish it and chase after it with all the intensity and focus that most people chase after their own self-centered desires.

I have known some addicts who have gotten into recovery, who will tell you that they were always very determined and willful and persistent people when they were drinking or using. They would walk barefoot through a snow storm to get their drug. If they lost a dealer, they would get on the phone all day until they found another one. They would go to any lengths to get the money they needed to pay for the stuff. Some people think addicts are lazy, but they are in fact highly motivated, dedicated people.

In recovery, when they find themselves balking at the difficulty of something they must do to stay clean and sober, they often remind themselves of how dedicated they had been to their addiction. I've heard them say, "I need to work as hard at staying sober as I used to work at staying drunk."

What if we worked as hard on God's will as we have worked on our own goals throughout our lives? What if we applied the same creativity and focus and determination and willingness to learn that we applied to our own ambitions? What if we truly cared more about the kingdom of God than about ourselves and our immediate circle?

The first person to fully and truly model this kind of passionate obedience was our Savior, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, Jesus of Nazareth.

So when God is talking about a new covenant, I'm not sure how new it really is. I think it's new because people are never ready for it until they're ready for it, not because God just now thought it up. The new covenant is always new, because every generation starts off focused on self-centered interests, on me and mine. But from God's perspective this is not a new covenant at all; it's what God has always wanted.

We start off our relationship with God basing it on the "what have you done for me lately" model, and our relationship, like all our relationships, is governed by the desire for rewards and the fear of punishment. Some of us never leave that mode, and it is indeed a mode in which God relates to people.

But the new covenant, the one Jeremiah and David both dreamed about, the one that is in Jesus Christ, departs from the inheritance of tradition with its privileges and restrictions and opens itself to the newness of passionately loving God and God's will. What makes it new is not that it is a new list of requirements and rules. What makes it new is that the requirements and rules are no longer necessary to make it happen.

What does it benefit us to be generous? It doesn't. What does it benefit us to forgive those who wrong us? It doesn't. What does it benefit us to love our enemies? It doesn't. What does it benefit us to care about people who don't live near us, who aren't like us, who don't care about us? It doesn't. What does it benefit us to help some congregation we've never heard of? It doesn't. What does it benefit us to build a school we will never go to? It doesn't. But all these things please God. What if we so passionately loved God that we wanted to do these things for no other reason than that?

The things God wants, the things that please God, don't change and have never changed. But the difference between a covenant between two parties that are suspicious and distant and one between parties who love one another may be the same covenant in terms of the rules and regulations, but in the living out, the latter is utterly different from the former.

It's awfully hard to imagine. I was going to use the model of a family to talk about it, but my own experience and the experience of many others is that family members can and do walk away from each other, do abandon their covenants with each other. They do it all the time. And there are certainly families that stay together in ways that are deeply unhealthy. It's hard to imagine, yes, but we usually know it when we see it, strangely enough. It's as if we have some memory deep within us, even though we may never have actually experienced it, a memory of paradise.

The new covenant, the kingdom of God in which God's children know and love God from deep within their hearts out, is new because it is created anew with every generation, every individual. It is new because it is never a place we have been before.

Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." It's hard to give oneself to the newness of the new covenant, because there are by definition no promises or threats. It is a kind of relationship most of us have never had. We can't imagine it. We can't predict it. We can't depend on it to deliver what we think we want. The promise is that it will deliver to us benefits we could not have imagined, blessings beyond our wildest dreams, a land we have never been to, flowing with milk and honey.

Amen.

Five Brothers and a Bag (Lyle Predmore's sermon for the 19th Sunday After Pentecost)

2010-10-10T13:13:00.000-07:00

Today’s sermon is about a bag and five guys. Just wanted to let you know.

So, what did we hear from the scripture lessons that we can fill the sermon time with? These are all familiar passages, and they seem to be pointing to a common theme.

We know from the OT passage that for the past several weeks Jeremiah has been the OT reading, and as Mike has mentioned that it is not a very happy time for the Israelites. The Golden Age of Israel under King David has come to an end. Solomon his son came next, and things started going down for Israel and up for the surrounding countries, especially the Babylonians. VS 32:2 It says: “the army of the king of Babylon was then besieging Jerusalem”.

And what does Jeremiah do? He buys some land. In an economic down turn – a time when the stock in Judah must be going south fast, the wolf is at the door, the Babylonians are in Jerusalem, and this guy is dealing in real estate.

Why? Because Jeremiah has a faith, a faith in verse 15: “For this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: houses , fields and vineyards will again be bought in this land.

For Jeremiah that faith is all he needed. To Jeremiah it the national ruler could be the king of Judah, the King of Babylon, the Wig Party or the Tories – his faith was not in the White House. His faith is in the future, that God will still be in control regardless of what is going on around him.

I Tim 6:6-19
And then there is our NT reading, Paul’s instructions to Timothy. Did you hear these words of Paul? Some often quoted thoughts here such as: For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it --- and (10) For the love of money is the root of all evil.

And then to our Gospel lesson, Luke 16:19-31. Here we have one of Jesus best known parables. What is it called? The Rich Man and Lazarus. Every bible with headings probably titles it this way. They are two main characters here. The rich man dressed in purple and fine linen living in luxury. Lazarus, the poor beggar who lived just outside the gated community. He waited day after day for the garbage truck to leave the high scale neighborhood. Maybe there would be some good things drop off as the truck made that turn onto the highway.

And then they are in the afterlife. The rich man buried in hell. Lazarus is in the bosom of Abraham.

And the teaching? Abraham says to the rich man: Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted. You are in agony.

The lesson? Today, these passages are being used around the world by preachers who use the lectionary scripture readings week after week. A couple of days ago I received the weekly church news note from the Bukit Doa International Church in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia. This is one of two English Language Congregations that Hiroko and I are involved in when in Indonesia. Another retired pastor and friend, Dan Bruch is the current pastors at Bukit Doa.   Concerning today’s Gospel lesson Dan wrote:

“Have you ever looked for yourself in this parable? In the parable, Lazarus and the rich man have lived out their earthly lives and gone to the life beyond death, but the five younger brothers are on this side of death. Consequently we are where they are. We are in the same place. The characters of the rich man and Lazarus are important to us, and we can learn from them, but the point of the parable is most powerfully made in our lives when we see ourselves in relationship to the five brothers. We share a common ground”

See his point? We can listen and consider the Rich Man and Lazarus, but they are not where we are – or we are not where they are. They are in an afterlife, one in hell, one in the bosom of Abraham. But the other ones in the parable that we forget about are the Rich Man’s five brothers. They are where we are today. They are among the living, the living of this world – like you and I. And the Rich Man wants to send Lazarus back from the dead to warn them of their rich and calloused ways of treating the poor.
Abraham’s answer is, they have Moses and the Prophets – if they will not listen to them, then they will not listen to someone returning from the dead.

See Dan’s point? We are one of the five brothers - we know and live a life on this earth. And Jesus answer for the five brothers is the same answer for you and me – we who are among the living of a earthly life of four score and ten or twenty.

And the answer Jesus leaves us, and the five brothers with; – “Listen to Moses and Prophets.”

And we have the benefit of one who has returned from the dead, Jesus the Resurrected Christ. So what do we do? What can we learn from Moses, the Prophets, the Resurrected Jesus and these scripture lessons that are for our study and sermonizing?

Maybe the answer is in the bag!? This is a bag that Clarksbury UM has distributed in our community this past week. We are to fill it with food items and leave it for pick up today. Then it will be distributed in their food bank this coming Saturday. The instructions are on the bag. There is an article in this past week’s Sentinel giving the same information.

Last night Hiroko and I stopped by Wal-Mart to buy a few extra things for the bag.

And it occurred to me that in our choices of things for the bag we had different visions of how to do it. I looked for the boxes of Macaroni & Cheese. Great Value brand, 50 cents a box. For four dollars I can get eight boxes – that is half a bag full. Right?

Hiroko starts picking up Hormel Roast Beef & Gravy in little cans. $4.18 a can!

$4.18 a can? Eight cans, quick math, 8 x $4 equals $32!

I suggest to Hiroko that my math works out better – half a bag for $4 as opposed to $30. Her response is’ “well people without much money can buy the Macaroni & Cheese, but they can’t afford the much better and tasty canned Roast Beef and Gravy”.

I am interested in filling the bag and getting what I consider a good value on my dollar. She is interested in filling the bag and given someone a better meal than they might have otherwise. Both will help a hungry person, or a hungry family.

Who is right? We have Moses and the Prophets and even the Resurrected Jesus for guidance on this. We are the living brothers of the parable living out our faith on this side of the grave.

How are we going to fill the bag? Marconi & Cheese or some of the good stuff?
And the parable doesn’t stop with this shopping bag – it starts with the shopping bag. It starts with serving those close by, with the Clarksbury Bag, with the Cryer Center, HANDS, HFH and other community bags.

The bag includes own congregation, for this is the vehicle that comes together once a week for worship, to share God’s word and Jesus’ table. But it is a vehicle, an instrument of God, the Body of Christ in our midst. And there is another bag. Called an offering envelope. How are you to fill it? How comes our budget is 10 or 20 thousand behind? Have we forgotten the bag? $1000 a piece today from ten or twenty people here would bring us up to date.

The bag includes the work we do together as Disciple Churches. There are a number of things we do better joined together as a Region. One is the Craig Springs camping program – for our own youth and a special camp for the Lazarus’s children in our Commonwealth. How are we going to deal with that bag?

And the bag goes around the world with the Body of Christ that we are a part of – how do you and I and the Rich Man’s brothers deal with that bag? The bag includes Global Missions.

There was an article in Thursday’s Daily Press about Global Poverty. Did you know that the international poverty level is $1.25 per day? Internationally, around the world, anyone who makes less than $1.25 is considered to be in poverty.

The map goes from 5.3 % for the Commonwealth of Independent States (much of the old USSR) to 50.9% for Sub-Saharan Africa.

As residents of North America we set on a piece of the wealthiest real estate in God’s entire creation. More water, good soil, climate, natural resources, mineral deposits etc. per capita than anyplace else in the world. We have fish in the sea and cows in the pastures. In the Parable as residents of the North American Continent we are the ones wearing the purple robes and the linen garments.

What do we do with that bag?

May we mix in a little of Jeremiah’s faith - a faith that God is ultimately in charge. Jeremiah’s faith is steadfast even when the Babylonians are burning Jerusalem. Even when land prices are going south – it is okay to believe that God is in ultimate control.

So – there we have the same challenges as the five brothers. We are to hear God’s word and put our priorities in order.

And – don’t forget the bag!

Amen.

The Welfare of the City (20th Sunday after Pentecost)

2010-10-10T05:13:00.000-07:00

We three kings of Orient are.
Bearing gifts we travel afar.
Field and fountain, moor and mountain
Following yonder star...

Remember the magi? They appear in Matthew's Christmas story. Astrologers, holy men, possibly ruling class. This morning we heard Jeremiah bringing God's word to the Jewish exiles in Babylon in roughly 500 B.C. Five hundred years later, these non-Jewish holy men from Babylon will come looking for the Jewish Messiah. Exactly how did that happen, I wonder?

Last week we talked about the rapid changes we have experienced in our world in recent years. Without a doubt, these are the most rapidly changing times in the history of humankind. Our culture and its moral compass seems to be swinging wildly in all directions.

If we are getting a sense that the culture around us is more and more distant from us, it is I believe a great opportunity to rediscover our true purpose and mission. There's of course the old line we often hear that we need to accommodate the culture more thoroughly, and we see preachers doing that right and left, with some success, or might I say, some institutional success, that is, more people and more money. And we have those superficial Christians who identity their faith with a set of Victorian morals that really don't have anything to do with the bible, the so-called old-time religionists, who manifest themselves in the conservative churches. They are somewhat popular too.

But I think the good news is that neither of these strategies are working anymore. Both of them are failing. Why am I happy about this? Because at last we might really turn to scripture and really attempt to understand who God really is and what God really is working toward.

It seems to me that the word from God today directly addresses us in our present situation. It encourages us to continue to understand ourselves as a separate people, or if we haven't understood this, to rediscover our separateness. It encourages us to figure out what it is that makes us separate. Is it a particular family structure? Is it a set of morals? Is it only rules for living? Is it a particular kind of etiquette? Is it just about being nice?

It's worth noting today that when the Assyrians destroyed the Northern Kingdom and carried off its people, we never heard from them again. The remnant left behind in what was then called Israel eventually became the hated Samaritans, a kind of hybrid ethnic group that retained a portion of the Jewish tradition but was also seriously influenced by and racially intermingled with Assyrian culture.

Of course, Samaritans become for Jesus a kind or object lesson for the dissolving boundaries around the kingdom of God. The Good Samaritan is one of his most famous parables, so much so that the word Samaritan, which then meant "hated foreigner and heretic," now means "someone who helps his neighbor." In today's story, the only leper that shows gratitude for his healing is the Samaritan. The meaning in those days was "an ethnically inferior and heretical foreigner has more gratitude than nine Jews."

So the Northern Kingdom disappeared into the mists of time, but the southern Kingdom of Judah did not. It retained its identity even as it went into exile, even as it lost all its national and religious trappings. No land, no palace, no army, no temple, no king, but strangely, still God's people. Stuck in a hostile land, filled with violence and false religion, and under their conqueror's rule, but strangely, still God's people.

Jeremiah, who up until this morning seems to have had nothing positive to say about anything, encourages the Jews in exile in Babylon to marry each other and have children, to setting in and settle down, to dig in for the long haul. You'd think maybe he'd have a word about how God was going to come and smite those darn Babylonians and get everyone back home quickly. But no, he says, we're here for the foreseeable future and we might as well get used to it.

What he says next shocks us even more. Imagine for a moment that your homeland has been decimated by a foreign invader, your friends murdered, your family separated from you, perhaps forever, you've been dragged in chains to the foreigner's homeland and forced to work for him. Now your minister comes along and says, "Well, the word from God is we're not going anywhere." Certainly that's bad enough. But then he goes on to say, "And by the way, God wants you to pray for the foreigner. Remember, his welfare is your welfare."

So many of us think that Jesus was some kind of revolutionary prophet that departed from Jewish tradition. But here we see the roots of his teaching.

It's in loving the enemy that our light shines the brightest in this dark world. It is the practice Jesus commanded that I think separates the real Christians from the false, to use the old somewhat sexist saying, it's what separates the men from the boys.

We tend to have a scattershot approach to ministry which came about as the result of having churches packed full of everyone in town, a situation that pertained in the 60's and has been long over, never to return. And so it is that we always remind ourselves that we should keep on doing everything we have always done, and keep on adding new things too, because if we don't we might leave something out.

But all this effort amounts merely to the endless pining for those big steeple days of yore. If the Jews in Babylon had acted as we act, they would never have unpacked their bags. They would have got up every morning and expected to go home. They would have spent their days miserably remembering how good it once was, and how everything would be fine if they could just go back.

Of course, if they had done that, they would have been fooling themselves. The fact was, as Jeremiah had so clearly said, the seeds of their exile had been in their faithlessness and sin. In our current situation, we do not do well to imagine that all we have to do is go back to something that we once were, to pine for a past that we have dressed up in fine clothes, but which in fact was the very cause of our current exile. In that very past are the seeds of the chaos in which we now suffer.

The great mystery, the wonder and beauty and awe-inspiring majesty of God's love, is that even as we have turned our backs on God, even as we have set ourselves up for exile, God was nevertheless faithful, nevertheless loving us, even as he brought us to ruin, even as he threw us into a terrifying future. Even as we turned our backs on him, he was preparing us to do as he has done for us. Just as he has loved us as we fought against him, so we are now called to love the world as it fights against us.

The news machines of the demonic forces in our world today are extremely powerful. Compared to God's little church, they are like those Babylonian armies, thousands of highly trained, well-fed soldiers clad in glittering armor, armed with razor sharp steel and bristling with arrows, riding the latest, fastest chariots, all against our ragtag few with our tiny slingshots.

And so it seems to me that we need to pick up the one thing that makes us greater, the one thing that cannot be defeated, the one little pebble that is enough to crush the skull of Goliath. And that one pebble, that one amazing difference, is loving our enemy.

And so, church, there is your chief mission. How do you come to love those you believe are destroying your way of life?

Today is your deciding place. Maybe you need to leave the church. Maybe you can't accept such a mission.

Or maybe you'd like to be free. Maybe you'd like to join the little ragtag, outnumbered gang standing up to the mighty empire of hate, with a few pebbles of love.

And so it was that five hundred years after the Jews went into exile, Babylon had been so affected by their presence among them, that three non-Jewish holy men of their religion traveled hundreds of miles to find the Jewish Messiah.

Amen.

Captives Before the Foe

2010-10-06T12:01:00.000-07:00

Captives Before the Foe

Every five hundred years Christianity blows up.

And you know, before that, it was true as well. Every five hundred years, Judaism blew up.

It seems there is a cycle of renewal in our tradition. The event Lamentations is talking about, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, happened at about 500 years before Christ. Five hundred years later, well, Jesus came along. Five hundred years later, the Eastern Church split with the Western Church over the creed. Five hundred years later, Charlemagne changed Christianity into the imperial hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Five hundred years later, Martin Luther tacked his revolutionary declaration on the door of a church and the Protestant churches were born. Interestingly enough, one of the most famous essays Luther ever wrote was called "The Babylonian Captivity of the Church."

Five hundred years later: us.

There is a major shift happening in the church today and Philippi's right in the middle of it.

Now let me stop here a minute and deal gently with those of us who think that the Christian faith has been one long uninterrupted institution of peace since Jesus. I know there are people who think that the religion of their mothers and grandmothers is old-time religion, and that if they just hold fast to that they'll be okay. It's good to honor your parents, as the scriptures tell us, and its good to remember what they taught us, just as Paul instructs Timothy to do today. But even as we do this we need to remember that Timothy's mother was not Christian, but Jewish. Clearly Paul didn't want Timothy to reject Jesus, as many Jews of that day did, but he nevertheless instructs Timothy to hold fast to his mother's teaching.

Let me also take a moment to lovingly address those who think that everything Christianity has done before Philippi is evil and best forgotten. If only it were so simple. Like most individual human beings, the church has not been wholly evil nor wholly good. Yes, there are examples of terrible wrongdoing. But there are also many examples of soaring beauty and goodness.

Nevertheless, every five hundred years, it all just blows up. That's my overstated way of saying that major change happens, major reinvention.

The reason Christianity blows up is because the world blows up. Judaism, if it was to survive after the fall of Judah, would have to reinvent itself, and it did. Five hundred years later, at the zenith of the Roman Empire, it had to reinvent itself again. Five hundred years later, as that same Roman Empire was itself crumbling, it reinvented itself again. And when the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages began to crack into pieces, old Martin Luther came along.

Now, change is happening on such a huge level that people don't even know what to call it. All we can say is that certain things are over. The modern era, when we believed that reason and science would solve all the problems of humankind, is over. The great era of the nation state seems to be falling apart with the advent of global economies. The debates in the public square, whatever they are about, are standing on theories that are no longer applicable.

