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

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)

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)

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

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)

"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

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

...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.