Fryer Drew's Sermons

Preaching Like a Scribe

2012-01-29T13:43:00.000-05:00

In our modern world, when preaching among most people who consider themselves believers, reading this particular text is sometimes problematic. It’s sometimes uncomfortable. What do we do with Jesus’ healings? What do we do with demon possession? The aspects of the Gospels that are overtly supernatural are hard to deal with. We don’t practice them here, we don’t keep them as part of our tradition as Methodists, and such things in our culture are fodder for either movies like the Exorcist, TV Evangelists who ask for money, or country barn churches. Not for us middle class, hardworking, practical, reasonable people.

I have never performed a healing in the sense that a person’s physical health was changed after I had prayed for them. I don’t believe that it is impossible, and it may signal that I do not have enough faith, but it has never happened. I have tried.

It’s a hard thing to say, but that has not been one of my gifts. It is not where the source of my authority lies.

When we read this whole chunk of scripture (scholars call them “pericopes”), the question is about authority. Jesus’ healing of the demon possessed man is one example, but the leading example is that he stands up in the synagogue and teaches, not like the experts, but as one with authority, and they were all amazed.

What does that mean? Teaches with authority? How does he teach not like the scribes; or better asked, how do the scribes teach?

If it is a matter similar to how many people preach, there is a sense that sermons and Bible studies are a matter of “this is what scholar said, this is what that scholar said”, and allowing the weight of scholarly opinion, combined with one’s own opinion, to sway you to one side or the other. The source of authority there, then, isn’t what is clear and true, because sometimes that’s just not so easy to see. So the Scribes waffle, because they just don’t know, because none of their research provides a clear leading of what’s right.

Jesus teaching with authority, though, may have been a matter of knowing more than the scribes, and then providing a resolution with a clear leading for the people of God. What was unclear is now made obvious through his teaching. Authority then, is lodged in knowledge and a well reasoned conclusion based on that knowledge.

This, I think, is what the people mean when they said “What is this? A new teaching? And with authority?” Jesus had laid it all out, step by step, in language that was so clear and basic, As Thomas Jefferson once said “so as to command their assent.”

Having received such respect, he then handles a disruption in the worship service, as a man comes forward and starts shouting about Jesus being the son of God, and Jesus calls the spirit out of him.

Now that would be a pretty interesting Sunday morning, wouldn’t it? As the people go off into the restaurants and brunches after church, they talk about what they’ve seen: Wow, this new guy, he preached like he actually knew something, and then he healed crazy old Mr. Smithers!” And the people around them overheard their conversations, maybe asked what had happened, perhaps other posted it on their Facebook statuses, others twittered, and maybe someone was lucky enough to film it with their phones.

How many people would be impressed with the healing, and how many with the authoritative teaching?

I guess what I would say to you is that both are way that Jesus is beginning to introduce himself to the people, to the world he is about to overturn. Some people respond to the flashy healing, some people respond better to a teacher who has such a grasp on the Scriptures and their commentators, and rather than just demonstrate his knowledge by presenting all the varying opinions, he presents what is necessary to provide the clear answer of God.

Between the two, I’d rather have the teacher. It seems a mightier task.

What is the nature of authority? What is it that causes you to respect one preacher, and not another? When a new preacher comes, is it their robes, their voice when they sing, their comfort in the pulpit? I like ones that sing well, can provide good engaging music, can teach me with knowledge tempered by mercy, and loves me, but that’s my opinion. What do you want? What changes over time? Does their authority grow or shrink as you see them preach, organize worship, the hymns they choose, when they sit in a meeting, be around people? Do you give them the benefit of the doubt in the beginning, or do they have to start at zero and grow in your eyes?

At the risk of teaching like one of the scribes, I’m not going to tell you what you should prefer in a teacher or a preacher. You’ll like some, you won’t like others. Jesus was a great teacher, and a healer, and many things besides, and many, many people didn’t like what he did. Many people didn’t accept his authority, and you’d think, being the son of God, he’d be the one everyone would agree on.

But they didn’t, in the end, did they? So, what then is the nature of authority?

I’m not giving a lot of answers today, and I am asking a lot of questions for you to wrestle with on your own. But what I can suggest is that at root, the authority we as Christians should look toward is the Holy Spirit, the aspect of God that lives with us, in, and seeks to connect us with each other. Whatever your authority may be, let it be based in grace, in mercy, in kindness, and in wisdom. This is how the authority of God is exhibited to everyone. Amen.

Fishing With John Wesley's Net

2012-01-24T12:14:00.001-05:00

Mark 1: 14-20
Preached on January 22, 2012, in the Center Moreland Charge

An update of a sermon preached in 2006.

What a wonderful image we have today- Jesus fishing for people, enabling others to do the same. Jesus by the lakeshore, walking in the sand. Jesus crooking his finger and the disciples come running.

Jesus’ metaphor was clever, and it gave his mission very quickly, it is also our mission as a church- we are called to fish for people, which is half of the two interpretations of making disciples for Jesus Christ.

What I would like to do today is to think big picture. It’s January, the time when a lot of pastors think or talk out loud about the direction of their church. January preacheritis. I am going to think about the denomination as a whole- The United Methodist Church. And I want to think about the kind of fishers of people that we are.

Who are we as a denomination?

Are we the church that allows pastors to bar people from becoming members for various reasons? Are we a church that demands that people who join us agree and sign a paper that says they believe certain things about God, Jesus, the Bible and heaven?

Or are we the church that loves everyone, that allows people to freely come and go, as they see fit, because God works in each person’s life, and we are there to shepherd them as they come to us, and expect no support in exchange for the good we do?

Or are we the church that stands as an institution? Are we a bulwark in American society strong enough to be able to say that I am Methodist, I stand for something?

For better or for worse, we are all of these things. We are also a lot more. We are also a lot less.

The truth is, in this time in American History, in World history, it is not easy to say anything about who we are. The terrain has changed. We are not the middle class American, anti-Communist, church any more. As we have grown out of the 1950’s, we have sprouted aspects of what used to be the characteristics of Baptists. We have also grown aspects of what used to be called Episcopalian. As a denomination, we have always bridged that gap, but now it has seeped far deeper into our character.

The world has changed. Church has changed. What makes us unique, as Methodists, now?

I believe that the thing that makes us unique isn’t our style of music. You go to energetic, vital United Methodist churches around the world, and you will hear fantastic organs and chorus of voices that sound as perfect and angelic as anything you’d hear in Westminster Abbey. You’d also hear the sounds of African acapella voices. You’d hear the quiet contemplative singing of acoustic guitar and voices, and the sharp electric guitars and thump of drums. And all of it is beautiful and United Methodist.

Maybe you can tell who Methodists are by the way the clergy dress. Nope, sorry. White albs, black academic robes, suits, dresses, denim shirts and khaki pants, saris.

How about the way the laypeople dress? Nope. Some wear suits, some wear button-down shirts, some wear t-shirts, and some wear football jerseys. And that’s just here. Think of what United Methodists in churches in India, in Nigeria, in Korea would wear. The people in the pews are more varied in their dress than the people behind the pulpit are.

Of course, to say that you are United Methodist is to say that you are Christian. But when you are trying to describe us uniquely as United Methodists, you need more. We have a unique flavor that you should be able to find in every Methodist church, Center Moreland or Dymond Hollow, Seattle, Seoul, or Sudan. Here is what I think that is.

First, we understand that God works in the world not to divide, but to unify. God sent Jesus into the world not to separate the sheep from the goats, but to get God’s people to believe that they are all sheep. We are all worthy of the love of God and the promise of heaven. Jesus came to make the all world understand that we are “we.”

Second, if you believe in God, and seek earnestly after his wisdom in your life and actions, you will go to heaven. No strings attached. Blessed Assurance, indeed!

If these sound obvious to you and perhaps a little disappointing, let me say to you that there are a lot of churches that do not believe one or the other.

Those things being said, here are the things that, I believe, we are not, or shouldn’t be:
The Republican party at prayer.
The Democratic party at prayer
Middle class, white, self centered seekers of our own salvations.
Absolved of any responsibility to take care of our fellow humans in the world.

The stated goal of the United Methodist church is to make Disciples of Jesus Christ. The best thing about that mission statement is that it is pretty universal. It can mean both that we are called to evangelize the world, or that we are called to Christian formation of those who have already been baptized. And I believe that our call is to both.

We are called to do both. God loves the world, and wants the world to live closer to what God means by love. We, as God’s adopted children, are the people to act on God’s behalf.

We are not called to make the whole world Methodist. We are not called to force the whole world to become Christian. We are called to understand Wesley’s phrase “the World is our parish” as a guideline for our own lives in Christ.

When Jesus walked along the beach and called James and Andrew, and went to all of those other places and called all of those other people, he started a chain that has led through John Wesley, Francis Asbury, through our grandmothers and fathers, our teachers, our preachers, our parents, through us, to our children. We are called, as are all other Christians, to serve Christ, and we are called to serve Christ from our unique understanding of how God works in the world. We are called to serve from our Wesleyan understanding.

We are called to fish with John Wesley’s net, as it were.

We are called to lead with grace, with acceptance, and with love. There are no people who are outside our message of the Gospel, our welcome to God’s love, or eligibility for membership in our churches. Or at least there shouldn’t be. Where we have made less than loving choices, we have fallen short of the glory of God. We have switched the bait for the pain of the hook.

We are an international church, who seeks to welcome those of all nations into our churches. And this is the right thing to do. Let us continue to seek God’s grace and guidance to remain this way, and let us seek God’s forgiveness when we have fallen short of his loving intention for the world. And I pray, serving this church in this place, that we do our part to make sure that God’s universal love is known to all who hear of us.

The Claim on This Side

2012-01-21T14:09:00.002-05:00

Mark 1: 4-11

Baptism of the Lord
Preached January 15, 2012, in the Center Moreland Charge

There was a time when I believed that when I was baptized, God would save me from my sins. There was a time when I believed that to be baptized meant that God would reach down into my heart and change me, take away the things about me that caused me to hurt people; that caused me to judge. Being baptized, becoming a Christian, was going to bring me God’s intended partner for my life. Baptism was going to help me lose weight. Baptism would help me get a good job, because I was obviously now one of Christ’s’ own.

So I asked to be dunked in a backyard above-ground pool by a pastor of an independent church in Napa, CA, in 1991.

And almost immediately wondered if I’d made a mistake.

The church that I had joined was in many ways a good group of people. Many of them had a good heart and helped me out greatly in a difficult time in my life.

But they were a church that I quickly found out was on the opposite side of many of the issues of that day from me. And, stubborn as I am, I did not accept the teaching of the leaders as higher than the feelings of my own heart. I knew that the people they told me were going to hell were good people, and I loved them. They embraced the world, embraced creativity, and honed the gifts they had been given, in contrast with the people who I had now thrown my lot in with, many of whom saw the world as dangerous and evil, and any gift given by God was either to be used by God in church or was not really a gift.

So now I was in conflict. I believed in my baptism, but by becoming associated with the baptized, at least these baptized, I was setting myself up in opposition to all whom I’d known before, all that I’d known before. And while it’s true that becoming a Christian in many stories is the story of beginning to reject the evil powers around us and becoming better, in this case I began to feel the reverse was true. My baptism had put me on the wrong side of my heart, and I was beginning to think my baptism had put me on the wrong side of God.

There were quite a few life events immediately after the day of my baptism, and within a few months, I had moved away from Napa and back to Delaware. I was in crisis, wondering if my baptism was valid, and it was in that frame of mind that I followed a friends’ advice and checked out the Methodist Campus ministry at Delaware, where I was soon to resume my studies.

Ahhhh. Here were people who were not afraid of gray. Here were people who lived in the tension of not always knowing immediately what God wanted, and were willing to study, pray and listen until God’s will became clear. And here were people who said to me that even though I was not the kind of Christian of whom had baptized me, my baptism was nonetheless valid, and I was still one of God’s children.

Here was a place for me to grow, explore, and change, a place where the Word could be discussed rather than dictated, and the simple reasonable pleasures of life were not always tests of one’s commitment to God.

It was in that environment that I began to wonder about God’s call on my life, the leading of the divine, and my eventually being encouraged by my peers and the campus minister to explore seminary.

There was a time when I thought baptism was going to change me. And it turned out that I was right. I just was wrong about how, and in what ways. Baptism didn’t help me to lose weight. But it did put me in a situation where I was able to find my life’s partner, and the mother of my son. It did set me on a track toward a vocation of service to God. If you want to say that baptism brought me a wife and a good job, though, that sounds a little incomplete, a little shallow. I would say that baptism has brought me my life. It wasn’t instant, and it wasn’t easy, the journey from there to here has been painful at times as well as joyful, but I do not think my life would have been as rich or as full, or would have taught me as much, had I not been dunked in the above ground pool back in 1991.

Baptism is the one unifying symbol of one’s status as a Christian. Catholics baptize as infants, Baptists baptize as adults; there ware many ways to understand baptism, many way to perform the ritual. But the symbolism is universal, Egyptian Coptic, Guatemalan born-again, Italian Catholic, Alabama Baptist or Pennsylvania Methodist: We are marked as Christ’s own, we are claimed by God and the people around us as a child of God.

It is such an important symbol to the people around us that Jesus even demanded baptism from John for the visible symbol it represented to those around him, and even though John was reluctant, it was done.

What does your baptism mean to you? Are you baptized? If you aren’t please come talk to me after the service if you feel moved, and we can discuss how and when and why. If you are baptized, what does it mean to you? I would encourage you to think about it as more that just your ticket to heaven, your safe passage to what’s next. Baptism is the mark of God’s claim on this life, too. What does that mean for you, to have God’s claim on your life on this side of death?

Where Do You Stand?

2012-01-21T14:01:00.000-05:00

Epiphany Sunday, Year A
Matthew 2: 1-12

Preached January 8, 2012 in the Center Moreland Charge

There was once in Kenya a local priest who was trying to get his parishioners to resist tribal urges, and act for God. He said this in a rally in a park that was organized to protest the appearing election fraud that allowed the majority tribe to maintain its hold over the government: "It is not enough to kneel and pray," he says. "We tell parishioners that whatever they do, they must do something that will affect peace somehow."

It might be difficult for us, here in this area of the world, to understand exactly what is going on in places like this. We have not had tribal warfare in Northeast Pennsylvania ever since the Revolution. Perhaps you might say that the tensions between labor and management were tribal, or the ethnic tensions between Irish and Welsh, between Italians and Irish, between everyone who is already here and Hispanic who are now migrating here, may constitute tribal warfare, but that is perhaps a little bit of creative metaphor. During the American Revolution, it was a mess, with whites fighting Native Americans, settlers from Connecticut fighting Pennamites (ones from Pennsylvania), and American colonists fighting the British. All at the same time. It’s been two hundred years since we’ve had trouble even remotely like what Kenya suffered four years ago, what the Sudan and Ethiopia are suffering from now.

Religion is a part of it, economics are a part of it, but there is also a strong tribal component. Then, as now, I’m sure you could find ministers preaching war and extermination, supporting Sullivan as he marched upriver from Wilkes Barre to exact revenge on the Native Americans who had attacked settlers in the Battle of Wyoming, but I am also sure you could definitely also find ministers and priests saying to those settlers, as Sullivan began his march up the river to New York, burning villages and killing Indians as he went, that "everything you do in these times must affect peace, somehow"?

Desperate times call for specific measures. Sometimes there is no sitting back and watching. God acts for the benefit of the world, and those who stand to lose materially in the kingdom of God, the one that is to come, react in self interested, evil ways. Ruling tribes, wherever they are in power, act much in the way that Herod did all those years ago, when a threat is perceived. And the Christian response is to do more than kneel and pray.

It was magi from the east who came to Jerusalem looking for the King of the Jews. Their reasons were certainly news to the current king, Herod. He was not aware that he was to be replaced. He was not aware that there was any problem. He just knew that he was king, he was serving Rome well, he was getting rich, and though there were occasionally squabbles with the local Jewish population, it wasn’t anything that he and his soldiers couldn’t handle.

The magi probably didn’t know they were stepping into a political mistake. They were theoretical sorts, all full of knowledge about the skies and of prophecy, but not exactly your most astute political operators. It might not have occurred to them that coming to a king and asking where to find the king that has been born would sound to Herod as "hey, we've come to honor your replacement!" They were, I guess, a little clueless, and what they did proved to be a little problematic.

Of course, the one they are coming for was Jesus, the baby, just born. During Advent, we named him as being the son of an unwed mother, living in an occupied territory. But the magi showing up also reminds us that he is one searched for by the wise, wished as dead by kings, saved and protected by God, and led by prophecy. No ordinary disadvantaged child, this one!

The Magi look for the child, find him, honor him, give him their gifts, and then "warned in a dream", leave by another road. They don't show back up at the palace, and when Herod realizes this, his plan to kill the usurper to the throne goes by the wayside. Time to go to plan B, as we talked about last week. He kills every kid in the Bethlehem area who is two years old or less. Not just the male children, but all of them. And so it is done, but Jesus escapes through his father Joseph having a dream telling him to run to Egypt.

See, this is the way it is. Good is all over this world, and those who are threatened by it seek to destroy it. We are the people of God, and it is our responsibility, even in our sinfulness, to stand against those who would destroy others for their own gain. It is in the name of Jesus that we must act to stop the massacres and oppressions of these days. There are people who stand against the powers of the world, and it is our call to stand with them, in the name of the baby who was threatened by a king, and in the names of all the children who died because they were from the wrong town and were the wrong age.

It was not God's will that those children die that day. It is not God's will that anyone dies violently. It is not God’s will that anyone dies. God acts for the good of the world, and evil responds in its own self interest. God knew what Herod was capable of, but Herod's order to kill the children was Herod all by himself. God chooses the poor over the rich. God chooses the oppressed over the privileged. The rich and the privileged respond out of their own self interest in evil ways.

It is our call to stand with the poor and the oppressed. We are the people of God, and it is our call to stand with those who are in harms' way. And the Kenyan pastor is right--it is not enough to kneel and pray. We must stand between power and its victims. Christians have stand between Jewish soldiers and Palestinians, wearing red baseball caps. Christians today stand between armies and the tribes of Darfur. Christians today stand between hunger and the people of Appalachia. Christians today stand between AIDS and the children of Africa. Christians today occupy parks, sleeping in tents, and seek to call American big business to account for their excesses. And American Christians stand between their own need to be powerful, to defend their lifestyles, and the incessant call from Christ to lay aside their privilege and serve the world in his name.

It is not enough to kneel and pray. Whatever we do must affect peace somehow. We must act, and as Christians, it must be in the name of the baby who was born, and in the names of the babies who were killed when evil lashed out in self interest.

Where do you stand?

A World Filled Only With “Us”.

2012-01-01T18:23:00.000-05:00

Matthew 2: 10-18

I’m sharing with you all today a scripture that gets passed over a lot. It only is mentioned in Matthew, and is what causes Jesus to fulfill another scripture, and to conform to an archetype that the Bible uses a lot, that what happens that is the most important for the people of God often begins by leaving Egypt.

I have taken it out of story order to be able to talk about it this Sunday, the first day of the year, the first Sunday of the year. The lectionary would have us talk about something else, and the traditional Sunday for the wise men is the feast of the Epiphany, which falls next Sunday. After that is the Baptism of the Lord, and I don’t want to skip those, so we talk about this scripture today.

The traditional title for this text is “the Slaughter of the Innocents.” It is a particularly disturbing scripture, up there with Jephthah’s daughter in terms of senselessness, and it may well be another one of those texts that make you say “that doesn’t beoming in there”. But there it is, and old old minds made sure the story was told, so it’s up to us to pay attention.

This occurrence, sad to say, is certainly of a piece with the rights of rulers at that time, and there are even times today when we hear of similar things, such as Saddam Hussein unleashing poison gas on a whole Kurdish village during his reign. Perhaps that is one of the things that we can be thankful for, as Americans: no matter what you may think or feel, no matter what your chosen media outlet may lead you to believe, eliminating an opponent by killing all of their children is not within the scope or capabilities of either Republican or Democrat.

But it was within the religious and governmental rights of Herod. The wise men, the Magi, the astrologers, whatever, they had told him that a king had been born in Bethlehem, and it had been foretold in the stars. Herod was, I would expect, not a biblical scholar, so he was not aware of the prophecies of the coming messiah in the Hebrew scriptures other than what he was told, and to those who are of an undiscerning mind, astrology is the same as prophecy is the same as history, and all of it can be truth.

As is typical of the rulers of that day, and to a certain extent of our own, they are jealous of their reign, and hypervigilant in watching for rivals. It is a ruler for life, and to be able to pick one’s own successor is an expression of the continuing power they can wield. To be visited by foreigners, intelligent foreigners, probably smarter than you, and told that a king has been born in your region, and for it not to be your son? Can you see how threatening that would be to Herod? Back in verse three, it says Herod is frightened, and in verse eight, it says he sends them to Bethlehem, and tells them to report back to him where they found the new baby king.

To be clear, they don’t. Perhaps more lives would have been saved if they had, because when Herod realizes they have gone home by another road, he chooses to send soldiers to kill, as the Scripture says, every child under two years old in and around bethlehem. The Bible does not say every male child, but every child.

And his doing so was his right. There was no concept of human rights, there was no worldwide court for human rights. In part the religion of his region allows him to make such decisions, and there is no law against what he did.

Religion, in the form of a patchwork of astrology, prophecy, and something akin to what later cultures will call the “divine right of kings” is what gives him the right to issue that order.

Religion can make us do funny things. It can give us guidelines for how to think and act about difficult ideas, it can give us guidelines for how to live. But it can also get in the way of being a decent human being. Ironically, religion and faith can get in the way of being a good person.

I read a quote this week that expresses this perfectly. It’s attributed to Karen Armstrong, who is an author and a religious scholar. Here is what she says:

“If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology.” ― Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (pv)

What does religion bring you to do? Does your personal faith in God impel you to love God’s people, or are there people you exclude from that? Does a relationship with Jesus Christ lead you to help the poor and weak, feed the hungry, and share what you have, or is being a Christian a way of knowing who is in and who is out? Is being saved a matter of knowing who to vote for?

As we start this new year, I would ask that you review the assumptions you have made about your faith. Has your relationship with Christ made you kinder, gentler, more respectful, more caring? Has it made you more active? Has it caused you to express sympathy with people that others mock? Has it made you more aware of the plight of so many people in this world?

That is what faith in Jesus is supposed to do. Help us, drive us, open our eyes, to the needs of the world. It is not meant to separate us from a scary world, a world filled with “them”, but to engage us in a sad and needy world, a world filled only with “us”.

Faith calls us to love the whole world, no exceptions; to be the light of God, to be the evidence of Christ, with strength given by the Holy Spirit.

Happy new year, and God’s blessings for you in 2012!

Joseph Finch

2011-12-18T15:21:00.000-05:00

Matthew 1: 18-25

You know, he didn’t have to.

From everything we have in the Bible, and little enough it is, Joseph didn’t have to stick around. Until he was visited by the angel, Joseph was going to do what any man of that time would do, when presented with the fact that the woman he was engaged to be married to, a marriage that was probably arranged, or at least strongly approved of my both families, was pregnant. He was even expecting to do it in a very tasteful way, not by dragging her into the square and condemning her publicly. He was just going to quietly “dismiss” her.

Then an angel shows up. Well, not in the way that an angel shows up for Mary, but for Joseph, the angel shows up in a dream. “Don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, the angel says, because she’s been given this special job, the baby is no ordinary baby, but she’s going to need support.

Remember, we talk about how Mary was a teenager.

In those days, life was different; people grew up faster, and lived a lot shorter than we do now. Teenager in the sense we understand it now was a lot different than then. When you turned twelve or thirteen back then, you weren’t just considered an adult as a rite of passage, you really were an adult. You’d only live till your forties or fifties anyway. But thirteen is still thirteen, whether society understands adolescence ending at thirteen, or whether it ends at thirty, which it seems to do these days.

When you combine that with the much reduced role women had in society compared with our day, the reality of that, then as now, is that Mary was going to need help, protection, care, and everything else as a new mother. I am not sure where we get the idea the Joseph was significantly older than she was, and frankly, I don’t think it matters. Mary was about to have a baby before she was married. To do it as a single mom would have been impossible in that society,

Plus there’s the thing that is needed, so much so that both Luke and Matthew make it a priority to name-the baby, the son of God, God with us, has to come out of the line of David. Matthew spends almost all of chapter 1 covering the genealogy of Joseph, and Luke makes sure we know that Joseph’s proper census place isn’t Nazareth, where he lives, but Bethlehem, which is the ancient seat of his family, the family of David.

Joseph accepts the angel’s authority, and does not dismiss Mary, but stays with her to give the baby safety, support, and most importantly for the gospel writers, his name.

When we think about manhood these days, there are a lot of images that pull at us. There’s the old John Wayne image, where the man acts on behalf of a code, and moves about untethered by attachments to community, romance or duty. He has his own code, and his sense of right and wrong are often simple and starkly defined.

We have about us as well the image of a man as the supreme shark, and the mark of a man’s virility is how much money he can make or how successful he is on a field, pitch, court or course, how ruthless he can be in pursuit of his goals, and his leadership is the kind of leadership that keeps score. When he wins, you lose, and that’s the way it is supposed to be.

Joseph, holds up for us another style of manhood, one that we don’t see often, but in comparison I often compare to the character of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Here is a man who is a leader in the community, and is known for his wisdom and his gentleness, his attention to duty and his competency, as well as his ability to stand for what is right and wrong.

We don’t know about Joseph other than these two short passages in the beginning of only two gospels. There is no birth story in John, or in Mark. Joseph doesn’t appear again after Jesus going missing when he’s twelve, the story of them finding him listening and talking in temple. Joseph is not present at the crucifixion, as Mary is. It seems Joseph’s importance was primarily to be Jesus’ protector, which includes taking him to Egypt when Herod commands that all boy babies in Galilee under the age of two be killed.

That and to make sure that Jesus is adopted into the line of David.

Here’s to all the men who do the right thing, like Joseph. Who listen to the angels and to God, and sometimes do what isn’t expected, but act in the name of love and devotion. Who, in an age where God is foreign to so many, recognize that the approval of society is sometimes not the best way to go, especially when God calls on you to do something else.