Even in our little town of Deltaville, younger people are living in arrangements and family structures that look nothing at all like even one generation prior did. The great institutions, including the church, which people have believed in and invested in for several generations, are of no interest. I know a lot of people think this is a normal cycle and by the time these young people get to be fifty, they'll be in church. But there's a big difference between them and today's fifty-somethings. They can't return because they never came to begin with.

At the same time, these young people are very concerned about the world, very concerned to make a difference, and very interested in spiritual matters, maybe even more than their parents and grandparents. What they are completely uninterested in is any kind of institutional entity with doctrine and dogma. They have no interest in becoming a member of anything. They aren't interested in buildings or hierarchies or party lines.

I sat on a plan with Mitch on my way home from the church conference I attended. It was Mitch's first time on a plane, first time out of Indianapolis. He was twenty years old and he was heading for boot camp in Indianapolis. I learned a lot about Mitch. He shared very openly with me. He came from a broken family. He had a stepfather and a mom. He was a high school graduate, and though he appeared bright, just couldn't get into college. He had no opinion about politics. He had no opinion about the economy. He really didn't have any attitude about our country. He was joining the army because of one reason. He needed a job that paid reasonably, because he was in love and wanted to marry a beautiful girl, whose picture he showed me.

Mitch had never been to church. Let that sink in, friends. This is the future that's coming. Lots and lots of people who have never been to church.

I think it's a marvelously inspiring and exciting time, but I recognize for many people, Lamentations says it best. If feels as if we are being led to some captivity in a foreign land.

The citizens of Judah didn't know what awaited them in Babylon. They didn't know what challenges they'd face as believers in their God. How would they continue to be faithful as exiles in a foreign land full of foreign gods?

When his disciples ask him to increase their faith, Jesus answers, "What faith?" The crisis we face as the church is not a cultural issue. It's not a crisis of too much education or too little. It's not a crisis of political leadership. It's not an economic crisis. It's a crisis of faith. And by faith we mean the passionate and exclusive love for God. Glenn Beck and his ilk want to say we need to return to God. I would say we might never have been with God to begin with.

But the good news friends is that it's not just a question of our being faithful. When they went into exile they found that God was still with them, God still spoke to them, God still encouraged them with words of hope and promise. God was faithful.

We may not ever have been with God. But I am certain that God has been with us.

And God will be faithful to his people now as well. God will be working wherever people are struggling to put him first in their lives. And wherever there is even the faith of a tiny mustard seed, the world will be changed.

Amen.

No Balm in Gilead: sermon for the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost Year C 2010

2010-09-20T13:39:00.000-07:00

No Balm in Gilead

There is a Balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole
There is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin sick soul.

Sometimes I feel discouraged, and think my work's in vain.
But then the love of Jesus revives my soul again.

There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.
There is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.

This hymn comes out of the black church tradition, probably developed in the slave churches in the mid-nineteenth century. It's interesting to me that they used this very despairing phrase from Jeremiah and changed it.

Jeremiah is involved in a kind of three-way dialogue. We hear the people and we hear God and we hear Jeremiah all commenting in this passage. In the line in question, Jeremiah asks if there is no balm in Gilead, if there is no physician there? As if answering some unseen person who has said "Of course there is," Jeremiah says "Then why has the health of my poor people not been restored?"

Jeremiah is continuing with his terrifying vision of destruction and despair. We need to remind ourselves that Jeremiah was not preaching about something that had already happened, nor was he preaching about what was certain to happen. He was lifting up a very significant possibility, a likelihood. We might say that this is the flip side of God's promises.

When Jesus says, "I will be with you until the end of the age," we must remember that he prefaces it with a serious command to go and baptize and make disciples of all nations and teach them everything he taught. So if we don't do as Jesus commanded, what happens? Is he still with us? Jeremiah's vision tells us, no. No, he isn't.

But the enslaved black Christians of the American South didn't let old Jeremiah have the last word. No, no, Jeremiah, there is a balm in Gilead. They insisted on this despite their awful situation.

It interests me that slavery has been abolished since then.

We heard from Jon and Dawn Barnes yesterday about their ministry among a people who live with 40 percent unemployment, whose homes are literally shacks made of cardboard and tin, who don't make enough money to pay even the $10 that it costs to send a child to public school for a year. And yet they, and everyone else who went to South Africa who was at the Assembly yesterday testified that the faith and joy of the Christian communities there greatly outshines their counterparts in the US.

Yet here in the US it seems we hear of nothing but anger and fear and hopelessness. What do you suppose the answer would be to a survey if we put it out in our culture? Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no God present who really can fix us? A bunch of us shout "yes, of course there is!" But the answer comes back, "then why are we so messed up? Why haven't we changed already?" No, there's no balm in Gilead.

What is this balm? We know the physician is God, but what is this balm that God uses to heal the people? Is it the right economic program? Is it the right political system? Is it the right military strategy?

Jesus us taught us to pray "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." In the ancient world, the system of debt was essentially a system of legal robbery, a simple means for powerful people to snarf up the ancestral lands of the poor. While Jesus may have been using debt as a symbol for sin, I believe, as do many other scholars, that he was also talking about literal debt. In any event the two are closely related.

Whether someone owes us money or owes us restitution of some other sort, it is this situation that gives rise to a simple choice, and surprisingly enough, that choice is the main seed from which our future will sprout.

Do we forgive the debt, or do we insist on our rights? If we insist on our rights, if we give free rein to our resentment, our choice will give birth to all manner of misery. But if we restrain our anger and fear, and keep our eyes and our ears open, and let go of our right to a pound of flesh, new possibilities arise like water in a desert.

The balm of Gilead, wielded by the great physician God, is first and foremost the balm of forgiveness. The healing doesn't end with the forgiveness, but it must and always does begin with forgiveness. The future might be very very dark, but only if there is no forgiveness. And if we are not the ones doing the forgiving, then the forgiving doesn't happen. God's forgiveness, friends, never comes until we forgive.

Jon told a story of a friend of theirs who had been a pastor during apartheid who had led his congregation to cross township and racial lines to help less fortunate people and who had been arrested for treason. He spent a year being tortured in prison before the UCC managed to get him released and out of the country. After spending some years in the US, he returned to work for the new post-apartheid government. He got a house in what had been the white town he'd previously lived near. While working in his garden one day, he saw one of his neighbors walking a dog. The neighbor had been in charge of his torture while in prison. The neighbor recognized Jon's friend and froze. Jon's friend struggled with himself and finally made a decision. He crossed his yard, walked up to his former torturer and wrapped his arms around him.

Is there no balm in Gilead?

Let's sing our answer.

Amen.

"A Hot Wind": Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost Year C 2010

2010-09-14T18:24:00.000-07:00

A Hot Wind

When the first plane hit the tower nine years ago yesterday, I was attending my last meeting as pastor of Our Saviour's Lutheran Church in Dorchester. One of my oldest friends had become an associate of the bishop's and he was attending the meeting with some of my colleagues from the urban churches of Boston. He came in with one of the early reports, having heard it on the radio, and thought perhaps that a small plane had lost control and hit one of the towers. It was on my way home from that meeting that I heard the terrible news about the coordinated attack.

Liz and I drove to Deltaville, Virginia around October 1 of that year, and as we passed through New York, signs asked us to light our headlights to honor the fallen. The busy highways were a sea of bright headlights.

You sometimes hear people talk about a disaster of biblical proportions. And by that they probably mean something like the flood or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah or the Red Sea waters crashing down on the Egyptian army.

No one at the time identified the attack as a disaster of biblical proportions, but I can't imagine people weren't thinking it. But I believe they dismissed the notion because, well, because I knew perfectly well that no one in those towers deserved what had happened to them. None of the heroes who went into that horror to try to save lives deserved to lose their lives in doing so. And for whatever reason, I have this idea that a real biblical disaster is only visited on those who deserve it.

But don't we wonder about the flood. Was it really true that every single human being in the world except Noah and, surprise of surprises, his whole family, was righteous? I mean didn't Noah's family get involved in some kind of sin in the midst of that story as well? And what about all the animals? Did all the animals have to die just because human beings were sinful?

And what about the Egyptian army? Do we think that all the Egyptian soldiers, who were just out there doing their job, deserved to drown? Not to mention the thousands of first born children in Egypt. What had the first born children done? It was Pharaoh who was hard-hearted. Why did his probably innocent people have to suffer for his sinfulness?

And hear we have Jeremiah, telling us God's word, God's threat. A hot wind will come, says the Lord, on my poor people. My poor people. Even as God threatens to destroy, he actually expression compassion for those he is destroying. How weird is that?

And God goes on to say that not only will the people be destroyed, but it sounds like a lot of the creation, the living things, the plants and animals. What had all the little animals done? It was the people who were unfaithful.

But it's this very metaphor that bears some attention if we are to get at the answers to these questions. Jeremiah, or perhaps God through Jeremiah, reminds us of the creation and our place in it. The human creature, humankind as a whole, was made, Genesis says, in the image of God. In the ancient world, an image was a statue or picture of a deity. You've heard of "graven images," right? But the human creature is different because this image is one that a true and living God has made, and the human creature is therefore a true and living image. This is in contrast to graven images, which are of dead stone or metal and therefore, in Israelite thought, represent dead gods.

Forward to the New Testament, and we have Jesus, whom Paul and the Gospel of John say bears the fullness of Godhead in his physical human body, and further that he is the firstborn of a new creation, one that presumably fulfills that Genesis purpose, to be the image of God in the world.

I want to say this morning that whether we have ever heard of God or not, whether we believe in God or not, whether we have the right ideas about God or not, we are, from the biblical point of view, collectively the image of God. Think about that for a minute. The whole of humankind, all the nations and peoples, considered as one body, is the image of God.

There's a brilliant book I'd recommend to anyone about the twin tower attack, called "The Looming Towers." It has earned universal praise from all sides of the political aisles and from the whole of the journalistic community. The book never excuses the attacks and if anything we come away all the more convinced who is culpable for them. But the book does a brilliant job of pointing out the insidious and terrible way evil has of manifesting and growing and feeding on itself.

There's another book by Hannah Arendt, which I would only recommend to the very serious reader, called "Origins of Totalitarianism" that does a similar job of explaining the forces that came together to create the terrible holocausts of the early twentieth century in Germany and the Soviet Union.

I don't for a second believe that natural disasters are as some have called them "acts of God." But when human beings in large groups engage in systemic kinds of evildoing, there is a way in which these forces begin to fester and spread like some kind of disease. The disasters that come out of them are out of all proportion to the seemingly inconsequential sinfulness that began them, and thousands if not millions of more-or-less-innocent people suffer. A hot wind blows on God's poor people.

It seems perhaps crazy to suggest that my striving for a good and honest and loving faith in a true and living God could really do anything to stem the tide of such evil. And I assure you, other disasters like the twin towers are in our future. It may even be that even as we strive to have such faith, we ourselves could become victims of such disasters, just as the crucifixion of Jesus was an example and forerunner of the widespread destruction of Israel and Jerusalem some forty years after his resurrection.

The evil that spreads throughout the world and comes back with insane and overwhelming destruction begins in seemingly small and insignificant sin in individuals and then coalesces and grows into something out of all proportion to what it started as. And many of the innocent suffer; it's the nature of evil and, yes, the judgment of God. For the judgment of God is built into our very creation, our very natures. If any group of us rejects the will of God, the whole of us grow sick. Heaven grows black, and the hot wind comes. And not only we, but the whole of creation we were created to care for, are in jeopardy.

But thanks be to God, there is hope in Jesus Christ, who came to save sinners. And it is because the tremendous power even one person has to turn the tide away from God's judgment and toward God's mercy, that there is such rejoicing when even one repents.

It is in our very nature to embody God. What shall we embody? Shall we embody the hot wind that comes to tear down and destroy? Or shall we embody the streams of living water, that come to build up and renew? Will the heavens grow black because of us, or will there be a party there today?

Amen.

The Potter's Hand (or the Play Dough Sermon): 15th Sunday After Pentecost Year C

2010-09-05T04:08:00.000-07:00

The Potter's Hand (or the Play Dough sermon)

Play Dough just won't do certain things.

Play Dough has its own agenda. It won't stand up tall. It seems to favor being short and squat. It doesn't like to reach out. It likes to keep to itself. It won't do anything delicate or subtle. Clumsy and crass is Play Dough. It won't survive well for long without proper storage. Has a tendency to dry out. Goes from Play Dough to Play No.

Any artist or craftsman will tell you that materials have their own kind of willfulness. Every material has things it likes to do and things it doesn't like to do. And a lot of artistry is learning how to work with materials and use their willfulness in service of one's purpose or vision. It's all about learning what the materials like to do, so that when one is working with them, one isn't confronted with the frustration of trying to get a material to do something it just won't do.

But no matter how good an artist is, no matter how well an artist might know a particular material, there are times when that material won't even do what it usually likes to do. When it just won't cooperate at all.

Jeremiah is led to a very particular place, to witness a very simple human activity. With the addition of the word of God, this simple human activity becomes a powerful parable, a brilliant teaching moment in which God's relationship to God's people is very elegantly described.

God instructs Jeremiah to go to a potter's house and watch the potter work. And Jeremiah observes that the clay, as he says, spoiled in the potter's hand, so that the potter had to smash the clay back down in order to remake it.

Last week, I suggested we might want to dismiss old Thomas Aquinas from the room, with his ideas about the omnipotence and omniscience of God. And old Thomas will still find himself uncomfortable this morning. Because God is showing Jeremiah a whole lot of emotions that an all-powerful, all-knowing God could never have, a situation that such a God would never get stuck in.

I sometimes hear us talk about God as if every moment of our lives has been planned by this inscrutable and unknowable God, as if our lives and our futures are fixed, and it remains for us simply to trust this and go about our business, for surely the ways of God are beyond our capacities. To be clay in the potter's hand is to be passive. It's all up to God. So why think about it at all?

I think too that we have our fair share of Deists in our midst, those who think that God is no longer among us, that God no longer interacts with God's people. Jesus came and Jesus left and now, these folks believe, it's all up to us, at least until we die, and then we go to wherever it is that Jesus went to. The potter's hand is only on us before we get here and after we leave. All the time in between is up to us.

Now, we might all figure the bible is really of no use in the whole God conversation, but as long as I serve the church I will insist that the bible remain the touchstone and measure of all our conversations about God. And the bible very clearly shoots down both the image of God as the master puppeteer and the image of God as the absentee landlord.

But if God is not one or the other of those, if we are neither passive clay nor masters of our destinies, then what are we, and who is God?

This amazingly simple and very dynamic image makes it very clear. First of all, it speaks of a nation, God's people. God is not working on the level of individuals. God is working on a broader inter-relational context. Secondly, it speaks of a God who is an artist or craftsperson, who is working toward a vision and purpose. Third, it speaks of this nation, this people, as a living material God is using to accomplish God's vision. Fourth, it describes this material as having it's own part to play in enabling or frustrating God's vision and purpose for it.

There are some things Play Dough just won't do. It doesn't like to stand tall. It doesn't like to reach out. It goes dry if it's neglected.

It's true that when the Play Dough doesn't do what we want it to do, we smash it back into a useless and formless lump, or tear it into pieces. And if we give thought to the worldwide people of God, all the people everywhere who claim to be God's people, we might well wonder whether this great piece of Play Dough is in the shape God wants it, or whether is might now be torn into pieces and scattered about, or smashed into a formless and meaningless lump.

And we might well wonder whether we are fused into this material, or even want to be. Whether we want to be a part of something that can take a beautiful and lovely shape one day, then be torn to piece or mangled into shapelessness the next. We might ask ourselves whether we really wish to be reshaped, remade, re-created. Jesus asks us if we really want this kind of transformation, which might well cost us some relationships we value, might well put us at odds with the majority of the world. Do we want to be challenged the way Paul challenges Philemon, to embrace ideas and practices the world might call foolish or self-defeating, or even revolutionary?

If the people of God are like Play Dough in the artist's hand, we might hesitate about becoming a part of that Play Dough. We might not like the idea of that rough handling, what Jesus calls "taking up the cross."

But there are some things Play Dough is very good at. It's flexible and can be molded into many shapes. It can be torn apart and put back together easily. And if it's cared for, it will remain moist and ready for play, well, forever.

We in the church have a word for the kind of life we live together, this strange and powerful Play Dough way of life. The kind of life that can be smashed or torn apart, and then remolded and fused back together, the kind of life that can go flat as a pancake but then get back up into something taller than it was, the kind of life that is constantly being made more and more beautiful, no matter how many times it falls short of its purpose. Yes, we Christians have a word for this Play Dough kind of life.

We call it "the body of Christ."

We call it "resurrection."

Amen.

Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost Year C 2010

2010-08-29T12:05:00.000-07:00

The Fountain of Living Water

So you open your mailbox and there's this official looking piece of mail. You know, with the printed return address. Something like Smith and Smith and Jones, Partners. Or maybe a deputy's car swings into your driveway, your old friend Jim gets out of the cruiser and comes to the door carrying this piece of paper.

You've been served.

You're being sued. You're being charged. Your stomach turns to ice water. This is going to be trouble. It's going to cost money. There's going to be conflict and arguing. You might not win. It might be you're guilty but just didn't know the law, or it might be that you're not, but the system is so screwy you get convicted anyway. Oh, Lord, why did this have to happen to me!

But then you see the plaintiff in the case: The Lord of Hosts, in the courtroom of heaven. Yow.

The prophets, as we have been saying, spoke for God. This is really the simplest and clearest definition of the word. Prophets speak for God. You might have noticed if you've been coming to church over the last month or two that very rarely have we heard prophets predicting the future. Yet predicting the future is the what lots of people apparently believe prophets are all about. Nope. Sometimes they do, but a lot of the time, they simply speak for God.

At this juncture, similar to Isaiah, Jeremiah is trying to convince the priests and rulers of Judah to stop trying to play power politics and straighten up the domestic scene. And by straighten up, he means, get with God. In this particular oracle from God, Jeremiah is using a classic prophetic form that shows up in many of the prophets, the lawsuit of God.

In a very real sense we all live in covenant with each other. A covenant is really nothing more than a contract, but in the form of the divine-human covenant, the partners make it something a great deal more remarkable. But we all live in covenant. The law of the land is something we all more or less recognize and respect. Until someone doesn't. What happens then?

Well, then lawyers and cops and judges get involved. If the lawyers and the judges and the cops get involved it means that the whole covenant thing isn't working. In church life, I often say that the bylaws come out when the gospel leaves. If we're all being serious disciples and doing our level best to grow in our spiritual lives together, there is usually no need for any rules. It's when one of us or a group of us stop trying to be disciples, and behave on the basis of some other set of rules of ideas, that's when people drag the bylaws out of the file cabinet and everyone tries to remember what the rules and regulations are.

A marriage is a beautiful and happy thing as long as the partners are passionately keeping their covenant with one another. But if one of them turns to someone else, the covenant is broken. There might be an opportunity for forgiveness and reconciliation but the chances are just as good, maybe better, that lawyers and judges are around the corner.

Jeremiah speaks for a wounded spouse, sick of betrayal, who is saying, "That's it, no more counseling, I'm calling my lawyer."

And, just like a wounded spouse, God tells God's counsel the long sad tale. After all I did for my spouse, God says, look how my spouse has treated me!

Now to really get at Jeremiah's message though, we need to look at the gist of the accusation. It's not just betrayal that outrages and wounds God. It's that the betrayal is with empty things that really can't deliver anything God can deliver. Cracked cisterns that can't hold water versus a fountain of living water.

God, the creator and sustainer of all life, has offered to be our king and lord, and has asked us, if we would like to accept this offer, to renounce everything else to which we give authority. From God's point of view, and I suppose even from ours, this would seem a no-brainer. God, who makes everything that grows grow, that makes everything that breathes breathe, that makes everything that is born alive, is saying, "Give up all the things you are chasing after, and serve only me." Why in the world would we say no?

God offers to create a society of people who not only love their friends and family but also strangers and aliens. God offers to create a society free of violence and warfare. God offers to create a society in which all who are sick are cared for. God offers to create a society in which human beings are provided with all that they need, and in which everyone is safe from each other.

This offer begins with the Israel and extends to the church. And yet it seems that periodically, both Israel and the church simply say, "we like this other empty thing better than we like God." We like power. We like recognition. We like control. We like acquiring things. And as our psalmist says, it's the nature of God to let us have the consequences of our unfaithfulness.

What amazes me is that despite the many things that one can clearly find wrong with the church not only now but all through history, the fountain of living water is still pouring into the world in the work of God's people. If you just take a little time to read what Global Ministries is doing, or for that matter, what local churches all over the world are doing, you'll find that living water gushing forth in the wildernesses of the world.

Right here in our congregation, we have a boatload of people who I know routinely share with those who can't repay, forgive those who should never be forgiven, show grace to those who deserve none. God is good and is able to work with us, even as we follow after what doesn't profit, even as we dig cisterns that won't hold water.

And so it is that I'm grateful to old Jeremiah for reminding me and warning me and yes, even judging me. Such a word from God is a blessing that saves.

Amen.

Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost Year C 2010

2010-08-22T11:43:00.000-07:00

Do Not Be Afraid

You know I went by to see the Hatchers yesterday because their grandson, as many of you know, has gotten a very serious diagnosis and they've had a hard, scary week. He's doing better, and we're hoping he's going home tomorrow. We'll certainly be keeping little Griffin in our prayers.

But as I was thinking about my sermon this morning, I was wondering how the Hatchers reacted when they got the call that Griffin was in ICU. I wondered if they said to their son, "We're not ready. We're not worthy to come and be with you and Griffin." Sounds ridiculous doesn't it? I didn't ask them but I'd be willing to bet they were in their car and driving in no time at all, praying all the way there.

God tells Jeremiah, "Do not be afraid."

What is it that Jeremiah is afraid of? Jeremiah's afraid that he won't have the guts to go to people who are incredibly powerful and tell them, in the name of the Lord, to shape up. He won't have the eloquence to argue with people who are older and smarter than he is.

Jeremiah is in the wilderness, cold and hungry, because he is evaluating his own fitness for the mission to which he is called. God is telling him to go and do this thing, God is inviting him to Mt. Zion, but he's still at Mt. Sinai going through the commandments and finding out how far short he really falls.

The Hatchers were in their car and on the way before they even thought much about it. Were they scared? Sure they were. Did they doubt that they could do much to help? Probably. Did any of that stop them from getting up and answering the call? Nope.

And yet when we're asked to take part in saving the world, when we get asked to come to Mt. Zion, we say, "No, we're staying out here at Mt. Sinai for a while longer; we've got a lot more self-improvement to do before we're ready."

Why do we do this? Is it because we're scared of the job? Certainly. Conventional wisdom and common sense tells us that we can't save the world. We have all kinds of smart people who tell us all the reasons why saving the world is someone else's problem. We just don't have the power, the insight, the reach.

But I think there is another kind of fear we have about this call. I think we can't let in the possibility that God really wants us that close to God, that God would really entrust something so important to us, that God would draw us that close to God's heart.

God's response to Jeremiah is God's response to each one of us here this morning, each one of us who have also been called to help God save the world.

God says, "Have you forgotten that I knit you together in your mother's womb? Do you think that your work depends on your skill and wisdom? Who do you think is the source of all skill and all wisdom?"

Our perennial problem is that we confuse Mount Sinai with Mount Zion. At Mount Sinai, we are meant to respond with fear, and on that basis, obey. And that is a step in the journey for sure. It's a necessary stop we have to make on our way to the kingdom of God. Mt. Sinai is the place where God's thunderous voice tells us right from wrong, and we shake in our boots because we know where we come out on that score.

But it's not the kingdom of God, no matter how many preachers like to preach from there. Yes, it makes more sense. It's a lot more like the way of the world. It's certainly gets our attention much more powerfully. "Do this and you will live, but fail to do it and you will die!" "Do this and go to heaven, but fail to do this and go to hell!" "Work hard and save your money and you will be happy, fail to do this and you will be sad!" "Be nice to your neighbors and you will feel good about yourself, fail to do this and you won't!" "Work for peace and justice, and you will be fulfilled, but fail to do this and you will be empty!"

All of these things are true, but God is inviting us to a new place, just as he invited Jeremiah.

Sooner or later, in the course of our journey, God invites us across a line. And the line is between Mount Sinai, where it's all about saving ourselves, and Mount Zion, where it's all about saving the world. At Mount Sinai, we obey God because we want his blessing and we fear his condemnation. At Mount Zion, we obey God because we're passionately in love with God. God invites us across the line from being good to being God's.

The synagogue leader is not a moral hair-splitter. He's not a religious hypocrite we need to dismiss. Yes, he's still at Mt. Sinai, but Mt. Sinai is a very holy place, and a lot of us are still there, stuck there, not really sure how to get away. The synagogue leader might have reasonably been concerned about forgetting the purpose of Sabbath, the day we're supposed to be in worship, by getting into a healing free-for-all. And to be perfectly honest, our culture has gotten pretty bad about keeping the Sabbath. We might do well to pay some attention to this man.

And Jesus, we must be careful to note, does not disagree. He doesn't dismiss the law. Mount Sinai is on the way to Mount Zion. But Jesus does invite the old rabbi across the line, where Sabbath-keeping goes from being something we do because we're seeking God's blessings and avoiding God's judgment, to something we do as the new creations of God, free of our crippling and fearful self-interest that keeps us bent over, staring at the ground at our feet.

Do not be afraid. God is leading you a whole new existence. Stand up, grow up, be what God intends you to be. Forget about whether it will make you happy or not. Just answer the call. Just go for it. Just give up searching for fulfillment and fall in love with God.

You're headed for Mount Zion, to the company of all the saints, to the festal gathering, to the feast to end all feasts. Yes, we know you've never been there before, and the freedom of the place may feel like falling off a cliff, but this is what it means to be a grown-up Christian. It's not about you anymore. It's not about what choices you make. It's not about what you get out of it.

It's not about saving yourself. It's about saving the world.

Do not be afraid.

Amen.

Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost Year C

2010-08-15T18:34:00.000-07:00

The Vineyard of the Lord

In out modern culture there has been such an abuse of authority that we have all become leery of experts. We are all aware that so-called experts can barrage us with statistics and authoritative sources and convince us of one thing, until the next so-called expert does the same thing to convince us of the exact opposite. And so we simply make up our minds in advance about the camp we'll stick with and only respect the experts that already agree with us. The days when we could rationally weigh factual evidence and come to a reasonable decision are over. If any of us genuinely try to wade through the monumental sludge pile of facts and figures to try to get at the truth of a thing we find ourselves exhausted.

Or is the truth more that the whole idea of reasonably making a decision based on facts was misguided to begin with? Isn't it more likely that in everything except perhaps the laws of physics it's not really possible to talk about facts? Isn't it more truthful to say that we have theories that seem to work and so we stick to them, sometimes even when they don't work? Don't we gravitate toward those who agree with us and avoid those who don't? Isn't our self-esteem wrapped up in what we believe to be the right map for living, so that we are genuinely offended if someone or some group convincingly challenges it?

How do we decide what's really going on? And then how do we figure out what to do about it?

I think there's a clue in Isaiah's beautiful song of the vineyard. The song is really a parable, and Jesus used it hundreds of years later in his own teaching.

You can open your bibles to it if you want to Isaiah 5. Old Testament, toward the end. The form here, this song, sounds something like a love song, something like the Song of Songs, in fact. I like to call this Isaiah's country western song. It's a lament about betrayal. God loved God's people, but the people done him wrong.

I went to visit Gene Blake last week and every time I go to see him he shows me his tomato plants. He has them in big planters on his porch. Earlier this summer he was proud to show me how big they were getting. He was pretty excited. But last week he was not so proud. "Do you know," he said, "I haven't gotten a single blossom?" And sure enough, there were the big tomato vines, just as healthy and green as you please, and not single flower on them. "Not tomato one," he said. I wondered why and he did too. He opined that it might have been for lack of bees. Who knows?

I suppose all of you gardeners and farmers out there know just what is being said here. One chooses a good spot for a garden carefully. One prepares the soil. Lots of effort goes into planting and watering and weeding, doesn't it? A good gardener has success most of the time, but sometimes, inexplicably, the whole effort comes to nothing.

And Isaiah says this is a metaphor for God's view of the then-current situation. He doesn't try to explain why the vineyard produced the stinky fruit, which is a better translation than "wild grapes." But the metaphor is a good one for describing why it is that Israel is lying in ruins to the north and Judah is about to follow suit.

We may not understand how an ordinary person can have a vision from God, but God doesn't understand how an ordinary person can't.

This is a parable about heritage. The people of God have forgotten all that God had done for them, all that God had promised them, all that God had commanded them, all of their experiences with God over many generations. And for this reason they had not seen what was really going on, and they had not know what to do about it.

If we claim our heritage as God's people, and work at remembering it, we all become prophets. It's not easy, but it's not rocket science either. Nor is there any guarantee that it will make us happy or fulfilled in the usual sense of the words. Sometimes our heritage will give us to courage to stick to an unpopular course for the sake of the truth. Sometimes it will turn even those we love away from us. Sometimes it will cost us. But the joy and peace that we derive from this heritage has to do with the salvation that God is working through us.

What our heritage gives us are the perspective we need in order to know what's really going on and just what to do about it. Our heritage gives us the ultimate vision, an idea of the right kind of soil to plant ourselves in, and the kind of grapes God is looking for.

If there was a picture album of the most influential people in your life, who would be in it? Who are the people who taught you how to figure out what's going on and how to decide what to do about it? That's your heritage. That's the vineyard you're planted in. And God is asking you and I today, is Abraham in there? Moses, Elijah, Isaiah? Is Paul the Apostle in there, and what about Luke and the early church?

With the perspective of our heritage as God's people, we can evaluate with confidence the evidence of whatever expert comes along. No we won't get answers to scientific matters. We will not be able to get clear direction on the specifics of moral questions our ancestors never had to answer. What we will get is a good idea of what we can expect of human beings, where God might be in all of it, and what the best bet is for the next right thing to do.

It's never too late to get to know the cloud of witnesses, the heritage of God's people. It's never too late to be planted in the vineyard of the Lord.

Amen.

Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost Year c 2010

2010-08-11T03:16:00.000-07:00

August 8, 2010

Isaiah's Vision

This morning we're presented with a vision of the prophet Isaiah, and it's been on my heart to speak to you about prophecy, so let's take a look at old Isaiah, shall we?

I'd like first to get past some common misperceptions. While prophets often wrote about things God was going to do in the future, they were not fortune tellers or seers in the usual sense. Prophets were really interpreters of current events. The mode of their interpretation was to speak in God's voice. The most common phrase in prophetic literature is "Thus saith the Lord."

You'll notice if you look at your bible that Isaiah begins with a historical setting. In this particular time and place, God spoke to Isaiah. During the reign of the following kings in the southern kingdom of Judah, God spoke to Isaiah and told him to tell the people thus and such.

Now this morning's reading jumps over some verses that describe a terrible disaster, the northern kingdom, Israel, lying in ruins. Judah, the lower half of the land God had given to the Jewish people, still barely standing, now surrounded by powerful empires all spoiling to tear Judah apart. God is grieving over Israel, who turned away from God, and therefore experienced this awful destruction and desolation. God speaks of Israel as God's child.

But of course, Isaiah is a priest of the temple in Jerusalem, the capital of Judah. We met him, if we read our bibles, in the latter part of the Second Book of Kings. His prophecy is for Judah.

God begins by speaking about worship. Isaiah would have seen a lot of worship in his day to day job. There can be no doubt that Isaiah believed in worship and practiced worship with real devotion. But Isaiah also saw what was going on outside the temple.

It might be that the people of Judah, particularly the upper classes, thought themselves superior to the people of Israel because they did worship right. They had the temple after all, and believed that God had commanded the building of the temple and had forbidden the old worship in the so-called high places, where the northern kingdom people had worshipped.

Well, now, God really showed those bad old Northerners, huh? Wiped 'em right out. Sent the survivors into exile. But that won't happen to us. We have the temple.

Well, God says, temple shmemple.

Judah had the same problems Israel had. They were infatuated with and terrified of the tremendous power Assyria and other empires around them were developing by creating big hierarchies, vast slave labor forces and well-trained, well-equipped armies. Nothing succeeds like success, you know. The promises of God were all well and good but look at those buildings! Look at all that shiny armor! Look at all those horses and chariots! Yes, it means a huge poverty-stricken labor force, yes it means widows and orphans will die of starvation and neglect, but hey, that's just the price of doing business, man. Who needs widows and orphans? They're a drain on the system. They can't fight and they don't generate tax income.

The temple itself was a doubtful proposition to begin with. It seemed like it was more something the people wanted than God wanted. The king deal was the same way. The people wanted a king like all those other empires had. God was not so sure that was a good idea, but God said, sure, why not. But then, all those other emperors had big palaces. David and then Solomon thought that God had to have one of those too. God was doubtful, but then he said, sure, why not.

Before you knew it, the temple and all the impressive rituals going on in the temple got to be more important than the God for whom it was built. The love affair with empire building went on, and God's rule was more-or-less forgotten. Judah, just like Israel, wanted to run with the big dogs.

Well, God says, if you're going to worship and then ignore my law, you're going to end up like Israel. So all your worshipping just makes me tired. I see just where you're headed, and the worship just makes me feel worse. It just makes me sick.

God had demonstrated again and again through the time of the judges that the people didn't need all the trappings of empire to be safe and secure. They didn't need the king, they didn't need the temple, they didn't need the standing army, they didn't need the big palace bureaucracy. God would keep them safe, as long as they were willing and obedient. But the people didn't believe God.

And this is what Isaiah is on about here, friends. The people didn't believe God's promises, so they operated out of their fears and infatuations, and this, God says, always leads to disaster and ruin.

But, God says through his prophet Isaiah, it's not too late. You can still change your attitude. You can become willing and obedient and all the terrible things you've done while you were building your empire will be forgiven and forgotten. And God makes it very clear what God means by becoming willing and obedient.

God says, rescue, plead for and defend the poorest and weakest people among you. Isaiah uses the widow and the orphan, because in the patriarchal system of that day, to be without a husband or a father was the most desperate situation anyone could be in.

God is not saying that God doesn't want his people to worship. Worship is indeed the main work of God's people. Isaiah certainly wasn't preaching that the temple should be shut down or that people should stop worshipping. God is saying that worship's purpose is to inspire a living and active faith, a belief in God's promises on which God's people act willingly and obediently.

Who are the widows and the orphans among us today? And when I say "us" I don't mean Philippi or Deltaville or the United States. When I say "us" I mean the world-wide church. Who are the people who have no one in their corner? Who are the people on whose backs the rest of the world stands?

Might God be wearied of the worship of the church in these days? Could God be a little tired of our preoccupation with pretty buildings and entertainment worship? Could it be that the economic wastelands we see today might spring from the same causes as Israel's desolation was caused by?

God has made a simple promise that is hard to believe. Plead for, rescue and defend the weakest and the poorest, and we will be fine. Fail to do that, and no matter how lovely our buildings or how inspiring our worship, desolation will be the end.

Amen.

Tenth Sunday Fter Pentecost Year C

2010-08-04T03:45:00.001-07:00

Raised with Christ

I'm a chronic worrier you know. My wife calls me her little dark cloud. One of the many things that has always troubled me is the idea that I would die in the middle of something stupid or unworthy. You know, have a heart attack while arguing about a restaurant bill. Or drop dead while committing adultery. I've wondered about the stuff people would find in my house, the things I've written, things I've read, the stuff I eat and drink. Would I be at peace with everyone, or would there be a bunch of enemies out there that I died in the midst of battling? Would there be people openly or secretly dancing on my grave?

If I died today, what sort of conversations would people remember me having in my last days? What would people remember me being concerned about or interested in?

This isn't such a bad thing to think about, as Jesus himself reminds us this morning.

But something I haven't thought about as much, and I suppose I should, is what it would be like if I died and came back. And in a very real sense, this has happened to me, not once, but three or four times that I can remember, and that's just talking about physical death, moments when I literally came close to leaving this beautiful world and didn't.

There were also many times, even recent times, when I have died and returned to life in a spiritual sense. But even this is not exactly what Paul means.

When Jesus rose from the dead, he was transformed, or "transfigured," as the story of his mountaintop revelation says. He continued to be a person who ate and drank and touched people, but he also became a person who could walk through walls, materialize or dematerialize at will, or appear in forms unrecognizable to his friends. He was still a human being in the most ordinary sense of the term, but he had also become a divine being who could ascend into the hidden world of heaven, and even come back again.

When Paul says that we have been raised with Christ, he is suggesting that we have become ourselves such beings. Indeed, the stories about Paul in the book of Acts have some of these kinds of resurrection body miracles.

Obviously, we have never dematerialized in the literal sense. We can't walk through walls. But it may be that what Christ and his apostle Paul demonstrated to us in such a powerful literal way is what we are able to do in a figurative and spiritual way.

I whimsically suggested a trip to heaven and visits with angels a few weeks ago, but isn't this what Paul really is talking about? Isn't he suggesting that we can and should have a resurrection relationship with the risen Christ, that we should make the trip to heaven and worship the Christ who sits at the right hand of the Father?

Now we're Disciples of Christ, and we like to keep things real, you know. We have a certain rational, down-to-earth heritage that kind of goes against such mystical ideas. Let me see if I can break it down for us this morning.

If we absorb the stories of Jesus from the four gospels, if we absorb the stories of Israel in the Old Testament, these stories will begin to resonate in deep ways in our minds and hearts and spirits. They will become for us a kind of lens through which we look at ourselves and the world. Most importantly though, they will give us a means by which we can discern the presence of the living God, the creator of all that lives.

And then if we enter into relationship with this God, we will inexorably be led to building community with all who call on God's name. In building this community, we are further shaped and find more and more ways to see and experience God's Spirit.

Jesus so deeply entered into this world, the world of scripture, the world of his Jewish heritage, and most importantly the vision of the living God, that he renounced all that was powerful and impressive in his world in order to worship and love God alone. In turn he embraced all his brother and sister Jews, no matter what their sin. His renunciation of the world was so complete that the powers of the world executed him for it. And yet they could not defeat his God, who raised Jesus from the dead as the first gesture in making a new creation.