Pink Candle

2011-12-11T07:49:00.000-05:00

Luke 1: 47-55

Some advent candle sets are just four purple candles. Some, in an effort to separate Advent from its sister season, Lent, have changed to blue candles and paraments. But most traditional Advent wreaths have three purple candles, and one pink one. The pink one is lit on the Third Sunday, and it is there so that, in the rush to get to Christmas, we stop even for a minute and remember the one who gave birth to Jesus.

This Sunday is the Sunday of Mary. Mary, the Mother of Jesus. Mary the unwed, minority teenage mother, the one who said yes, knowing what it would do to her standing in the community. In the short term.

Mary didn’t have to do what she did. When Gabriel visits her, he doesn’t say “and now you will be impregnated by God”, and boom, it happened; No. We serve a God who asks first, even though God doesn’t have to. God has the power to do what God wants, and even has the power to make us like it, but that’s not how God works. God asks. God wants us to choose service, not be made into slaves. Adam and Eve were created to be a companion to God, not a toy, and God has been acting as if it will come true ever since. God has faith in us, and in Mary, his faith is justified. She says “Here am I, Lord.”

In the Protestant Bible, there is a gap of about 400 years between the last prophet, Malachi, and the beginning of the Gospel story. Other Bibles are a little different, but not much. I don’t know whether God had gone completely silent (which I doubt), the voices and writings of the prophets of those middle years are lost, or were somehow deemed to be not worthy of being made into scripture.

But something changed. The last voices we hear are of Nehemiah, and all of the prophets, which all seem to have come about roughly the same time, and around the building and completion of the Temple and the city walls of Jerusalem. To the people of God then, perhaps the last act of God was the restoration of the Temple, and the temple cult. Indeed, for any story teller, that would indeed be a great and happy ending to the story.

But human life is not tie-able into neat bows, is it? The end of the story is not the end of human existence. Even in the texts we have, the people are already showing signs of faltering, falling short of the promises they made to Ezra at the rededication of the Temple, the public reading of the Scriptures of God.

As the story ends, Jerusalem is re-inhabited by the people of God, under the care and watchful eye of the Persian Empire.

But yet, 400 years later, when the Gospels open, Jerusalem and the Temple are now subject to the rule of the Roman Empire, not the Persian. Persian officials seeking the re-flowering of the Jewish culture under caring and interested Jews like Ezra and Nehemiah, and called to account by various prophets, are replaced by soldiers and tax collectors. That story of history is far too long to be covered here, but what was once thriving and focused on God is now, 400 years later, silent and occupied (and not in a good way!).

This is the climate that first hears a voice crying in the wilderness, which is as much a spiritual wilderness as it is John living and baptizing out in the boondocks.

When God acts, in God’s time, God does so in God’s own way. God does not act to take his land back from the Romans, land is not God’s concern. God acts to call God’s people back.

And who does God use to begin that calling? A crazy hermit in the desert and an unwed, minority teenage mother. If these two kinds of people were who God used to call us back, I’m afraid of how many of us would fail to hear that call.

Michael Slaughter, who is pastor of a very successful congregation in Ohio, wrote this week that God chose an adolescent girl to give birth to the Message of Love because she had a proactive faith. Mary said yes, when she didn’t have to. I think what he means is that she was open to whatever it was that God would have planned, and to God’s purpose.

I could ask here what you think God’s purpose is for your life, but I think that would be a mistake. We all know God’s purpose for our lives. Whatever our choices, whatever our situations, whatever our responsibilities, it is simply stated, and often over-thought. We lose the forest for the trees. God’s purpose for our lives is to show and teach and live the love of God in the world. To give birth to it every day, in a sense. To say yes to God, to carry the love of God, to give birth to God, to give the love of God to the world.

That is the call on our lives. It’s that simple. To do what Mary did. To say yes to God, and to care for the love of God within us, nurturing it, feeding it, protecting it, until it bursts forth into the world, and it is our responsibility, like a good parent, to let it go freely into the world. And to do it again. And again.

This is why we have a pink candle in our advent wreath. To remind us of the unwed, minority teenage mother who gave birth to the Love of God, and raised that Love to be given freely to the world.

And to remind us that we can, too.

The Lament of the Weary and the Wounded

2011-12-04T08:02:00.000-05:00

Mark 1: 1-8

Consider me in the lineage of Ebenezer Scrooge. He is my spiritual brother, my role model, my Polaris. He signifies every thing I feel at the beginning of Advent. Christmas is a season of unmitigated consumerism, egged on by the vast multinational corporations that seem to rule our lives. Even the ones I like, such as Barnes and Noble and Starbucks, have special items and events that they wait for Christmas to release on the public-a full third of the Barnes and Noble store up at the Arana Hub has been given over to games and puzzles, and the Christianity and Spirituality sections have been folded into the self help and “relationships”.

Bah Humbug.

And the church? Humph. Everyone wants to talk about the coming of Christ, and that Advent is the time of waiting and Expectation. Waiting for what? For the son of God, they say. Well, I’m kinda sure that he was born about 2011 years ago. What are we waiting for? It’s a metaphor that just isn’t working for me at all. I’m not waiting. I just don’t have the time to wait. Waiting for something that has already come? Foolishness.

Heaven help me.

Then there are those people who insist of keeping Christ in Christmas. Somehow, the month of December is to be completely reserved for those who claim Christ as their lord and savior, as if the rest of the world has no right to celebrate their own traditions. Or, maybe they can, but just not here in America, thank you very much. In America, no matter what the Constitution says, you really shouldn’t acknowledge that you might not celebrate Christmas, and the neighborly thing to say when you really don’t know someone, Happy Holidays, is somehow offensive to people who seem to be properly insulted by the creeping consumerism we all live with. Right intent, wrong action. Right ammo, wrong deer.

For many of us, this time of year is not a time of gladness, and it is not a time of joyful tidings. It brings up old pains, and fresh wounds, just now beginning to scab over, feel like they get opened afresh, just a little bit. We remember people we love who aren’t with us, for whatever reason; they live too far away from us to see often, and regular contact has fallen off. Some people are separated by some of fight or resentment, and they may live close to each other, but haven’t talked to each other for years. Some miss loved ones who have died, whether it be recently or years ago.

This poem, by Ann Weems, sums it up well:
In the godforsaken, obscene quicksand of life,
there is a deafening alleluia
rising from the souls of those who weep,
and of those who weep with those who weep.
If you watch, you will see
the hand of God
putting the stars back in their skies
one by one
Yesterday’s Pain
Some of us walk in Advent
tethered to our unresolved yesterdays
the pain still stabbing
the hurt still throbbing.
It’s not that we don’t know better;
it’s just that we can’t stand up anymore by ourselves.
On the way of Bethlehem, will you give us a hand?
--Ann Weems

Will you give us a hand? Lord, Who is our creator, will you send your love to us, so that we may feel you with us? Help us to climb out of this mire of rampant consumerism? Of lines at the Walmart that form at 9:00 on Thanksgiving night? Of people pepper spraying others to eliminate them from competition for the perfect toy? Of stores playing Christmas music the day after Halloween?

Will You give us a hand? Lord, who is our sustainer by the Holy Spirit, would you send your love to us, so that we might be able to love our neighbor? That we might find it in our hearts to wish all of those around us well, even those who do not believe as we do? Help us Lord, to be more secure in your love, so that we are not threatened by the beliefs of others, and that we might be people of good will to all, whether they celebrate Hanukah or Ashura?

Will you give us a hand? Lord, who is our redeemer in the person of Jesus Christ, will you send your love to us, so that we might be able to relieve the pain this season gives us? That we might be able to concentrate on the joy that the memories of those we love give us, and not focus so much on the pain of their departure, or separation from us?

Will you give us a hand? Lord, who is our Lord, will you send your love to us?

Will you send your love to us?

Oh.

You already have. Two Thousand and eleven years ago. And the sending of your love is what we celebrate every year at this time.

God sent us God’s love in Jesus Christ. Through Christ, as an adult, and even in the circumstances of his birth, God showed his love for all people. From every other baby who ever was laid in a stinky, flea ridden, cold manger because their parents couldn’t afford decent lodgings, all the way up to babies with silver spoons.

God loved us so much that god sent his son. God did send a hand.
God did send God’s love.

Lord, help us find it again. Lord, help me find it again.

Amen.

Oh, Yeah, That IS What He Said...

2011-11-29T10:59:00.000-05:00

Preached in the Center Moreland Charge on Nov. 20, 2011

Matthew 25: 31-46

This morning’s gospel reading may seem familiar to some of us. But it may also be new to some of us.

This scripture is traditionally read on this Sunday, the last Sunday of the liturgical year, the Sunday before the first Sunday of Advent. It is the last teaching he gives to the people, to his disciples. Matthew’s version has it happening two days before the Passover, and the authorities have started plotting, He goes to Bethany, and is anointed by “a woman”, who is unnamed in Mathew’s version. He calls it his anointing for burial. Judas makes his agreement. The Passover with his disciples occurs, within which he institutes the Lord’s Supper. He goes to the garden of Gethsemane, and then is arrested.

These words today are, in Matthew, the last things he teaches to his people. And what does he teach? God’s judgment is coming, and you won’t know what you’re going to be judged by. The righteous won’t make it, and the rich will have plenty of problems, no matter how much they donate to the faith.

You won’t know, because you judge on the wrong things. Your synagogue attendance doesn’t matter. The volume of your prayers is irrelevant. How loud you wail at a funeral isn’t going to change the balance.

Instead, you will be judged on your generosity, rich or poor, and not just your material generosity. You will be judged on your generosity of heart. Your patience with people, your conduct when you disagree with someone, whether you stay engaged and mature of huff off when you don’t get your way.

What he is saying, as his last statement is this: if you want to know about my Kingdom, the one that is coming, listen to how the path to salvation is to be structured; by helping, be assisting; by serving. You’ll never know when you might run across someone who will actually be Jesus, so you must treat everyone like Jesus. Everyone.

And here is the irony, or the design: if you treat everyone like Jesus, then everyone will see Jesus in your actions.

Your way to the Lord has been mapped out- it is not in power accrued, but in power given away. Not in accumulation, but in generosity.

According to Toys R Us, it was Christmas A week before Thanksgiving. Joe and I went into the store up on Kidder Street this week to buy a birthday present for his cousin, my nephew. And the music we walked in on was that song by John Lennon and Yoko Ono called War is Over, which is a song you ONLY hear at Christmas.

So, since it is Christmas, let me remind you about the story by Charles Dickens. The point of the story, the visits of all the ghosts, and Scrooge’s change of heart on Christmas morning is to move him to a greater heart, a more generous spirit. The Grinch learns the same lesson.

It’s an enlightenment that these characters achieve, a realization, an a-ha moment. In Ephesians, Paul writes about an enlightenment of the eyes of the heart. With an enlightened heart, we understand that the riches are in the inheritance we have received, to become one of the saints of God. That inheritance gives us the hope that God wishes on us all, the awareness of God’s power. Scrooge and the Grinch, it might be said, both become enlightened when they realize that true power lies not in money and the keeping and hoarding of it, not (in the Grinch’s case) the baubles, the trees, the tinsel, and the roast beast, but instead in the generosity and the spirit. The kids playing in the street in front of Scrooge’s house, the Whos in Whoville standing around the last tree, the one in the square, singing.

There’s a power in having the enlightenment of knowing your place in this world, your inheritance as one of God’s children, the hope that comes from knowing you are a child of God. You are not so important that you must solve all the problems of society- your money will only go so far, your physical energy will only keep you working for so many hours, and then you need rest. Then you need to recharge. Then you need to move over and let someone else work. We are just not important in that way. We are not indispensable.

But neither are we irrelevant.

T many of the people of Jerusalem, This is the last public thing that Jesus says. The next time they see him in public, two or three days later, he is being beaten and being prepared for crucifixion. Maybe a privileged few would see him on trial, but all he says there is that “from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

When most people see him again, they are screaming for his blood.

They are shouting for his death because of his preaching the kingdom of God, and threatening the powers of earth. For teaching love and generosity. In Matthew, Jesus’ last words to them are that they will be judged by God for their spirit and their generosity.

Do you think they might have had the words “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me…” ringing in their ears as they call out of his crucifixion?

May those words ring in your ears this week, and this season of Christmas. And may you heed them better than the first people who heard it.

Daydreaming

2011-11-13T21:20:00.000-05:00

Matthew 25: 14-30

Speaking literally, a talent is 15 years’ worth of a laborers’ daily wage, according to several sources. So, let’s begin with a little math. Imagine your current monthly income from work, or your monthly social Security check. Lert’s choose a nice round number: $2500 a month. Multiply that by 12, giving you your year’s income: that’s $30,000, and then multiply that by 15. $450,000. That’s one talent.

It’s a pretty big chunk of money, no matter what you start with.

This is the amount of money that the third servant starts with. The second servant starts with twice that amount, or $900,000, and the first servant starts with five times that amount, or $2,250,000. Jesus is making a point here, in his way of telling parables that get your attention: his hearers would be blown away with the amounts of money he’s using, and what’s really interesting, is that the audience is thinking that the third guy is the prudent one.

Think about it-if you were given fifteen times your yearly income in one check, what would you do with it?

Pay bills, right? Maybe buy a treat or two for the ones you love? Get a decent piece of land and build a house? Buy a new car, or pay for your kids or grandkids to go to college, if they’re so inclined? And of course, invest most of it.

Problem is, at the end of the parable, this money isn’t given to the servants to be used for their own needs. Apparently this huge amount was given to them so that they would be useful with it.

What is true about all of that is that you would be taking that money and exposing it to some sort of risk, wouldn’t you?

Which is why it is so fantastic that the first and second servants both double the amount of money they are given. Imagine thirty times your yearly wage. That’s how much they give back. But that involved quite a bit of risk, and as they are returning the money they were given, the implication is that they were not to keep it.

So, that being true, this is why the third servant may have been seen as the prudent one. He did not submit that money to any risk at all, and returned it whole to the master.

Shockingly, however, he’s the one who failed.

Speaking literally, then, Jesus is saying that the talents we are given are not to be kept safe, but to be used for the glory of the kingdom.

Now, we all have talents. I know that there are some of you who say that you really don’t have anything to give to the kingdom, you just want to live your simple life, keep things uncomplicated, come to church, go to work, see family and friends, volunteer, and not get involved in the pain of the world.

Speaking metaphorically, however, Jesus tells this story in order that we might now just how highly the Kingdom of God values our talents. Not the money we make, not just that. But God sees what he has given us as talents, gifts, and graces, the things we do well, as equal to the wealth of fifteen years of wages in one check.

And in the story, the one guy who plays it safe with his talents is the one who is punished.

So, frankly, the lesson is this; not giving of yourself to the church and the world is a punishable offense. Gently put, it is a sin.

This is what Jesus is teaching. We are put onto this earth to risk. We are put onto this earth to find out what we do well, to nurture it so we can then do it better, then put it in service to the world. Staying home with our talents is how we find out what weeping and gnashing of teeth means.

Sometimes we don’t even know what it is that we are good at. We’ve spent lives of comfort and fear, not venturing out of our comfortable houses, relationships, things we’ve always known, people we’ve always known. Perhaps for some of us the last risk we took was the person we married. Perhaps the last risk we took was the house we bought.

As the people of God, we are called to risk more. We are called to risk everything. We are called to be, as Martin Luther called us, little Christs.

Thomas Merton said that often, what the desire of our hearts is, the thing that we idly daydream about when we think of serving God, when we think about the world’s needs, that thing we see ourselves doing is what we are really called to do. God has placed his call on our hearts before we have even begun to think of it.

What is that idle daydream for you?

Go and invest your talents, as God has sent you to do.

The Undiscovered Country

2011-11-07T13:48:00.000-05:00

1 John 3: 1-3

It has been a struggle to formulate this message, this week. An All Saints’ sermon is never easy, because so much of what we want to talk about is unknown. Most weeks, we can talk about a parable, or a story from the Hebrew testament, and it’s often true that what happened to them in the story is relatable to us in our time and place. But how do we relate our lives to death and loss? We are, some of us, able to reach into feelings of loss, but none of us truly know what death feels like. It is unrelatable. It is, to quote Shakespeare by way of Star Trek, “The Undiscovered Country”.

I have to think that the author of 1 John does not know what death feels like, either, and what happens after we die, not from a first hand account. His or her writings might be inspired, but they are still suppositions, they are still approximations, they are still guesses. They are honest about that, too. “What we will be has not yet been revealed.”

But I’d like to think they are good guesses. They are based solidly in the faith they were building about 60 years after Jesus’ death, and our belief now, 2000 years later, are informed and built on what they wrote.

I want to believe what they wrote because what they say is that after we die, we become like Jesus. A lifetime of seeking after Jesus’ image, a lifetime of imitating Christ, becomes fulfilled in death. “We will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”

For those of us who have suffered the loss of a loved one in death, this is comforting, because this means that the people we have lost have gone on to greater things-they have indeed finished the race.

I have a friend who just ran a marathon two weeks ago, and it brought back to me the goals of running, which I am trying to get back to myself. Those people who run marathons, the vast majority of them anyway, find that the challenge of the marathon is not to come in first, but to finish. They also hope to finish well, in form, and with a decent personal time. It is a personal challenge, a test of strength and discipline, but it is hardly ever a race in which the goal is to finish faster than everyone else.

A life disciplined in God, is the same-we want to be able to run well, we do not need to be the best. We do not need to run perfectly. We can see perfection, we know the goal, but we forgive ourselves for not reaching that goal, and push on doing the best we can. We just want to finish.
We all can remember aspects of our loved ones that approximated Jesus while they lived: caring, kindness, hospitality, self-sacrifice, courage, bravery, wisdom, strength. These aspects of Christ are the ways they ran the race of life with good form. We have our own aspects of Jesus, too. They are harder to see sometimes, because we are still running the race. We are still living.

1 John tells us that in death, our loved ones have become like Christ because they are able to see Christ. Whatever else heaven may be, cherubs playing harps on clouds, or some sort of pearly gate with a lectern out front, or whatever, heaven is the place where we see Jesus clearly. We see God “not through a glass darkly”, but clearly. And the aspects of those people that we miss that resembled Jesus now are highlighted, and the rest have grown. They have become even better images of themselves than they were here. Their beauty is magnified. The pain they felt on earth is taken from them, and though they may still carry scars, though Jesus may still carry his scars, their internal beauty, their physical beauty has become perfect in God’s love.

Once a year, we take the time to remember and recognize as a congregation the ones among us who have died during the past year. We also take the time to remember all of those people who have died in past year in our lives, and we naturally wonder where they are now, what it looks like, what they’re doing. We wonder if they are, now. We don’t know. But our faith tells us that they are in God, and with Christ. That, in the end, has to be enough. We have that hope, and as the author of 1 John says, all who have this hope purify themselves, just as Jesus is pure. Our hope of being with God after death purifies us, and in living life in that hope, we become more like Christ while living.

We begin to wear the clothes and sing the songs of that undiscovered country, even though we’ve never seen it. And this makes us more like Christ.

May we always seek the things of that undiscovered country.

Yeah, But...

2011-11-03T14:15:00.000-04:00

Matthew 22:34-46

Preached Sunday, October 23, 2011 in Center Moreland and Dymond Hollow United Methodist Churches

Sometimes I distrust the lectionary designers. I will grant that it must be quite a task to be able to fit four gospels, all of the epistles and the rest of the new testament, the Psalms, and about 60% of the Old testament into three years worth of Sundays, say about 156 Sundays, and have some set aside for 3 Christmases, 3 Advent seasons, 3 Lenten seasons, and 3 Easters. Frankly, they have done an excellent job of providing access to the breadth and depth of the Biblical witness, but…

Some Sundays I do wonder what they were thinking. Like this Sunday-what do these two stories possibly have in common? They seem like two completely different ideas, and somehow Matthew or the later editors have decided that they need to be put next to each other. Perhaps it would be better to just preach one of them.

And then I started reading the commentaries, and realized that there was a reason; there was an idea.

The first chunk is verses 34-40, and what has happened just before is that Jesus has answered the Sadducees’ questions so succinctly and cleverly that they are now silent. So, here come the Pharisees, looking both the get at Jesus, and show up their theological rivals. The representative guy asks Jesus which commandment is the greatest. He might be thinking about the Decalogue, the first ten laws that Moses brought down from the mountain, what we know as the Ten Commandments, or they may be asking him which of the 613 laws that are listed in Leviticus and Deuteronomy are the most important.

Jesus’ response doesn’t actually even come from the Ten Commandments, or the 613 laws; he answers them from the central prayer of belief for their culture, time and place, the one that Pharisees, Sadducees, Jesus and his followers, John the Baptist and his followers, and everybody up to Herod himself agrees to; The first and strongest thing we believe is that you shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Then he adds to it, And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

He has answered the question, and has even used the texts, Deuteronomy and Leviticus, that the Pharisees would have expected. But he has not chosen his favorite-he has summarized the whole law in a way that reminds them that they have perhaps missed the boat on the laws.

Next, he has a question for them. It’s a funny little puzzle, but gets to the point of the issue that both the Pharisees and the Sadducees have with this guy.
“Whose son is the messiah?” that’s easy for these guys. It’s like asking a Christian what the name of the Book is that we read from every week. They probably even hesitate a minute, thinking it is some sort of trick question. But here is only one right answer, that the messiah comes out of the line of one of their most heroic Kings, David.

“so,” he says, “in Psalm 110, which we all believe were written by King David” ( which he doesn’t say, but everybody listening knows), “ how come it says that our Lord God says to the Lord, the Messiah, come sit at my right hand? Why is the author of the Psalm calling one of his descendants, a great grand child maybe, his Lord. Why does he subordinate himself?

Now, Jesus could be making several points here, but what I think might be happening is that the Pharisees and Sadducees are feeling a little high and mighty in their time and place, and Jesus has reminded them that the guy they all say is coming is going to be a guy with the lineage they want, but even David acknowledges that the messiah will be greater than he. It must be that he is seeing these religious leaders looking to themselves for their spiritual leadership, to their interpretations of Scripture, to their own ideas as normative for their culture.

And Jesus is telling them, hard on the heels of synthesizing the whole of the law and the prophets through the prism of God’s love, that the messiah will be the best of them all, and will unify them in a way that their beliefs cannot maintain their divisions against.

He doesn’t explicitly claim that he is that Messiah. He doesn’t have to. This is Jerusalem during Passover week, it’s already in the air, these leaders are already aware, and they also know that he’s a Bethlehem boy, born in David’s line.

What is the lesson here for us? We Methodists who sit here on Sunday mornings, instead of down at the Baptists, or back in the woods in someone's barn, at some other church, find something in what we find here to keep us coming. But does that something get in the waqy of seeing God as for us all? Does that something block us from being able to see Jesus for Jesus’ sake, and everything else a matter of taste and style?

It’s a matter of cutting through the “yeah, buts.” I do not believe that Jesus saves us for all time merely by us being baptized once, and we can do no wrong after that. I don’t believe that salvation for God’s people lies in membership in the right group, having said the right words. But I can acknowledge that when the perspective is proper, these are both ways of discussion how we respond to God’s love, which is the point of church, I think. And we all respond to love in different ways, don’t we?

So, what are the “Yeah, buts” that keep you from truly, clearly, and simply saying that prayer from Deuteronomy? I will love the Lord with all my heart soul mind and strength? And what about the prayer from Leviticus: I will love my neighbor as myself?” As one commentator says, “Jesus is a faithful Jew, yet he bursts the bonds of custom that limited God’s concern to faithful Jews.” “Those who Love God must love all God’s creatures, even at great cost to themselves and their own privileges.”

What privileges, either earthly or spiritually, do you hold more dear than the love of God? These are your stumbling blocks. These are your “yeah, buts”.

May you learn some day to get rid of them all, and simply be in the love of God for all of the world.

Don't Be "That Guy"

2011-10-10T14:29:00.000-04:00

Matthew 22: 1-14

A few years ago, I was invited to a wedding, two of my friends from the undergraduate Wesley Foundation I was a member of were getting married, and I had flown all the way back to DE from Texas to attend. But I had packed badly. I had forgotten a tie, and an undershirt, and the dress shirt I had at that time depended on an undershirt to not be rather see-thru. I had had a wonderful time with the group the night before, a regular mini-reunion, but when it came time for the wedding, I found myself ill-prepared for such an event. Because I couldn’t wear the dress shirt by itself, and there was no store near to the hotel to grab such items last minute, I ended up wearing a red plaid button-down shirt with an open collar.

I felt really self-conscious the whole time, especially around all the men who were wearing high class suits and women who were dressed to the nines. I would try to explain myself to everyone I met, because I felt so out of place. Yes, I was one of “those” guys. I’m sure I had sweat rings under my arms, my hair was too long and not brushed, and I had food in my teeth, and yet I spoke too loudly and laughed too loudly. If I didn’t literally do all that, that’s how out of place I felt. I did not have the proper wedding attire on, and I am thankful to this day that they did not cast me into the outer darkness of a hotel parking lot in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

There was a time in which God’s call to the world was heard in very separated ways. The Israelites were called to be God’s people, over and against the tribes that surrounded them. When Israel fell, first the north to the Assyrians and then the south to the Babylonians, it was seen as divine punishment for untold generations’ failure to follow the laws that God had send down on Sinai by Moses. And yet God kept relationship with them in their exile, and eventually Persia conquered both Assyria and Babylonia, and sent Israel back home.

So Israel tried to put things back together, and to be God’s people again in the land that God had given them. But it didn’t work, and God’s laws again became misused-over thought out, this time, which perhaps was understandable; perhaps in a response against making the same mistakes twice, disappointing god again. The laws soon had laws and they had laws, and once again, the people of God lost the thread.

So God sent Jesus, to give the laws flesh and blood. And the invitation to be in relationship with God was made to all, not just to those who had the law.

This is the meaning of the metaphor. That those who are so richly invited will sometimes take it for granted, and sometimes, even when everyone is invited, there are still going to be a few who don’t get it. They will do nothing with it, and it’s like they are dressed inappropriately for the poshest of wedding banquets.