This is the resurrection we also can enter into, and the resurrection Paul is talking about. If we have been raised with Christ, we no longer are ruled by the desires the world tells us we should have, along with all the fears that come with them. If we have been raised with Christ, we are no longer angry about anything because nothing of real consequence can be taken from us when God is our Father. We never need to lie or twist the truth because we will not have anything to hide when our inappropriate desires and our anger and wrath has died on the cross with Christ.

You know, there are character defects of mine, sins, I guess you could call them, that have died on the cross with Christ. And you know how I know they've died? Well, first of all, I don't act on them anymore. But this is not why I know they've died. I know they've died because I grieve them the way I grieve the death of an old friend. They're like ghosts, sometimes I feel them hovering around me, but they are no longer real.

It's obvious from reading Paul that this is not the all-or-nothing, once-for-all thing some people make it out to be. Paul wouldn't be preaching these things if everybody got it right the first time. No this process of dying and rising, of being put to death for renouncing the world and then raised by the God we renounced it for, this process goes on and on. It's a way of life, an ongoing transformation God is working that Christ has opened for us.

Maybe my worrying will get fixed too, and the little dark cloud will dissolve in the sun.

Amen.

Ninth Sunday After Pentecost Year C 2010

2010-07-25T18:50:00.000-07:00

The Whole Fullness

I went to Peebles yesterday. I've started going to these exercise classes at the Y to maintain my heart health, and the shorts I have been wearing were a little too constricting, so I needed (I guess you could say I "needed") special shorts for exercising. And of course, right there in the middle of the store, there was a whole section of exercise clothing. I mean, think about that for a minute. What does that tell you?

Our culture tries to reduce us to consumers. As consumers, we embrace a lifestyle, and with each lifestyle comes its package of consumables. A lifestyle in our culture, which I don't think is only American, but increasingly global, or at least Western, consists of what we do, how we do it, where we do it, what and who we do it with, and so on. All of these things have become consumer items which are marketed and delivered to us, who consume them. I think eventually, someone will figure out how to market the air we breathe. They may already have done that.

There is an endless multiplicity of lifestyles. There's the waterfront retirement lifestyle, for example. The boater lifestyle. The tree-hugger lifestyle, complete with the Prius and the "save the whales" sticker. There's the fitness lifestyle, and you can even have your entire diet mailed to you every week. Each lifestyle has it's clothing, its range of automobiles, its package of toys. And increasingly, in our culture, even its spirituality.

A Christian economist wrote that a consumer society is not about having things, but about shopping for things. It's not about materialism, but about the quest for fullness. If we were all happy once we had the things we wanted, our economy would shut down. In order for the economy to keep growing, we all have to keep spending. Our economy is based on never really being happy, always needing something, or someone or someplace, more.

At the end of the consumer rainbow, I suppose, is the miracle of fullness, that magnificent moment when everything is just the way we want it, when we are surrounded by people we like, in a place we find comfortable, with all the toys we need to feel happy, and wearing the perfect clothing. No more shopping required.

Fullness. This seems to be what we are seeking. I guess some people might call it "fulfillment." Our culture has taught us that it's impossible, that we just have to accept that not everything will ever be all right. We're just going to have to shop, well, until we drop.

And in our religion, many say that's the point at which you get your fullness, your fulfillment, and they picture heaven as that pot of gold at the end of the consumer rainbow, everything finally just the way we want it. Others find other spiritualities that in one way or another make us feel better, feel fuller.

Believe it or not, things weren't that different in Paul's day. Particularly in the religious department. Other gurus were going around in the newborn churches saying, you won't be full until you add my special ingredient. Paul is saying that we don't need any added ingredients beyond the fullness of God.

Did you hear all those organic, physical words? Root, body, ligament, sinews, growth, substance. Paul doesn't deny there is a spiritual and unseen dimension to our existence, but finally in our faith, fullness is not in some other dimension or at the end of our lives. Fullness is available here and now in our physical and real lives. Not only fullness, but abundance, an overflowing cup.

The whole fullness of God is pleased to dwell in Christ, and this fullness can be our fullness as well. Christ is really here, then, now and always. He was here then in Jesus, he is here now in communion of saints, and he will always be here. Here on earth. Here in the body.

We know Paul isn't denying our physical bodies because he talks about our resurrection as already completed in Christ. He doesn't say you will be raised. He says you have been raised. Instead of the old covenant self-mutilation, we have a new covenant Holy Spirit resurrection. If we have been raised with Christ, we need no carrots or sticks anymore. We serve God because we are his children and we love him.

As for the other world, the hidden world of heaven, the realm of the elemental spirits, we are concerned with them only insofar as they affect our lives in this world, as Paul asserts that all of these powers are ultimately under the authority of Christ, in whom God is pleased to dwell bodily, that is, in our world, in this creation. We spoke about this last week in our whimsical flight to heaven.

God is in our world in the vessel of the human body, wherever human beings open themselves to Christ. Even old Hosea was invited to physically experience God's anguish at Israel's unfaithfulness by being married to a prostitute. Some might say this foreshadows our physical experience of the crucifixion in the work of forgiving our enemies, of which Paul spoke at the beginning of this letter, and of which Jesus speaks so often, and indeed includes in his teaching on prayer. And we learn in today's lesson from Luke that he is actually teaching us to pray for God's Holy Spirit, which is the power that raised him from the dead, and raises us as well.

I wonder if all our shopping, all our sweat to build up the means to buy our lifestyles, I wonder if it all isn't a search for this fullness, the whole fullness. We are still seeking by our self-punishment and self-reward a fullness we can never accomplish. We are still seeking something that we can never find in this world, not because it is in some other world, as some of us might hope, but because it doesn't exist at all.

And I wonder too if our Christian path is not toward a fullness that is very much in this world, the fullness of the Holy Spirit, whom our loving and forgiving Father offers us for the asking, pleased as he is to dwell in all his fullness in our messy bodies and in our even messier church.

Amen.

Eighth Sunday After Pentecost Year C 2010

2010-07-19T04:04:00.000-07:00

When Good Angels Go Bad
(The Mystery)

July 18, 2010

Let's take a little trip, shall we? Let's fly on up to heaven. Got your wings on? Let's go!

Have you ever seen pictures of the Imperial City in China? It's huge, let me tell you. In the old days before Communism, the emperor of China lived in this gi-normous palace in the middle of this magnificent walled city, surrounded by somewhat less huge mansions occupied by all the thousands of ministers and generals they needed to run the empire. Well, in most of the bible, heaven is pictured like that, only the ministers and generals are mostly angels.

Now, just like people, all these angels were created by God, and so like people, they are basically good. But sometimes, just like people, angels go bad.

Yes, it's scandalous I know. Angels, of all creatures in the universe! I mean, they're angels, for heaven's sake!

Let's swoop down into this little neighborhood of God's imperial city. Check out the mansion, third from the left. Here's an angel who presides over the gift of wealth. Now this angel is a good angel, created by God, and we hear of many good and faithful people, people who really loved God and who also enjoyed wealth as a gift from this angel.

But then someone comes along who worships the Angel of Wealth. Well now, the angel, being only a creation of God and not God, gets tempted. "Why should God get all the glory? It's nice to have some worshippers of my own."

And just like that, the angel goes bad.

What's really, really awful about this is not just that its mistaken. It's that when people worship the Angel of Wealth in the way they should worship God, they begin to think that it's okay to steal and exploit and cheat and lie in order to get the wealth they are seeking. Without the word of God, all the goodness that might be associated with receiving a little well-earned abundance is sucked out of it, and it becomes dark and evil.

Well, now, you know the angel of wealth really doesn't have anything to offer if it doesn't keep its position in heaven. So it not only gets too big for its britches, it gets sneaky. Whenever it goes before God it sings, "Holy, holy, holy, yeah, yeah yeah." But then it sneaks back to its mansion and its little secret band of worshippers, and they all sing "Holy holy holy" to it. (Maybe quietly, thinking God can't hear them.)

Now let's take a look at what happens on earth when the Angel of Wealth goes bad. This is heaven so time doesn't matter here. Let me see. Ah, there's ancient Israel in the time of the prophet Amos. Let's see what's going on there. Got your wings on? Let's go!

It's the reign of Jeroboam the Second and boy, do things look great. Listen to the royal messenger at the city gates... wow, seems like things have never been better. Israel is powerful, it's gaining territory. Its army is one of the most feared in the region. Look at the impressive building going on. Look at all the fancy clothes people are wearing.

Ah, but if you go out into the rural areas, what do you see? You see starving, enslaved families, misery, ignorance, violence. What's going on here?

Apparently there's a huge gap between the many who are desperately poor and the few who are wildly rich. As the elite rich class gathered wealth, they used various deceitful means to build up the debt of the agricultural poor to the point that they could steal their ancestral lands and more-or-less enslave them.

Now check this out: the wealthy elite give all kinds of lip service and indeed pretty big piles of gold to their religious observance. The temples have never looked better, and the priests are driving the latest model chariots. Not only was the northern kingdom one of the strongest nations in the world, it also appears to be one of the most religious.

But you know the truth is that the Angel of Wealth isn't God, so no matter how many big beautiful buildings you have and how many gorgeous silver and gold sets of altar-ware, no matter how entertaining or inspiring the sermons, if it's the Angel of Wealth you're worshipping, you'll not hear anything at all from God.

That's what happens on earth when the Angel of Wealth goes bad in heaven.

OK, that's enough about that angel. Let's fly back up to heaven and check out this other angel I know about.

Let's call this one the Angel of Traditional Womanhood. Now the Angel of Traditional Womanhood is a good angel. A traditional woman takes care of everyone around her, her parents and her children and her husband and all the guests of her house and everyone she works with and everyone she goes to church with too. That's how people benefit from the gifts of this wonderful angel. And women who serve in this way also receive a nice sense of self-esteem and peace as a gift from this angel.

But let's say some people decide to put the Angel of Traditional Womanhood on the pedestal that rightly belongs to God. Remember, angels aren't God, so they get tempted too. The Angel of Traditional Womanhood says, yes, you know, it's true, I do deserve some worshippers.

And another angel goes bad.

The problem is not just the mistake. The problem is that when the Angel of Traditional Womanhood becomes more important than God's word, its worshippers will think its okay for women to be enslaved and abused and exploited.

Well, now, lets swoop back down and see what happens on earth when the Angel of Traditional Womanhood goes bad. I see a good spot: Mary and Martha's house during Jesus' earthly ministry. Let's go!

Now, here's Martha preoccupied with keeping all the hospitality customs of her people, which were extensive. Nothing wrong with that. It's a beautiful thing, you know, a woman who keeps a warm and welcoming home.

But Mary, Martha's sister, makes a different choice. She chooses to sit at the feet of Jesus and enter into discipleship. Now to sit at the teacher's feet while women waited on you was the norm only for men in Jewish society. Yet this is no problem apparently for Jesus.

So Martha is running around practicing hospitality, the Angel of Traditional Womanhood is doing its thing, and Mary is sitting at Jesus' feet and listening to the word of God. Everything is still fine.

But then Martha says it. "Lord," she says, "tell that Mary she can't do what she's doing. Tell her that the Angel of Traditional Womanhood is more important than God's word!"

Bad, bad angel.

Paul writes in today's lesson from Colossians that Jesus Christ not only fixes us, but he fixes the bad angels as well. Indeed, from heaven's point of view, fixing the angels is what Christ is all about. Paul says that Christ is the firstborn of the new creation, and that in him and for him all things in heaven and on earth were created, "whether thrones or dominions or powers." And through him all things in heaven and on earth are reconciled. In other words, if we keep Christ first in our minds and hearts, the angels are themselves saved from the temptation to take God's place, and return to their rightful places.

I've chosen this whimsical way of imagining heaven to make a very serious point. It's not bad things that most powerfully tempt us into unfaithfulness, that lead us into sin. It's good things. Good things we love very often creep up in our esteem beyond the word of God, and the next thing we know, we have forgotten love, decency, generosity, and respect, all for the sake of the good thing we are worshipping in the place of God.

Good angels don't want to go bad anymore than we do. Let's help them out, shall we? Let's keep our eyes on Christ.

Amen.

Seventh Sunday After Pentecost Year C 2010

2010-07-14T03:48:00.000-07:00

The Saints in the Light

"May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light."

We're going to be considering Paul's letter to the Colossian church over the next several weeks, and we notice right away that Paul is delighted with this congregation. Big difference from Galatians, isn't it? Paul begins this letter as he begins all of them, except for Galatians, with this outpouring of love and joy. Of course, there is an issue Paul needs to discuss with them, but they themselves are not the problem.

You might open your bibles if you have them and scan these first lines again, because hidden in them is a whole wealth of good information about the church in Paul's day.

One of the things you'll notice is that Paul had a global orientation. He didn't start the congregation at Colossae, His co-worker Epaphras did, but Paul as an apostle nevertheless had oversight of this congregation. Paul makes note that the Colossians have love for all the saints, that is, all the other congregations of the church. He also makes note that the gospel is "bearing fruit in the whole world," and that the fruit-bearing at Colossae is within that larger context.

The church for Paul, and I think for the New Testament as a whole, is not instituted by human beings. It's something God is doing for the whole world. And so, while each congregation has its own local authority to shape its ministry in its peculiar context, to forget its covenant with all other congregations is to cease to be the church.

Suspicion and distrust is very much the order of the day, isn't it? It seems the world is filled with a sense of betrayal. I think many of us, myself included, find themselves asking, "whom can I trust?" And for many of us, I think the answer is only those who are close by. Only those who think as we do. Only those who live as we do. Only those who look like we do. Only those who speak our language. It seems that for our safety and well-being, we must simply reject and ignore or even destroy everyone else.

So it was for Israel in the days of the prophet Amos. Israel was split into two kingdoms. Kings were assassinated and replaced by even less faithful kings. The priests of the Northern Kingdom abandoned faith in God in order to suck up to the latest assassin in the throne. Most importantly though, the Northern kingdom had abandoned the unity of the people of God by refusing to worship at the one temple God had established in Jerusalem in the Southern kingdom.

Because they broke the covenant of unity, God sent Amos to the Northern kingdom to pronounce God's judgment. If the Northern kingdom rejected God's word and command, Amos said, God would reject and condemn the Northern kingdom and it would come to ruin.

Centuries later, the fallout of that judgment was that in the northern part of Israel there lived an outcast community of Jews called the Samaritans, named after what had been the capital city of the northern kingdom in Amos' day. The Samaritans rejected the prophets and had as their bible only the first five books of Moses. They continued to refuse to worship in Jerusalem at the temple, as all the rest of the world's Jews did, and worshipped only in the so-called high places, the mountain-top altars scattered around the northern territories. Jews regarded the Samaritans as beyond help, unclean, rejected by God forever. KInd of the way we think of the Middle East today.

So when the Jewish lawyer asked Jesus who his neighbor was, Jesus' answer was a shocker. A Samaritan is your neighbor, friend. The person you have rejected, the person you have dismissed from your mind and heart, the person you least trust, the person for whom you have the most contempt. That's the neighbor you are to love as you love yourself.

Who are the saints in the light? They are those who have been transferred into the kingdom of the Son of God, in whom, Paul says, we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Forgiveness is the foundation of Christian unity. Not love, not friendship, not like-mindedness, not homogeneity, not place or race or ideology or obeying the same laws. Forgiveness. Without forgiveness, redemption is not possible. Without forgiveness, Christian community is not possible. Without forgiveness, there is only destruction and death. Without forgiveness, the gates of hell slam closed and the world is plunged into despair.

The saints in the light are not the perfect people who never do anything wrong, who never hurt anyone. They are the forgiven people, who practice forgiveness for each other and for all the rest of the broken and troubled world.

God alone is judge, and God's judgment, his plumb line, is a gift. It's only the judgment of human beings that is toxic and ugly and disastrous. Whatever war is going on today is not some new war, but the same war that's been fought ever since Cain slew Abel, because every act of judgment and violence eventually begets more judgment and violence. No war has succeeded in accomplishing anything except more war. So it is with all judgment and vengeance. It's a never-ending demonic cycle leading only to sin and death.

Still, we are broken people who continue to put ourselves in the throne of God and judge other people. This is our chief sin. In fact, I find it almost axiomatic that whatever it is that makes me most angry about others is precisely what is wrongest with me. By the same token, what I admire most in others is often what is best in me.

God's plumb line, his measure of our uprightness as it were, is a gift. It's not our job to wallow in self-hatred and self-denial, but it's also not our job to justify and rationalize everything we do, while at the same time pointing out the faults of everyone else. To receive God's judgment helps us to see the riches of his grace. Twas grace, after all, that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.

To love my neighbor as myself means to continue to bless my neighbor even as he or she disappoints me or even hurts me, just as God continues to bless me even as I disappoint and even hurt God. its to help those who are far away and unknown to me even though they don't know me or show any gratitude to me or give me anything in return, just as God helps me though I am far away from him and don't know him and show him no gratitude or do anything in return.

The saints in the light are those who are not holy in themselves, but have been made holy by the forgiveness of God. And the unholy world is blessed with holiness by the forgiveness of the saints.

And so it is that the garden of paradise, in some places and times, yet blooms in the world.

Amen.

Sixth Sunday After Pentecost Year C

2010-07-07T03:29:00.001-07:00

A New Creation

06 Pentecost Year C 2010

July 4, 2010

2 Kings 5:1-14

Psalm 30

Galatians 6:(1-6), 7-16

Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

The Continental Congress, on July 4, 1776, formally declared the United States of America independent of Great Britain. And so it is that we celebrate every year by shooting off fireworks and having parades and cooking outdoors. Of course, one of the great themes of American history and culture is freedom.

The letter of Paul to the Galatians is also about freedom. The passage we have heard this morning is the end of the letter. After giving the Galatians all kinds of what-for, Paul encourages each one of them to be easy on the others but hard on him or herself. And he goes on to speak about, well, humility. A letter all about freedom, that ends up speaking about humility. Hmmm.

I might associate all kinds of things with freedom, but humility wouldn't be one of the first things that pops to mind. Parades are not exactly humble. Fireworks are not humble. What's the connection?

I think it may be that the whole point of Galatians is that there is no greater danger to freedom than the struggle for status or importance.

Status and importance in religious communities seems to be gained by exceptional spiritual gestures or acts of piety. For the Jews these were circumcision, dietary laws and the practice of hundreds of very particular legal restrictions. You could measure the status and importance of a Jew as a Jew by how rigorously he understood and obeyed all the restrictions God had put on the Jewish people.

Status and importance have to do with power over other people, and this is what we are really after: the capacity to make other people do what we want them to do, or not to do what we don't want them to do. Because Paul was such a perfectly observant Pharisee, when he became incensed about the Christians invading the synagogues, he was able to marshall all kinds of official power to support his mission. Status is about power over others.

It's easy to confuse status and importance with love. All of us need love, none of us need status or importance, but the latter sometimes comes to fill in for the former. Naaman was almost certainly hated by most people who knew him. Disfigured, ugly, violent and cruel; the only positive vibes he got were around his power over others. But then, from completely unexpected sources, he received the greatest gifts of all, health and acceptance, the simple gifts of God's love.

For all the great drama God has been a part of in the great story of the bible, I am learning that there is in God's very heart a kind of humility. His voice is not in the earthquake and the tornado, but in the deepest silence. He doesn't speak through Naaman or even Elijah, but through a couple of nameless slaves. He doesn't choose the most beautiful river to wash away disease, but a muddy and unremarkable stream. His power is the quiet power, the humble power, what one scholar called "lamb power."

Paul would call it the power of Christ crucified.

Christ Jesus received the Holy Spirit in such a way as to fundamentally change him into something quite different from an ordinary human being. The Holy Spirit married the flesh and blood of Jesus in such a way that he because the perfect child of God. He was liberated entirely from the powers of the world, freed to be what every human being truly wants to be, in love with God and all of God's creation. Jesus was given the mission of proclaiming the forgiveness of sins and the coming of this new creation, the kingdom of God. Those who respond to his proclamation, which we call the good news, or the gospel, by accepting the forgiveness and opening themselves up to God's Spirit, become as Jesus is, a new creation, a perfect child of God.

The cross is the center of Paul's teaching. He makes this clear in Galatians as well. God comes near to those who are the farthest from him. God's presence is most deeply felt among those who least deserve it. His power is with those who are the least powerful.

The power of God is not the power to make other people do what we want them to do. It is a much much greater power. It's the power to be free, the power to tell the truth in love and have no fear of the consequences, the power to be who you really are whether the world finds it valuable or not, the power to love God the way you really want to love God, with your whole heart and soul and mind, and to love everyone else in the world the way you really want to love them, even as you love yourself.

Pride, the bottomless longing and endless competition for status and importance and power, is the only true prison there is. No matter what government anyone lives under, no matter what oppression anyone suffers, they can be free in Christ. And no matter how free their government, no matter how liberating their society, no person is free who is filled with pride.

I read the Declaration of Independence the other day, and the thing that struck me about it was how humble it was. It is the declaration of good people who had been backed into a corner, the declaration of people trying desperately to maintain the best of their humanity in an inhuman situation.

And I remembered that moment when the first George Bush addressed the nation after the Gulf War and described an American marine's kindness to a native Iraqi. A tear rolled down his face. It took me a long time to realize what it was that Bush was so moved by. He had a vision of the American character: yes, powerful, yes, great, but also yes, generous, kind, and ready to forgive.

Barbara Brown Taylor once preached a sermon on old Naaman that happened to fall near the Fourth of July. It was called "The Cheap Cure."

“You may never hear it again on a Fourth of July weekend, but maybe the next time you are saying your prayers for this great, shaky nation of ours, you will remember that great, leprous man Naaman, whose wealth and power turned out to be useless to him in his search for health, and who was ready to trade it all in when God surprised him with a cheap cure that made him truly free.”

It's Jesus the Christ who enables us to receive the Holy Spirit, to be born anew, to awaken to God's presence. It's this gift we're after, the gift that makes all other things in our lives well and whole. With it, our names are written in heaven, and all that we pray for, since our wills are aligned with God's, is given to us. Greater miracles that Jesus himself did will be done by us, not because we are good, not because we obey God's law, not because we are nice, or well-mannered or rich, but because God has graciously given us a power not our own.

Amen.

Fifth Sunday After Pentecost Year C 2010

2010-07-01T03:23:00.000-07:00

Led by the Spirit

05 Pentecost C 10

June 27, 2010

2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14

Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20

Galatians 5:1, 13-25

Luke 9:51-62

Let's practice.

First came Elijah, then came who? Elisha. The two names sound very much alike and we can get them confused easily. First came Elijah, then came Elisha. Let me hear you say it, church. Hebrew names are usually contractions of sentences. Elijah means "God is Yahweh," and Elisha means "God is salvation." First came Elijah. Then came Elisha.

Elisha was Elijah's single-minded and determined follower. He kept his eyes on the prize, as it were, and you heard it in the passage this morning: the prize was the Holy Spirit.

Keeping one's eyes on the prize is what all these passages are about, my friends.

The psalmist is distracted by the trouble he's in. It's all he can think about. His mind is occupied with it. You ever get that way? Happens to me all the time. I got up yesterday morning and I prayed for a quiet mind, and you know a half an hour later, my mind was like the New York Stock Exchange again. Just seems to happen.

So I had to get my mind on the kingdom again, you know. I had to meditate on the power of God again you know. If you have this problem, well, this psalm is your solution. Write this baby down. Psalm 77. The psalmist stops thinking about his trouble and what he's going to do about it, and he gets his eyes back on the prize. He talks about the unseen hand moving in the cosmic waters of chaos. He's thinking about that breath or wind or spirit that came from God and pushed back the cosmic waters to liberate the creation hidden underneath it.

There are all kinds of meaningful and important things, good, good things that can pull me right off track, make me forget all about the prize, the prize of the freedom of the Holy Spirit. Family, business, health and happiness. I can get preoccupied with these perfectly good and worthy things and the prize slips out of sight while I'm not looking and all of a sudden, I'm rushing here and I'm rushing there, but nothing really quite seems to work.

We live in a world of specialists, all of whom have expertise in this or that very difficult field. It's good that we have all these things. And there might be some in the church who think that being Christian is about becoming an expert in a whole bunch of special techniques. You know, how to have a Christian marriage for example. Or how to raise Christian children. Or what the right thing is to say in difficult situations.

Well, I understand that technical knowledge, being able to deal with some complex problem with good tools, is a great thing. But I've never been able to understand how faith has anything to do with techniques.

Jesus said, and I think it might be one of my favorite quotes: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these other things will be yours as well." We heard it yesterday at Elaine's funeral, and it appears it was one of her favorite passages as well. For me it means seeking the Holy Spirit, and I think that's what it meant to Jesus as well.

The prize of Christian life is the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is the salvation of God that has been given to us in Jesus Christ.

I've been reading Philip Gulley, and I'm hearing a lot of people are reading him. The Men of our Region brought him for one of their retreats. Gulley seems to want to let go of the claim that Jesus was divine, and for this he has gotten a lot of grief, even in the relatively liberal context of the Quaker community. Well, I think I know where he's going with his ideas, and I think maybe someone should suggest he come on over with the Disciples. As long as Jesus is the Christ, son of the living God, savior of the world, it doesn't matter to us if you have trouble believing he's divine.

I agree with Gulley that for many of us, making Jesus divine puts Jesus out of our reach, just like making a person a saint, in the more conventional sense of the word, makes them into something none of could attain or might even want to attain. But a saint is nothing more or less than one who has been sanctified, or made holy. A person who has been made holy is a person who has come to share in divinity.

I think the problem Gulley has is that when we worship Jesus we often stop following him. When we put Jesus on the unattainable pedestal, we cease to believe we might become as he is.

To follow Jesus is to open oneself to be filled with God's Holy Spirit, just as Jesus was himself. It is to be uncovered, revealed, released, liberated. It isn't to put on a first century robe and sandals and grow a beard. It isn't to know every law that is written in the bible (though I'm not sure there are many rank-and-file Christians who are in any danger of knowing all the laws of the Old Testament... anyone want to stand up right now and recite the ten commandments?). It isn't to have all the right techniques for living a happy life. It isn't to be able to cope with the one or two things we find difficult to explain.

To follow Jesus is to open oneself to the freedom of the Holy Spirit. We want to be God's children, we want to live in the light, we want to be fountains of love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and faithfulness and generosity. But we aren't. That's our problem. And Jesus is telling us this morning that the problem is our focus. We are distracted by perfectly good and valuable and important things. But, like the psalmist, like Elisha, we need to get our eyes back on the prize. We need to get back to chasing that Holy Spirit.

You know I've read a number of sermons on this passage of Galatians that take that list of the seven fruits and talk about what each one means. It amazes me how quickly we fall into making Christian life into adherence to rules and laws. It's particularly amazing because Paul's whole point in Galatians is that rules and laws are of no use now that Christ has come.

The seven fruits of the Spirit are not a new list of commandments. It would be strange if they were, since in this same letter, Paul is certainly being neither patient or kind with the Galatians. The seven fruits are, well, fruits. They grow naturally out of a person that has received the Spirit. There's no list of commandments involved, no technique, no moral discernment.

What there is, is focus, commitment, determination. Making the reception of God's Spirit the absolute top priority. There are a whole list of spiritual practices that help us to open ourselves to the Holy Spirit and to recognize the Spirit when we see her. The rest is up to God, who is our liberator.

I believe that freedom is salvation, and salvation is freedom. The freedom to be the spectacularly beautiful divine creation God intends you to be. Just as this glorious world was hidden in the dark cosmic waters, so glorious people are hidden inside each one of us. As that glorious person you have within you pops into view, Jesus himself crosses back from death into life. And when a bunch of these glorious people are drawn together around this table, the kingdom of God is here, and it is the day of salvation.

Amen.

Fourth Sunday After Pentecost Year C 2010

2010-06-26T11:06:00.000-07:00

No Longer

04 Pentecost C 10

Father's Day

June 20, 2010

1 Kings 19:1-4, (5-7), 8-15a

Psalm 42 and 43

Galatians 3:23-29

Luke 8:26-39

(to the reader: about an hour before our services, Elaine Wilson Miller, one of Philippi's most honored members, passed away at 96 years of age.)

It seems fitting that Elaine Miller would fly to her heavenly rest on a Sunday morning.

Elaine amazed us. Many, many years, about fifty I guess, we have known and loved her here in Deltaville. Most of us know about the remarkable way she seemed to love everyone, even the people who were annoying and difficult. And not just in our congregation, but throughout out community. And not just throughout our community, but people halfway around the globe. This tiny little woman just seemed to pour love into the world.

Elaine didn't like being called a saint, I think because she knew that people meant by the term that she had no faults, and Elaine knew that she had faults. But I like that old quote from Dorothy Day, the great Roman Catholic lay woman who dedicated her life to helping the working poor, "Don't call me a saint; you can't dismiss me that easily."

Elaine would never say such a harsh word. But I have to agree with Dorothy. I think when we call someone like Elaine a saint, we are letting ourselves off the hook. It seems to me when we call someone a saint we are saying, "Of course, I can't be expected to live like that." We are, in essence, dismissing them.

Let's not dismiss Elaine by calling her a saint. Let's take this morning to learn from her.

How many people here want to do God's will? Raise your hands. I thought so. It's unanimous. We all want to do God's will. And you know, if you went out there and found everyone who believed in God, if you went into all the other churches in Middlesex, if you went and found all the people who are worshipping at St. Mattress, or the Cathedral of the Chesapeake, and you asked them if they wanted to the will of God, I think they'd all say they absolutely would.

The question that naturally arises, though, is "why don't we?"

The wonderful thing about people who believe in God, and there are lot of people who do, is that they all want to do God's will. And you know, even atheists and agnostics, even people who don't really believe in God, if you asked them, they would say that they want to live moral lives and adhere to good values. Even if they don't believe in God, they certainly believe in goodness.

We all want to do the right thing. We all want to live moral lives. We all want to do God's will. We all want to love everyone. We all want to bless the world. We all want to live every moment in the light.

Well, then, why don't we?

To me the essence of freedom is doing what you really want to do. We really, really want to do God's will. So, if we were truly free, we would. We would do God's will all the time.

It's obvious that most of us, no matter how badly we want to do God's will all the time, don't. And it's obvious that even though we want only to be associated with things that are good, we aren't. We are all of us woven into all kinds of evil. And even in our interpersonal relationships, right close by, in our families and in our communities, we somehow find ourselves doing things we're not proud of, getting caught up in behavior that we thought we'd never get into. How many times have we somehow hurt someone, when we didn't mean to? How many times have we found ourselves gossiping about someone and afterwards winced in recognition of how wrong we had been to do so?

Today is Father's Day, and I feel about as ambivalent about Father's Day as I do about Mother's Day. It seems to me that both days insist on promoting this ideal vision of motherhood and fatherhood that to many, many people is completely false. I hear the odes to perfect fathers and I remember that I don't even know my birth father's name, and I don't know if my adoptive father is alive or dead. I hear these songs about strength and dependability and tenderness and I remember that my own fatherhood has never been good enough for the standard. I'm glad for all those people who had loving fathers, but that's not my experience, and I know it's not the experience of a lot of people. But here is yet another example of what I'm talking about: every father wants to be the father we celebrate on Father's Day, but very, very few actually are.

Why?

Something prevents us. Something seems to compel us to do what we would not do, and to refrain from doing what we want to do. We want to do God's will, but something always seems to get in the way.

Elijah wanted to do God's will. Oh, yes, old Elijah, now there's a guy none of us could hold a candle to in the faith department, right? But here, a situation prevails that drives even this epitome of faith into despair. He gets word that Jezebel has a contract out on his life, and he runs. The war is over, Lord, and we lost. It never dawns on him as he runs into the wilderness that a God who could provide him with a nice breakfast every morning might be more powerful than Jezebel.

Jezebel is impressive, baby. She's got the big palace and the big throne and the political connections and the highly trained assassins just waiting for her orders. She's big and scary, no doubt. So maybe a God who serves you breakfast doesn't seem like a God who could stand up to her.

But, as Elijah finds out, God is not in the big and the scary. God is not in the hurricane and God is not in the earthquake. The power that defeats all other power is not like that. The power that sets us free to be ourselves has a whole different profile. In the book of Revelation, John sees Jesus in heaven as a lamb on a throne. Against the legions of Rome, a lamb. One preacher called God's power, "Lamb Power." It's not in the big and scary.

Elijah isn't free because he lives in a free country. Elijah isn't free because the law of the land lets him do what he wants. Elijah is free because he has the quiet power of God. Nothing can stop that power, not even Jezebel and all her assassins.

The poor man in the land of Gerasenes is not free. He is compelled to rip off his clothes and howl and shriek and live outside among the graves. He has no home, no friends, no family, no community. The legion of demons infesting him have completely robbed him of himself. They are loud, powerful, terrifying.

But they are under Jesus' authority. You notice there's no struggle. Luke doesn't tell us that Jesus trained for a week before he took on this task. There's no sense that Jesus finds this in any way difficult. And you'll also notice that the demons don't even bother to resist. They know Jesus right away, and the only option available to them is negotiation. They've been ordered to leave the man, and that order is not up for discussion. All they can do is ask for a different destination.

Upon his release, the man is clothed in his right mind, and now has a home he can go to. He can now be who he was meant to be.

This is the power of freedom given as a gift from God. It's not big or flashy. It's quiet and peaceful. It doesn't compel anyone to do anything but releases them to do what they really want: to be children of God. This is what happened to Elaine. A long time ago, she fell in love with Jesus, and she was set free to be who she was made to be.

Now, I want to point out that not everyone who is set free ends up looking like Elaine. That's just another kind of legalism, another way of locking us up in a cell. What's magnificent about God's new creation is that every person who is liberated has a different set of gifts and graces. Some are sweet and loving people like Elaine, some are fiery prophets like Elijah, some are passionate evangelists like Paul. Once we start doing what we were born to do, we are each one a unique and lovely creation.

No longer male or female, Jew or Greek, slave or free. No longer bound to convention or culture or law. No longer concerned with the murky question of what is wrong and what is right. No longer worried about any power that might demand our allegiance or try to compel us. No longer locked in any spiritual prison.

No longer bound, but free.

Amen.

Third Sunday After Pentecost Year C 2010

2010-06-16T03:51:00.000-07:00

Crucified With Christ

03 Pentecost C 10

June 13, 2010

Crucified With Christ

1 Kings 21:1-10, (11-14), 15-21a

Psalm 32

Galatians 2:15-21

Luke 7:36-8:3

A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good. ---Stephen Wright

A minister asked a group of children, "What's the first thing you have to do to be forgiven?" And one of the kids said, "You have to sin!"

I saw a posting on facebook this week of a friend of a friend, someone I know through Amy Hurd. Her name is Jen Lawton and she wrote in her status, "Perspective, consider this an open invitation."

Perspective. Maybe it's time to get down on the floor. (Getting down on the floor.)

Here I am, at the feet of Jesus. Here I am, a worthless sinner, deserving only the cross, in the presence of a God who loves me anyway. Hmm. It's not too bad really. Nowhere to go but up, you know.

Would anyone like to join me? I don't want anyone to injure themselves, but you know, it's really not too bad.

It's a relief you know. Nothing to prove. Nothing to insist on. Nothing I'm entitled to.

You could come down here and we could just lay on the floor at Jesus' feet and we could tell him all our problems. Bring some oil and we'll anoint his beautiful, calloused, dirty feet. And maybe we'll do some crying too. Not a bad thing to do in the presence of the Lord. If you'd like to let some tears go now, by all means, offer them up.

You know down here, it's not hard to love God. Down here, it's not hard to love the whole human race. It seems like love is inversely proportional to pride. The lower you are on the pole, the easier it is to love.

You know, the scripture says his feet are beautiful, and they sure are.

(Standing and continuing the service.)

It's important in understanding Paul's message to the Galatians to understand that even at that amazing moment when the church was born, conflict arose. It's one of those things that troubles us in churches. Somehow we all have this idea that the church is supposed to be this kind of mid-sixties TV family. We're shocked when there's conflict. We're even more shocked when people behave like old Ahab and Jezebel.

And yet the bible is full of stories like that.

Even old Peter was kind of two-faced, at least according to Paul. Paul went to Jerusalem and pitched his whole idea of being apostle to the Gentiles. We've heard some of the stories of what was happening in Jerusalem after the resurrection, about how Peter had the dream about the animals and welcomed the Gentile centurion. So Peter agreed with Paul that the Gentiles didn't have to be circumcised, at least to his face. But apparently, after Paul left, Peter or someone in Jerusalem put together a group to follow after Paul and clean up after him. This group got to the Galatians and said, "What Paul told you was all well and good, but it lacked the whole circumcision thing. You really can't be a member until you're circumcised."

Now, this is not about Paul rejected the Old Testament. We know from all the rest of Paul's writing that he believed and taught the Old Testament. That was in fact the only scripture he had. And it wasn't just that he was opposing people who were clinging to old and useless traditions. He didn't see the law as old or useless.

As for Peter and the Judaizers, they also weren't necessarily being unreasonable. There was a lot of tension in the synagogues about this news about Jesus. A lot of Jews were very receptive. You remember that thousands were baptized the very first day Peter started preaching in Jerusalem. Imagine managing 3,000 new people here at Philippi. Then as now, so many new people brought all kinds of unexpected problems and difficulties. One of them had to do with Jewishness. Gentiles were converting upon hearing the news of Jesus. Didn't that mean they needed to become Jews?

Peter vacillated about the question, a vacillation that appeared to Paul to be hypocrisy. But think of it. Peter saw a tremendous wedge potentially coming to split his new movement in two. What might he do to minimize the damage? Maybe he needed to concede to those who wanted to keep Judaism intact. What kind of chaos might ensue if any part of the law were jettisoned?