There are dangers when you send out an invitation to everyone. You never know who you’re going to get. This last week, during the new documentary about prohibition by Ken Burns on PBS, they make mention of the fact that the hours after President Andrew Jackson was inaugurated in 1833, there were so many drunk people in the White House messing up the place (access was a lot freer then) that they booted everyone out of the house and onto the lawn, “so the furniture wouldn’t get messed up”.

But the invitation to relationship with God is addressed to all. The invitation is sent far and wide, both to people who know what to do with it, and those who don’t.

The thing is, we are invitees to the banquet. We are not the bouncers. We are not the doormen who run, as they say in the club scene, “the velvet rope”. We are just invited to come and be at the party, and to celebrate.

Think about a relationship with God. What would you want? How would you want to conduct that relationship? What would you do to be the best at it you could be? In other words, how would you dress?

Hopefully not in a red plaid shirt when everyone else is wearing suits.

God does not want our rules, our style, our politics, our opinions. God is not a Republican or a Democrat. God is somewhere both in the Occupy Wall Street folks and in the Tea Party.

God wants us to know God.
To pray.
To learn about God by reading the Bible and talking about it with others.
To be in a community.

Each time we seek God in fellowship, or prayer, or in mission and charity, we are learning about how to treat the rest of God’s people, and it is then that we are putting on the proper wedding clothes. The guy who didn’t wear the right clothes, didn’t pack his suitcase properly, even knowing he was going to a wedding for people he loved, in the posh part of town? He’s the guy who says he’s a believer in God, but doesn’t do anything about it, doesn’t work on it, doesn’t try to grow and learn. He’s “that guy.”
I invite you to not be “that guy.” Work on your relationship with God. Identify for yourself what your prayers, presents, gifts, service and witness are and do them to the best of your ability. Read your Bible and find ways to talk about what you read.

Put on the wedding clothes, so that you may enjoy the party without being self-conscious!

Relationship Advice

2011-10-02T07:41:00.000-04:00

Exodus 20:1-20

Most preachers, me included, come to the weeks that the Ten Commandments appear in the lectionary, that guided journey through Scripture, and groan. What new can we possibly say about this, what new angle could we possibly find to teach this? After all, not every part of the Bible has its own movie, right?

So, here’s the background: Moses and the nation of Israel has left the Promised land behind, and has entered the desert. After about three months, they come to Mount Sinai, and Moses goes up onto the mountain of Sinai, and God speaks to him, saying “go back down, tell everyone to wash up, and consecrate themselves. I will come then, when everyone is ready.” So Moses does, and on that third day,. When they look up, they see the top of the mountain obscured by clouds and lightning, and they hear the loud blast of a trumpet. Then, with the whole nation wearing their Sunday best and focused on God, they “make their stand” at the foot of the mountain. Moses goes up, and he’s told to go back down and tell Israel to stay off the mountain (which means, I guess, that some folks had started trying to steak up the mountain themselves). So Moses does, and when he goes back up the Mountain, he is ordered to take Aaron with him, and that is where the scripture I read this morning starts.

What I read is the first twenty verses of Chapter 20. These are called the Ten Commandments, but they are really the first of many laws that God gives to Moses, all the way out to Chapter 31, and it is in Chapter 24 that we hear the idea of stone tablets. It is while Moses is up receiving these laws that the people get restless, and ask Aaron, (who went down the mountain at some point) to create for them the Golden Calf.

So, there’s your context, that’s how the laws come to the people. But what we concentrate on, for better or for worse, are the first ten laws set down by God. I think we get the idea of them on stone tablets out of the Jewish tradition, five on one, five on another. I think we get the idea of Moses carrying down two stone tablets from the mountain from Cecil B. DeMille, and some folks just know that Moses looks like Burt Lancaster!

These are laws passed down to God’s people by God. God’s chosen people receive them. Paul calls us adopted into God’s family, chosen by virtue of our belief in Jesus, so these laws in some ways still apply to us.

So what do we have before us? The first ten things God mentions to Moses about how to live within the boundary of being the children of God.
Well, let’s look at them individually.
1. You shall have no other God’s before me
2. You shall not make for yourself an idol
3. You shall not make wrongful use of the name of God
4. Remember the Sabbath Day.

The first four laws are all about relationship to God, aren’t they?

What are the rest?
1. Honor your father and mother.
2. You shall not murder
3. you shall not commit adultery
4. you shall not steal
5. you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor (in other words, you shall not lie)
6. you shall not covet anything your neighbor has, including spouse, house, land or property.

How you would characterize all of these laws? Aren’t they all ways to preserve relationship with others?

So what we have is a marked focus by God- there are two things that God concerns Godself with, overall, thus they are the leading statements. God’s primary concern is with relationship to God and to humanity.

So, does this sound familiar? It does to me-I hear in these words given to Moses the words of Jesus, when he is asked which of the commandments are the most important. Do you remember what he says?

Right. “Love the Lord with all your heart, mind soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

I also hear these two primary concerns, both relationships, in the words Jesus uses to lead us into prayer:
Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name;
Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

There’s the God part. Then comes the human part:
Give is this daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.

And then back to God again:
For thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, forever and ever, Amen.
Whenever we are given summary statement from God in the Bible, there are these two overarching ideas, and they are both relationships.

Relationship with God.
Relationship with each other.

It seems to me to be true then, that if we will be judged on anything, we will be judged on how we are in relationship with God, as well as those around us. Family, friends, colleagues, co-workers, neighbors, as well as those on this earth who are hungry and suffering, in Tunkhannock, in PA, as well as in Bangladesh and Sudan.

How you doin’?

Imago Christi

2011-09-25T16:46:00.000-04:00

Philippians 2: 1-13

Humility. What is it? Is it the ability to self-deprecate, which means to downplay your own achievements, as if they do not mean much? Is humility a low opinion of yourself, in relation to others?

It seems to me that there are two poles of humility. The first pole is that there are some people in the world who think that they are the best at everything they do, and while they may sometimes indeed be very good at something, they don’t always have such a realistic view of themselves.

The other pole is the complete self-negation of someone who thinks they are worthless. They’ve always been told that they are worthless, and now it has seeped into their mind, into their heart, into even their bones.

True humility, I think is the ability to be realistic about one’s talents, gifts, and graces, to be able to accept correction from others. To have pride in yourself is ok, because pride, in moderation, rather than swell someone’s head, can also drive you to be excellent.

True humility, also, is the ability to place one’s gifts and talents into the service of others, and not to always have it be used only for gain and fame and fortune.

But humility is a slippery slope. St. Benedict, in teaching monks to be better Christians fifteen hundred years ago, used the image of a ladder, by which you can only climb to heaven by seeking to minimize yourself in the eyes of God. By looking to God more, and to ourselves less, we become more like the image of Christ. It is easy, when doing this, to think that you are worthless, and that is the quickest way to heaven, but it’s not true. If you think that there is nothing that you can give to the world, nothing to offer, then you are withholding what you can offer, and that is a sin. There is no quicker or slower way to heaven, anyway-there is only your path through life and your daily relationship with God.

Benedict’s key is that humility is the ability to look to God in thanks for our gifts, and to learn how to look to God for leadership in how to use those gifts. The more we are able to consciously serve God, the more we imitate Christ in our lives, the more we approach true humility.

Let me say again-humility is not thinking of oneself as worthless-humility is not accepting the judgment of those who are mean and evil and call us useless, worthless, and trash. We all have something to offer this world, God has placed within us some gifts and talents with which we can provide grace to this world. All of us. Acknowledging what we are good at is the first step, ironically, toward humility. Placing it in God’s service are the rest of the steps toward imitating Christ.

This idea of placing gifts in the service of God comes directly from verses 5 to 11 in today’s scripture. Jesus is our model. Paul writes that Jesus was in the form of God, and equal to God. Yet, in service to God, he emptied himself, he gave away everything that made him supernatural, and submitted to the chains of a mortal life. Freely. Not because he thought he was worthless, but instead, he was the one of most worth, the only one for the job. Once here, with a stomach that growled when he was hungry, a body that needed sleep, that felt cold, that needed washing periodically, that could suffer pain and ultimately, death, but with the knowledge that he was here serving God, he submitted himself further, even to accepting death, even a death that was the most humiliating type that the Roman Empire could muster. Not because he felt worthless, but indeed because he knew that his death would demonstrate in the purest way the love of God. It was the whole reason for coming, the whole point of the exercise.

Why? Because he loved us. Because God loved us, and our ancestors had forgotten. And God knew that every generation would forget. So the story carries forward everywhere, that God loved us so much that he gave us Jesus, and when they killed him, as every generation most likely would have, God did not retaliate in anger, but responded in love, while still showing God’s ultimate power, in resurrecting him.

I am struck by the lyrics to the hymn “Trust and Obey”, specifically verses three and four, as they are in the United Methodist Hymnal:

But we never can prove the delights of his love, until all on the altar we lay;
For the favor he shows, for the joy he bestows, are for them who will trust and obey.

Then in fellowship sweet we will sit at his feet, or we’ll walk by his side on the way;
What he says we will do, where he sends we will go; never fear, only trust and obey.

True humility isn’t minimizing one’s own spirit in fear of being thought haughty or bold by our family and friends, our husbands and wives or parents. True humility is being realistic about our gifts and graces, given to us by God, and choosing to put them into the service of God. When we do this, we imitate Christ, which, after all, is the point of living Christian life.

May we all imitate Christ this week, and the rest of our lives. Amen.

Olly Olly Oxen Free

2011-09-19T10:07:00.000-04:00

Matthew 20: 1-16

Often, when we hear the parables of Jesus, we want to make a straight and strict similarity, one to one, between what he says and our lives. When we hear the story of the prodigal son, we want the father to be God, and we either cast ourselves as the younger wayward brother or the resentful, dutiful older brother.

The thing about parables is that making strict equivalences is a mistake. Some similarities between some of the characters and our own lives are to be expected, but the stories of Jesus are not journalism, just like the rest of the Bible is rarely factual reportage of historical facts.

The point of a parable is to tell a story where the point of the story is something about God. A characteristic about God that Jesus wanted to highlight.

When we read this parable this morning, I wanted to make a straight equivalence-the people who haven’t gone and helped flood victims yet are just as eligible for the love of God as the ones who were filling sandbags a week ago Thursday. But that was the wrong way to go.

One of you said to me last week when I was asking for names of volunteers, “I don’t know what I‘ll be able to do, but I‘ll put my name down anyway”, knowing that they couldn’t do paneling stripping, or sludge shoveling, or other suchlike work. But sure enough, the first need I heard about was the sorting and folding of clothes at one of the drop-off points, and that person, who thought she wouldn’t be able to do anything, was the first one called to help.

We all have work, and we all have responsibilities. We are not always able to respond to emergencies the way that we want to. We’d love to help, but we’re not always ready to. I called around for a team to go help someone else later in the week last week, and many of you understandably could not go help because of previous plans, working, etc., and it feels bad, knowing you’d put your name on a list to help, and then not being able to follow through when the call comes. I know.

This parable is a comfort to those of us in that predicament, because it’s point is that the time we arrive, the time we’re called isn’t important. God’s grace, god’s equal wage, is available to us all.

The last church I served in Texas was in a little town called Commerce, where I was a campus minister for the local university. There was a spot in the town where day laborers, mostly Central Americans, would gather to be hired, and where employers would know to go to find them. It was probably illegal to hire them, some of them were probably undocumented workers, but it is a time honored and practical system that seemed to work pretty much the same way in Jesus’ time.

So a guy would come by, and he would talk to a few of them men there, if he knew Spanish. If he didn’t, he would just hold up his hand, and however many fingers he held up, that was how many workers he’d need. They’d climb up into the back of the pickup, and off they’d go. I don’t remember seeing any negotiation about wages, I don’t know how they agreed on the pay for the day. Maybe the workers got whatever they could. But off they went.

So, imagine if a guy came up in his pickup truck and needed workers in his cotton patch. He goes at daybreak, he goes at nine AM, noon, three, and five, and they all work until dark, getting his cotton in. It’s understandable for all the workers to think that the early ones would get paid the most, and the 5:00 ones the least. But the owner of the cotton field pays the five-o’clockers the living wage that was customarily paid to the guys who’d been bent over in the hot sun for 14 hours. It’s perfectly understandable that the early guys would start to think they’d hit the mother lode, right? But then they get the same wage as the late guys.

In the world run by humans, you’d understandably be ticked, right?

Well, that’s where the parable bit comes in. Jesus is not making a point about living wages, or the unfairness of migrant work, or the racism of taking advantage of undocumented workers to pay them less, or the need for a farm workers union.

Jesus’ point is this: God’s love and salvation is available to everyone, whether they were born into faith, came to it early middle or late. When I was a little kid, and it was time for all of us on the street to go into our houses and take our baths before bed, we’d end the game of Hide and Seek by yelling Olly Olly Oxen Free, and everyone who was still hidden could safely come out without getting tagged. God’s grace is like that, God’s love and grace is available to us all.

Charlotte Dudley Cleghorn, and Episcopal priest and spiritual director, writes it this way in her commentary on this passage;
• God loves me and all of creation deeply and profoundly.
• I and all others are made in the image of God.
• God’s generosity is beyond our wildest imagination.
• There is nothing I can do to earn or deserve God’s generosity.

There is no room for grudges in this worldview. God does not harbor ill will, everyone is a child of God, and everyone is created in the image of God.

This is what this parable is about.
This is what Jesus is about.

This is what we should be about.

How we doing with sharing the unlimited love of God?

Anyone you’d rather not include in that love? Yeah, me too. But God’s living wage goes to all, whether we like it or not.

Olly, Olly Oxen Free.

Footprints in the Mud

2011-09-11T17:12:00.000-04:00

Psalm 77

You know how they say that God laughs at the plans we make? I don’t think that is true, but since God is the supreme improviser, able to make good out of anything we throw at God, being able to sense the need for flexibility in our own lives is a gift of the Spirit.

So it was this week. I was all set to bring a word to you all about Paul’s graciousness in allowing Christians of different flavors to worship and think as they will, according to their own culture and understandings, out of Romans 14.

Then it wouldn’t stop raining. And then the waters began to rise. Then my thought about Sept. 11, 2001 became a little more focused, and I realized that something needed to be said, more than the pro-forma observance I had planned. I currently have a house full of M. Div Degrees, with my friend Alison staying with us, and her friends Elizabeth and Ray getting stopped here on their way to Owego. Elizabeth is due to be ordained in the Presbyterian church today, but with the flooding it will not be at her home church, it is now in Ithaca. I had planned on a wonderful round table discussion about how to acknowledge such a confluence of difficult moments, both current and in memory.

Then my stomach started hurting.

So, laying in bed, my stomach rumbly and sharp, thinking about my pain and the pain of all the people who had been flooded, an the remembered pain of that day ten years ago, I began to ask God what the answer was. I have many friends who were evacuated out of the Valley, as we all did. Tunkhannock, Meshoppen, Noxen and other areas along the river and the feeder creeks were also very hard hit, and the roads are in some case, still impassible. Andrew had to come home from Dickson City by way of Pittsburgh, it seemed.

What word is there to give to the people of God as we pass through these simultaneous misfortunes? What could I possibly say with the voice of the God of love?

The same things that have been said to the people of God in every time in place since they were written, three thousand years ago. The Psalms.

Specifically, Psalm 77. It has a word for us today. Yes, now is the time for us to gather our resources, of food and excess clothing and send them into the fray of recovery. Yes, now is the time to take up work gloves, hammers and bottles of bleach, and renew, fix, and wash the houses and property of our neighbors. Opportunity will be plentiful soon. But first we must think about how to cure ourselves of our own paralysis in the face of such large problems.

First we must place ourselves, dip ourselves, throw ourselves into the healing stream of memory, and remember that we’ve seen this before, we’ve dealt with this before, and God most certainly does know that we know how to do it!

The author of the psalm lays on his bed, also remembering the bad things, the times when it seemed God was far away. But then the author remembers that the times when that feeling was strong, it was always temporary. The author remembers those times when God did appear, and then wonders were worked, God’s power was shown, and the situation was put into its proper perspective, as well as our place in it.

And when the time came to be led by God, it was not God who led, but the people who could hear God the best, who led the way forward, who were God’s feet, hands, mind and heart. It was not God’s footprints in the floor of the Red sea, it was Moses and Aaron’s.

September 11 was ten years ago. It is fitting to be reminded of the events, but it is also fitting to be reminded of the mistakes we made, the prejudice against Arab-Americans that was not justified and caused even more pain where it was not needed, and perhaps most of us have realized that even the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. It is also good of us to remember the responsibility we now have to help Afghanistan toward a peaceful co-existence, cleaning up the mess we started there. And in God we can find our footsteps deep in the mud of a red sea of our own, bringing peace where we had brought war.

This has now been called the worst flood on record. The gauges that were broken by the waters hid that face from us for a while, but now we know. And what is the response of the people of God? What then will we do? How will we put our feet into the fresh mud of that river so recently receding, and have those footprints be God’s?

Opportunities will be offered over the next few weeks. For now, I ask that everyone go home today and go through their closets, and pull out all of the clothes that are in good repair, and that you don’t wear much. Business suits, women’s work suits, as well as the clothes your kids have outgrown. Wash them, and bring them down to the church this week, I’ll make sure that they get to the proper hands.

Also, I am sending around a list, and if you are willing to work on a cleaning crew, put your name, home phone number, and if you have one, an e-mail and a cell phone number, and also let me know if you text. Doesn’t matter when you are free, just if you are willing.

Let us put our feet in the mud of this receding river, and have those footprints, like Moses and Aaron in the Red Sea, have those footprints be those of God.

The Armor of Light

2011-09-04T13:32:00.000-04:00

Romans 13:8-14

It is good to be back with you this week, though it seems I missed a lot of excitement! A bit of irony to share with you-when I heard that the east coast had had an earthquake, I was visiting my friend Lisa, who lives in the “east Bay”, or the area across the bay from San Francisco. That area is crisscrossed with a large number of fault lines, and, thinking about earthquakes, is one of the most dangerous areas in the world. And I was standing right in the middle of it reading about the earthquake that evacuated the White House and the Capitol and put people in Wilkes Barre out in the street.

While I was visiting California, reconnecting with old friends and making a few new ones, I had the opportunity to attend church in two different UM churches. And I have been thinking a lot about the different ways church is done.

I don’t say this as a way of comparison, as if one is better and the other worse. Every community does it the best they can, I believe, and takes on the character of the environment they live in. One church’s prayer concerns were largely about world hunger, social justice, and peace, naming Somalia and Darfur specifically, and was enriched by a homeless man, one of many the congregation has relationship with, speaking in a language all his own in the midst of the sermon. The pastor acknowledged it, and the congregation accepted it as worship in the world. Another church had a large rainbow flag, signifying their support of people who are homosexual, hanging in their fellowship hall, but in every other way would have had much in common with what we do here.

All churches, and indeed all Christians, live in a weird space between the here and now, the “who” we are; and the who we’re supposed to be. Sometimes we succeed in being the face of Christ to someone. Sometimes, like the nuclear elements that are created in those 30 mile radius super-colliders, the existence of which only lasts milliseconds, we are fully able to reflect the spirit and the strength of God. Other times, we fall short of being fully human-we fall prey to petty jealousies, to nursing resentments and hurts, we unfairly judge people for their mistakes, we do not forgive, and do not acknowledge our own shortcomings.

We are given the gift of knowing the personality, humanity, the image we are trying to attain, that of Christ. Sometimes I think this is God’s greatest gift to us. In Christ, we have the goal set before us, and we spend a lifetime seeking to grow into a Christlike, fully human being. At least that’s what we should be doing.

Paul, writing to the Roman church, tells us in this passage, that if we are to project the face of Christ into the world around us, if we are to share the good news of God that is entrusted to us to share, the secret ingredient to it all is love. It is love that is at the root of the law. If you love your neighbor you will not murder them. If you love your neighbor, you will not commit adultery with their spouse; if you love, you will celebrate what they have, you will not be jealous of it, and crave it. Love, as Paul says, “is the fulfilling of the Law.”

He writes that we are to “live honorably as in the day.” This implies that there is a way of life that we live apart from the day, or from the light. We sometimes live another way, as in the night. What is it that we do under cover of darkness, in secret, away from prying eyes, something we do not wish people to know? What attitudes, prejudices, and opinions do we not share because we know they are not part of the light of the love of God? Paul specifically goes to the examples of drunkenness, debauchery and licentiousness (which I think we can safely define as sexual promiscuity and loss of self control), and I think these examples are obvious in that they are clearly separate from the image of Christ we are seeking to copy.

But then Paul jumps from that to specifically calling out “quarreling and jealousy”. This is entirely another kettle of fish, isn’t it? It’s one thing to judge those people who go to dance clubs and wear very little as they dance suggestively on the floor as not being Christian, however we may define it, and however little we know about them. It is something else to purse your lips at someone who has just bought a spiffy new car, or shake your head at some relative who is trying to change the patterns of their life, ones that they inherited from your common family system. It’s easy to be angry at or dismissive of the person who has different politics or business practices from you. But I think it very interesting that jealousy and quarreling, of which gossip and rush to judgment are usually a part, is judged to be equal in the eyes of the Apostle Paul to drunkenness and promiscuity.

Is it because they cause the same amount of damage to the body of Christ?

How then, as Christians, are we called to refrain from causing that damage? How are we supposed to live in the world?

Both kinds of sin here feel good. But both are empty pleasures. Loving is hard, and loving someone who we disagree with, or even don’t like very much, is even harder. It’s much easier to distance ourselves from them, and see them as somehow falling short. We may even use the language of the church to assist us in causing pain to them, in enabling us to separate ourselves from them. To stand with someone in love can sometimes give us wounds, too, when the community around that person is angry.

But this, nonetheless, is our call. To accept that homeless guy who interrupts our sermon. To love that person who loves to tear down people of authority. To loving address the shortcomings of the ones whom God has put in our path, while acknowledging our own.

This is to lay aside the works of darkness. This is to put on the armor of light.

This is to be the body of Christ.

Good From Evil

2011-08-14T08:19:00.000-04:00

Genesis 45: 1-12

Last week, I used the beginning of this story as my preaching text, and heard from a few people that this story was new to them. So this week I thought it would be appropriate to finish the story.

When we last left our hero, he had been sold into slavery by his brothers, and the slavers had taken him into Egypt. (Last week I said that Potiphar, the person who bought him, was Pharaoh, but I was wrong. Potiphar is the captain of the Pharaoh’s guard.)

Joseph does well as a slave to Potiphar, and is eventually given management of all of Potiphar’s lands and properties. And as it says, Potiphar “had no concern but the food that he ate.”

The scripture says that Joseph was a pretty good looking guy, and he caught the eye of Potiphar’s wife. She pursues him for extramarital relations, and he resists. She finally catches him when they are alone in the house and he slips out of a cloak rather than give in. She takes that cloask and uses it as evidence against him, accusing him of wht he had always resisted, and Potiphar tosses him into jail.

In jail, Joseph begins to interpret dreams for prisoners, and, when one prisoners’ fortunes are restored, he eventually remembers Joseph when Pharaoh has a hard dream. Joseph is brought up from prison, and interprets the dream for Pharaoh-seven years of good harvests, followed by seven years of famine. He suggests that Pharaoh put some of the good harvests aside for the lean years, and Pharaoh does so. Not only that, but he also raises Joseph to the role of manager of this plan, and gives him the symbols of Pharaohs’ second-in-command. So when the dream comes true, and there is a worldwide famine, Egypt has food for it’s people, and even sells to the other countries around them.

One of those countries that is starving is the country of Joseph’s father and brothers, and they are starving, too. They come to Egypt, and Joseph sees them. He puts them in prison, then tells them that they must go bring their youngest brother to him (they don’t know this, but he is asking to see his full brother Benjamin, who is the youngest of them all.) They go home with grain, and unbenknownst to them, Joseph has also put their money back into their sacks-he has given them grain.

They go back when the grain they were given runs out, and take Benjamin with them. Joseph sees them, and sees Benjamin with them. He prepares a meal for them, and eats with them (still not revealing who he is to them), at one point needing to leave because of how emotional he becomes at seeing Benjamin.

As they prepare to leave, Joseph decided to play with them again, and has a valuable cup put into Benjamin’s sack

The “theft is discovered, and Benjamin is detained. Judah, the brother who so long a go was the lead guy planning to sell Joseph to the slavers, steps up and makes a speech asking for Benjamin back, even using the language that Joseph had predicted they would use, when he was a boy and had the dream about them all kneeling before him. And here they are, just as he had seen.

So he finally gives up the game, and reveals himself to them. They are of course astonished, and more than a little afraid of him-he is now very powerful, and they are weak and hungry, and they remember they have already been in prison once by his decree.

But Joseph, in grace and in love, tells them to bring Jacob their father with them down to Egypt, and the family shall have the land of Goshen, and live prosperously.

And this is how the nation of Israel became part of Egypt. The slavery part came later, under a different pharaoh, and that is a different story for another day.

What do we do with this story? What can we glean from it about the loving hand of God? What can we see about the character of God, something that we see that is similar to the character of God we see in Jesus?

Joseph says it: What the brothers meant for Evil, God has turned it to the good.

There is power in forgiveness. Joseph could have easily sent his famil7y back to Canaan hungry, could have finally enslaved them as they did him, could have had them all thrown into the Nile, and no one would have thought much about it. Revenge is the usual way, after all, even now. But it is not God’s way.

There’s a sense in the world that God has our lives planned out. So many times people would say to me about Donna’s illness : “it is God’s plan.” Never once did I believe that. But I do believe that God makes good from evil. God can take the mistakes that we make, the things that happen to us and to our loved ones, and turn them to the good. I am a different person from whom I used to be, and I think somehow better. My relationship with Josiah is much different now than it used to be and much much better.

We must have faith and patience, not that God has a plan for all of this or that, but that God, in God’s infinite wisdom and power, can make a plan that will land us on our feet- will fall us forward.

If we listen.

From the Frying Pan into the Fire

2011-08-07T08:04:00.000-04:00

With great thanks, and permission given by Rev. Alison Hendley, San Rafael UMC, San Rafael CA., for the use of her text and ideas.