It's not that Paul didn't believe in circumcision. It's that he believed in a greater and more perfect circumcision. He believed, and I believe, that God had come into the world to dwell with his people. Not some new God, but the same God who had ruled over Israel from the time of Abraham. The question was not about keeping the law or not. It was about where one goes to start a relationship with God.

The message for today is about the cross. The cross is the place where God enters the world. It's not in the temple. It's not in the beautiful town square. It's outside the usual paths and walkways, outside the house of worship, in the place where people are cast off and forgotten. The cross is the place where God comes into the world.

God prefers the company of those farthest from him. He bypasses all those who are jockeying for status before him and runs right to the ones who are the least worthy. He whips people in the house of worship and comforts people who are being executed for robbery and murder.

I think we like to imagine, at least us males like to imagine, that the woman bathing Jesus' feet with her tears is a prostitute. Jar of ointment, the hair let down, kissing; it's hard not to think about sex. But the text doesn't say that. It just says a sinful woman. What if that woman were Jezebel? Not the somewhat titillating and lovely temptress, but the scheming and vicious murderer, maybe even with with beady eyes, straggly hair and bad skin? A woman who had done real and terrible wrong to lots of people, who really deserved to be executed and have her remains eaten by dogs?

That's the kind of offense that the Jewish Christians were taking at Paul for welcoming non-Jews into Christian fellowship without circumcision. It's like he was saying, well, that God loves sinners, for heaven's sake.

But Paul's own experience of conversion was exactly this. In the midst of doing the most terrible wrong a person can do, Paul encountered Jesus Christ. Christ met Paul on the cross. Paul found himself hanging on a cross next to Jesus, like the rebel robber in Luke's gospel, guilty of what Jesus was not, of insurrection and rebellion and murder, crimes against the kingdom of God. Jesus, though he was not guilty, was there with him, welcoming him into paradise.

Some of us encounter the cross in the course of experience, without actively seeking it. But it is possible, and this is a wonderful gift from God, to seek the cross. It's possible to find in oneself the many ways, through commission or omission, we make ourselves superior to others, the many ways we plot and scheme to undermine our perceived enemies, the ways we stand quietly by and say nothing about injustice because it so richly benefits us, the tantrums we throw when we don't get what we want or think we deserve. We can seek the cross by seeking out our rebellion and our willfulness. When we find our sin, when we find enough evidence to convict us of rebellion against the kingdom of God and yes, even murder, we will find Jesus Christ, hanging on the cross next to ours.

It's at the cross that we encounter God, and it is the only place we can encounter God, at least in the sense of being able to begin a relationship. Forgiveness and salvation are really something else. The cross is simply the place we begin. It's the place everyone has to begin. There's no other entrance into God's presence. If there is, to paraphrase Paul, Christ died for nothing.

What if we saw our worship on Sunday the way the "sinful woman" saw it? What if we came intending to lay on the floor and bathe the beautiful feet of Jesus with our tears?

Amen.

Second Sunday After Pentecost Year C 2010

2010-06-16T03:41:00.000-07:00

And They Glorified God

02 Pentecost C 10

June 6, 2010

1 Kings 17:8-24

Psalm 146

Galatians 1:11-24

Luke 7:11-17

In a newspaper commentary I read yesterday a guy named Matt Bai observed that we've been living in what feels like a crisis for about forty years. Of course, for a lot of that time, at least half of the people felt like something positive was getting done about whatever it was. It was usually only the other half who felt like things were getting worse and worse. Now, we're in a rather special moment in this country. I think everyone is pretty convinced that things are spinning out of control and show no signs of getting sorted out. You don't hear too many people saying hopeful things.

Mr. Bai said that if you wanted a metaphor for the growing sense of crisis we've been experiencing over the past forty years, you couldn't ask for a better one than the oil leak. A slowly and steadily spreading disaster of unimaginable proportions with results that are almost impossible to imagine or predict. Think about it. For forty years the situation between Israel and the Muslim world has gotten worse and worse, and now is getting critical. The uneasy peace between the Koreas is now descending back toward war. Iran is working on a bomb, we're still at war in two countries, Osama Bin Laden is still on the loose, the continent of Africa continues to waste away with AIDS and coups and massacres, and the world's economy is shaky at best. And nothing anyone has done seems able to stop it. No one has been able to plug the leak.

At Regional Assembly over the last two days, I have to say the message was somewhat gloomy all-in-all. The two authors who came to speak seem to specialize in writing books with catchy titles with nothing in them but the same message as the title. This one was "Getting People Under Forty While Keeping People Over Sixty." And if you read the book, it basically says we should get people under forty and keep people over sixty. It never really tells us how.

The fact is that the mainline church has been in decline for forty years and hasn't really done a thing about it. Nothing that's worked anyway. Even the Baptists are declining. I remember thinking yesterday that I've been going to assemblies for eighteen years, literally, because I was ordained 18 years Friday, and I've pretty much been hearing the same message. We need to change but we aren't changing. If we don't change we're going to disappear. And everyone nods and applauds and heads back to their congregations ready to change the world. But the oil just keeps on pumping. The church keeps declining. There are fewer and fewer Christians in every generation.

I think about a year, maybe two years ago, we all started feeling like the metaphorical oil leak was pumping away and no one was able to stop it. I think the feeling is getting really pointed now, and it's beginning to infect every aspect of our lives. It's not only the world that's coming apart, it's our older parents, it's our kids, it's our church, it's our own communities and neighborhoods.

Some of us are angry. Some of us are exhausted. Some of us are still hopeful. But all of us finally know that the leak pumps on.

There's a drought in Israel, don't you think? Not only has the widow lost her husband, but now, cruelty of all cruelty, she's lost her only son. Not only has Jesus been crucified, but this guy Saul has it in for everyone who believes in Jesus. Insult upon injury. Trial upon trial. Do you know the root words for "pandemonium?" "Demons everywhere?"

At some point or another, the solution really does have to come from outside. At some point, there's no one to hire, no one to fire, no one brilliant enough, can-do enough, insightful and wise enough, to fix this. Nor is there any way we can all consult one another and thrash it out and make it all work.

At some point or another, the savior has got to step in. At some point or another we really have to get on our knees. And I don't mean as some kind of metaphor for giving it more thought, or as some kind of show of piety. I mean surrender. I mean making that last loaf of bread, eating it and laying down to die. I mean just loading the body on the bier and having the funeral. Just go on and say, "This is all wrong, and I have not the foggiest idea what to do about it." Just go on and grieve. Just go on and admit the battle's over and we lost.

When Paul is saying that his gospel comes from God, he's really not trying to validate himself; he's trying to validate his gospel. He's not affirming himself, though it rather sounds like it, doesn't it? He's affirming the message he's been given. He's trying to point out that the thing that comes from God is the thing that saves. Ideas that come from people are not saving. They might put a bandaid on the wound, they might redirect the oil leak in some other direction, but the solutions that come from us usually make the situation worse. The ongoing effort to keep improving and solving and fixing actually amounts to a spreading field of poison.

The answer will come from God, and it will come when we cry "uncle" and not before. When we become as ready as only the dying can be, room is made for a miracle.

I'm wanting to glorify God. That's the path I'm interested in this morning. That's the salvation I'm looking for this morning. I'm ready to say I'm licked. I don't know what the right thing is to do. I don't know how to fix any of it. I don't know what the moral choice is, the righteous choice, the effective choice. I don't have the magic technique or the perfect ideology. I'm looking for the miracle. I want to give up and lay down and wait to die, and see what God does.

Just when I thought the Assembly was pretty hopeless a bunch of young people of multiple colors got up on the stage and told all us old fogies that we needed to figure out how to get blacks and whites together, that all our talk about acceptance and unity was hollow to them. And they proposed a simple plan to make it happen I don't know why but tears started flowing down my face. Maybe its just that I so badly needed a little hope. I think I was glorifying God there fore a minute.

And later, I went to a workshop where a congregation in Lynchburg told how it had come to openly welcome and affirm everyone at their church, particularly people of different sexual orientations. One of them said, "if you are worried about being accepted at a church for any reason at all, find an open and affirming church. They really mean it when they say they accept you." Wow. In Lynchburg of all places. I did a little glorifying God right about them.

Will you all do a little exercise with me right now? I want you to think of two phrases. The first phrase is "God might be..." And the second phrase is "But soon God will..."

Now you're going to complete the phrase. The first phrase is about the punishment of the trial God might be visiting upon you. Like that old widow who told Elijah it was God who took her son. Like the early Christians who though of Saul as God's test for their faith. Now don't bother arguing about whether God causes bad things to happen or not. That's why the word "might" is in there. God might be causing that oil leak to spew. God might be giving me cancer. God might be taking my mother away from me piece by piece. God might be putting my church through a trial. God might be brewing another war in the Middle East. Put it all on the list. Just close you eyes and list all the terrible things God might be doing.

Now I'd like you to complete the second phrase. The second phrase is about the sudden reversal that God is going to bring about. Like the widow's declaration about Elijah, like the congregation's that had feared Saul glorifying God because of Paul, like the people of Nain glorifying God because the widow's son was brought back to life. "But soon God will..." But soon God will restore his creation to wholeness. But soon God will liberate my mother and comfort me. But soon God will deal with my cancer. But soon God will bring peace in war-torn places. But soon God will...

I'm looking to glorify God. How about you?

Amen.

First Sunday After Pentecost Year C 2010

2010-06-16T03:39:00.000-07:00

God's Approval

01 Pentecost C 10
May 30, 2010

1 Kings 18:20-21, (22-29), 30-39

Psalm 96

Galatians 1:1-12

Luke 7:1-10

The opening of Galatians lets us know that it is a letter. It wasn't written as a theological treatise for the centuries. It's a letter to a particular congregation at a particular juncture in its life. Nevertheless, this letter was saved, copied, circulated to other churches at other times. Eventually, teachers in the church decided that it contained such truth about the gospel of Jesus Christ that it needed to be called holy scripture for all time.

We have quite a few letters written by Paul. All of them follow a certain pattern. Usually, right after the greeting, Paul writes a thanksgiving section. He finds those things about the congregation he's writing to that he loves or admires and he gives thanks to God for them. Here, however, we have no thanksgiving section. This is the only letter of Paul without one. It begins instead with an accusation. The Galatians have turned to a different gospel, which of course is no gospel. What that false gospel is, we don't yet know.

Paul goes on to curse anyone who teaches the Galatians a different gospel from the one he taught them. Now, we have lots of stories of Paul's power over supernatural beings. He encountered his share of demons and so on, and he had the authority to command them. So this would have been no small thing. He lays out a curse that's provisional, only to go into action if someone, even him or an angel from heaven, ever teaches a false gospel.

People pleasing is the theme of this line, and I have to say I struggle with this temptation all the time. Now we might ask ourselves, what's the matter with pleasing people? Don't we all want to please people? Well, first let's do a little bible detective work here and ask ourselves, why is Paul asking this question? Well, at least one speculation we could make, I think, is that someone has accused him of people pleasing. That is, someone has said, "That Paul is not teaching a true message. He's watered it down to make it easy for people to buy into it. He's pleasing people, not God." Now I think it's also interesting that he uses the phrase, "If I were still pleasing people." Does this mean that there was a time when he was still pleasing people, before he became a servant of Christ? Could he be referring to his career as a Pharisee and persecutor of the church?

Then it seems that Paul has either changed the subject or he is making some kind of case. He is no longer talking about pleasing people or pleasing God. He's now talking about the source of the gospel he preaches. Why is he doing this? Perhaps he is making his case. In other words, "I couldn't be guilty of pleasing people because my gospel didn't come from people. It comes from God."

I feel led to preach Galatians over the next few weeks. And it seems fitting to begin this preaching on Memorial Day, when we remember those who lost their lives in the defense of the United States. We often say that they were killed defending our freedom. The opening passage of Galatians doesn't tell us the main theme of the letter, but we will discover in the coming weeks that its theme is freedom.

Memorial Day is a National Holiday, and the church is not a national institution. Nevertheless, we are mindful of those who lost their lives in the various wars our nation has been involved in. And some are thankful to God for them. Personally, I celebrate Memorial Day not as a happy day to have a party, but as a day to mourn. To me, war is a tragedy.

Be that as it may, the word freedom certainly comes up a lot on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, doesn't it? It's a lot of what the US stands for. And this is indeed the theme of Paul's letter to the Galatians, which has been called the Magna Carta of Christian Freedom.

But Paul hasn't mentioned freedom yet in today's passage. The first thing we know about the letter is that Paul is not at all happy with the Galatians. The second thing we know is that he believes they have turned to a different and very false gospel. The third thing we know is that Paul feels the need to defend himself. And the overall theme of the letter seems to be about the simple question of real versus false gospel.

I model my ministry very much on Paul's. Paul's primary methods involved persuasion and encouragement. But there were also times when Paul admonished and scolded. There is a long history of Jewish and Christian religious leaders admonishing and scolding their congregations, both before Paul and after Paul. I agree that it can get out of hand, but I also observe that in our commodified culture, admonishment is not a dish anyone wants to be fed, and so if a pastor admonishes a congregation, he or she will often find himself or herself without a congregation. This is a part of freedom we enjoy in our country. The freedom to walk away. It does however make the traditional role of the prophet rather difficult. In our society, the minister is supposed to be a "people person," as Ethel Wiley often reminds me, friendly, warm and accepting to all. Paul is obviously not being friendly, warm or accepting here.

But the accusation being leveled against Paul is not that he had been too hard on the Galatians, but that he'd been too easy. We don't know yet what the false gospel was, but at least a part of it was that Paul's gospel was somehow too easy, somehow not hard enough. The claim was being made by leaders in Galatia that Paul was a people-pleaser, that he'd built his church by proclaiming a false, easy, popular gospel in order to fill up the pews.

This is a common accusation against the big mega-churches springing up all over the country, that they kow-tow to the masses, feed them the religious product they want to buy, whereas all us little churches are much more faithful, since we make Christianity really, really hard.

Because we all know, don't we, that when it comes to God, it's got to be really, really hard.

The funny thing is, if you study the churches the way I do, you quickly find out that the message of many of the biggest of the mega-churches, though certainly not all of them, is a lot harder than the message of the small churches. It seems the more popular message, the most attractive gospel out there, is the one with all the rules. Check out the belief statements on the websites of the country's biggest churches. Check out their requirements for membership.

The revelation from God in the crucified and risen Jesus is just that, a revelation. You know, let's take a moment with this shall we? Jesus is really of no interest to anyone if he didn't rise from the dead. Let's just admit that right now, shall we? This supernatural event is the center of the whole thing. Everything we are as Christians and as the church radiates out from the main point: Jesus was executed by the most powerful government in the world, but he rose from the dead, and rules over God's kingdom forever. He didn't defend his freedom. God defended his freedom. He died without raising his hand to anyone. And God raised him from the dead.

The revelation of God is so hard to take simply because it proposes something rather easy. It's so easy it couldn't come from people. It is to stand aside, do nothing, and let God rule. That's it. That's the whole moral equation. God makes righteous. God makes holy. God makes free. Period.

This is from God, not from people. If it were from people, it would be a list of difficult rules you must always follow. It would be a bunch of magical incantations that you have to say just right. It would be a lot of sacrifice and self-injury. It would be a lot of fighting and dying and violence and bloodshed. But it's from God, and it's strangely easy. God says, "Let me do it."

What's hard about the gospel is not that it's full of impossible rules. What's hard about it is that isn't.

What do we have to do to gain God's approval?

Perhaps we just have to accept it.

Amen.

The Day of Pentecost Year C 2010

2010-05-29T04:05:00.000-07:00

"What Was Spoken"

Pentecost C 10
May 23, 2010

Acts 2:1-21

Psalm 104:24-34, 35b

Romans 8:14-17

John 14:8-17, (25-27)

"God declares" is the classic phrase of prophecy. Throughout Israel's history, the Old Testament tells of certain men and women who received God's Spirit. The prophet's job in the drama of history was to bring God on to the stage.

All our little dramas proceed along, you know, our household struggles and our family tragedies and our political conflicts and our international disasters and our oil spills and our recessions and so on, and what the prophet does is play the part of God. In the prophet, God just walks into the scene and starts talking.

Now it might be about the future or it might be about the present, but usually it has to do with a warning or a promise, and not so much fortune-telling. Not "You will meet a tall dark stranger," but more, "If you do what I tell you you will meet a tall dark stranger, but if you don't, you will only encounter short, pale people you've known for years." Do you hear the difference? There is something of a prediction here, but there is also a choice offered. In many cases, there are multiple futures out there and God is saying, "OK, you've done thus and such, and so that leaves you these two possible futures, one that I'd like you to have, and one that you will have if you don't listen to me."

Yes, sometimes the future God announces is a fixed thing, like with his message to Noah. "It's going to rain, buddy. Therefore, build the boat." But even there, the idea is that Noah has a choice. Maybe not much of one, but a choice. Build the boat or drown. And in Joel, the passage Peter quotes to help everybody understand what's happening, well, it would seem this was a fixed future, a certain thing, not dependent on human choices.

But it wasn't really. Joel was asking for Israel to remain faithful. He was granted to see this vision of the future to encourage everyone to keep on being faithful, even though being faithful didn't seem to be getting them anywhere at the time. That's the thing about faith, you know, the thing about faithfulness. The main thing about it is not giving up, even though it might not appear to be working. Why? What Joel says is, at the end of the day, finally, when all is said and done, God's going to do this amazing thing, and if you give up, you'll miss out.

Presumably, all the Jews who were present, all those people who lived scattered all over the Roman Empire, a people who were broken and oppressed, but who struggled to remain faithful to their heritage, presumably all of them knew that Joel passage and others like it, and that's why they were there in Jerusalem. They'd most of them been there since Passover, and most of them had either seen or heard about the crucifixion of Jesus, and the strange rumors that some of his followers had seen him risen from the dead. They were all there to keep the faith, even though it was expensive and inconvenient to drop everything and make the journey to Jerusalem, even though belief in their God apparently hadn't delivered them out from under the Romans, they were there to keep the faith. Their priests were corrupt, the Jerusalem Council was self-righteous and hypocritical, the king Herod was a murderous monster, but they came anyway, they came for the festival, because they were keeping the faith, hoping against all odds that God might someday do the things he promised he would do.

And what had he promised to do? Well, he promised that instead of just one person here and there becoming a prophet, one big-shot per generation, a Moses here, an Elijah there, an Isaiah and then a Jeremiah, everyone, his whole people, would become prophets. From King down to dishwasher, from daycare center to nursing home, the whole shebang. God's people, what we now call the church on earth, would become one big prophet. And the church would then take on the job that Moses did and Elijah did and all the prophets had done. Whatever was going on in the world, whatever was going on wherever the church was, the church would be God walking into the scene, making warnings and promises, and doing various miracles.

And what's going on? Portents, Joel says. I think of portents as the terrible things that drive us to our knees before God. It interested me that people did not flock to church when the economy went south. Actually the trend has been in the other direction. People have been leaving church. Now no one has studied this or figured out why. My take on it is that we are still trying to fix this thing ourselves. We haven't been driven to our knees yet. But we're getting there, I think. We'll be on our knees sooner or later, and probably sooner.

Blood and fire and smoky mist. Crucifixions and oil spills and old friends suddenly dying, bloody wars and terrorist bombings and parents getting Alzheimer's, political stalemates and rampant dishonesty and a son or daughter who's addicted, blood and fire and smoky mist, the sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood. Things that are just wrong. Things that just aren't supposed to be.

But there are the very things, old Joel is saying, these are the very things that should give us hope, because these are the things that set the stage for our longing, our calling, our shouting out for God. These are the very things that prompt us to open ourselves, to give up and ask for help.

What was spoken was a prediction that we would someday come, my friends, we, the church of Jesus Christ. Waitresses and doctors and store clerks and contractors and farmers and therapists and soft drink salesmen and professors and boatyard workers and bank tellers, that we as one body, filled with the peace of God, would walk on to the world stage, the world full of darkness and blood, to speak and act for God.

This is why the church building stands here, why we gather each week, why we collect our resources at this table, why we listen to the word of God each week. This is a last day thing, the ultimate purpose of God, to be his presence in a broken-up and frightened world. Through us and through the whole church on earth, we are each of us being saved, and are each of us also be drawn into the saving work of God for all the world.

Today is our day to pray for God's Spirit. To cry out to God in our powerlessness, to turn to God with our incapacity to make right what is clearly wrong, or even understand which is which. It's our annual day to ask God for his Spirit. We are not asking that certain of our members receive it, that we lift up this one or that one, we are not asking that the pastor receive it, so that the rest of us need not be bothered by it, we are asking for what was spoken by the prophet Joel. We are asking that we all receive the Spirit, and not only us, but everyone worshipping at Zoar, and everyone worshipping at Clarksbury, and everyone worshipping at churches in Bali and South Africa and Germany and Japan. We are asking for the one Spirit of God, the one voice that we all understand, that makes us all one child of God.

In my last long conversation with Mrs. Miller, she was telling me a good bit about what used to be at Philippi. But then she stopped and paused and thought a moment. Then she smiled and said, "But Mr. Used-To doesn't live here anymore."

There's a book we'll all be studying at the Regional Assembly called Reaching People Under 50 While Keeping People Over 60, and one of the studies it reports says that people under 50 tend to look into the future, while people over 60 tend to look into the past. And that has been true in my experience.

I remember a woman named Hildegarde. She was in her early eighties when I met her while serving her church, Faith Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was thinking of her this morning. She's long since passed on, but she was my Liz's godmother when I baptized Liz in 1998. Most of the members of Faith were over 60, and most of them talked more or less all the time about the way it used to be.

But Hildegarde wasn't like the other older people at Faith. Mr. Used-To was really of no interest to her. Right up until she died, she was a visionary at Faith. She saw what God had in store for that church. One Sunday she came into my office and talked with me about her dreams for the future of her congregation, and at one point tears began to run down her face. I asked her what was wrong. And she said, "I just wish I could be here to see it."

But of course, she was there, and she was seeing it. She was living it. She was living what was spoken by the prophet.

"In these last days I will pour out my spirit on all flesh, so that your young people shall see visions, and your old people will dream dreams."

Amen.

Seventh Sunday of Easter Year C 2010

2010-05-29T04:00:00.000-07:00

And the Prisoners Were Listening

07 Easter C 10
May 16, 2010

Acts 16:16-34

Psalm 97

Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21

John 17:20-26

Happy Easter! Yes, it's still Easter. It began at the beginning of April and here we are halfway through May and we're still celebrating.

I've been led (I believe by the Spirit) to preach on the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. And I've been asking along the way if you can see Philippi, our own church, in these stories of the church in its infancy.

I know of an alcoholic, I won't name her, and she might not even be a woman, who found her way into a spiritual life and thus out of the grips of her addiction to alcohol. She had been a terrible drunk, ripping, as the twelve-step literature says, though the lives of those she knew and loved like a tornado. Her husband, especially, suffered. She was no kind of partner, of course. Her spending and her laziness and her moodiness and self-centeredness all conspired to make her terribly difficult to love. But the man was really a saint. No matter how often she disappointed him, he was always there to help her, to clean up the mess.

So of course, when she got sober, there was much rejoicing. The husband was very excited and all his friends congratulated him.

Then, one night, she came home from a meeting to find a bottle of her favorite gin on the table in the kitchen. It had a note taped to it. "I want my wife back."

The husband had bought her the alcohol not because he wanted her to continue to suffer, but because his own identity and status had become dependent on her being sick. When she began to heal, he suddenly lost his sainthood status. He had nothing further to suffer.

Exploitation takes many forms. In our story today, the slave girl's owners make money on her ability to predict the future. When she is healed she becomes useless. The resurrection agitates and unsettles a world that often exploits the suffering of many to make secure the happiness of a few. When God comes on the scene, wrapped in the flesh of the people of the church, those in bondage are set free, those in power are knocked down a notch, and those who are weak are lifted up.

So much of our daily efforts around the world are based not on healing the creation, but on servicing its disease. So many of our institutions and business ventures depend for their survival on the presenting problems they address remaining unfixed. We make a virtue of suffering and then laud the overworked and underpaid, instead of simply treating them fairly. We have a huge and costly health care system that depends for its profits on rampant food and drug addictions. We also have a huge and costly criminal justice system that depends on many of those same addictions. We have an increasingly global economic system that lays the prosperity of a relatively few on the back of a relatively large majority in poverty. Then, social service organizations, including the church, expend tons of life-draining energy putting bandaids on those who are bleeding to death, instead of loudly and fiercely casting out the demons that are doing the cutting.

How many of the working poor in our community might have been okay through this economic downturn if they'd been paid a living wage when the economy was good? How many Mexicans would be staying in their own country now if our nation's farmers hadn't dumped cheap corn on their markets? How much might our health care system have benefited if something other than economic growth at all costs were not the defining value taught and preached from every pulpit in the country, therefore encouraging compulsive behaviors that become the cornerstone of big profit?

The resurrection is the power of God to save the world. It is not give to us to help us cope with problems that can't be fixed. It is not given to us to favor a few at the expense of the many. It is not given to us to help us put up with injustice and keep our mouths shut. It is not given to us to gain social status as saintly individuals dependent on the suffering around us to look important. It is the power of God to save the world.

Harry Leach often serves as a spiritual mentor to me, and the Serenity Prayer is one of his favorites. He often reminds me that serenity depends on my willingness to put into God's hands those things over which I have no control. It is a worthy and important lesson, but one that can be misinterpreted.

That prayer is the favorite of recovering alcoholics and drug addicts all over the world, who begin their recoveries by recognizing their powerlessness over their own addictions. Giving their problem into the hands of God does not mean that they simply give into it. Turning something over to God doesn't mean forgetting about it, not thinking about it anymore, not doing anything about it. Recovering addicts turn their problem over to God through a series of very difficult steps. I believe those steps are the path taught by Jesus Christ. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change" does not mean accepting a life of active addiction. It means accepting that I must turn to God to change things I cannot change myself. I will need tremendous courage to do the things that I must do to turn my problem over to God.

This is the church's work, friends, the work of resurrection, of getting up from the dead, of being reborn as new creatures, of saving the world.

When Paul and his companions were locked into the prison, they sang praises to God. And Luke tells us that the prisoners were all listening to them. Think of that for a moment, friends. Think of that rotting, stinking, dark and dingy jail, the prisoners in near despair. Think of the sound of songs of praise drifting through those hallways.

That's the sound of resurrection.

Amen.

Sixth Sunday of Easter Year C 2010

2010-05-29T03:56:00.000-07:00

"Come and Stay"

06 Easter C 10
May 9, 2010

Acts 16:9-15, Psalm 67, Revelation 21:10, 22:1-5, John 14:23-29

Happy Easter!

Yes, I know it's Mother's Day. And we're not going to let this worship service go by without honoring that national holiday. But it's also still the season of Easter. Today is the sixth Sunday we celebrate the resurrection, and next week will be the seventh and last. Of course, every Sunday worship service is a celebration of the resurrection.

I've been moved this Easter season to preach on the book of the Acts of the Apostles, which we have said seems more like the book of the Acts of the Holy Spirit. It's Luke's sequel to his Gospel. In today's movie sequel language, The Gospel of Luke 2. It's the story of what happened in the few years immediately after Jesus rose from the dead. It's a protracted story of his resurrection.

It's Christ, through the Holy Spirit, who is running the whole show. Christ enables Paul to have the vision of the man from Macedonia. And it's Christ who opens Lydia's heart to the message about Jesus.

Now before we all start talking about our dreams and telling each other how our own desires and choices are actually God's mystical guidance, let's remember that both Paul and Lydia are described in the scriptures as practiced and experienced believers. I know there are a lot of ideas I have that are not at all Spirit-led, and discerning between what comes from heaven and what comes from my own belly is not always easy. Paul grew up in the Jewish faith, and after his conversion to faith in Christ, he also received significant training. Similarly, Luke describes Lydia as "a worshipper of God," which means she has been at this thing for a while.

Lydia is of course another of Luke's women. Luke, of all the gospel writers, seems most interested in the ways in which the resurrection uplifted women. We've heard this Easter season about the wonderful saint Dorcas, the wealthy woman who bestowed lavish gifts on the poor, and here we are introduced to another wealthy female merchant, who becomes the founder of the original Philippi. You might call Lydia our congregation's spiritual mother.

When I read the passage, and the other passages appointed for this day, I was struck by the idea of God making his home in the midst of his people. In a very real sense this is what the whole life, death and resurrection of Jesus points to. God coming among his people and making his home there.

And so it was Lydia's simple words, "Come and stay," that struck me. Lydia, she of the God-opened heart, invited Paul and his companions, the emissaries of the risen Christ, to "come and stay," and in so doing, invited the risen Christ as well. And in inviting the risen Christ, she also invited God.

"Come and stay," she said.

Our own Walter Deagle has been to the city of Philippi and has visited the ancient sites. Some of his compatriots in the army were even baptized at what is believed to be the church founded by Lydia. He has a particular fondness for the place and told me yesterday that he really wishes he were here today. Philippi went on to become a major city in the ancient church, where a number of congregations sprang up, all because God opened this woman's heart. God came, and God stayed. God made his home in Philippi.

Despite the importance of women in the early church, as late as about a century ago, it was virtually impossible for a woman to become an ordained leader of the church. Many who were drawn to ministry ended up taking another route, marrying ministers. There are any number of famous ministers' wives in American history. In some cases, the minister's wife ended up having more of an impact than her husband.

In the black church, there's an honorific for a female leader, one who exemplifies everything Christians strive to be. She is called "the mother of the church." Just as Lydia was the mother of the ancient church at Philippi, so Elaine Miller is the mother of our modern Philippi. It's obvious to all of us who have gotten to know her that God indeed had opened her heart, and she, like Lydia, invited him to "come and stay." Come and stay in my heart. Come and stay in my home. Come and stay in my village. Come live with us.

I asked Mrs. Miller yesterday if she was afraid at all. Of course she wasn't. And despite her discomfort and being away from home, she grasps the hands of everyone who visits and tells them as best she can that she loves them. She's not frightened because the Spirit of God has come to her and stayed in her. And there is nothing, nothing in this world, that can kill or destroy the Holy Spirit.

I feel led to announce this morning that the church is Jesus risen from the dead. I want to say that again, "The church is Jesus the Christ risen from the dead." Another way of saying this is, "The church is God in the flesh." Another way of saying this is "The church is God's way of making his home in the world."

Let me say more about this, and I hope you're listening, because this is important. The church is meant to be a unified body of Spirit-filled members, working together to manifest the presence of God where they are. From among those members certain leaders emerge who carry the message elsewhere. Members like Paul and Peter and all the ordained ministers of the church since.

But for most of us, all the other ministers, the church is the particular embodiment of God's Spirit at home among humankind in any given place or time. It is Jesus Christ risen from the dead in the form of a bunch of people who collectively welcome his Spirit and allow him to Lord over them.

Now this may not be how we experience the church. We might experience it as yet another consumable. Another thing on the list of things we want in our lives, another thing we go out and purchase and use to improve the quality of our lives. And at the point where the church meets North American 21st century culture I suppose this is pretty much what it is. And for some, perhaps, it never ceases to be that.

For others, the church is a social club in which one works at improving one's status in the community. It's all about the public perception. I saw a play recently in which a character described a certain perfect Christian. She said, "If you just stand next to him, you just feel vile." Some folks are aiming at creating that impression. Personally I like Harry Leach's favorite Mark Twain quote: "It's my vices that endear me to my friends, my virtues that annoy them."

But deeper in, where the real church resides, are the people who have embraced the practices of prayer and meditation and deep investigation of scripture and self-examination and repentance and forgiveness and reconciliation, seeking to be filled the God's Holy Spirit, and to encounter Christ alive as Lord. And no matter who appears to be in charge, at the heart of every real church are at least a few people who are filled with God's Spirit, who are literally transformed into God's flesh, at least at those times when they are spiritually healthy.

Mrs. Miller is certainly one of those people, and it is her lifelong work and passion for Christ that has blessed this church, just as Lydia's did the ancient church at Philippi.

Let's not forget this, friends. Let's not forget that we are hear not so much to have our needs met as to have our hearts opened by God. Let's not forget that the purpose of our being here is not so much to get what we want, but to be filled by God's Spirit, who will give us far more than we could even imagine to ask for.

Let's not forget to invite God to come and stay.

Amen.

Fifth Sunday of Easter Year C 2010

2010-05-03T03:38:00.000-07:00

What God Has Made Clean

05 Easter C 10
May 2, 2010

Acts 11:1-18

Psalm 148

Revelation 21:1-6

John 13:31-35

It amazes me how difficult it is for me to change how I feel about something or someone. In fact, I would say it's impossible. My emotions seem to have a compulsive power, even though I know they don't represent reality or fact. There are times, though, that I become convinced that how I feel about something is connected to facts and reality, even when it isn't. This is the greatest trap of all.

It may be our culture has taught us to trust our feelings above all other things. We are trained, day in and day out, to assess our feelings, to ask ourselves if we are happy, if we are getting what we want and what we need, to put everything we spend time doing to that test. Is it making me feel good? This seems to be the ultimate question in a consumeristic society.

But I have learned the hard way that my feelings can't be trusted, that chasing what I feel is right and good for me or even for others can often be deeply wrong. My salvation does not come from within. It comes from God, through Jesus Christ, in the gift of the Holy Spirit. I can trust the Holy Spirit. I can't trust Mike. And you can't trust Mike either, by the way. But you can trust the Holy Spirit.

In whatever culture we belong to, there are all kinds of distinctions that are made. We are taught to stick to our own, to stay close to those we "belong to." Those outside of that circle are of no concern, or at least of less concern, than those inside it. Moreover, we are taught that we can be compromised by spending time with outsiders, that we will lose our purity or identity if we don't keep the boundaries clear. All of us, whether we are Jewish or not, have an idea of what is unclean for us, what is dirty for us.

I think at least one of the most basic issues causing the decline of the church in the Northern hemisphere is our growing inability to simply stay in the sandbox with our neighbors, to simply stick by them, stay faithful. We're always looking for someone to push out of the sandbox, or else we're looking for a new sandbox. Either way, we give up on each other, we give up on partnership, we give up on community.

This passage teaches us that, if we pay attention to the leading of the Spirit, it will almost certainly lead us to those we would not ordinarily relate to. And if we don't pay attention to the Spirit's leading, the Spirit will find whom she will find, and may in fact abandon us.

The book of Acts has been called the Acts of the Holy Spirit. It's probably the bible's premiere book on the subject. And one of the chief markers of the identity of Christ's Holy Spirit is faithful community. The Spirit seems most interested in drawing people together around the table of Jesus Christ, and keeping them there. The Spirit seems interested most in building a bigger and bigger sandbox, and keeping people together within it.

It's the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ that gives us all our energy and power and distinctiveness and purpose. In this story from Acts, Peter remembers the word of the Lord, who said, "John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit." The purpose and intention of the Holy Spirit is primarily creative. God's Spirit is the breath that animates life and growth and newness. Whatever it is that may be wrong with us or with our community or with our world is fixed not by our efforts or ideas or opinions or power, at least not finally, at least not completely. But anything may be made whole through the infusion of God's Holy Spirit.

We in the Disciples tradition have a few slogans that address this issue. One of them is "In essentials, unity, in non-essentials freedom, and in all things, love." Unfortunately, these days I think the essentials have come into question. We have plenty of freedom and plenty of love, but in the essentials, I don't think we are unified.

Without unity in the essentials, we can't be the church. Giving up this essential unity, even for the sake of a good thing like diversity, ultimately undermines the church and robs it of its energy. It is essential for example that Jesus Christ be the center of everything we believe and do as the church. I would submit that few rank-and-file Christians could tell you much that is accurate about Jesus Christ, much less articulate how he is actually the Lord of their lives. Instead, I think we tend to follow charismatic individuals who appeal to what we feel we need or want, and justify it all in the name of Jesus. We can have all the liberty and charity we want, but without the unity in this essential, we cease to be the church and become instead just another human institution, without the Holy Spirit.

But when we come to believe Jesus Christ is alive, we receive God's Holy Spirit, and we are transformed. We see what we could not see before, we hear what we could not hear before, we do what we could not do before. Our feelings no longer rule us. We are ruled instead by God. This is how God makes us holy. And one of the many things that we can see and hear and do, that we couldn't do before, is to share this same Holy Spirit.

Peter's dream writ large has to do with the cleansing of the whole creation. It has to do with the ways in which we draw lines between what is holy and what is not, what is of concern and what is not, who is acceptable and who is not. And it is about the spiritual process, the path of Christ, toward a greater and greater presence of God in and through all people and things. It's a pivotal story in the book of Acts, because it points to the whole story, the story of the spread of the Holy Spirit, like some spiritual flood, pouring out into Jerusalem and spreading throughout the Roman empire.

God doesn't condemn the unclean. We do. It is true that there are things that have not been suffused with God's Spirit. But this is not because they can't be. It is because we haven't suffused them.

What God has made clean, we should not call profane.

Fourth Sunday of Easter Year C 2010

2010-04-26T10:32:00.000-07:00

"Get Up"

04 Easter C 10

Acts 9:36-43

Psalm 23

Revelation 7:9-17

John 10:22-30

Happy Easter, church. Yes, it's still Easter. This is the fourth Sunday we're continuing the celebration and we have three more Sundays we're going to celebrate the resurrection. In Greek the word for resurrection is "anastasis." Remember that word because we're going to come back to it later this morning. It's a very important word. I might even argue that it's the most important Greek word you might ever want to know.

I've been led, I think by the Spirit, to preach this season of Easter on the book of the Acts of the Apostles. I'm kind of hoping that some of you, if not all, might read the book of Acts and ask yourselves, how much does our congregation look like or feel like this story? Can we see ourselves in these stories of many disciples and many congregations, of exorcism and healing and miraculous escape and dead folk coming back to life? Acts is the story of the church. Can we see our church today in this story?

Since Easter we've reflected on the stories of the people who were immediately affected by the resurrection, by the anastasis of Jesus. Last week we talked about a certain Pharisee named Saul who got knocked off his horse by the risen Christ. That was this same chapter, you know.