Genesis 37: 12-28
Matthew 14: 22-33

Have you ever been in a situation where things are bad… you know the kind of bad where you think they can’t get any worse? Yet, almost as soon as you think this, they do.

A cancer diagnosis followed by notice from your insurance company that your treatment is not covered.

A car dies on you, followed by an irreparable computer crash, maxing out your credit card and making your bank account overdrawn.

A child gets stomach flu, and just as he is in the worst of the illness the next child, your husband and you begin to feel the symptoms crashing down.

You think a budget has been reached and then the economy takes another dive.

Sometimes life throws us from the frying pan into the fire, from one situation to another that seems even worse. The pit Joseph was tossed into was bad enough, but then being hauled out and sold to slave traders: humiliating and scary for anyone. For Joseph it was, I imagine, a big blow to his large ego. Here is a young man who has never had to work as hard as his brothers, the spoilt favored child of Jacob, showered with expensive gifts and love. And a bragger to boot, telling his brothers how he is going to rule over them and they will have to bow down before him. He is beaten and thrown into a dark pit, his life spared, but barely, and his future uncertain. I wonder if he feels a flutter of hope as his brothers pull him out, hope that proves to be short lived, as he soon sees the slave train he is to join as he is led off to land unknown. Does he fall into despair? Curse his brothers? Withdraw into himself and deny his gifts?

Joseph is taken to Egypt and soon lands on his feet as the favored slave or servant of the Pharaoh. But he is also the favored object of the Pharaoh’s wife, who tries to make him sleep with her. When he refuses she frames him for the crime anyway and he is thrown into jail. Soon he is the favored inmate, given privileges and tasks that other prisoners envy. He begins to interpret dreams of the other prisoners, and is eventually released to a new Pharaoh to interpret his dreams, and becomes the favored one once more, saving Egypt and the Pharaoh from famine.

Now, contrast Joseph, who seems so confident, beyond arrogant in his younger days, in relationship to his brothers, to Peter, who in the Gospel story is tentative, timid, unsure of everything.

It seems like these two men have very different temperaments: Joseph is sure of himself and somewhat cocky. Peter is filled with uncertainty about himself. Joseph keeps landing on his feet. Peter finds himself in hot water (or cold sea water)! Joseph lands in the right place at the right time. Peter follows. Yet these two continue to listen to God wherever they find themselves. In Joseph’s interpreting of the dreams he is able to save thousands of people from death, and eventually sees and forgives his brothers who come asking for food, and is reunited with his family.

So, even though certain personality traits stay strong throughout their lives, God works in these men helping them to grow into who God intends them to be. Each time they make the same mistakes or face the same situations I believe they change, sometimes in ways that are not perceptible to us on the outside, but change is happening. By their willingness to continue to follow God, God works in their hearts and minds, maturing them, shaping them to their fullness.

John Wesley's interpretation of Peter's wavering isn't the sort of moral scolding one might have come to expect from some evangelical preachers in our day. He doesn't take Jesus' question, “Why did you doubt?” as an accusation. Instead, he wrote, "He was afraid - Though he had been used to the sea, and was a skilful swimmer. But so it frequently is. When grace begins to act, the natural courage and strength are withdrawn." Wesley sees "Little-faith" not as a negative, but a positive. It's not that Peter has only a little faith, but that he in fact does have a little bit of faith and exercises it, steps forward onto the water and walks, even in the windstorm. It’s not that he failed- it’s that he did, for am moment resemble Christ.

This is the task we have for today… to listen to where we are being led, to follow, to step out of the boat, to be bold enough to step into the stormy seas, or into this broken world of ours, and to allow transformation to happen. To put ourselves, for just a moment into the position of resembling Christ, even for just a moment.

There’s a way of life written some 1700 years ago by a man named Benedict, who lived near Nursia in Italy. It’s called the Rule of St. Benedict, and it is the basis for most of the covenants people make together these days when they pledge to live together in Christian Community. It is the rule that is at the center of the community I am a member of.

It begins with the word LISTEN:
Listen carefully, my child,
and incline the ear of your heart.
Receive willingly and carry out effectively
God’s advice,
that by the labor of obedience
you may return to God
from whom you had departed.

Joseph and Peter both kept listening and stepping forward, not hiding who they were, at times, not seeming to ‘get’ it, but discerning the call and taking the step.
And so, this morning, I invite us to reflect for a few minutes, what we are being called to, in our individual lives, in our relationships with ourselves, our relationship with God, our relationship with others and our relationship with the community. Listen. And hear where God is inviting you to follow. Listen, and see the characteristics that you keep showing and how they are slowly helping to bring about transformation. Listen, and incline the ear of your heart, to be open to the ministries God may be setting before you. Listen for the step you, or we as a community, are being asked to have the courage to take. Listen for where the brokenness in the world is showing itself to you and ask how you can help. Listen.

Silence

As a further, bolstering of our faith, and courage to step off the boat onto the water, I offer us a blessing as written by a fellow member, a sister in that Christian Community I told you about named Jan Richardson, called
Blessing on the Waves:

I cannot promise
that this blessing
will keep you afloat
as if by lashing these words
to your arms,
your ankles,
you could stop yourself
from going under.

The most this blessing
can do, perhaps,
is to stand beside you
in the boat,
place its hand
in the small of your back,
and push.

Be assured that
though this blessing
is eager to set you
in motion,
it will not
leave you forsaken,
will not compel you
to leap
where it has not already
stepped out.

These words
will go with you
across the waves.
These words
will accompany you
across the waters.

And if you
find yourself
flailing,
this blessing
will breathe itself
into you,
will breathe itself
through you

until you are
borne up
by the hands
that reach toward you,
the voice that
calls your name.

Amen!

Pile Driver

2011-07-31T08:05:00.000-04:00

Genesis 32:22-32

So, he was worthy, in the end.

Jacob is coming home, but he is very nervous about it. The circumstances of his departure, when he stole the blessing of his father Isaac from his brother Esau, was in the past. Jacob has been to Laban and back, married two wives, Rachel and Leah. At least Seven years have passed, and Jacob has become rich, although he has done so at his father in law and clansman’s expense—all this is in the previous chapters, beginning at Chapter 27.

The night before the meeting or reunion with his brother, whom he has not seen in years and when he did last see him, he had defrauded him from the customary older son’s blessing. He has sent ahead of him a huge gift of some 500 head of livestock, but he has also split his camp into two parts, so that Esau will not destroy everything if that is his intention.

Jacob is coming home, and he is very nervous about it. He has set Rachel and Leah, their two maids, and their 11 children and sent them back across the river. So, the night before he meets his brother, full or fear and probably finally regret for what he has done, he is in his camp alone.

And the scripture says a man comes and wrestles with him until daybreak. No greeting, the scripture doesn’t say who it is, just that “a man wrestled with him.”

It’s apparently an epic wrestling match, one that lasts all night, there next to the river.

In the end, Jacob at least wrestles the man to a draw, or might even, after all those hours, be winning, so that, as the sun comes up, the man, who doesn’t want to be seen in daylight, touches Jacob’s hip, dislocating it. Jacob still has him in his grip, though, so he asks Jacob to release him, and Jacob says that he won’t unless the man blesses him, because Jacob has figured out that this man is no ordinary guy perhaps looking to pilfer the camp. There’s something supernatural about this man. Something divine. Nobody just touches a hip and dislocates it. So Jacob, showing again his quick mind and disregard for proper boundaries, asks for a blessing.

And, boy, what a blessing. Ever since Abraham, God has been promising that the descendants of this family will one day be a great nation. Abraham received the promise, as did Sarah. Isaac received it, as did Rebekah. And now Jacob has received it, but after three generations, the nation has been named. Jacob is no longer Jacob, but Israel. In Everett Fox’s translation of the Torah called The First Five Books Of Moses, it becomes plain; “Not as Yaakov/Heel Sneak shall your name be henceforth uttered, but rather as Yisrael/God Fighter.”

Jacob, as is his character, asks the man his name, but the man refuses, and says goodbye.

And as the sun comes up, Jacob/ Israel is walking by this amazing site in the desert, changed and perhaps a little less nervous. When he sees Esau coming to meet him, he puts his children with each of their mothers, and walks ahead of them. One would think that he might hide behind them before. So there has been a change.

At some point in all our lives, there is a wrestling match with God. Circumstances conspire to take away all of our support systems, and we are alone, and it is then that we have our moment to wrestle. If you can’t think of the moment when it has happened to you, perhaps by a diagnosis of cancer for you or a loved one, or a divorce, or the death of a child or spouse, or the loss of a job, it hasn’t happened yet. It is coming. We all wrestle with the divine. Sometimes, we can name multiple times we have met the man in the desert, alone. And have been changed by the contact.

At least one hopes we are changed, because if you are able to wrestle with God, be in contact with God in that way, full contact-knock-down drag-out-pile-driving-half-nelson, it is the most honest time of your life. We ask why this event has happened, and that is the first grapple. And off we go.

We want to know why. We want to know why us. We want to take God and, not even using the rules of polite wrestling, like Olympic wrestling, we want to throw chairs, stand up on a corner stanchion and fly into God with our elbows in God’s stomach, swing God into the ropes and clothesline him as he bounces off.

And he lets us.

And then, when we are worn out with all our exertions, and we realize we’re really wrestling with someone who has submitted to us willingly, who has had the power to bend us like a pretzel and chosen not to, we begin to realize the grace that has been shown. And if we’re smart, like Jacob, we start asking for blessings. God has let us beat up on him all night long, but we are right back where we started. And we are graced by it. A limping Jacob is a different man the next morning. He is now Israel. It is his children who will make up the twelve tribes. The long time blessing promised to his forefathers is starting to take shape, in him. He puts himself at the head of his family facing his brother, rather than behind the wives and children, as if to say “ don’t kill me, look at all these beautiful children and these wives, these maids, who will all be penniless and bereft if I’m dead.” He stands ahead of them.

So, in the end, he was worthy. He was made worthy by wrestling with the divine, and allowing himself to be changed by that contact.

Opening ourselves to be honest with God is scary, and may even feel improper, somehow. Certainly not respectful. But without it, we cannot grow in relationship with God. We may not no the answers when we’ve finished, but we will be changed, better than we were. If we choose to accept that blessing.

So that in the end, we may be worthy, after all. As God sees us.

The Kingdom of God is Like . . .

2011-07-24T17:33:00.000-04:00

Matthew 13: 31-33, 44-52

We continue this week in our tour through the parables of Jesus as found in Matthew. Verses 34 to 43, the bits we skipped, are partly Jesus’ explanation of the use of parables, which is from Psalm 78, and the rest is part o last weeks’ reading, Jesus’ explanation of the parable of the weeds and wheat.

Today, we have no less than five parables thrown at us. Now, it might be wise in some years to take each parable one by one, and each Sunday talk about mustard seeds, and yeast, and treasure, and pearls, or fish.

But it seemed to me that there might be some value in looking at all five parables together, and seeing what, together, each parable tells us about the character of God through Jesus Christ.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed. . . “

Yesterday, I planted that box that last week was full of weeds- or as I preferred to say last week, plants in undesirable locations. I generally planted petunias, because they’re bright and can live in full sun. but I also scattered some California Poppy seeds that had been given to my mom by a friend of hers in one of the boxes, the one facing the house, so that mom can see them when she’s sitting at the couch, looking out the window. California Poppy seeds are tiny, about like a mustard seed , and it never fails to impress me how something so small becomes so different and so much larger. And these seeds just become wildflowers. If you left a mustard shoot to grow from a seed not much bigger than those poppy seeds for a few years, the resulting bush, just as Jesus describes it, becomes a large bush or small tree, (depending on your perspective, kind of like the difference between a stream and a creek). Internet pictures of mustard bushes that I saw when looking for bulletin cover art were sometimes taller than a person, and wider than a car. All from a little tiny seed.

I believe that this parable teaches us about the abundance of God’s Kingdom.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast. . . “

In reading this parable, of course I want to know how much a Measure of flour is. There’s a similar parable to this in Luke, in which the woman works the dough until the yeast is worked all through. That seems reasonable, since you want the dough to rise evenly. But when I looked up how much a measure was, it told me it roughly was only a cup. So if you add yeast to three measures of flour, it is roughly the amount needed for a loaf of bread. Again we have a symbol of something very small affecting a much larger body around it, similar to the mustard seed, so it could be abundance, but I hear another attribute of the Kingdom of God, here-power. Something as small as a wee beastie like yeast, who are kind of animals, after all, can take three cups of flour and some water and transform it from a paste into a large loaf of bread, given enough time.

I believe that this parable teaches is that the Kingdom of God has the power to transform and the power to change, and the power to make that which seems useless into something useful.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure . . . “

This is sometimes hard to understand this one, because the story of the love of God, Christ’s choosing to die for us, is a story that needs to be told in as many ways as our creativity permits. Why would you go hide it? And then why would you go and doubly own it; not just being the person who knows where it’s hidden, but being the guy who owns the land where it is hidden? That doesn’t sound like sharing to me. But I don’t think keeping it secret is Jesus’ point, here. I think he is trying to communicate that the feeling that a person has about something valuable, that they want to keep it safe, how highly they value that object, is how highly we should value the Kingdom. Take care with it. Tell the story accurately, with all the love and respect you can muster. Don’t fall prey to easy explanations, don’t just parrot what you’ve been taught, retelling the story without your own connection to it.

I believe that this parable teaches us to take care with the great value of the story of the Kingdom.

“The Kingdom of heaven is like a merchant . . . “ Not like a pearl. Like a merchant. The Kingdom of god is an active place, a place that is willing to sell all it has to claim one great pearl. And that attitude, the valuing of something above all else, is how I think the Kingdom sees us. We are that one great pearl, and the Kingdom of God is willing to expend all it has to make sure we are included.

I believe this parable teaches us that the Kingdom of God Values us far more than we can understand and believe.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a net. . . “

Jesus tells a parable about the end of the world here, and how there will be a process of separating the good from the bad. I don’t really hear this as a prophecy of the end times, in anyway that we hear it in Cultural Christianity today. The Psalms are full of separations, separating the people of God from their enemies, individually and collectively as the nation of Israel. For a people who are oppressed, the language of good and evil is clear—we will be redeemed, by God’s hand. They will be punished for doing this to us, by God’s hand. It is not so clear to us, in a first world country, the most powerful nation on earth, how we can think we are oppressed, because in the main, we are not. There are individual oppressions; women abused by husbands, children abused by their parents-there are economic oppressions, when people must work under duress and for less than a fair wage; but as a whole, we are not oppressed. We are not occupied by a foreign power, we are not being invaded, most outrage that we see these days is based not in justice, but in selfishness. To the people listening to Jesus, it is clear that the bad fish that they are caught up in the net with are Romans and the people who have cast their lot with them. There is nothing here about the saved and the unsaved.

I believe that this parable teaches us that the Kingdom of God is for the people who act justly, with compassion and humility, and sensitivity to situations in the world.

So, the Kingdom of God is described 5 ways here; abundant like a mustard seed; powerful like yeast; valuable to us like a treasure; places great value on us like a pearl merchant with a pearl, and discerning with who it includes.

There is much to think about here. And perhaps a lot to decide about how we fit into that Kingdom.

Scattering the Seeds

2011-07-10T07:16:00.000-04:00

Matthew 13: 1-9, 18-23

I heard on the radio a few weeks ago about a project sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution. In the forest somewhere in Western Maryland, a fence was put up about 30 years ago. That fence encloses about 30 or 40 acres, and it’s called an “exclosure”. The purpose of it is to keep out the white-tailed deer of the area, in an effort to understand what the land would look like if they weren’t present.

Inside the fence, there is a wonderful abundance of foliage, some 20 different types of trees, in all stages of growth, and a wide variety of grasses and flowers.

Outside the fence, there is a mono-culture of one or two kinds of grass, and the only trees are adult and elderly.

I would love to take this story as a full metaphor, and name each element of the story as a part of the modern church, but that is not for today.

What I’d like to concentrate on is this-several times, we used the metaphor Thursday night at Administrative Council of scattering seeds that we hope to grow. The seeds that we scattered were in the hearts of the children we recently were host to for a week, and the field we were working in is our own neighborhood. The remark was made that what Vacation Bible school did was spread many good seeds among young children, so that they will know God’s love, and that we do expect that God will do God’s best work with them. But what was also true is that between the children served in vacation Bible school and at least most of the people sitting around the table Thursday night, there is a great gulf of years-the same gulf between the adult and elderly trees and the tender, new shoots of new trees that have not yet been found by the deer.

The thing about parables is that they are pliable, useful for making illustrations, but only up to a point. I do not want us to think that we are responsible for making sure that every heart of every age person in Center Moreland (or Dymond Hollow) is healthy and ready for seed-we know that that is impossible. I also do not think that the parable tells us that we should only scatter the seeds of the story of Jesus only among those whom we know, and those whom we like, in a sense, spreading the seeds only in good soil. The farmer has apparently spread his seeds over all types of soil-his job seems to be not judging who gets the seed, only that it is spread. The end of the parable is the most important part for us, as people responsible for the spreading of the story of God’s love through the life of Jesus. Jesus ends his explanation of the parable by saying this- that some yield one hundred to one, some sixty to one, some thirty to one.

May I suggest that that is for us the point we should be taking away?

I think what we’re being given permission to believe here is that the yield is not the point. Things like Vacation Bible School are a success because 70 children and teenagers heard the stories of God’s love. If one of them becomes a mature, reasonable, compassionate and gracious Christian, then God’s harvest has been fruitful.

Our job, as Christians, is to spread the love of God through Jesus to all, without judgment of how healthy the soil of the hearts who hear it may be.

So then, what’s next? What shall we do now to share that story? What shall we do now to share God’s love? Do we wait until next year, for another VBS summer?

Or are there things we can do before then? Are there events we can invite others to? Is there an attitude we can prayerfully cultivate within ourselves that strengthens our faith enough to open up to friends about what gives us Joy in Christ?

In September, at Center Moreland’s Admin. Council, we are going to try something. We will get the work done of the church early, and then we are going to talk about what gives us joy in Christ, and in being a Christian. We are going to talk about what we do well. We are going to listen to each other, and get a sense of who we are as the body of Christ. We do invite you to join us then! I would like to do the same at Dymond Hollow, sometime this fall.

One thing that occurs to me in that talk is that we should begin to understand what it is that makes us different from other churches in the area. I do not want us to be in competition with the other churches. But in our rush to not be controversial by not highlighting differences, we do lose the opportunity to speak about what it is that makes our way, our particular “method” of following Christ, so special. Our “special sauce”, if you will. It isn’t as simple a message as some other believers in our area may have, and for many, that’s fine. But there are many people out there who know that a relationship with God isn’t simple, and there is no place for them around. I would like to be that place.

The word of God, the love of God, is a seed that can take root early and can take root late, can take root after several tries. All we are really responsible for is the scattering of the seeds by our words, and actions. We do not choose the soil, we just, like the legends of Johnny Appleseed (and I was reminded of this by the lunch grace at Center Morelands’ Sunday School picnic yesterday), are called to scatter the seeds wherever we go.

God Loves You. You are Loved. Come and See.

2011-06-12T08:09:00.001-04:00

Acts 2: 1-21

Happy birthday to you all, and happy birthday to every church in the world! Today is the celebration of the birth of the church! Pentecost, when the flame of the Holy Spirit came to each of the followers of Jesus, and all of the followers of Christ spoke in the native languages of the people who stood around them watching what happened.

It’s a great story, one of renewal and new promise. These followers of Christ, as you remember, had kind’ve been in hiding since Jesus was crucified. They certainly weren’t carrying around coffee mugs and wearing t-shirts that said they were followers of Jesus Christ in those days. They were wounded. They were traumatized by what had happened, and by the seeming death of their dreams. They were fearful of those around them, because after all, some of these people may have been the ones who were in the mob crying for the death of Jesus. It was a scary time.

But even when they were scared, they remember Jesus saying “stay in Jerusalem until the promise of God” comes. So they did.

So they stayed there, kept a low profile, nursed their wounds, worried a little, I’m sure, but did all of the things that a community does to take care of itself. They replaced Judas in the leadership team with Matthias. They fed themselves, housed themselves, and cared for their widows, took care of their orphans. And they went to the temple.

So then one day comes, when they are together in one place. Acts says that they were in a house, but I always think of this huge painting of the Pentecost event in (Big D) Dallas that I always think of in this story, that has them in a portion of the temple that wasn’t especially holy, and that the Holy Spirit comes to them in a very public way (funny how our Bible interpretation is colored by pop culture, isn't it? How many people still understand the creation of the 10 Commandments through the eyes of Cecil B. DeMille?). The Holy Spirit did exist before this-there are occurrences of what we can call the Spirit of God throughout the Hebrew Bible, and it was the tool of Jesus to heal at a distance, as well as those he touched up close. The Holy Spirit descended like a dove at Jesus' baptism, too. But this is a very public occurrence; the rush of wind, the sound of it, the roar of it, attracts a crowd, and these tongues of fire came to each person who was a follower of Christ.

And they speak in the languages of everyone around them who had gathered in that crowd. Now, these followers of Christ weren’t linguistic scholars. Some were learned, some could read, but the average person in that time couldn’t, and the average person had perhaps never traveled any further than Jerusalem from their hometowns. They generally spoke Aramaic, and those who could read probably could speak Hebrew, the language of the Scriptures. And yet they were speaking the languages of people hundreds of miles away, even thousands. It would be like us never traveling any farther from here than Tunkhannock, or maybe Wilkes Barre or Scranton. And yet, without any study, we all of a sudden can all speak Spanish, French, Chinese, or Arabic.

That’s how weird this was. And everyone knew it was weird. It was obviously a supernatural event, and a very public one at that.

As Keanu Reeves is famous for saying, “Whoa.”

Now, what do you think these people were saying? Acts tells us that everybody standing around them could hear their own languages, but Acts doesn’t tell us what they said. They probably said things like “what the heck?” and “this is amazing!” and “This is what we were told to wait for!” Perhaps some of them even said “whoa.”

And Peter takes the opportunity, while everyone around him can understand him anyway, in this moment, to tell them about Christ. It's the first sermon about the risen Lord in the power of the Holy Spirit, ever, so he kind of has to start at the beginning. But he does get to the point, which is; “y’all see these flames? Y’all hear this wind? Y’all hear us ordinary folk speaking in your languages, even though we’ve never been there? Yeah. That’s the power of this God we believe in, that’s the power of this Jesus that was killed a couple months ago. You see, he isn’t dead. And when he was here, he told us about the love of God. Now we’re able to tell you, in your own language, because he sent this wind, sent these flames, sent this power of language. Come, be forgiven for everything you’ve ever done, and know the love of God.”

Come. Be forgiven for everything you’ve ever done. Come learn that you are loved by God, because you are one of God’s own children.

Acts doesn’t say what it is that the followers of Jesus said to each other in that moment, but I’d like to imagine that, while they had the power to speak to those who were around them, they shared the simple message, God loves you. You are loved. I know, it’s hard to believe, but come and see.

God loves you. You are loved. Come and see.

The rest of Acts is story after story after story of people traveling, writing, Philip running up to chariots, and Stephen dying under hails of stones, to tell this story, deliver this message.

God loves you. You are loved. Come and see.
We, as the church, exist to deliver this message. Everything we do should be pointed toward delivering this message.

Folks, we too have been through a hard time. You know what has happened to me and my family. You all have shared in that pain, in that woundedness. We’ve all had other hard times in our lives, as well, and we are all marked by them. We are all wounded. We are all hurt, somehow. But God loves us in that woundedness, and wants us to be whole, in love. God wants us to grow in love, and have our lives be public examples of the healing power of love. God wants us to be graceful, compassionate, forgiving, with each other, with ourselves, and with the whole world.

God wants us to share the same message that the Disciples and followers learned-God loves you, you are loved, come and see.

And we can deliver that same message now, in this time, in our lives. With our lives. Sometimes we can use words, but our greatest testimony isn’t what we say, it’s what we do.

So go, and like those early followers, deliver that message with your lives.

God loves you, you are loved, come and see.

Doing what We’re Told

2011-06-06T07:24:00.000-04:00

Acts 1:1-11

Today is Ascension Sunday, which is the last Sunday of the Easter Season. Next week is Pentecost, which begins the long church season of “ordinary Time”, or “Kingdomtide”. The paraments hung in front of the pulpit and lectern will be green, except for the Sundays of Communion, when they will be white. And that will continue all the way to the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

Ascension celebrates the occurrence in the bible that we heard read just now, the bodily ascension of Jesus out of the sight of the disciples. It’s only reported by Luke. In the Gospel of Mark, the most reliable ending of the book, at chapter 16:8, leaves the women running away in terror, and it is only a later, tacked on ending (according to the scholars) that talks about Jesus’ being raised to heaven.

Much energy has been spent about why this particular occurrence is important. I remember one energetic young man when I was in college insisting to the point of fanaticism that if you don’t believe that Jesus ascended into heaven bodily, meaning that his actual body rose into heaven until it was no longer in sight, and that he is sitting in a physical chair on God’s right side right now, you are not a Christian. I wasn’t knowledgeable enough back then, nor brave enough either, probably, to ask him if that meant that John and Matthew weren’t really Christian.

It’s always been comforting to me to find out, in the midst of differences, to figure out what the four Gospels have in common. And in this story, in the time between Jesus’ resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit in Pentecost (which also only appears in Acts), what all four gospels have in common is a propulsion toward service.

In today’s passage, which is generally understood to be the continuation of the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells the Disciples that “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes to you, and you will be my witnesses . . . to the ends of the earth.” Then he rises into the air, and they stand there, gawking, mouths open, like I think anyone who had just seen such a thing would do. Two men in white robes, who weren’t there before say to them “Hey, why are you still standing here? He’ll be back, just the same way you saw him leave”.

Matthew ends with the Disciples joining Jesus on a high mountain, and his telling them “go and Make Disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
Mark, in the tacked on longer ending, which is verses 9-20 in many Bibles, he also sends them out to heal, and exorcise demons, and do other stuff.
John ends with a series of appearances of Jesus to the Disciples, and the last thing he says to Peter is to not worry about others’ paths, but for him to follow me.