I noticed that this chapter, chapter 9 of the Book of Acts, keeps repeating a certain phrase. If you'd like to get out your bible and follow along, take a look at verse six of chapter 9. In it, the voice of Jesus says, "But get up and enter the city." Go a little farther to verse 11, and Jesus is speaking again here, this time to Ananias, and he says "Get up and go to the street called Straight." Now go to verse 18, when Saul is healed of his blindness and the scales fall from his eyes, and Luke says "he got up and was baptized." Now go on to verse 34, where Luke describes the healing of Aeneas by Peter, who says to him "get up and make your bed." Now go to verse 39 from the passage we read today, and Luke says that "Peter got up and went with them." And here finally in verse 40, we hear Peter say to Tabitha, "Tabitha, get up."

The phrase "get up" or "got up" appears many, many times in the book of Acts. There seems to be a whole lot of getting up going on.

In this particular case, we find ourselves at a funeral of a woman known as "Gazelle." Dorcas was the Greek name and Tabitha was the Aramaic name.

I suppose we have to travel a little distance to get to where this story is. We have to leave the world in which clothing can be bought for a dime at a thrift shop and cloth is cheap. We need to go to a world in which cloth and the dyes needed to color it were expensive. We need to go to the world where there were no clothing factories.

In such a world, a woman who had the time and money to make clothing for poor widows would have been a very wealthy woman. It's hard to tell from this brief story what readers of that day might have understood, but the idea of giving away clothes or even making clothes today is very different from the same idea then.

Tabitha is not a middle-class 21st century country girl with a Singer sewing machine and lots of cheap fabric at some nearby JC Penney. She is a powerful, wealthy 1st century woman, who uses a great deal of her own personal resources to directly support the poor around her. Not just lots of her time, not just lots of her talent, but lots of her money as well.

The widows gather around at her funeral and display the clothing she gave them. Now if this had been a matter of cast-off polyester pants suits or worn out jeans or sweaters with pills all over them, I don't think the widows would have bothered to take them to the funeral. No, I expect the reason the widows brought these things is because they were gorgeous. I suspect they were made of the finest materials and executed with the most thorough craftsmanship. How do we negotiate the distance between then and now? Maybe we could say they were the first century equivalent of first-run designer wear right out of a high-class Paris shop. This is what Tabitha was giving away to poor women. It wasn't just about helping out someone who was unfortunate. It was about making a statement.

Poverty then and now is feminized. The most at-risk of poverty, working or not, are women. A recent study shows that women are still paid less than men for the same work. An interesting discovery from former Wal-Mart execs is that Wal-Mart deliberately opened stores in rural America because they knew they could gather a workforce of cheap female labor from the less educated, more fundamentalist female population of such areas. The conservative church of course still teaches that women are somehow inferior to men and are supposed to be submissive slave labor to them.

In the cities, a poor woman doesn't bother with Wal-Mart. Once she figures out a waitress job won't feed her and her children or put a roof over their heads, once she and her kids have spent a little time living in a car, it's a no-brainer to get into the sex or drug trade. That or the welfare system, which is nearly a full-time job itself.

It wasn't much different then. At-risk women were a significant group among Jesus' disciples.Without a male protector or benefactor, many women had to turn to begging or prostitution. Some were lucky enough to come into some wealth, and these often were the disciples that offered up the first homes as places of worship of the underground Christian movement.

So when Peter says, "Get up" to this beautiful Gazelle, he is saying "Let this Spirit continue to move in the world; let this resistance continue; let this blessing to the poor go on. Let this testimony be made forever."

The reality of life is that we die. This Gazelle, this Tabitha, would go on to die herself. The point of this story is not about personal ongoing life. It's about a Spirit continuing to be present in flesh and blood action, here in this world. It's about that Spirit getting up again and again in someone's body, in many bodies, in all these who are clothed in white.

You remember that word for resurrection, anastasis? This phrase "get up" is the same word in Greek, just a different tense. In other words, when we say Jesus rose from the dead, the Greek really says, Jesus "got up" from the dead, that what we are celebrating in the season of Easter is "the getting up."

The church in the book of Acts is a ever-growing community in which people are getting up from out of their death, their blindness, their disease, their false beliefs. The church in the book of Acts is the getting-up people.

So let's ask ourselves today, church, is Paul getting up at Philippi? Is Tabitha getting up here in Deltaville? Is Peter, Aeneas, Ananias? Is the Spirit of God filling up the flesh and blood of the people here at Philippi?

Is Jesus getting up?

Amen.

Third Sunday of Easter Year C 2010

2010-04-18T04:36:00.000-07:00

03 Easter C 10

April 18, 2010

Acts 9:1-6, (7-20)

Psalm 30

Revelation 5:11-14

John 21:1-19

How Much He Must Suffer

Breathing threats is how Luke puts it. Have you ever been resentful? I don't mean angry at someone. I mean have you ever had a kind of chronic desire to fight with someone? To breathe threats is something like bathing in them, having them for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Getting up in the middle of the night for a little late-night threat-snack.

Saul is an authority guy though. He's not going around busting heads illegally. He follows the law. The radio call goes out, you know, "We've got a code 53 going on, Straight Street, Damascus." Officer Saul dutifully makes sure he's got the warrant in hand before he cranks up the siren and flips on the flashing lights.

This is not to say he's cool, calm and collected though. He's mad. He's outraged. These people, these followers of "The Way," will not stop slandering his sect. Nor will they acknowledge the authority of the council in Jerusalem. They told Peter and his disciples to shut up about Jesus and the council's role in the crucifixion not once but twice. But would they shut up? No, they would not. And then Saul himself was present when that Stephen was brought before the council and right to their faces accused them of participating in the wrongful execution of this blasphemer Jesus. The crowd had stoned that one to death, and good riddance.

You've got to trust the people in charge, the people who are the big shots, who have everything under control, the people with the big sticks. I mean, if you can't trust them, who can you trust? You can't just go around saying you're not going to obey them anymore, you're not going to be a citizen of the country you live in anymore, you're not going to go along to get along anymore. You just can't do that. It's chaos. The system may not be perfect, Saul might have granted you that, but without it everything would go to hell in a hand basket.

And then on his way to silence the enemies, a voice comes that is so powerful it literally knocks him off his horse. You know, this is how I've come to know the Holy Spirit. Have you ever suddenly found yourself getting turned 180 degrees? Have you ever been in the middle of being really, really mad at someone, having your threat-snack in the middle of the night, and suddenly realize that it's not them you're mad at but yourself? Have you ever suddenly seen yourself as the bad guy in your story, when all along before you had thought you were the hero?

That's one of the reasons I personally think God does not naturally indwell in all human beings, but offers himself to be accepted or rejected. Insights like "I'm the one at fault" in the midst of being certain that everyone else is to blame is the kind of insight that cannot begin within oneself. There are plenty of people who have chronic low self-esteem and blame themselves for all sorts of things. I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about the one who is absolutely sure he is right and everyone else is wrong, who suddenly sees that the truth is almost entirely opposite, not necessarily that everyone else is right, but that he has been profoundly wrong.

The story of the apostles is a story of resurrection power. It's the story of the kind of radical transformations the resurrection of Jesus brings about. This power is entirely consistent and continuous with the power that infused Jesus throughout his ministry before his own transformation. It's Holy Spirit power.

The authority of our day is a much more powerful deity, a much more insidious and baffling foe. It is our own desire to control not only our own lives, but the lives of others. It is not a failure of willpower that makes us fat, greedy, drunk, stoned, selfish or violent; it's actually an overabundance of willpower. It's our own individual wills that are trying to run the show, and it's so pervasive in our culture, so absolutely blessed and baptized, that we are coming to a place where we know nothing but power struggle. Is it any wonder that people are getting sick with stress all around us? Is it any wonder we are getting sick with it? We spend our days feeling embattled and besieged. We are told constantly that there is some threat to fear.

What if all the stuff we are hearing is simply a lie?

What if it isn't up to us at all? What if the threats everyone is saying are threatening us really aren't? What if there wasn't anything we could do about them anyway? What if there really is enough for everyone, and we really don't have to protect our own? What if we just stopped believing anything we hear but the word of God, who announces, "I love you, and I love the world, and my rule is the only just rule there is"?

What if God all of a sudden just interrupted your late-night threat-snack and said, "Why are you crucifying me? Why are you persecuting me? Why are you laying me in the tomb and remembering me like some dead family member? I'm not some dead god who died a long time ago that you have to do without. I'm alive, I'm right here, and I love you."

Well, that might just knock you off your horse wouldn't it?

It's quite a feeling, having such a realization. It feels like you've gone blind all of a sudden. It feels like you suddenly don't know anything. You know, it's a wonderful feeling, really. Sudden darkness and silence. All the running chatter of rationalization and self-justification going through your head just kind of goes quiet. Your whole museum of convictions just goes dark. Sort of like dying, but strangely wonderful. What if none of the bull manure the world was shoveling you just wasn't true? Ahhhh. That's better. Got a little room now. Not so crowded in here. Not to mention the somewhat better smell.

And the voice of God comes: "Why are you persecuting me? Do you love me?"

And the voice of God says, "Want a job?"

Amen.

Second Sunday in Easter, Year C, 2010

2010-04-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

We Must Obey God

Sermon on Acts 5:27-32

The high priest was really starting to get nervous. They had carried off the whole thing beautifully. No one had known that it was him and the council that had been behind the whole thing.

Jesus was a loose cannon, certainly. And he had been whipping the crowds up into quite a frenzy. Speaking of whipping, he had come into the temple and interrupted the very profitable Passover business going on there ever since the Romans had taken over. The crowds loved it of course. They like a good show. But it was a very, very dangerous thing to do. The Romans must not think for a minute the people might be rising up against them. That's pretty much what religious leaders are for, aren't they, to keep the peace, to bless the flag of the republic?

And so they had acted very wisely in quietly working behind the scenes, arranging Jesus' downfall. A few half-truths here, a few false testimonies there, a bribe to the right disciple, a midnight arrest, and by morning, the crowd, always ready to change their minds at the drop of a statistic, turned against Jesus nicely. The crucifixion should have erased him.

But then these rumors started about his rising from the dead. People shouting in public that they had seen him, even had dinner with him. He should have been erased, forgotten, wiped from memory, but crowds were gathering again, this time around his disciples. And worst of all, they were going around telling everyone that he and the council were behind the whole thing.

They'd arrested them already, Peter and his compatriots. But they really were pretty much powerless to do anything about it. Too many followers. And when they'd put them in jail, somehow they'd just walked out. That story was everywhere.

Something had to be done.

We may not have the high priest anymore, or the Pharisees and Sadducees. Yes, we still have those who stand right out in the public square and tell the truth, while those who work against them sneak around in the dark. But this wasn't about good people or bad people, then or now.

Then and now, the conflict is not really between those who are dishonest and those who are honest, those who are forthright and those who are sneaky. The real conflict is between authorities, spiritual entities that claim the allegiance of followers. The behavior is simply the indicator of what authority is being followed.

In our culture, we claim to be religious or spiritual or whatever you want to call it, but the same studies that show a wide interest in spirituality also seem to show that we seem to regard spirituality as a lifestyle accessory, like driving an economical car or shopping at Target. This same so-called spiritual culture we have is also caught up in addiction like it never has been before. We say we are spiritual, but our behavior says we are addicted. We say we seek a relationship with God, but our behavior says we are seeking only control, we simply want our way.

Food, money, sex, drugs, nicotine, alcohol, oil, power, you name it, we are an addicted culture. Two out of three Americans are obese; not just overweight, obese. One out of ten, conservatively estimated, is addicted to alcohol. Yet another one out of the same ten is addicted to some other substance like heroin or prescription drugs. And the symptoms of addiction, whether in an individual, a family or a nation, are the same. Dishonesty, immaturity, self-centered fear, chronic anger and resentment, grandiosity, defiance and denial. Whether personally addicted or not, and there are very few who are not personally addicted, addiction poisons whole relationship networks with certain classic symptoms, like collective blindness, using heroic people as proof there's nothing wrong, and using scapegoats as the cause of everyone's problem. Other classic symptoms: fear of direct conflict, gossiping, betrayal, an inability to respect the boundaries between one person and another.

This is nothing new. There have been other words used to describe it, but it has always been around. It is a spiritual malady, almost entirely. It has to do with the authority in one's life. Iti comes down usually to two choices: the self or God.

When Peter comes before the council, it's not the council he ultimately has to worry about. He ultimately has to worry about whether he will put his own well-being ahead of the truth. Will he go toward feeling comfortable or will he go toward the will of God? Will he do what makes him happy or will he do what makes God happy?

It's not that easy of a choice. Hard-core addicts who have entered recovery will tell you there was a moment when they were looking at dying of their illness on the one hand and embracing a real and authentic spiritual life on the other, and in their eyes it was a toss-up. Because an authentic spiritual life requires a complete shift in allegiance from one authority, the self, to a new authority, God.

Look, the high priest says, we just want you to play along with us for crying out loud. Keep the peace, don't rock the boat. Be reasonable.

And the voice of destiny might as well have been saying to Peter, "Here are two roads; one leads to a long but compromised life, the other to a short but authentic one. One leads to happiness, the other to joy."

Peter will end up crucified. But here we are, two thousand years later, chatting with him, having a meal with him. Apparently he is risen from the dead. Hmmm.

Who is the authority in my life? Who must I obey?

Amen.

The Resurrection of Our Lord, Easter Day, Year C 2010

2010-04-13T09:43:00.000-07:00

01 Easter C 10

April 4, 2010

Combined Service at 10:00 a.m.

A lesson from the Early Church: Acts 10:34-43

   34 Then Peter began to speak to them: "I truly understand that God shows no partiality, 35 but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. 36 You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ--he is Lord of all. 37 That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: 38 how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. 39 We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; 40 but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, 41 not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. 42 He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. 43 All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name."

A Song from Ancient Israel: Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

1 O give thanks to the LORD, for he is good;
his steadfast love endures forever!
2 Let Israel say,
     "His steadfast love endures forever."

14 The LORD is my strength and my might;
     he has become my salvation.
15 There are glad songs of victory in the tents of the righteous:
"The right hand of the LORD does valiantly;
16 the right hand of the LORD is exalted;
     the right hand of the LORD does valiantly."
17 I shall not die, but I shall live,
     and recount the deeds of the LORD.
18 The LORD has punished me severely,
     but he did not give me over to death.
19 Open to me the gates of righteousness,
     that I may enter through them
     and give thanks to the LORD.
20 This is the gate of the LORD;
     the righteous shall enter through it.
21 I thank you that you have answered me
     and have become my salvation.
22 The stone that the builders rejected
     has become the chief cornerstone.
23 This is the LORD's doing;
     it is marvelous in our eyes.

To Us Who Were Chosen

One of the most amazing and unusual things about our Christian religion is that we believe that everything that is and everything that ever came into being, particularly every thing that is living, came though God saying something.

We're noticing, many of us, that our grass is taking seed and growing tall and green in our yards. We're noticing our perennials popping up again, and those bulbs we planted talking root and sprouting from the ground. And there are those in some of our families that have enjoyed the miracle of becoming pregnant, of feeling that new life growing within, and some we know have even given birth in the past year. And we who are Christian, we who believe, we who, as Peter puts it, were chosen, believe that all these things, these flowers and bunnies and birds and babies all of them begin with a word, with God saying "let this happen, let this thing be real."

I don't know exactly whether people in the church really appreciate this idea, but in most other religions, the role of words is hardly important, much less central. But words are terribly important to us Christians and with Jews as well. Everything that is, everything that really has any meaning to us at all, came through God's word.

Stories are made of words, and the Christian faith, in fact, every Christian person and every Christian community, is founded entirely on a story, a series of words, words in a certain arrangement, a certain order, a certain set of sentences. Nothing but some words.

And the words are basically these:

God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power... he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.

It doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what religion you grew up in. If you hear these words and believe them, in almost any kind of way, to even the least degree, a power begins to work in your and through you, a power that changes not only you, if you let it, but the world around you, if you let it.

Jesus of Nazareth was anointed by God with the Holy Spirit. He used the power of this Spirit to go about doing God and liberating people from the power of the devil. A number of special people were chosen to follow him around as witnesses. Then, "they," meaning the religious and political leaders of that time, arrested him and executed him by crucifixion, the punishment of choice for those found guilty of insurrection. But three days later, God raised this Jesus from the dead and allowed him to appear to certain people who had been chosen to be witnesses of the resurrection, chosen to eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded those witnesses, that is, we who were chosen, to testify that Jesus is ordained as God's judge.

Now the funny thing about this story is that when certain people hear it, it starts weird things to happening. It draws people in. It gets them thinking. Pretty soon, it gets them feeling things. Next thing you know, they get to seeing things, things like the risen Jesus eating and drinking with the people of God, the people who have been chosen. They begin to hear the Lord Jesus giving them commands, pronouncing his judgment.

Yes, all of this comes out of this story, and all the many stories that have been collected about this story. It comes also out of other stories, stories of things that happened as a result of telling these stories, things like this Roman Centurion giving up a pretty highly paid job killing people for the emperor of Rome in order to give his life to the peace-loving, non-violent king of the Jews and savior of the world. It's really a remarkable thing. You tell this story---Jesus filled with the Spirit, Jesus healing, teaching and exorcizing, Jesus crucified, Jesus risen from the dead, Jesus leading his church---and it causes things to happen.

God says, "let this grass grow," "let this egg hatch," "let this child be conceived," and these things come to pass. And we say, "Christ is risen," and it is as if God said, "Let this new life begin," "let this person be reborn," "let this church come into the world and turn it upside down."

If we believe this story in some kind of way, and I think most of us can at best only believe it in some kind of way far less than perfection, if we believe this story some kind of way, then it ipens this rather amazing door for us. It is, as Jesus tells us, a rather narrow door, a rather tiny little gate, one perhaps that we will only barely squeeze through, but the gate and the door and the way is nevertheless open.

The way is open to the kingdom of God, a kingdom in which the one who made the living universe is in charge, a kingdom in which all those things we formerly thought might be impossible become possible. Forgiveness. Transformation. Healing. Freedom.

You know all those things people say will never change? You know those things that people say are just outside our control? You know all those things that are unacceptable that people tell us we just have to accept? Of course, they are right. We can't change certain things. Many things are far outside our control. Many unacceptable things must simply be accepted. In fact, these are important spiritual realizations that some really can't manage, but need to.

But once we accept the unacceptable, once we let go of things we can't control, once we give up trying to change things we can't change, we who believe, we who for some strange reason have been chosen to be witnesses to the resurrection, have this gate, this door, this way open to us, into this kingdom where there is one who can change anything, who can control anything, who does not have to accept the unacceptable. If this first man, the first one who was chosen, if this first one, the one who was crucified, if this first one rose from the dead, then it may be that the thing that never will change, will change, the thing we can't control will be controlled, the thing we can't accept may not have to be accepted, because when the power of God enters the picture, everything, friends, everything is possible.

Even peace. Even justice.

Just a story. We just tell the story, and these things happen.

Do we believe it?

Amen.