If Good Friday can be a day to think about the seven last words of Jesus before his death, Ascension Sunday is a day to think about the Last words of Jesus after the resurrection, the last words Jesus says in each Gospel, even a less than reliable, tacked on statement.

Go and Make Disciples.

Follow Me.

You will be my Witnesses.

In a very clear sense, we are in the same boat as those early disciples and followers. We live in the same in-between time that they did, we have received the Holy Spirit, but we are waiting for his return. And, like them, sometimes we need to be reminded what it is we should be doing while we’re waiting.

The people of God are a people who are waiting to see the return of Jesus, and are not afraid. It’s interesting to me to note that most of the hue and cry about the predicted Rapture a couple of weeks ago was generated by people without understanding of the Christian faith, and people who believe in the Rapture. The majority of Christians, including most of us here today, watched with gentle amusement, or were, frankly, completely oblivious to it. Our actions and faith are not motivated by the fear of Jesus’ return, and we don’t necessarily care how he returns. We believe in him, and we have our commands.

Go and Make Disciples.

Follow Me.

You will be my Witnesses.

Let the world do what it will, let them spin themselves up and get all kinds of excited over the latest thing, the latest false prophet with an advertising budget.

We will continue to serve Christ in the way that we were told, by our mothers and fathers, our teachers and our preachers. We will do what we were told, and when Jesus comes back, in peace, in love, and in glory, and for the whole world at the same time, we will be found doing what the last words we have recorded from him say.

Go and Make Disciples.

Follow Me.

You will be my Witnesses.

May it be so for us all, in all the ways we can think of.

Listen for the Wild Goose

2011-05-29T07:56:00.003-04:00

John 14: 15-21

Center Moreland Charge, May 29, 2011

Do you know what we mean when we talk about the Holy Spirit? What do you think of?

The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, which means that to Christian doctrine, the Holy Spirit is to be understood as God, the same as Jesus and God the creator.

When we invoke the Holy Spirit, however, I think perhaps we invoke more of a mechanism than what for us in our time and place is the presence of God. We want God to reach out to us, we want God’s presence with us, but when it comes it is the Holy Spirit, it is not whatever image we have of the creator God.

We see the Holy Spirit as passive, we see it as almost the puppet strings that God uses to run the world-the leather reins which God uses to direct the horse that is pulling the carriage. For those of the Star Wars generation, they fall into the trap of seeing the Holy Spirit as the Force, a passive energy that can be directed by us to be used for evil or for good.

But that is not what Scripture tells us it is, is it?

The Holy Spirit as talked about today in the passage of John’s Gospel we’ve read talks about the Holy Spirit as an advocate-a teacher of truth, the leader of the Christian community beyond the time of Jesus’ presence-the eternal teacher.

Earlier in John, Jesus tells Nicodemus that those who are born of the Spirit are like the wind, which “blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.”

The Holy Spirit is completely outside of our control, and is to be a guide-something to listen to, something to search for, but not something we can bend to your will. There is an old Irish image of the Holy Spirit as a Wild Goose. When I say wild goose, I don’t mean for you to think of the geese that are now camped out at their usual summertime spot along Demunds road between the county line and Marsh Cemetery, though maybe some teaching could be done using the metaphor of needing to slow down in the presence of the Holy Spirit.

No, what they meant was the wild goose that they would hear faintly in the dead of night, honking as they flew. You knew they were there, if you were quiet enough, but you didn’t know where they were coming from, and you didn’t know where they were headed.

This is how the Holy Spirit should be thought of-an independent operator in our lives, and not a tool with which to succeed in life. We are to follow the lead of the Holy Spirit, and we are not to try to lead it ourselves. Have you ever tried to put a harness on a goose?

So, the next question you may have is, “OK, that’s all well and good and poetical, but how?”

How do we listen to the Holy Spirit? How do we seek its’ guidance, and how do we then follow it?

I think there are many ways to receive the promptings of the Holy Spirit. One can read Scripture for wisdom; to study the Bible is to immerse yourself into the language of the Spirit, and lessons can be learned from the stories of the people in it, as well as the advice and commands of Paul, Peter, James, the rest of the epistle writers, and of course, the words of Jesus himself.

One can listen to the voices of experience, people of faith in our community who have lived similar situations, and can tell you what the outcomes were in order that you not make the same mistakes.

But in the end, what it all comes down to is prayer and quiet. The best way to seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit is to stop for a time, be quiet, and listen to the welling up of the Holy Spirit within your own heart. Stop, and listen for it like you are seeking to hear the call of the geese flying high above in the still of the night.

Take time to do it, and be honest. Sometimes, it is definitely hard to separate your own hot temper, your own jagged resentments from what the Holy Spirit is prompting you to do, and perhaps it would be nice just once to say that the Holy Spirit is leading you to speak your mind on a matter, and let the chips fall where they may. That is always a mistake, for the Holy Spirit does not ever seek to divide, destroy, or cause hurt. The Holy Spirit is the voice of God, the voice of love, the voice of gentle reason. The Holy Spirit works against our earthly, inconstant, fallible egos, and pushed us toward reconciliation, harmony, peace and justice.

How do we seek to follow the Holy Spirit? We read about the aspects of the Holy Spirit in our Scriptures, we speak about it with our elders and with those who are wise in our lives, and we are quiet. We pray, we sit in a peaceful place and listen for what comes from within like we sit and listen for the cry of a goose in the middle of the night. We judge those upwellings against what we know of God’s love, and peace, and if they match what we know of God, that is our leading.

The World Needs More Thomases

2011-05-29T06:54:00.000-04:00

Baccalaureate Sermon
Wyoming Seminary, Kingston PA
May 28, 2011

Romans 12: 1-10
John 20: 24-29

I come to you today as a minister in the Protestant branch of the Christian church, but I’m aware of the multi-cultural nature of this graduating class, and indeed of the whole student body. I am not wise or learned enough to speak to each and every one of you using the wisdom of your own traditions; I can only speak to you out of the personally accumulated wisdom of my own.

I do trust and believe, however, that in each major tradition of this world, there is common wisdom; ways in which the divine reaches people so that their lives may be lived in harmony and peace. So, while what I may say to you today is informed by my life lived with the Christian Bible, I have faith that what I’ll say will have resonance in your experience.

I am proud to say that I am the parent of a student at this school. At one time, I was the husband of an employee of this school. I have also taught here, in an adjunct capacity. The times when I have taught here, I have come into contact with students who are quick, bright and sometimes even intimidating to their teacher, but graceful enough to be present in the class in body and in intellect. All of the students I have had have been eager, and have all sought to perform to the best of their abilities. They have all been involved in multiple activities which engage their bodies, minds, and talents, which I hope they will carry forward into the rest of their lives, keeping them grounded, rounded, and engaged. I am sure the same is true of all of this years’ graduates.

I want to name for you what I see as a great value to the education you’ve received here, and the environment in which the education is imparted, and for this, I would like to use a story that we in the Christian faith call the story of Thomas, or what has traditionally, but unfortunately, been called “Doubting Thomas”.

To refresh the story you heard earlier: Thomas was one of the twelve primary assistants, or Disciples, that Jesus had developed through his ministry. After the events of Jesus’ arrest, conviction, crucifixion and death, the Disciples and the other followers, assuming including Mary Magdalene, were gathered together in one place, all except for Thomas. We don’t know why he wasn’t there.
While the others were together in that locked room (they were hiding), Jesus, who had already appeared alive to Mary, appeared to them.

Well, of course, when Thomas showed up, they told him that they had seen Jesus, and he did not immediately believe. He said that he needed to personally verify what they were claiming before he would believe them, and the conclusion of the story is that Jesus did indeed return, and while he was there, stopped to prove to Thomas that he was risen from the dead, scars, wounds, and all. Only then did Thomas declare his belief in the Resurrected Christ.

In the world that you are inheriting, the world that so many call “post-modern”, there is a dire and desperate need for such people as Thomas. A life of faith, any faith, does of course require a certain amount of trust in aspects that are not empirically verifiable, of course, but with that being understood, much of what passes for faith and religion in this world would not pass muster if Thomas were to stand in front of it today and ask for proof.

Just last week, there was the latest of a long history of predictions of the parousia, which is the ten-dollar-world for the return of Christ in Christian doctrine. It was very interesting to me that there was so much attention paid to the event, as the man who predicted it had been wrong before, and indeed was wrong again.

I believe that what caught people’s attention wasn’t the correctness of his prediction. In fact, of all of the coverage I saw about it in the various forms of media, very little of it was a step by step exploration of his theory. Very little thought was given to the idea that perhaps it would be a good idea to check out what the Bible as a whole says; the traction that the story got was not based at all in a popular literacy or familiarity with the Christian Testament; instead, plenty of room, ink, radio waves, electrons, and website inches were given to fleshing out and debating what this particular pastor was saying, how it was that he saw the impending Armageddon coming. There were not a lot of people who truly explored what was said, but there was a large majority of people who kept hearing about it in popular culture. And they began to worry. It was covered up by a lot of joking and sarcasm, but there was also a significant amount of relief when it turned out that the prediction was wrong.

It was fascinating to me because the whole event did not show the power of the Bible, or of the Christian faith; it showed the power of advertising in a hard, difficult, and frightening time in our world.

One of the many authors collected in the Christian Testament, the apostle Paul, writes in his letter to the churches in Rome, in the late 1st Century CE, that the people who consider themselves followers of Christ are to “not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of (their) minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable, and perfect.” (NRSV)

Do not conform to this world. The education that you have received here has enabled you to be of critical mind when evaluating the news of the day and the trends of society. Be transformed by the constant renewing and refreshing of your intellect, and the reviewing of your opinions when seen in the light of new information. I truly do believe that the talents, gifts and graces that each of you have will be greatly needed in the world that you are inheriting; I truly believe that you will be of great use in the world, because of your education here. The world needs more people who are comfortable with difference, who have experienced people who are not like themselves, and have been trained to think critically and with rigor.

I believe that most of the zealotry and bigotry in the world, most of the rigidity and most of the extremism, is caused by ignorance. One cannot be blamed for initial ignorance, because someone cannot know everything upon being born. That is what life and education are for. And from living life and being taught, from traveling and from talking, for eating with and sitting on the plane or bus next to, real people, we learn compassion, we learn that the world is full of interesting and good people. And then it becomes harder to demonize them, to de-humanize them. It’s harder to see a people, a country, or a culture, or even a religion as a monolithic evil if you have known an individual from that people, country, culture or religion.

Thomas, when he was met by Jesus, declared that Jesus was Lord and God, upon verifying what it was that the other Disciples had claimed was actually true. He acted in faith for the rest of his life, according to Christian tradition, because his mind had been renewed by the information he had received.

May you go forth from this place, having faith not just in the traditions and rituals that you have been raised in according to your experience of the divine, but faith also in the talents, gifts and graces, including intellect and curiosity given to you, and trained and sharpened here.

The world needs more Thomases. Go out and be a Thomas.

If You're Wearing the Bib, You're in the Race

2011-05-22T08:05:00.000-04:00

1 Peter 2: 1-10

A while back, I spoke about a “Christ-shaped foundation”. I don’t know what images that may have created in your mind, back then, but some of them may have been about what a real Christian looks like to you.

What does a real Christian look like?

Let me ask this-what does a real runner look like?

I have begun transforming my body and my habits into those that are consistent with a lifestyle that includes running and exercise. I started this first as a way to combat the effects of the stress of Donna’s illness and imminent death; My blood sugar had skyrocketed, my cholesterol had risen, and I was gaining weight. All of these indicators of illness were back under control within a few months after I had started a daily routine of exercise and eating better.

In the course of learning about exercise and being around people who run and bike, I began to explore more about this new world, and decided to make it a goal to run a race. I have decided on the race, and it’s in November, which I figure gives me plenty of time to continue to get stronger and lighter.

When I look at photos of friends at races, especially the easier, shorter distance races, there are lots of people in the background who look all kinds of ways. There are short round people, tall people, muscular people and thin people. There are people all decked out in Lycra and the latest performance fabrics, wearing $200 shoes or even those spiffy new shoes that are just gloves for your feet. There are also people in beer t-shirts and their old high school gym shorts, wearing their lawn-mowing sneakers. Some are obviously runners, they look the part, but everyone has paid their money, gotten their race bib, and lined up at the start.

And when the gun goes off, they all begin the journey to the finish line. Some will run the whole way, some will walk all of it, and some will do a combination of both.

Who among that crowd is not a runner? Do you really have to run to be a runner? Who among that group of people wearing race bibs and following the race route isn’t trying to get better? It could be that they have been running since they were children, ran cross country in high school, and runs now for the health benefits. It could also be that the person who walks the whole way is seeking to live better, a healthier lifestyle, and the race is a milestone in doing so.

It’s a truth to me that, since you don’t pay the money and sign up for the race accidentally, you want to be there, you want what the preparation for the race gives you.

For many people, winning such a race is irrelevant. Participating and finishing it is.
There are several ways that runners try to get better, and doing all of them is where the greatest benefit is gained. Runners eat right-they eat lean, they eat whole, they eat green, they don’t gorge. Runners do more than run, they train and strengthen their muscles doing other things besides running. And runners run. There are infinite varieties of how and what they do, but they run. Swimmers swim, bikers bike, kayakers kayak. These are their foundations. Eat, strengthen, and do.

You might even say that these are the foundations, or the cornerstones, of success for them. Do them, and eventually, the benefits of these choices will become evident.

Now, think again for a moment about what the ideal Christian is, for you. Some people obviously look the part, like those Lycra-wearing runners may be ideal runners. On the other hand, some people, perhaps you might even include yourself in that bunch, are more the gym short-lawn mowing shoes crowd.

Just as we talk about eat strengthen and do, there are things that all Christians do to benefit themselves. Just for the sake of simplification, let’s use Bishop Job’s Three Simple Rules, which we’ve studied here before, and were his distillation of the General Rules written by John Wesley over 200 years ago. Do no Harm, do Good, Stay in Love with God.

Do no Harm: Just as runners eat right, Christians seek to treat each other properly-not gossiping, not speaking badly of people, seeking to minimize their own prejudices. They seek to see each person they meet as a child of God, a person created in the image of God, created with a little spark of God within them.

Do Good: Just as runners strengthen by doing exercises outside of running, so too do Christians seek to go outside of their “Christianly” pursuits in order to strengthen their faith. Cross-training, you might call it, pun intended! Runners need to keep their core strong, all of the muscles between their knees to chest, and devise all manner of ways to do so, through weights, stretching, and other exercises. Christians can keep their core strong by reading the Bible in different ways, trying to pray in new styles, and continually seeking new people to be with in settings outside of the church and the congregation. They may also seek out non-Christian pursuits, and reflect on them while applying their faith. A stagnant Christian is like a stalled runner, and it takes new practices and new ideas to break through and grow again.

Stay in Love with God: Runners run, swimmers swim, bikers bike, kayakers kayak. Christians do the things that are distinctively Christian. They pray, they read the Bible, they take communion, they worship and praise. They get baptized. They tell of God’s love and glory each day.

You might even say that these are the foundations, or the cornerstones, of success for Christians. Do them, and eventually, the benefits of these choices will become evident.

When you think of those people at the start of a race, it is difficult to impossible to see who the real runners are, because, if they are at the starting line, and wearing a bib, they are in the race. Those who walk are no less runners than those who run. They’re all trying to get better, do better, be better.

When you look around you in church this morning, it is difficult to impossible to see who the real Christians are, because if they are here, and a part of this community, they are obviously seeking God.

They are all trying to get better, do better, be better, too. They are seeking the cornerstones upon which they can build a better life.

So, just as at a race, how people are cheered on as they do their best, let us also cheer each other on, encourage each other, support each other as we seek to get stronger. Let us be a royal priesthood, a chosen race, a holy people.

No One Shall Know

2011-05-15T17:39:00.000-04:00

John 10: 1-10

ca. 2800 BC According to Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts (1979), an Assyrian clay tablet dating to approximately 2800 BC was unearthed bearing the words "Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common." This is one of the earliest examples of the perception of moral decay in society being interpreted as a sign of the imminent end.
ca. 70 The Essenes, a sect of Jewish ascetics with apocalyptic beliefs, may have seen the Jewish revolt against the Romans in 66-70 as the final end-time battle.

2nd Century The Montanists believed that Christ would come again within their lifetimes and establish a new Jerusalem at Pepuza, in the land of Phrygia. Montanism was perhaps the first bona fide Christian doomsday cult. It was founded ca. 156 AD by the tongues-speaking prophet Montanus and two followers, Priscilla and Maximilla.

380 The Donatists, a North African Christian sect headed by Tyconius, looked forward to the world ending in 380. (Source: American Atheists)

Late 4th Century St. Martin of Tours (ca. 316-397) wrote, "There is no doubt that the Antichrist has already been born. Firmly established already in his early years, he will, after reaching maturity, achieve supreme power." (Abanes p.119)

500 • Roman theologian Sextus Julius Africanus (ca. 160-240) claimed that the End would occur 6000 years after the Creation. He assumed that there were 5531 years between the Creation and the Resurrection, and thus expected the Second Coming to take place no later than 500 AD. (Kyle p.37, McIver #21)
• Hippolytus (died ca. 236), believing that Christ would return 6000 years after the Creation, anticipated the Parousia in 500 AD. (Abanes p.283)
• The theologian Irenaeus, influenced by Hippolytus's writings, also saw 500 as the year of the Second Coming. (Abanes p.283, McIver #15)

Mar 25, 970 Lotharingian computists foresaw the End on Friday, March 25, 970, when the Annunciation and Good Friday fell on the same day. They believed that it was on this day that Adam was created, Isaac was sacrificed, the Red Sea was parted, Jesus was conceived, and Jesus was crucified. Therefore, it naturally followed that the End must occur on this day! (Source: Center for Millennial Studies)

1000 There are many stories of apocalyptic paranoia around the year 1000. For example, legend has it that a "panic terror" gripped Europe in the years and months before this date. However, scholars disagree on which stories are genuine, whether millennial expectations at this time were any greater than usual, or whether ordinary people were even aware of what year it was. An excellent article on Y1K apocalyptic expectations can be found at the Center for Millennial Studies. (Gould, Schwartz, Randi)

1033 After Jesus failed to return in 1000, some mystics pushed the date of the End to the thousandth anniversary of the Crucifixion. The writings of the Burgundian monk Radulfus Glaber described a rash of millennial paranoia during the period from 1000-1033. (Kyle p.39, Abanes p.337, McIver #50)

1284 Pope Innocent III expected the Second Coming to take place in 1284, 666 years after the rise of Islam. (Schwartz p.181)

Feb 1, 1524 The End would occur by a flood starting in London on February 1 (Julian), according to calculations some London astrologers made the previous June. Around 20,000 people abandoned their homes, and a clergyman stockpiled food and water in a fortress he built. (Sound familiar? It's just like the doomsday cultists and Y2K nuts of today!) As it happened, it didn't even rain in London on that date. (Randi p.236-237)

Apr 28, 1583 The Second Coming of Christ would take place at noon, according to astrologer Richard Harvey. This was the date of a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, and numerous astrologers in London predicted the world would end then. (Skinner p.27, Weber p.93)

1600 Martin Luther believed that the End would occur no later than 1600. (Weber p.66)

1666 • As this date is 1000 (millennium) + 666 (number of the Beast) and followed a period of war and strife in England, many Londoners feared that 1666 would be the end of the world. The Great Fire of London in 1666 did not help to alleviate these fears. (Schwartz p.87, Kyle p.67-68)
• Sabbatai Zevi recalculated the coming of the Messiah to 1666. Despite his failed prophecies, he had accumulated a great many followers. He was later arrested for stirring up trouble, and given the choice of converting to Islam or execution. Pragmatic man that he was, he wisely elected for the former. (Festinger)

May 19, 1780 On this day in New England the skies mysteriously turned dark for several hours in the afternoon, causing people to believe that a biblical prophecy had come true and Judgement Day had arrived. In reality, the darkness was caused by smoke from large-scale forest fires to the west. (Abanes p.217)

Chronolological outtakes taken from: http://www.abhota.info/end1.htm

And so it goes. There have been significant predictions of the end of the world based on astrology, astronomy, Biblical interpretation, ancient calendars that run out, and clusters of floods and fires. There’s another significant one coming, one that is getting a lot of press, even to such news sources as NPR, because of the significant advertising budget spent by a group called familyradio.net. There are warnings on the sides of buses, and guys wearing t-shirts in Times Square. It’s set for this Saturday. And of course there has already been one movie about the one most people think of, the running out of the Mayan Calendar in 2012.

I believe that Christ will come back, and that will be the end of the world as we know it. But that will be a good thing, because what will come instead of blood and fire, the tearing apart of families and communities, is the final victory of love; an increase of every good thing that we have in our lives now-family, friendship, music, health, sunshine and rain, cherry pie. We will not need faith because we will be in God in a way that surpasses reassurance. It will be simple truth. All evil will be eradicated, all those who hunger will be fed, all those who are naked will be clothed, all those who are abused will be healed in body, mind, and spirit, and all disease will disappear.

But I am not so foolish as to start to think I can predict when that will be. All of these predictions are based on interpretations of Scripture that are unique and singular-some person deciding they know better than the rest of the world. These are people who decide that there are hidden meanings to scriptures, prophecies that are only divined by one’s own insight. Even Martin Luther, even our own John and Charles Wesley, separately each predicted an end to the world. And these people, acknowledged giants of our tradition of the faith, got it wrong, too.

If you want scriptural warrant for the end of the world, who better to listen to than Jesus? And what does he say?

Mark 13: 5-8
Mark 13: 21-23
Mark 13: 32-33

We do live in a scary time, it is true. But all times and all places are scary to someone, and we are not exempt. Earthquakes happen everywhere two tectonic plates meet. Tsunamis happen. Floods happen somewhere every year. We want to seek understanding of our times, and be faithful, both of which are reasonable. But let us not lose our heads; Many have come and gone in Jesus name, and we are still here. And Jesus himself tells us than no one shall know the day or hour. So, in other words, like a house break-in, we won’t see it coming.

It seems like a great waste of energy to me, and is a distortion of the way of Christ, when presented to those who do not believe. When Christ says be prepared, this is NOT what he means! He means that we are to be ever striving toward stronger faith, and a daily walk toward a better imitation of Christ in our thoughts, words, actions and lives.

Who would you rather listen to? Harold Camping, this pastor who is predicting the end of the world on Saturday? Hal Lindsey? Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins? Listen to the voice of the shepherd; do not listen to the thieves and bandits. Take comfort in the words of Christ.

Praise band rehearsal is next Saturday night at 6:30. See you all there, and see you all in church next Sunday.

What is Your Evidence?

2011-05-08T07:47:00.000-04:00

John 20:19-31

What was the evidence you received that allowed you to believe? What was it you saw, what was it you heard, what was it you read?

For me, it was about three weeks after I had prayed for Jesus to come to me, to come into my heart. Of course he was already there, but I did not understand that at the time. In the quiet of my bedroom in the apartment I shared with another worker at the winery I worked as a tour guide for, I prayed alone. I think I stepped forward at church, though I don’t remember when I did that. I had stepped forward in that traditional evangelical way; seeking to be forgiven the sins I had hurt people with, and seeking help and strength so as not to do it again.

And then I waited for evidence. I watched my life over the next three weeks, seeking proof that something had happened, because, frankly, nothing had happened that I could feel when I prayed in my room.

It was a small thing, but after three weeks I realized, as I was driving, that I was going the speed limit. I was not stressing out at the driver in front of me like normally would. I was peaceful behind the wheel, and ok with the posted law.

Now of course, it’s not as simple as “God made me obey the law.” But whatever sort of testosterone poisoning that all young men have that drove me to drive angry and impatient, whatever lack of calm there was within that 23 year old boy was replaced with a peace and a patience. Not a lot, of course, but enough to notice a change. This was my evidence that God was working to change my life. And so it has gone ever since-small incremental changes, over time, which build up, add up into a different path than I was already taking.

We all, if we stop to think, can remember times that we have noticed what could have been the hand of God guiding us, pushing us, or as one friend’s shirt says, “putting his arm around us and his hand over our mouth!”

This is all Thomas was asking for. Thomas, for some reason, was not there when Jesus came to the upper room the night he was resurrected, according to John’s story. So he had to hear it secondhand, and he is not to be blamed for not believing what he was told. Who did, the first time? Mary couldn’t make the mental leap to realize that the gardener was in fact Jesus; the disciples didn’t believe her sight unseen when she came and told them that the tomb was empty, and John is silent on whether they believed her when she ran back to them the second time and told them she had seen Jesus; and that night, when Jesus comes to them, Thomas is absent. They’re still putting the story together themselves, still seeking to reconcile the evidence of their experience with their knowledge of how the world works, when he walks in and says “what happened?”

So a week later, Jesus returns. Does he return just for Thomas, and as an aside, breathe on them the Holy Spirit (this is John’s version of what happens at Pentecost in Luke; much less intense, much more intimate)?

I don’t think that Jesus’ main reason for returning is for Thomas. I think his primary agenda is to return to commission the Disciples to tell the story, and give them the added backing of the Holy Spirit, so that those who hear may believe without needing to see. While he’s there, he gives Thomas an opportunity to catch up with everyone else. When the text ends with “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,” I think he’s referring to the Holy Spirit being given, and a commission to the disciples to tell the story with care and faith, not as a rebuke to Thomas for “doubting”; you’ve heard me say before that Thomas has an unnecessary and unfair reputation in the tradition of the church.

He’s just reacting the way any of us was-just because he’s the guy out getting the pizza and sodas, or whatever errand kept him from being there the first time, he’s “the doubter”.

We all need evidence of God’s presence and power in our lives. There are so few of us who are lucky enough to be knocked off our horses on the Damascus Road, like Paul. For many of us, it is a much more subtle working, less an earthquake and more a flood. Or to put into more positive terms-less a grand slam home run with fireworks, but the realization in the 8th inning that there hasn’t been anyone on base for the whole game. No-hitters sneak up on you.

For many of us, the church has always been there, we have been raised from infancy in an environment where God was always talked about, always present, always working. It may have happened so many times that we don’t remember it, but I do ask you-what is your evidence? How do you know that you are a child of God, and that God is working actively in your life, now? It's there, because God is always working in our lives, we just don't always realize it.

For me, that first time, it was looking at the speedometer, then looking at the speed limit sign on Redwood Road in Napa, California, and realizing they were closer than they used to be, and that my jaw was not clenching as I drove behind another car, the left lane open and inviting. Just that little thing and I could have also said “My Lord and My God!”

What is it for you? What is the evidence in your life that confirms for you the presence of God in your life?

First Fruits

2011-05-01T08:01:00.000-04:00

Exodus 31: 1-11
James 1: 16-18

We are all craftsmen, and craftswomen. There are things that we all do that are done every day, or are done on special occasions. Things that we take care to do well, because doing it well is important. Little things matter to craftspeople-like when you change a tire; you put the nuts into the hubcap so that they are kept together and lost less easily. Like the people at the Dairy Queen who can do that signature curlicue of soft serve at the top of the cone.

We are all craftspeople at something. Most likely many things. Things that we come to be known for. I’ve had a couple of conversations with Doug about the ethics of hunting; about taking only what is needed, and within the law, and how to act in the woods both to not scare off game and to not get yourself shot. I would say that he is a craftsman at hunting, and Seth is fast becoming one, as well. Some seasons he already outshoots his dad!

We are all craftspeople at many things. Everyone has their own way of doing laundry, of folding, and of how clothes are arranged in drawers. Those of us who have gardens have a certain rhythm of the seasons, whether we grow from seed or go buy already spouted plants. Some of us are good with flowers, some with vegetables.

Pizza guys take great pride in their style of stacking toppings, or preparing them-Grotto’s dices their onions very fine, Original Italian Pizza slices them.

My mom makes enchiladas in a very specific way, in the style she was taught by her family and her culture when she was young, and a long time ago, when the right spices weren’t as available all over the country as they are now, and before the advent of the internet, she used to have her brother send us the ingredients, sometimes including even the tortillas!

Families are taught down through the generations how to slice a turkey at Thanksgiving. Donna and I learned from that great food authority, Alton Brown on the Food Network, to cut off the whole breast at the bone, and then slice it into serving sizes. Some cut the serving size off the whole bird.

All of these things that we think are important, we do well. But have you ever thought that the things we do well might be a gift from God, a talent given by God?
Think of the pizza maker. To us, perhaps it is just a pizza. And we choose it just because we like it, we find it to be cooked well. We like the sauce, or the amount of toppings. But it’s a pizza, it isn’t rocket science, to us. To the pizza maker, though, it is. It is worthy of great care-the sauce has to be just right, the toppings have to be just so, the oven has to be at just the right temperature. But could it be that God has given the pizza maker gifts and talents do this? And with these gifts and graces, he is able to feed his family, provide a roof over their heads, and give joy to the people in his community? Could it be that making a good pizza is a gift from God?

What about gardening? What about hunting? Could the ability to do these well and good be gifts from God?

In the Exodus story for today, God calls out a specific craftsman, Bezalel, and an assistant, Oholiab, charges them with the creation of all of the worship hardware for the tent of worship. He gives Bezalel nothing less than the divine spirit, and he is to create for the people of Israel all of the candlesticks, the bookstands, the incense burners, the clothing of the priests, and the Ark of the Covenant itself, according to the designs and instructions God began giving back in Exodus 21. Now, if they have been charged to create all this stuff by God and for the Glory of God, then sure, it makes sense that they would be given the Spirit of God to do the iron work, the metalwork, the woodcarving, and the fine stitching.

But James tells us that every generous act of giving, and every perfect gift, is from God. We become the first fruits of God’s creation.

First fruits. Us. We are what is to be given back to God in thanks for the bounty of the earth. Not the first few zucchini that we grow that year. Not the first cut off the turkey, not the first diaper off the line up at the P&G plant. Us.

Since we ourselves are not to be sacrificed at an altar, then the meaning of first fruits changes, for James. Our whole lives are to be offered up as an offering to God in gratitude. It sort of changes how we do our homework each night, doesn’t it? It sort of changes how we practice our music?

The idea that all we do can be given as an offering to God changes our whole way of doing things. All of a sudden, the things we have been given care over, from mowing lawns to raising children, become holy. They become sacramental.

A friend of mine, who was once a Seminary president, told me once that he found it beneficial to see his desk as a communion altar, and that everything that crossed it was as important to God, and that it was his duty to make sure that every administrative task, every paper signed, be seen as just as important as the bread and wine at communion.

We are not all seminary presidents. But each time those of us who are nurses give meds, we can see it as offering the Lord’s Supper. Each time we finish working on a car, we can pass the keys to the owner over a communion table.

We are called by God, just like Bezalel and Oholiab, to elevate our talents and craftsmanship, in all that we do, to the level of offerings to God.

By offering our talents, gifts and graces to God, we are giving glory to God, and witness as well. By taking good care of what we are giving, and using it with dignity and grace and generosity, we show that God is good, and important to us.

And perhaps, if we see something as simple as making soup as an offering to God worthy of our best, I’d be willing to bet the soup tastes better!

Something New Under the Sun

2011-04-24T07:37:00.000-04:00

John 20: 1-18

Easter Sunday, April 24, 2011

It’s not the first time it happens in the Bible, after all. Lazarus is raised from the dead by Jesus not too much time before he himself is crucified. That one was so that the people around him could see the glory of God, according to the Gospel of John. I understand this to mean power, maybe-God can do this.

But I think it is also a precursor, a prelude-the thing in the movie that seems insignificant at the time, but it instead turns out to be the device that turns defeat into victory.

Think about it from the people at the time’s perspective. Jesus has died. He was killed in an absurdly insulting fashion, bloody, messy and in a manner fit for people who are less than human-non-Roman citizens. He taught some great things, died nobly, having chosen to show God’s love for humanity by choosing to die at their hand rather than use the power available to him to free himself and lay waste to those hurting him. He chooses to stay. That’s a great story, but that was three days ago.

Pontius Pilate’s gone on to other administrative duties, making more morally dubious choices to try to keep both the people of Judea and his Roman overlords happy.

The disciples are at a loss, kind of milling around, mulling things over, still not sure about whether it is safe to show their faces, and feeling like it has been a great ride, but I guess the time has come to get back to their daily bread, which still has to be earned, no matter how many times they have said to God to give to them this day that bread. They still haven’t figured out why Jesus just didn’t deal with everyone all at once, with one wave of the hand. They all believed he could, so we must think about why he didn’t.

Peter’s down in the deepest well of despair, having done exactly what he said he would never do, in denying Jesus three times before the cock crowed. He has betrayed the one man he loved the most in this world, and what makes it sting even more, Jesus even told him he was going to do it. He knew he would.

The Marys and the other women are left to contemplate the harshness of the world again, and their role in it-sure, the story may be over for the men, but someone’s still got to do the ritual cleansing and dressing of the body, which was put in the tomb three days ago, now. It’s not going to be too pleasant when they go back this morning to do the job of caring for Jesus’ body. They’ll have to endure the eyes of the soldiers sent to guard the tomb, endure the catcalls and wolf whistles, and figure out a way to open the tomb back up. Another unpleasant task that the women have to take up. Who’s got the Myrrh?

We know Mary believes in the resurrection at the last day-she says so when Jesus tells her that Lazarus will rise again. She says “yes, he will, on the last day.” He tells her that he is the resurrection and the life, and everyone who believes in him will not die, but live.

But she’s probably not thinking about that as she walks to the tomb, hands full of towels, spices and oils with which to properly dress the body that once was Jesus. She’s no Martha, but she’s probably still running thorough the to-do list, because, dreamer or not, as a woman this is still her role in that society. Remember not to make eye contact with the soldiers.

The prospect of dressing a body is already unpleasant. The discovery that there is no body to dress is probably worse.

It’s still dark, and the soldiers are blessedly, absent. Something else is clearly amiss, even from a distance. No soldiers, and the tomb is. . . open?

Oh dear.

What did those gentiles do with Jesus’ body?

So she drops her stuff and runs back to the gathered group of disciples and others, telling them the tomb is open and empty.

Simon Peter and the other disciple go into the tomb, sees this to be true, but goes home, not knowing what to do. Mary, in the meantime, has followed the two men back to the tomb, and is standing, crying, overwhelmed by all that has happened. She looks in again, and there are these two people sitting there. They’ve got smiles on their faces, like they know something she doesn’t. they’re not unkind, they just are in on the joy that she is about to realize, and, like parents that grin like fools just before their child opens a great present, are anticipating her joy.

“Why are you weeping?”

“They took away my Lord, and I don’t know where he is.”

She turns around, not wanting to talk to these two grinning fools dressed all in white, and bumps into the gardener.

He asks why she’s weeping, too. Didn’t these idiots pay attention to what happened on Friday? Men!!

“Mary…”

And the light bulb goes off. She remembers what happened to her brother. She remembers what he said then, that he was the resurrection and the life.

And she gets it.
Then she runs and tells the disciples again. Two sprints in one morning!

God can overcome it all. God could indeed have saved Jesus from that cross, laid waste to Jerusalem, been the wrathful God everyone remembers from their Bible stories. But here, finally, there was something new under the sun. God was not wrathful when his son was killed by human weakness, greed, and ignorance. God chose the proper moment, and showed even greater power than if he had mowed down the city. He showed grace and restraint, and that translates to love, and then he raised his own son from the dead.

It’s better to have great power and to not use it. It shows your grace, and love.

It tells us that death is not the final word. It tells us that there is something after, something bigger, something beautiful.

Christ is Risen, Indeed! Happy Easter!

Don't Know Much About Atonement

2011-04-17T07:57:00.000-04:00

Philippians 2: 5-11

What does it mean to say that “Christ died for us”? The ten dollar term for it is Atonement. The dictionary says that it comes from the middle English, “at-one-ment”, meaning reconciliation. There is no shortage, they say, of ways to think about why Jesus died on the cross. Most of the writers of the New Testament have some version, some understanding, of explaining or referring to why Jesus did it. Some say he is the last and final sacrifice God required, the last sheep thrown on the altar, and none need be sacrificed after him. Some say he is the price paid for our freedom from the ransom of sin. There are others, as well, and Paul alone makes reference to jesus death of the cross as a substitution for the death we deserve, a sacrifice in the Hebrew way, his death being the ultimate sacrifice of love for humanity, the way soldiers throws themselves on a grenade to save his brother and sister soldiers.

I wrestle with this, because I believe that God’s love is perfect, and all powerful, and I do not quite know why it is we need to have someone pay for the gift of that perfect love. So, take this with a grain of salt, but walk a little while with me, why don’t you, as I share with you where I am on this, on this Passion Sunday.

I believe in God. I believe that God loves the world. All of it. But the part he thinks about the most are it’s humans. They’re the ones he created to be his companions in the beginning. But because he created humans to have free will, so that they might choose him freely and not be housepets, he let go of a little control over humans. And because you and I have free will, we do not choose relationship with a loving God, always. God is always pursuing this relationship, however, and the Bible in it’s fullness shows us the different ways in which God has tried to reconcile us to him. There was the covenant that he gave to Moses, and that relationship took various forms such as the Ten Commandments and giving the people a king when they wanted it, though God didn’t think it was a good idea.

God’s people could not find their way back, over time, it got harder and harder for them to realize that they were moving farther and farther from God. So God sent Jesus, who had the perfect relationship with God-perfect in understanding, perfect matching of his will to God’s, perfect ability to show God’s love, though he was flesh and blood just like us. And Jesus’ life showed us that it was possible to live a life filled with the presence of God, even amidst the trials and tribulations of a human life, and in his doing so, both pointed to the existence of a loving God, and was a model for humanity to know that they could do it too. Humans could live in the presence and love of God, like him. Humans could live a life full of God. We would not have Jesus’ life, but our own lives would be soaked, drenched, infused with God. It was possible.

The problem then became people hearing this message and getting it, and dropping out of the existing religious structure. This became a problem to that structure, and the system it had set up to provide what was thought was needed. As so often happens, an institution set up for the benefit of it’s people soon turns it’s attention to its’ own survival, and it sometimes makes choices that are self-defending instead of choosing to serve the common good. Institutions are necessary mechanism to get anything large scale done, but as Mary Shelley wrote, the creation made with the best of intentions can sometimes go horribly awry, like Dr. Frankenstein and the synthetic human he created.

Presented with the existence of Jesus, the existing institution created for relationship with God did not choose to adapt and reconcile it self to God, it chose to destroy what threatened it. This is nothing against the particular people who were running the institution. There is nothing inherently evil in the priests in the temple-it could have been Ford owners, vegetarians, or Apple computer users. It just so happened that the people running the institution were Jewish priests, and their system was threatened.

And now we come to the instructive part. Anyone who speaks out, becomes a squeaky wheel, can choose to be quiet, to hush up, when confronted with the demand for their silence. To continue takes courage. A price will be paid for their continued agitation. As the threat ratchets up, it continues to take courage. When threatened, finally with the threat of your own death, it takes supreme courage to continue. Jesus chose to continue when it became clear that he was under threat of losing his life. Jesus’ bravery was itself evidence of a loving God. Jesus’ choices showed us that a relationship with God makes us perfect in this life-brave, loving, peaceful. Oh, he was not unaware of what was before him. He was scared, he was afraid of the pain, and there were moments of doubt. He was, after all, human. But he discerned that his death would be the best evidence for God’s love-here he is, the model of God on earth. It’s a crossroads; he could make himself be free, lift himself down off the cross, and demonstrate God’s power. Or he could stay there, and demonstrate God’s love and the courage of the people who are in God.

Well, we already knew about God’s power. There was much less evidence of God’s love in that world. So Jesus chose to stay up there, and to die.

We can show love to those whom we love through roses, through gifts, through support and through affection. But sometimes, what’s called for is sacrifice. I’ve already mentioned the sacrificial soldier. A loved one donates a kidney. A spouse accompanies their love through a final journey of disease, when they could very easily run and leave them to their fate, alone.

This is the love that Jesus showed us by submitting to the religious authorities and their silly little ways. God’s love was demonstrated to us one final time, in Jesus’ choosing to die rather than exercise the power available to him.

This is what we worship, this is what we honor, this is what we revere.

May it always be so.

Time=Rice

2011-04-03T07:53:00.001-04:00

Ephesians 1: 8b-10

We have this sense, in the world we live in, at least among people my age, because I can’t speak to the retired experience, that there is always more to do, there is always something left on the list, always another place to drive to. I think, however, that there are some retired people who run just as hard, do just as much, are committed to as many worthy goals.

We’re all doing our best, and we all really do climb some pretty tall mountains every day in our to-do lists. We’re all trying to be productive members of society, and we all seem to be doing pretty good jobs.

When Donna was sick, there were times I would drive down Demunds road and through The Cut three times in a day, headed to a hospital visit, then picking up Joe from school, and sometimes needing to stop to pick up something to cook quickly before an evening meeting. Now, as I continue to explore and construct what my new normal life is, I remember those days, and I wonder if, now that the time of extremity is past, if a day constructed by God wouldn’t look a little different.

Here’s a question: If you were to take your daily schedule and hand it over to God, physically put it in God’s hands, and say to God, “OK, you show me what you mean by proper use of time,” what do you think you’d get back?

Now, I think that there would be more time blocked off for family, and there would be less time blocked off for work. I think there would be more time for hobbies, and less time for TV. I don’t know if there would be more time for prayer, because I think personal prayer is a matter of intentionality rather than a calendar entry. I think it’s like breathing, or at least it is the goal. Praying with others, however, would take a calendar block

I think, but I’m not sure.

I am pretty sure, however, that there would be more time for rest. Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8 says that: For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.

God’s sense of time is eternal and balanced. So as we seek to construct our lives, to be good stewards of the time we’re given, perhaps we should seek the same balance.

It’s been noticed that the life of monks was split roughly into thirds-one third rest, one third prayer, one third work. There’s a quote I read once, in a book of wisdom from the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the people who went out into the Egyptian desert in the 3rd and 4th century that says (and I’m paraphrasing, here):

“If you are at manual labor in your room and it comes time to pray, do not say ‘I will use up my supply of branches for the basket I am weaving and then I will go pray’, but rise immediately and go to prayer. Otherwise, little by little, you will come to neglect your prayer, and your soul will become a wasteland devoid of any spiritual and bodily work.”

Can you imagine, in our culture, if you went to your bosses, say up at the P&G plant, and told them that, in order to keep your life balanced, it was not a good idea either to have such long shifts, or to work either night or swing? I have a feeling that that meeting would not go well. Production must be met, and if you weren’t willing to work the way that’s been set up, there are plenty of people who would.

The problem is, in God’s eyes, your request would be entirely proper. Corporations do not view the world the way God does. God has a sense of time that is eternal-he can see the whole scope of time, from beginning to end, the way we can see a grain of rice, one end to the other. Our struggle, as children of God, is to realize and keep that perspective as God’s children, and yet still be able to function in this world, keep food on the table and a roof over our heads.

We can’t always control what demands are placed on us, by work, by children, by volunteer obligations. But we can grow spiritually to the point where we realize that the task that seems so urgent, really isn’t so important in the long view. Or maybe the urgencies start to change. We can begin to realize that times of rest, times of prayer, times with friends and family, are just as important, and perhaps more so to our souls, as times of “productivity.” Sabbath, the idea of a dedicated time of rest, and times of prayer, truly aren’t just quaint ideas. They really do matter. We need down time, we need time to restore our perspective.

So, if you were to hand your calendar over to God, and he was to apply his perspective to your daily routine, how would it change? If you were to apply the old monastic rhythm of 1/3 work,. 1/3 prayer, 1/3 rest, how would it change?

So, for this Lent, are you perhaps willing to try to change a few things?

And can you begin by realizing that most of the things in our lives are truly not worthy of the “urgent” flag we stick to it?

Will you take a step toward living in God’s time?

The Chirp of the Alarm

2011-03-27T07:50:00.000-04:00

Isaiah 55: 1-3

It was about 3 in the morning. I don’t know what it is about that time of night, but that’s the hour of wakefulness for me most of the time. I was probably sleeping lightly, and it was the only sound in the quiet. A single chirp. Not from outside, not from a bird. The fire/carbon monoxide alarm. It woke me right up, and I lay there listening for another one, listening for the alarm to fully engage, and sniffed for smoke.

None of it happened, nothing smelled weird, and with electric heat, we don’t have to worry too much about carbon monoxide. But it didn’t chirp again, so it wasn’t the battery. I don’t know now whether I imagined it. But I did start to imagine, as I lay there in bed, what the plan was to get Mom and Joe out of the house. Mom’s dog Lily would stay with her anywhere, so I didn’t need to transport her. Rocket the cat would just have to find his way out, because in a situation like that, who knows where he’d go.

I began to think about what I should grab on my way out. I remember a former preacher telling us that he’d grab his Bible and his wedding ring. Would I grab any of my Bibles? No, they’re all replaceable-God’s word is as eternal as the next purchase at Amazon. Maybe the plaster casts we made of Donna and Joe’s hands? Probably. The pictures of her we made for the memorial services? Perhaps, but all three were also available in various forms of electronic media.

In my fevered 3 AM thinking, where all perspective is lost, distortions become reality, and all the little things that worry us become as large as last week’s moon, I began to worry about all of the things I’d have to replace in a house fire. Of course, all of the humans and the other living things in my household would be out, but after that, it would be a significant loss. It’s easy enough to read in Matthew that “we should not store up for ourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal (and where hard drives break down and destroy precious photos and music files, we could add today), but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven.” Theoretically, we understand that. But house fires do have a way of affecting our spirits, nonetheless.

Possessions are important. Cars are tools, musical instruments feed our souls, a thirty year old jacket still helps us remember who we were and are. Photographs are the last link to loved ones who have died. I get Jesus’ point, that true permanence is to be found in God’s promises and glory, that there will come a time when we will not worry about anything, and we will be focused only on, surrounded only by love. And I’ll say amen to that. But he’s right-Where my treasure is, there my heart will be, also. And sorry, I confess that my heart is in the memories that some material possessions represent. My heart is not in material wealth; my heart is in memory. And these things are rather harder to replace than a car or a guitar, or a television-those other things can be replaced by money from insurance policies. However, I would miss the art that Josiah has created and that we framed and hung on the wall. I would miss those hand casts that we made. Unfortunately, these things can’t be protected or replaced. You can’t build bigger barns and moats around mementoes. You could put them all in safe deposit boxes, fireproof bags, and such, but then they’d be locked away, and not with you, and what’s the point of that?

The book of Isaiah was probably written, scholars tell us, in two or three parts, over the course of 50-70 years. So it is probably true that there were at least two different authors. The first part was written as the Israelites were being taken away in what we refer to as the Babylonian Captivity; Babylon forcibly relocated the cream of the Israelite society back to their capital. The second part was written as they were allowed to return home by the conqueror of the Babylonians, Cyrus the Great of Persia. By the 55th chapter of the book of Isaiah, the audience had become the people returning to the land of Israel, the sons and daughters of the people taken away. They are now returning to a land that has been changed, and for some, those changes ruined the great golden Israel of their parents and grandparents. The land in the stories they’d been told for their whole lives was now shown to be lost forever.

But they have a chance to make a new Israel, to not follow in the mistakes of their parents, and to follow God in a way that their ancestors had lost sight of. “incline your ear, and come to me”, God says in Isaiah’s voice; “listen, so that you may live. . .”

Sometimes it takes something as drastic as an invasion, or a house fire, or the death of a loved one to refocus out hearts and minds on what is important.

Mementoes remind us of love, of joy, of pleasure. The emotions that they draw from us are reflections of the love, the joy, the pleasure we will feel at the moment we can take a drink of that milk, that wine we can buy without price; the moment we feel true satisfaction in the labor we have performed. There are moments on earth we can feel these things, and they are but glimpses of the way heaven is going to work.

Living in God, it seems, is an exercise in delayed gratification. It is a hundred percent certain that, by living in God, loving as God loves, living with the integrity and truthfulness of Jesus, that the fleeting moments of satisfaction of a job well done, or the flashes of feeling in romantic love, or the temporary contentment of a warm blanket or a song that just pierces your heart will be our permanent state.

We are invited into an abundant life. We just have our own definition of abundant; one that is rich in love, value, and spiritual satisfaction. It is an abundance that makes material possessions, even ones of singular sentimental value, irrelevant.

It is a comfort that I find is worth having at three in the morning, when the fire alarm chirps. Yes, in a house fire, the hand casts would be destroyed. But there will come a time, I believe, when the spirit of the hands that made those casts will again hold my hands, and every love that I have ever loved will one day surround me.

This is the promise of Isaiah, this is the promise of heaven; this is the promise of life in God.

Bicycle Tires in the Dirt

2011-03-20T07:47:00.001-04:00

John 3: 1-17

Back toward the end of January, I preached a sermon that described a portion of what we understand salvation to be in the Wesleyan tradition, a portion of the doctrine called “Arminianism”, which is a central doctrine of United Methodist belief.

I said then that “it is wholly by God’s pleasure that he leads us both to act and to think," and further,

“This would seem to be fine and clear for those that have found Christ and have been led to a decision for faith in Christ. But Wesley is clear in this additional point-God works his will in us long before we have even figured out who God is, and he is pulling us slowly towards Godself, the way that even a slow moving river can push a canoe.

Some would call the moment of decision that we declare our faith in Christ as the moment of our salvation. Wesley, and the doctrine of our practice, however, allows for there to be either one large dramatic decision, like Paul getting knocked off his horse and being rebuked by Jesus himself, or room for many small decisions, like a child attending summer camp and Sunday school, and being taught all along the way.”

These statements are my best understanding of how we are to think of being “saved”, in Wesleyan thought. In other words, that Ten dollar word from before, “Arminianism”, is our theological “special sauce”, our “eleven herbs and spices”, our “secret recipe”.

So then we come to today’s scripture, the story of the Pharisee Nicodemus’s visit to Jesus in the night. This scripture is very important for how Christians talk about this concept of being saved, because it carries within it the phrase “born from above” in verses 3 and 7. The footnote in the NRSV says you can alternatively think of “from above” as “anew”; “you must be born anew”. In the King James Version, and in the NIV, this word translated as “again;” as in “You must be born again.”

Now, I am no Greek scholar-I was such a young Christian when I entered seminary that instead of taking the Greek and the Hebrew classes, I took the extra classes in Bible in English, because there were still stories I hadn’t heard yet. That being said, I do know that the Greek word for whet we are talking about here, in verses three and seven, is “anothen”, you must be born “anothen”, and the most common translation of this word is “from above, and NOT “again”.

You might think that this is perhaps unnecessary quibbling, that it’s an “how many angels dance on the head of a pin” question, but I will claim that there is an important distinction. Nicodemus hears “again” when Jesus says “anothen”, and this is the basis of his question How can one be born a second time when you’re old? Can you really re-enter the womb?”

No. Of course not. And Jesus takes off on a pretty detailed explanation. It matters to Jesus that Nicodemus gets it right, so we probably should, too.

In our modern culture, we think we understand the phrase “born again” as the one think most needed for a relationship with Christ, and that we are “saved” when we are born again.

As if it is a one time thing.

A relationship with God is a lifetime thing, and just as in a marriage, where there are times of distance and times of connection, and when looked at over time, the relationship swings together and apart like the paths of two bicycles on a dirt road.

I spoke before of there being a connection to God from the first breath we take to the last; God is a part of our lives, shaping us, guiding us, before we even know God exists. The place that God is guiding us is toward God.

Being born “anothen”, I would suggest, is that moment when we realize what is happening, and we accept it. And in some lives, where the two bicycles have spread themselves out very far, coming back together again, and the comfort given from not being lost anymore, can happen several times. Some lives just take wide and varying tracks.

The implication of being born “again,” especially the way that we get it from popular Christian culture, is that it happens only once, and that when we were once “out”, we are now “in”. But I would suggest to the children of God that they, we, have never been “out”, and that the feeling of “in” is only the realization of God’s presence all along.

Wesley calls these moments of realization “regeneration.” We see all around us today the first bulbs of spring pushing out their shoots-some yards are already seeing them push up, and the daffodils we have seen this week are grown from bulbs that regenerate ever year. These bulbs need a certain set of conditions to begin to push up shoots-a certain amount of warm weather, a certain amount of moisture, and something that we really don’t know about, something that it knows but we don’t. maybe it’s grace!

Regeneration is not a one time thing. For some of us, it is cyclical; for some of us, it is erratic; for some of us, it is different every time. Some are large and dramatic moments in our lives, some are small and barely noticeable. As we know, and have been recently reminded about the science of earthquakes, some can be huge and dramatic and devastating, and some you only know happened because the pen jumped on the paper-you didn’t feel it. Growing in faith is a lot like that; some people experience devastating and dramatic shifts, and some people grow in faith through many, many small moments.

I would suggest to you today that when we are born “anothen”, born from above, it isn’t something coming to us we did not have before. It is something that has been with us all along. And for some of us, that realization will happen a couple times in our lives.

And Jesus will have pointed the way to us, through the Holy Spirit, and through the stories of Scripture. God did not send Jesus to the world, to us, to condemn us, to make us choose salvation or damnation, depending on only once chance to make one choice in a long life. Jesus was sent by God so that we might understand who God is, and what it means when we hear “God loves us.”

And being “saved” is just realizing that this is true.

Of Babies and Bathwater

2011-03-09T15:17:00.000-05:00

“The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”

Psalm 51

Ash Wednesday, 2011
Preached at Center Moreland UMC for the Center Moreland Charge

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, which is the traditional Christian season of repentance and rededication. In this season, it is commonly expected that you will abstain from something in order to tip your balance of life, your attention, so as to re-focus on something else. By abstaining from a common item, food or something, each time you reach for it, you will be reminded that you are to be thinking about God, or your sins, or something edifying.

We late-coming Protestants may scoff at this traditional practice at this Christian season, or we may find ways to adjust it to our understanding, sometimes as a egotistical and hubristic way of doing it better than the traditions. I’m pretty sure, however, that if you are here tonight, you are not one of those scoffers.

There is value in questioning traditions, but sometimes, the answer to the value question is “well, it just works.” And after trying to re-invent the wheel, we Protestants come to the blinding and perhaps embarrassing epiphany that, indeed, there was some value in the tradition we were handed, that after centuries of practice, there is wisdom that has been distilled. So maybe our growing observance of Ash Wednesday, and maybe even Lent itself, is our way of going out into the yard and picking up the baby that we threw out with the bathwater.

So, “giving up something” for Lent does have some value, as long as what it is that you give up does point you into a better relationship with God. I have a hard time believing that giving up chocolate, as an example that I have commonly heard people choose to abstain from, is a spiritual task. It is perhaps a food that we eat too much of, and we wish to stop, but Lent, if I may humbly suggest, is not a time to start a new diet. Lent is not the time to begin to escape from your addictions.

I will readily accept, however, that chocolate, as a symbol of personal excess and indulgence, needs to be greatly reduced in some people’s lives, and Lent is the time when, with support of friends, family, and fellow followers of Christ, we can take on the task of examining our own personal commissions of the sins of, again as an example, gluttony and greed.

Tonight’s Psalm speaks of the preferences God has with regard to what it is that God wants from us. We hear it in other places, as well, about how God does not want our rituals, God does not want our burnt offerings. Instead, time and again, in the Scriptures, we hear that God wants us. Just us. Unwashed, imperfect, delusional, mistaken, hurting, frightened, arrogant, us. God wants us humble and open.
God wants us to come to him the way Jonah did after three days in the belly of the whale.

Chastened.

Chastised.

Uncomfortable.

God wants us to come the way that Peter approached Jesus that morning on the beach as the disciples were eating the fish that Jesus had grilled;

Shy.

Timid.

Unsure of ourselves, but really honestly wanting to make amends.

The Psalm says: 17The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

Ash Wednesday is not for everyone. Lent is not for everyone. We’re Protestant enough to not expect everyone to toe this line, walk this path.

Lent is a non-scriptural, Church-derived practice, misused for abusive purposes by some over the ages, neglected by others through the centuries, and for some people, today, it is simply irrelevant.

Let me gently suggest that we have, tonight, a few of us, indeed gone out into the yard and picked up the baby. We see value in what lies before us, and we are choosing to present ourselves to be laid bare, in some way, by God.

Because that is how we grow. Just as Paul writes to the Corinthians that what we sow does not come to life unless it dies, and what we sow is just a seed and does not resemble the body of what will be, so too what we will grow into will very likely not resemble who we once were, and may not even resemble who we are now.
May you leave tonight with your Spirit under pressure, like popcorn heating up in the oil. May it crack somehow in these next 6 weeks, like a seed with a sprout. May your heart grow contrite, may your spirit be broken.

May you arrive at Easter morning with yourself as your sacrifice; white, shriveled, crawling up on the beach, and may the resurrection of Jesus join your brokenness back together into the body that God has chosen.

Because God will not despise a broken and contrite heart.

Find a Mountain to Climb

2011-03-06T08:05:00.000-05:00

Matthew 17: 1-13

Transfiguration

I’ve said before, and some of you may remember, that I have a certain sympathy, a certain affinity for Peter. He’s one of the major characters in the gospels, he’s present somewhere in almost every narrative, and, what makes him so sympathetic to us, ordinary human beings, is that he’s usually overreacting, failing, coming close but not quite to whatever Jesus means. And almost always his actions teach us hearers a lesson.

I’m sure you are familiar with the word epiphany, because you hear it here. In the church context, it means having a vision of the divine.

Peter has at least four I can think of, off the top of my head. There is the episode where he is walking on water, demonstrating his faith after he sees Jesus coming to him over the waves; there is his vision on the rooftop, where he is shown various kinds of foods, kosher and un-kosher, and told to kill and eat; there is his presence in the upper room when Jesus comes to them all, except Thomas, even though the door is locked; (well, let’s count that twice, because he’s also there when Jesus comes back just for Thomas), and there is today’s story.

Jesus invites Peter, James, and John up onto the mountain with him. The scriptures are pretty tight-lipped here, because it doesn’t say that there was any other reason for Jesus to have gone up there, other than to show Peter, James and John this event. Once they get there, Jesus is “transfigured”, or “transformed”.

He begins to glow with an inner light, and his clothes become dazzling white, instead of whatever earth-toned color his robes usually are. And then he is joined by Moses or Elijah.

Do you know how, when you are dreaming, people will appear and you know who they are, though you don’t know why? That must have been what it was like for Peter James and John, because Moses and Elijah had both lived thousands of years before them; it would be as if we were standing together, and suddenly here is Leif Ericson, the Viking explorer, and King Ethelred the Unready of England standing with us. Would you know who they are just by sight? I wouldn’t. Moses and Elijah are far more well-known to Peter, James and John, of course, at least their stories are, but their faces would not be any more familiar. It would be a little bit spooky, right?

So, there is Jesus, glowing like a lantern, in clothes whiter than any bleach could make them, standing with the two biggest Giants of their faith-the guy who will come before the Messiah, and the guy who is the founder of everything they know and believe about the world, about God, even bout food and marriage.

What would you do, when you realized what was going on?

Building some sort of shrine all of a sudden doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, does it? Peters’ no dummy, he realizes what is happening, and he wants to honor the situation, the event, the way we always want to honor these things. Jacob wrestles with the angel, he piles up a bunch of rocks and pours olive oil over them, marking the site of his epiphany. I’m not sure if anything happened in that rock grotto across from King’s College in Wilkes Barre, on whatever it is Pierce St. becomes when you cross the river, but that’s a pretty considerable shrine.

But God seems to intervene here, just as soon as Peter says that bit about building a three-boothed shrine. It gets very cloudy and foggy, but it’s that kind of fog that is shallow, and the sun is shining brightly above it-Josiah and I call it “fogshine”. That suddenly gets thick, and a voice announces to them that Jesus is his son, God loves him, and they should listen.

What was already an amazing, life altering event, worthy of a shrine, has now become terrifying, as God Goself has now spoken to them, and it doesn’t matter what tone God uses to speak-a commanding voice from nowhere, everywhere, from the fog, the mountain rocks, the ground, still commands attention like nothing else.

What can you do? You bow and hide your face. Filled with awe, indeed. I think I’d describe it, imagining what it would be like, as some combination of “This is amazing!” and “Make it stop!”

And here is what I think god means when he says: “Listen to him:” Jesus tells them “don’t tell anyone what has just happened until I am raised from the dead.”

So they don’t. And Peter has several more experiences with Jesus as a divine being, he’s already had one or two, which, at the end of his life, gives him the perspective no one else has, makes him into the Rock of the church Jesus expected him to be.

I want us to realize that in Peter’s story, ordinary people with faults and impulsive moments, people who make grave mistakes and regret them sharply, can still have a lifetime of rich experiences with God.

You may be sitting in that pew, listening to me, saying “I have never had anything like that.” You may be saying “I don’t want anything like that.” Well, perhaps. But’s it’s there for you, if you go and get it. Peter dropped his nets and followed Jesus, because Jesus was right in front of him. You might be called to such a ministry, or you might be called to stay right here, raise your children, play with your grandchildren, volunteer, eat, shop for food pay bills, sleep; live a life.

But, just as Jesus separated himself occasionally from his ministry in order to rest, recharge and pray, so can you. So should you. Kids go to camp, and almost always there is a time when they have experienced God-usually in an unstructured moment, but it happens. I’ve been on retreat, and if it has worked and the people OI am with mesh, it is indeed a mountaintop experience. You can’t stay there, we know, you have to come down the mountain sometime, your regular life awaits you down here, but those high moments of faith are available to you, and will strengthen you down here.

With the wisdom of his years, Peter, if he were to appear to us right now, would probably say to us that the life of faith is not constantly seeking life-changing experiences-it’s taking care to see God in everyday life, but make sure that we plant in our lives time away, to concentrate just on God. We travel away; go camping or to Disney to reconnect with our families; we go to the Poconos or to NYC to reconnect with our spouses-we go away to get closer.

It is no different with God. This Lent, I encourage you to find a way, make a plan, do something to be with God, alone, for a time. Peter went from mountain, to mountain.

What mountain will you climb to be with God this year? Use this Lent to make a plan.

Straddling the Fence

2011-02-28T15:26:00.000-05:00

Matthew 6: 24-34

I wish I knew how to preach this text.

Sometimes, when you read the Bible, it just seems so clear what the lesson is—love one another. Love God. Don’t judge others lest you be judged. Easily said, not so easily done, I know, I have trouble with that too, but it’s not so hard to say what God is actually saying to us.

But this text is hard for a different reason. Don’t worry? God will take care of it all? Easily said, but then you look around and see people who are living lives that, compared to yours, are terrible. They’re hungry, they’re suffering or in great pain, they don’t have sufficient clothing or housing, and you think to yourself, God sure doesn’t seem to be taking care of them. The lilies of the field are a little better off, it seems, when you compare them with the people living under tarps on the sides of muddy hills during hurricanes in Haiti.

So, I have to go to people who are wiser than me. And they point to the first verse of the text, the one I almost dropped because it didn’t seem relevant, but it turns out to be the key to the whole thing.

When you are serving mammon, or wealth, you make certain choices. You wish to protect your possessions. You put your wealth onto barns, and then put those barns into barns. You put electric fences around those barns, and dig moats outside the fences, and put piranha and alligators in the moats.

But now, you’re having to pay for two sets of anti-termite treatment, one for each set of barns. You have a whopping electric bill from the fence, you have to pay, feed, and house a guy to ride around the fence to make sure it’s in good order, and have to replace the wire and the posts when they rot or rust. You have to feed the fish and the gators, and you have to buy stuff to put into the water to kill mosquitoes.

So who’s serving who here? Seems to me the wealth in those barns are now starting to call the shots. Seems to me that you’re working awful hard to maintain a bunch of bags of coin.

And it isn’t giving back.

There’s stewardship, and then there is slavery, and wealth doesn’t give back.

Now, imagine what happens when you serve God with that kind of energy and care. We’re guided by the Bible in how to serve God, the words of Jesus give us the clues we need. Love God, and love your neighbor. Wealth sitting in bags of money stays silent. God says go out into the world and serve it.

Now, in our modern life, there are certain things required of us. Car insurance both to help us pay for the times we have damaged someone else’s mode of transport, and to pay for our own, which is so necessary to our basic way of life in this modern world. Warm clothing because we live in a cold climate. Housing and heat for the same reason. All of these things are necessary, and it’s reasonable to expect that we provide for ourselves to the best of our ability, without to much infringement on the rights of those around us to live safely.

It’s a long way, however, from enough wood to burn each winter to cutting down the whole forest. It’s a long way from warm clothing to a $1000 coat. It’s a long way from safe transportation to buying a car because of the status of the badge on the hood. It’s a long way from safe, adequate housing to having arches, columns, pillars and fountains.

This isn’t to say that you should go overly Spartan, either—buying the cheapest thing because it is the cheapest, whether it addresses your needs not-that’s still worshipping wealth, it’s still a showy display. No; good quality stuff, made and expected to last and taken care of well is a stronger witness than buying either showy expensive stuff or cheaply made, disposable stuff.

Jesus, when he says these things, is not talking with his head in the clouds. He is human too, he understands that we do have material needs. He also understands that not all of us get to go to the sea and pick the required tax out of the fishes’ mouth.

No, his point is that worry can block our relationship with God the same as anything else, and his words to his disciples, his audience on that mountain, and really, to us too, is that we are god’s children, and if we act as if we are God’s children, are sensible, industrious, and generous, as we are called to be, we need not worry about all of these things.

Those folks sitting on the muddy hillside in Haiti during the hurricane are no less God’s children than we are—their plight is not evidence of their somehow being less children of God than we are. If anything, in this interconnected world, we should perhaps think about what our society has done to force them into a place where rain and earthquake impacts their life so harshly. If we are God’s children, and they are God’s children, then we are family, are we not?

How do we treat family?

This is why I don’t know how to preach this text. I worry too. I don’t know how I, as an ordinary American, affect people around the world. I can’t stand up here in this pulpit and say “you’re a sinner, repent!”, because I am one, too.

I straddle that fence between God and wealth, as we all do. God help us all, God guide us all, God forgive us all.

Jesus-Shaped Foundation

2011-02-20T15:44:00.000-05:00

1 Corinthians 3: 10-23

This morning’s passage from Paul’s letter to the Christians in Corinth is an extension of the more familiar “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gives the growth” passage that comes immediate before this one. He’s continuing on in that vein of thought, but changing his metaphor from agricultural to architectural.

He says “No one can lay another foundation other than the one that has already been laid, which is Jesus Christ.” To Paul, his teachings to the Corinthian church (and every where else he went) are Christ centered, and anyone who seeks to follow Christ, and listens to teachers, can measure the quality of the teaching by that one yardstick—how is it about Jesus?

When Paul says “so, whether someone builds with precious stones, wood, grass, or hay, each one’s work will be clearly shown”, he’s not referring to the quality o the building materials. He’s referring to whether the walls that are built are load bearing. When he says “they will be revealed with fire,” I don’t think he literally means that they will be tested with a torch. You’d think that precious stones would be pretty fire resistant, and wood and hay would be terrible, but what do we mostly use for building houses? Wood. I’ve seen plans for houses, made of hay bales that are highly insulated and warm in the winter, and I am sure there are allowances made for their flammability, or e3l;se they wouldn’t meet code, you know?

No he doesn’t mean the quality of the materials, he means how they are used. If precious stones are what you have, then use them well. If hay is what you have, then use it well. The foundation, Jesus Christ, is sufficient to support and hold any sort of material, as long as you stay on the foundation.

The old Scottish Bible scholar William Barclay takes the metaphor of building materials to mean that everyone has a different level of ability with regard to intellectual worldly wisdom. Some people love the world ideas, and have the ability to entertain ideas different from their own with no danger of disturbing their faith. Others prefer to stay to what is proven, sure, and simple, and do not care to entertain ideas at all.

I’ll leave it to you to decide for yourself which are the precious stones and which is the hay!

People approach their faith in different ways, and Paul seems to say here that they are none better than the other. Precious stones are just as good s hay. What matters is how they test out under duress, how they do when the engineers get hold of them.

Barclay develops his thought further in this passage by saying that yes, each of these ways of thinking, these building materials, found in every congregation on earth, can be useful, but what happens so often is that one way of thinking or another often becomes full of itself, and begins to believe itself better than others. To extend the metaphor, precious stones may indeed be fireproof, but bricks of such small size take a lot of mortar, and the whole enterprise is very expensive. Building with Gold or silver would e less expensive, but are very soft metals, not load bearing, and melt in heat. Building with wood, or straw would be much cheaper, and are much more stable, but are the most flammable materials Paul lists.

Barclay makes the connection in his own mind that the metaphor Paul is using refers to the problem of intellectual wisdom, the Greek worship of the power of the mind, and that somehow, competing wisdoms, brought from different schools of thought, are infecting the congregation and causing dissention. We see it in Paul’s previous passage, when he talks about people claiming their faith derived from him, or Apollos, or other preachers who have come through. The sin of pride has arrived in Corinth, and everyone believes their own ideas are superior.

What matters, according to Paul, is how the building conforms to the original foundation—however it looks, in whatever way it fills space, as the architects say, does it stay true to the foundation? Is it Jesus shaped?

We have the same struggles here, today. Some of us here want to express our faith the way we hear it in Christian radio, from Focus on the Family, and from TV preachers. Others of us reach backwards historically, to John Wesley and Francis Asbury, who was the first great preacher of the Methodist way of salvation in America. Or they reach back to read the teachings of Martin Luther or John Calvin, or forward to Billy Graham or Martin Marty, or John Dominic Crossan. Others of us want to just rely on our own understandings of the Bibles we read, and consider the thoughts of others to be suspect. And others just don’t know what to think, and feel pushed and pulled in many directions.

Paul does not say that Apollos’ preachings are best. He does not claim his own are. He’s saying that however you came to the faith, from Apollos, from Cephas, from him, or some other route, fine. What matters is whether your style of faith is Jesus-shaped. Does it conform to the foundation that Jesus laid? Do your actions show the love of Christ for the world and all its peoples? If it doesn’t, then that part will be burned away, no matter what you built it with.

For me, there’s a implicit understanding here. The best buildings, the most beautiful ones, are the ones that are mixtures of all of the building materials available. Wood, hay, precious stones, gold silver—can you imagine a building made with all of them? How solid that will be? And if it is on a stone foundation, how long it would last?

Folks, the best churches are ones in which the congregations are kaleidoscopes, are mixtures of many materials, none of whom believe that theirs is the sole best way. As long as its Jesus shaped, as long as it’s solid, it’s beautiful.

Claim your tradition. We are a United Methodist church, founded in the doctrine of salvation not as a one time event, but as an ongoing journey, from birth to death, never out of the grip of God’s grace. This is who we are, no matter what precious metal the walls shine with. If your faith is deepened and informed by Third Day or Skillet, good. If it is built up by U2, good. If it is strengthened by Bill Gaither, good. If it is fortified by Bach and Mozart, good. They were and are still held in the hands of God’s grace, too.

Let us all live in houses with foundations built on Jesus Christ.
Jesus

“You Have Heard That it Was Said”

2011-02-13T12:35:00.000-05:00

Matthew 5: 21-37

Preached Feb. 13, 2011 in the Center Moreland Charge

This week’s gospel lesson, continuing in the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew, is a text than many preachers like to avoid. There are many reasons for this—they don’t want to be seen as making themselves out to be morally superior, because maybe they’ve made some of the mistakes mentioned in this portion. Maybe they have had a divorce themselves, and don’t have the emotional energy to try to explain why. Rather than be seen as a hypocrite, they avoid it all together. Maybe they don’t want to have someone come to them and complain that they were embarrassed to have to explain to their children what adultery was.
The problem with that is, then, that the only time these texts are talked about are when used as a weapon. In divorces, especially in contentious ones, the accusation of adultery is the nuclear bomb of the legal world, in some ways more powerful than abuse.
Well, I do not feel that scripture is to ever be used as a weapon. I just don’t believe that a proper use of Scripture is to cause division, dissention, and hurt. Jesus may have come to bring not peace but a sword in some areas, but I sincerely do not believe he came to cause pain to people who are already hurting.
So I took this text on this week more than anything to find out what is said about these texts, by people wiser than I am. I wanted to find the Jesus I know and love in these hard passages.
Think about the three instances we read of the phrase “You have Heard it said”: Don’t be angry; Don’t commit adultery; don’t swear. He speaks more in depth about each case, but we can use these as three areas of discussion.
“You have heard that it was said”, Don’t be angry-and under that, don’t insult your brother and sister, don’t call anyone a fool, leave your offering at the altar until you have reconciled with them, and settle out of court.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I find it almost impossible not to be angry sometimes. You see on TV or read in the paper about another shooting death, and you realize that it happened in the next township over. It’s reported that there was an argument between lovers, and both died because of it. Anger was the root cause of the actions that one person took, and he (allegedly) chose an action that was irreversible. So you can see that anger is dangerous, and you might think that Jesus is right to say that you should never be angry.
But what else are you to feel when the phone bill is almost double for the same amount of calls you made last month? How else are you to feel when the doctors can’t find what’s wrong, and this is your third time in the hospital? How else are you to feel when someone scratches the paint on your car with their shopping cart?
If Jesus was fully human, as we claim as a church, then Jesus knew what anger felt like. I can even point to a story from the Bible—when he cleared the temple of the corrupt moneychangers.
So, Is Jesus really saying here that we are not to ever be angry? That seems to be a little impossible, doesn’t it? What then are we to do?
“You have heard that it was said that you shall not commit adultery.” Then Jesus goes and describes adultery as something that far above and beyond what we’ve always known as adultery. In our world, his definition meddles in most of pop culture. So much of what we experience in our daily lives, from music to TV shows to commercials, (especially commercials) uses this very concept, the physical attractiveness of half the human species for the other half. And Jesus says essentially the first time you say that Katie Couric is kinda cute, you need to take your eyes out. The first time you say that Tim McGraw has a nice smile, pluck out your eyes.
We understand what adultery is. It is the breaking of a marriage vow in a very specific way by one partner or the other. When we pledge to be married, we pledge that we will forsake all others, and adultery is saying I forsake most others. I don’t think I pledged to Donna when we were married that I wouldn’t think occasionally that one of the women on Friends had a nice smile.
Scripture is silent on whether Jesus ever felt someone was cute, but what we do know is that he saw value for the Kingdom in both men and women, and saw them both as Children of God. We do know that Paul knew strong women who were witnesses to the faith. They seem to have been able to operate among all of the children of God, seeing the spark of God within each, and seeing their utility to God’s purpose. It was not adulterous for Paul to praise Priscilla and Eunice.
Divorce is a hard thing. Verse 32 is where most people grab hold of this text and swings it like a sword. But in this world, don’t you believe it to be true that as on commentator puts it: “the dynamics of some marriages are realm resistant, and that the purposes of the realm may be better served by freeing the couple to live into other relationships?”
Every marriage has issues. There are always negotiations, there are always compromises, each partner in the marriage changes a lot over a period of time. Not every partner is as flexible as God intends for the living of a good life together, and perhaps some marriages were agreed to under the wrong assumptions. Some marriages just need to end. I’m not saying that marriage needs to be a fluid, temporary institution at all. I am saying that we all know people who are probably better off without each other, and to stay together is to cause themselves and their children greater damage.
“You have heard that it was said that you should not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.” What does it mean to swear? Apparently Jesus is not talking about cussing here. What he’s talking about is the concept of saying,” I swear that I will get this job done.”, or “I swear that I will never go into this town.” The key here is verse 36, when Jesus says that you cannot change the color of the hair on your head by swearing-it’s just not in your power. It is God’s alone. He is saying here that trying to exercise power, even when you are trying to be a person of integrity by doing so, promising to do something, by swearing to do it, oversteps the boundaries between humans and God. He says that you should only say yes, or no, and then let it be. Let your actions, with God’s help, be the evidence of your integrity. If you were to swear, say, on something of God, like the temple, or earth, or heaven, then fail, then what witness is that?
Jesus, in speaking of these passages, is making one point three different ways. We are, to the best of our abilities, never to take actions that destroy, invalidate, or damage the vows and relationships we have with our fellow human beings. Some of those vows and pledges are serious and deep, like marriage; others are the day to day workings of living a human life, like feelings of anger, or the need to keep a sense of integrity in your life. He goes over the top to make the point, sometimes, but the point is still made. You have, as a follower of Jesus Christ, a certain responsibility to manage and marshal the ordinary feelings of human life in a way that gives glory to God. Don’t make vows you can’t keep. If you have made vows, do what is necessary to either fulfill them, or withdraw from them honorably. Express anger and other human feelings in Godly ways-neither tamp them down, nor express them uncontrollably.
This is what I think Jesus is saying, because I read Jesus as the proclaimer of God’s grace and love, and God is a loving God. Jesus speaks with great exaggeration to make a simple, sober point-honor relationships in all ways, because in honoring your relationships, you give honor and witness to God.

Salt and Light

2011-02-06T07:53:00.000-05:00

Matthew 5: 13-20

Preached on Feb 6, 2011 in the Center Moreland Charge.

“You are the Salt of the Earth, but if that salt has lost its flavor, then it’s not got much in it’s favor. . . “

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the musical “Godspell”. I think that it was the high water mark of the “Jesus Freak” movement of the 60’s and early 70’s, a creative presentation of the Gospel of Matthew told through upbeat music, magic tricks, and actors dressed as hippies, in makeup that suggested clowns. Jesus was in full whiteface, but with a Superman shirt. The original show made it to Broadway, and a movie was made of it, as well. I read now that there is a Broadway revival of it in the works, and it may open this spring or summer.

My dad directed the show when he taught high school, and I was in 2nd or 3rd grade. So I remember a lot of the songs. I can’t hear this chunk of Scripture without hearing the song that goes with it!

So, I’ve heard this phrase for years, but until this week, I didn’t have a very exact sense of what it meant. I knew it was complimentary, but I didn’t know what it was complimentary of. It means good folk. It means “people of great kindness, reliability, or honesty”. It means people of value. Roman soldiers were paid often in a portion of salt called a salarium, so to be “worth your salt” is to have earned your pay. We even get the word salary from salarium.

To be the salt of the earth is to be of value to your community. This week, we’ve learned yet again the value of salt for a community, with salt being dumped on the roads and sidewalks, haven’t we? To be the salt of the earth doesn’t mean rich, it doesn’t mean poor, though now we sort of hear it in conjunction with lower middle class, hard working types. Jesus, I think, means to ask his disciples if they are of value to the Kingdom of God, here. If the salt has lost its taste, it has lost its value. If salt has lost its taste, it is useless.

Akin to this is Jesus’ second image, the light of the world. Who would put a lit candle or oil lamp under a bushel? Aside from the obvious fire hazard, why light a lamp if the light is blocked, and the darkness is not overcome?

The light of God comes from the spark of God that is within us all. As I said a couple of weeks ago, when we become aware of all that has been done for us by God, in the actions and choices of Jesus Christ while he was on earth, and also in the presence and actions of the Holy Spirit who is with us at every moment; when we realize just all that God has done, our natural humble response is gratitude, and we act in ways that show our gratitude, and when we are seen this way, the light of the world has shined. The salt of the earth has been tasted.

Our witness to the love of God for this world is not in the radio stations we listen to, it isn’t in the bumper stickers we put on our cars. It is in the actions we take, the choices we make, the love we show for our fellow human beings. People who are salt of the earth do not judge others and purse their lips; Neither do salt of the earth people do whatever the culture is doing at that moment. Salt of the earth people show love and hospitality to their fellow human beings-people who are light of the world people care, but are humble enough not to ostracize others for their choices.

Salt of the earth people understand other peoples’ choices—they may have concerns about gas drilling, but they understand why people sign leases and take living wage jobs in a new and bustling industry during a tough economy. Salt of the earth people don’t take drugs or drink to drunkenness themselves, but they are aware enough of the hardness of life that they understand how someone else went down that road. Light of the world people may have political opinions of their own, but understand that there are reasonable people who may disagree. That doesn’t make them socialists or somehow less American.

Our saltiness is based in our resemblance to Jesus. The wattage of our light is based in how we seek to emulate Christ. When Jesus came to a well in a public place and saw the woman who seems to have had relationships with every man available, counting 5 husbands, and not married to the current man she’s with, number 6, he doesn’t shy away, or whisper to his friends behind his hands. He also doesn’t go stand in line to be number 7. He acknowledges the light in that woman’s soul, he acknowledges the presence of God in her being, and therefore acknowledges her humanity. He looks her in the eye.

Who was the guy with salt in the story of the man beaten by robbers and left for dead by the side of the road? The Samaritan.

Who was the person with salt when the sick man is lowered through the roof into Jesus’ presence? The guys who loved their friend so much they carried him to the house, and thought creatively when the crowd was too large.

Who is salt of the earth today? They’re easy to find—they are the people who shovel out their neighbors’ sidewalks when they’re ill or frail. They’re the people who volunteer for the fire department. They are the people who bring food to church to feed the hungry. They’re the people who visit shut-ins and the infirm, they’re the people who coach, lead Scouting programs. They teach, they heal, they speak out on behalf of others.

Having fun while doing these things is just a bonus, by the way, like that guy in the Maxwell House commercial, who drinks his cup of coffee and then goes out and snowblows the whole town.

So, it’s apparently true that salt can lose it’s saltiness. Chemically, I don’t think that’s true, because the Sodium atom would have to de-bond from the Chlorine atom, but Jesus isn’t teaching chemistry here. He’s teaching discipleship. If you can lose your saltiness, I think you can probably also gain it.

Everyone’s a little salty. Everybody is a little shiny with God’s light within them.

In your life, how can you become saltier? How can you become shinier? How can you become someone of great kindness, reliability, or honesty? How can you be of value to your community; not just your church community but to the community as a whole?

How can you be the salt of the earth for the world this week?

Holy Lists, Batman!

2011-01-30T07:55:00.000-05:00

Psalm 15

Sermon Preached on January 30 in the Center Moreland Charge.

This past week, my son and I went grocery shopping. Over the years, Donna and I discovered a couple of truths about grocery shopping that I am trying to pass down, now—First of all, never go when you are hungry! You end up always buying more than you need, and you’ll also have more foods of the kind you really don’t want around the house. Kettle Cooked barbeque potato chips, you know, stuff like that.

The second lesson that Donna and I learned together is that it’s a better idea to shop with a list, and that you don’t deviate from it. It helps the budget, and keeps the pantry properly filled with the stuff you actually use.

It was a lesson lost this week, however, when I cleaned the car out of a number of scraps of paper, carried them into the grocery store to toss into the big trash can outside the front door. The grocery list was probably one of those scraps, because we did not have the list.

I tell you all this stuff about domestic practice and doctrine because it was a grocery list that I thought of when I read Psalm 15 this week. Interestingly, two other lectionary scriptures this week, the Hebrew Bible passage from the prophet Micah, and the Gospel passage, the first 12 verses of the Gospel of Matthew, are also lists!

In reading commentaries, there were other lists, mentioned as well, such as one in Jeremiah, verses 5-7 in the seventh chapter.

Many many lists. All of them are ways given by the authors to those whom hear them for the guidance of the people of God. Now, some would say that no lists are needed, that a declaration of faith in Christ is totally sufficient for salvation.

Perhaps. But if one has genuinely consciously declared a faith in Christ, and you have responded to the leading Grace that I spoke of last week, then one genuinely begins to want to live a more righteous life—not self-righteous, as if you know more than others; but a life of genuine righteousness, humility and grace. And it’s hard to find examples of a genuinely righteous, humble and graceful life, especially when it naturally doesn’t call attention to itself.

Thus the value of lists of righteous behavior in Scripture. Good thing God thought of this, eh?

Psalm 15 speaks of who may abide in God’s tent. The ones who get to “live a blameless life, do what is right, and speak the truth from their heart.” Thankfully, they get a little more specific, when they say that the ones who live on the Lord’s holy hill “do not slander with their tongue, do no evil to their friends, nor take up a reproach to their neighbors.” Now, that little bit makes more sense if you read it in the New International Version, where it says “who does his neighbor no wrong, and casts no slur on his fellowman”.

There are a couple of other things about lending money and standing by your word even when it’s going to hurt, as well.

The list Micah gives is much shorter, and is preceded by God reminding God’s people about all he’s given them, and asking for so little in return; not worship, not burnt offerings, not even “ten thousand rivers of oil.” But simply to do justice, love goodness, and to walk modestly with your God”. The commentary from the Jewish Study Bible goes even a step further and says that that last line should probably read “walk ‘wisely’ with your God.”

Humble, modest, wise, are all equated as similar, and positive in this passage.

Jeremiah, one of the lists that I was led to by commentators, is a more specific list, but still helpful. It is Jeremiah the prophet speaking to Israel at the time of the return of the Jews to Israel after having been released by the King of Persia. “if you mend your ways and your actions, if you execute between one man and another, if you do not oppress the stranger, the orphan, and the widow; if you do not shed the blood of the innocent, and if you do not follow other Gods, even to your own hurt. . . I will let you dwell in the land I gave to your fathers.”

Are you starting to get the gist of how the various authors of the Bible, spread out over about 2000 years, have a similar idea of how we can be led to respond to the righteous impulse?

In the Gospel, Jesus speaks of certain values as more advantageous. Tell me if you have heard these positive attitudes named before-that the blessed are humble, meek, merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers, are willing to be persecuted in order to live this kind of life, (which sounds a lot like being steadfast “to your own hurt”, a phrase that both Jeremiah and Psalm 15 use).

Now, as Christians, it is absolutely true that we do not believe we need to do such things in order to become justified by faith. When I say “justified”, Christian doctrine means that our sins have been lifted from us. But lists like these help us to respond in gratitude to the grace of God lifting away from us the mistakes we’ve made, and interestingly enough, they also end up helping us avoid them in the future.

So, to live a life of gratitude in response to the grace of God given to us freely throughout our life, we learn from Scripture that . . .
• humility,
• mercy,
• kindness to the stranger and the widow and the orphan (or really anyone whom society has placed at a disadvantage because of their race, religion, immigration status, weight, mental health, learning disability, or anything else),
• speaking kindly and without any malice or gossip about your friends and neighbors,
• seeking justice,
• peacemaking,
• the courage to live this kind of life “to your own hurt”

. . . is a pretty good list to start with.

At one time, I was never a big list guy. Donna was, and I used to mock her (gently) for reaching out for order. But as I have matured, I have realized that they have their uses, especially in the day to day chaos of a modern life. They are useful, and lists like these, guidance for how to live a graceful life in gratitude and response to the gifts God has given us in Jesus, become something more than useful.

They become Holy. They become the voice and guiding hand and heart of God.

A Closer Walk With God

2011-01-24T00:36:00.002-05:00

1 Cor. 1: 10-18

Preached in the Center Moreland Charge, January 23, 2011

“It has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you. . . “

Paul has stayed in touch with his congregation in Corinth, and is seeking to assist them in their continued life together.

Corinth is a town on one of the main trading roads of the Roman Empire, and there were probably many people who were worshipping with that congregation who weren’t born there, and didn’t come to Christ through the actions of the believers in that town. It would be like any church in a crossroads city, where a lot of trade and a lot of traffic come through. I heard a preacher once describe Corinth as a city a lot like San Francisco—many cultures, many beliefs, many practices, all living cheek by jowl on a small plot of land. And what is true of the city as a whole would certainly be true of the Christians who gathered there.

It might have been true that all of these people who are named, these evangelists, for lack of a better term; Apollos, Cephas, even Paul for a couple of them, had visited Corinth. Paul mentions, however, some who had claimed their faith by Christ alone, and so I’m inclined to believe that these people of Cephas, these people of Apollos, developed their beliefs and understandings apart from the town of Corinth. And when they meet in Corinth, there are disruptions and disagreements about how to practice the faith.

A mild illustration of this would be if we were to go visit a Presbyterian church, and while a lot of the organization of worship would be similar enough to our own not to be troubling, when you got to the Lord’s Prayer, there would be some uncertainty when you would say “trespasses”, as you were taught, and hear everyone else around you say “sins”.

Imagine that on a greater scale, and perhaps you might have a sense of the underlying tension in the Corinthian church.

Many of us here have come from other places, and at the same time, many of us have been here our whole lives. I can’t say that there has been a constant influx of different cultures or Christian practices on the magnitude of a city like San Francisco or Philadelphia, or even at the level of Wilkes Barre.

But Paul’s lesson here is that the differences are not important-how we understand salvation, whether it be how we were taught by the founder of our practice, John Wesley, or as taught by Martin Luther, or John Calvin, or St. Augustine, or whether we arrive at some sort of idiosyncratic understanding of our own by an unaided and unguided reading of Scripture, Paul’s lesson for us is to say that our differences not be divisions, and that our personal understandings not be understood as the singular and sole correct views.

This is a United Methodist church, and our doctrines are based on the teachings of the 18th century English priest John Wesley. The most important and distinctive part of these teachings is that we are in the grip of grace from the moment of our first breath, that there is a grace that accompanies us and gently impels us toward God. Wesley writes about it a lot in his sermons, but here is one line that is useful for our purpose here: “It is God that of his Good pleasure worketh in you both to will and to do.”

If we were to update that language from the 18th century, King-James-soaked language, it means this-it is wholly by God’s pleasure that he leads us both to act and to think. This would seem to be fine and clear for those that have found Christ and have been led to a decision for faith in Christ. But Wesley is clear in this additional point-God works his will in us long before we have even figured out who God is, and he is pulling us slowly towards Godself, the way that even a slow moving river can push a canoe.

Some would call the moment of decision that we declare our faith in Christ as the moment of our salvation. Wesley, and the doctrine of our practice, however, allows for there to be either one large dramatic decision, like Paul getting knocked off his horse and being rebuked by Jesus himself, or room for many small decisions, like a child attending summer camp and Sunday school, and being taught all along the way.

I came to the Christian faith in my early twenties in a moral crisis, realizing that I could not refrain from hurting people based solely on my own strength. On the spectrum of conversion stories, it was relatively sudden and dramatic. But If I were to say that that was the only way that someone could be saved, I would have completely discounted the faith journey of many people, including Donna, the woman I married, who was raised from infancy in the church, and came to know Christ through long acquaintance and friendship. She couldn’t ever tell a satisfying, dramatic story of her salvation. Was she any less of a Christian by not having had the dramatic coming to Christ story of salvation? Those of you who remember her, her compassion and her willingness to serve, would of course say no.
Her journey to faith was very different from my own, but it was no less valid for its difference. Our son’s story of Grace drawing him toward a relationship with Christ began a long time ago, and will have its own trajectory, and it will be equally as valid as either Donna’s or mine.

Paul wrote to the Corinthian church that they were to be united in the same mind and the same purpose. Let me suggest that that purpose is not to convert souls as if we have some McDonalds sign out front counting billions and billions served. Rather, let me suggest that we are to take Jesus’ own model in sharing the love of God-we are to say to the world, through our actions and our speech, “come and see”. We are to show God’s love, and invite those whom we meet into God’s presence in a gentle fashion, sometimes even amongst us here, and hopefully allow them to take away something that increases their faith, awakens their awareness. We are not to “score a point” with the souls of others, we are simply called to offer Christ to the world, and support each others’ journey toward a closer walk with God.

We are called always into a closer walk with God. How we got here, how we get there, is a story to be told that may be of value, but one soul’s story is never to be used as how all souls should walk.

How Long Do We Sing This Song?

2011-01-24T00:35:00.000-05:00

Psalm 40:1-11
Matthew 9:9-13

Preached in the Center Moreland Charge, January 16, 2011

Some of you probably know by now that one of my favorite bands is U2. You may not know that I came to them very late, less than 10 years ago. When I was a campus minister in Texas, I had a group of students who were all friends and looking for a home. Most of them were musicians of a sort, and they played together a lot. Usually they would play in a way that turned to worship naturally. Listening to them from my office, I would hear a lot of the usual type of music, the praise choruses, the Rich Mullins repertoire. But there were some songs that didn’t fit-and I thought I’d heard them in decidedly non-worship settings, like school dances and MTV (back when they played music).

Sure enough, they were playing U2. and it was about that time there were a number of books that were dissecting the spiritual content of u2’s music.

Preachers sometimes are behind the trends, so I got a book or two to try to get into a place where I could be of spiritual help to them, and one actually had a Bible study based on U2’s music in the back. (I still have that book, if anyone would like to do that study.)

What ended up happening is that we did a series of worship services that were based on the music of U2, with one video being shown, and the band playing one live, and the message being inspired by the scripture that inspired the songs.

And I ended up being a fan.

One of the most overt scriptural references in U2’s music was a song that was pretty early in U2’s career, a song called “40”. And it was inspired by this morning’s Psalm.

I will wait patiently for the Lord, he inclined and heard my cry
He lifted me up out of the pit, out of the miry clay
I will sing, sing a new song,
I will sing, sing a new song,

He set my feet upon the rock, and made my footsteps firm
Many will see, many will see and fear
I will sing, sing this song
I will sing, sing this song

How Long, how long do we sing this song?

It’s a song of confidence in the presence and activity of the Lord, and echoes the song that first made U2 notable, a song about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, called “Sunday Bloody Sunday”. They both have the question “how Long to sing this song?” When will these troubles cease? How long must we sing and praise you, O Lord, I think they might be asking.

When you read deeper into the psalm, you get to the passage that caught my eye.
“Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin you have not required.”

It starts a discussion, this passage. It’s clear for many of us why we come to church, but why do we do some of the things we do? Why do we do a doxology as the offering comes forward? Why do we either affirm our faith or confess our sins together? It seems clear why we read scripture, and why there is a sermon, or a message, but why this other stuff, especially since God does not require sacrifices and offerings?

Why do we praise God, who is omnipotent, who created us, and who knows our innermost hearts and minds? Why should we praise God when God knows if we’re lying as we stand here?

Well, I don’t think God does. But I do think we do.

I think we need to be reminded of the basics of our faith. I think we need to be reminded that we fall short of God’s intention for us. I think we need to be reminded that God is great, but he has given us a great charge, to be God’s people on earth. If we are not the evidence of God among our fellow human beings, then there will not be any evidence.

How Long do we sing this song? Our whole Lives.
How long do we sing of our Joy in God? Our whole lives.
How long to we raise lament, how long do we express our sadness and anger to God?

How long do we have a real, honest, troubling at times, loving always, relationship with God?

Our whole lives.

Why?

Let me tell you a story. There was once a man called Matthew, and he did a job that put him at odds with his birth culture, and placed him in a place in between them and the dominant alien Empire that ruled his land. He was generally ostracized from his native people, and I’d imagine even the family holidays were a little tense.

And yet, there was a man who came along one day, saw Matthew working at his tax booth, and said “Matthew, follow me”. He did, and at dinner, sitting with this man and his followers, he noticed that there were many other people he knew who were also at odds with their people sitting around the table too. The people who were “right with God” asked why this teacher, this rabbi, was sitting with such sinners, and the teacher replied that those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.”

Then he says this: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” And he tells the Pharisees, and probably everyone there, to go learn what that means.

Why do we sing this song? God does not desire our sacrifice, or our offerings. But we need to give of ourselves. We need to prove to ourselves how central our faith is to us. We need to confess our sins to be reminded we are sinners. We need to affirm our faith to be reminded what it is we believe.

What God does desire is mercy. What God does require of us is to be loving, human, grace filled people. All that we do as a church is to support this mission, to strengthen this message.

How long do we sing this song?

Our whole lives.

Well Done, Good and Faithful Servant

2011-01-11T13:21:00.000-05:00

Matthew 25: 14-21
Preached on Jan. 9, 2011

Our story for today is one of the parables Jesus tell his disciples and others immediately before his arrest in Jerusalem-in a sense, this is one of the straws that break the camels’ back. He is teaching his disciples in this passage that if you have talents gifts and graces, you are best served as a servant (or a slave) of God if you bring those talents to good use. If you put your “talents” in the service of the Lord, you will “enter into the joy of your master”.

Interestingly, the word talent, which I took to mean that the slaves had been given an allegorical sum of money called a talent, was not so. It was the other way around. The word “talent” once meant a large sum of money; the New Interpreter's Bible commentary said it was 15 years’ worth of a days’ wage. And because this story was told so widely during the Middle Ages, "talent" only then, and because of this parable, became known as the gifts and graces you have been given by God. So what we think of as talents did once actually mean spending capital!

I think that it is probably wise to continue to think of them that way, and perhaps we should also think of them as the spending money that an eleven year old has in his pocket, “burning a hole”, as they say-we have to get it out of our pockets and spent, and circulating, as quickly and as often as possible!

This community, this church, this congregation, has been through some tough times in the last eighteen months. In standing with me and my family, you have stood to be hurt yourselves, and it has not stopped you from doing so. Many of you have certainly put those talents into circulation when needed; from cooking to cleaning, from taking on some of the administrative duties that I could not perform, to standing up here and providing a message to this congregation in my absence. Some of you even took a little bit of the inevitable heat that comes with serving in the role of preacher.

These folks are certainly not the whole list of people who have helped me, my family and this charge through this time. Mostly everyone has done something, even if it was to take on the first duty of a Christian, the duty of prayer. You have certainly spread your talents around like my son at Game Stop!

I do hope you are not expecting some great and deep theological insight today. My hope for this sermon is rather simpler. I want to be able to say to each of you that I am thankful for the grace and the help that I and my family have received over the past 18 months. I do not know what kind of pastor I will be after this experience, what kind of preacher I will grow into after this experience. I have been changed, and those changes are not over. I am still healing, and adjusting to what my new life means for me. I know I have been through a hard time, but I also know that I am not the only one-we all have had our tough days, our hard times. God has been with us through them all, and one of the best roles of a congregation is to provide the face, the hands, and the voice of God to those who are in need of it. And you all have been that for me, just as you have been for each other.

The talents that we have all been given, that burn holes in our pockets, are meant to be shared. They are meant to be put into the service of those who are around us. At the beginning of this year, I’d like us to take communion together in the spirit of offering our talents to each other as a congregation, and to re-offer them to God, the source of all that we have and are.

Instead of the Lord’s prayer being prayed at the appropriate moment in the Great Thanksgiving, I would like for us to pray it together at its' place the other three weeks of the month, at the end of the pastoral prayer. At its' place in the Great Thanksgiving, I’d like for us to pray the covenant prayer written by John Wesley. I’d like for us to pray this slowly and meditatively, thinking about how each part may apply to us.

May we all feel the heat of the talents that are burning holes in our pockets, this year, and may we spend those talents freely.

May these words have been God’s intention this day. Amen.

The Covenant Prayer in the Wesleyan Tradition

I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.
And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
thou art mine, and I am thine.
So be it.
And the covenant which I have made on earth,
let it be ratified in heaven.
Amen.

Re-Boot

2010-12-15T14:19:00.003-05:00

I am a United Methodist pastor, currently appointed to Center Moreland and Dymond Hollow UMC's, known as the Center Moreland Charge. I have in the past used this blog to post sermons and thoughts, but was not really using it for much more. I have recently, however, come through a very singular experience. My wife, Donna Charlene (Grieten) Cottle, was diagnosed in June 2009 with a brain tumor. She died on December 5th, 2010. That's a week and a half ago, as I write this.

As part of accompanying her though that journey, I narrated for our friends and family the sometimes daily events of Donna's illness, the accidental hemmorhage during her biopsy, and the struggle to maintain her quality of life through radiation, chemotherapy, physical therapy, and the life we led after all other treatments had been exhausted.

With her passing, the time to end that other blog is coming close, but blogging has become a part of me. It was a powerful experience. I find that I want to be able to describe what life will be like after her death, for both our son and me, but her Caringbridge blog does not seem like the right place. So I'm returning here to my old sermon blog. I've changed the color scheme, and will probably change other things as well. Consider it the same thing as buying a new bed or painting the walls a new color.

I will still post my sermons as the pastor of churches, but I will also now be describing the life of a mid-forties widower and his pre-teen son, a man who is seeking to get fit and healthy after over 20 years of being overweight, a seeker into the practice of Christianity as described by the Benedictine Rule, and perhaps even a budding musician and author. There are many things i'm looking forward to learning and experiencing, and this is perhaps the place to describe it.

An Eloquent Set of Excuses

2010-08-20T10:45:00.006-04:00

Dear All:

I am writing to apologize to everyone who follows this blog. There aren't many of you, but you deserve to receive an explaination because of the attention you so kindly pay.

My preaching style has undergone some significant changes, ones that are still being ironed out. Where I used to stand in the pulpit and preach from a manuscript that was easily transferred to this blog, a few months ago, I began to preach more extemporaneously. At first, it was driven by knowing what I wanted to say but not having the time to compose it on the page. I was also influenced by the encouragement that some of my parishioners gave me when I did step down out of the pulpit.

At first, I sought to generate a manuscript of the sermon by recording myself and using a transcription software, but for various reasons, the learning curve on such a project has been difficult and time consuming. This is why there has not been a sermon entry since the 4th of July.

My goal now is to go back to what my old preaching professor at Perkins/SMU, Zan Holmes, taught--preach extemporaneously all you want, but generate the manuscript anyway. This is now what I will start doing. there may be a false start or two as I develop a new habit, and the other current draws on my time and energy continue to be great, but this is at least my resolve. I also hope to find a way to post the recordings, which I will continue to make.

Thanks for your patience and understanding!

Fryer Drew

Donna's Caringbridge posting, August 20, 2010

2010-08-20T10:15:00.001-04:00

(I am currently having some trouble pasting in my entry from MS Word to the Caringbridge site, so I have posted this entry to my blog, here.)
All right, Judy. It was about time for an update anyway, I finally had a few things to tell.

Since I last wrote, Josiah turned 11. The mother of one of his school friends threw a paintball party, and sweetly invited Josiah to celebrate his birthday as well (the boys are about a week apart). I believe, and all the parents sitting in the safe room that day agreed, that when those boys graduate high school, they will still remember that party as one of their seminal common experiences! Joe wasn’t sure about it after getting hit in the mask where his mouth was covered by a plastic grille, and the paint splashed into his mouth, but he did end up loving the day, and wants to go again. Right after that party, I whisked him away to sleepaway church camp, and then a week later, on his actual birthday, we ate birthday cake (made by my mom) in the dining room at Mercy Center with Donna, and my mom, dad, and step mom all came up to eat it!

Donna started receiving physical therapy after that cold she had last month, she was just not getting stronger, and it was starting to affect how she got out of bed, toileted, etc. She also started receiving speech therapy as well this week. Speech therapy is kind of a misnomer, catch-all sort of title, because it seems to encompass everything having to do with the throat, from communication to swallowing. Donna had been having some trouble swallowing food, not getting it all the way down, and so they engaged their speech therapist on Monday this week.

Donna is doing well otherwise, though much more tired in the evenings because of all the work she is doing. She was sitting in the sunroom last night, with two or three other residents, and it was very quiet. I’ve fallen into the habit of bringing her ice cream when I come at night. Last night was a Coffee Toffee Twisted Frosty night, and I asked her if she wanted to go to her room, and she said that she preferred being with some company, but liked the quiet, there were people around and less stimuli. Or rather, when I suggested that that was what she was preferring about being there, she said “yeah, that”, and smiled.

It’s a tough couple weeks, because Josiah is in a two week spread between the last organized summer activity and the beginning of school, and though he would be all for it, I’m not interested in his playing Wii for ten hours a day for two weeks. So, I need to invent things to keep him occupied, like having friends over (where they play Wii or their DS’s together, as well as go outside and play soccer or football), or having him go to their houses. He will also run errands with me, and school supplies and shoes need to be bought for school. I’m also continuing to re-engage in the life of my two churches, which sometimes sends me places where Joe cannot go with me. It’s a very busy time, and some days I go to bed late and just can’t get to sleep. I’d always heard that you can be too tired to sleep, but I’ve never really experienced it until now. The car that I bought in March already has 15000 more miles on it than it had when I bought it.

All of this other activity means that Donna comes out on the short end of that stick a little bit. When I can see her, lately, with or without Joe, it’s usually when she and I are both at our weariest.

Dr. Oley ordered a new MRI last week, because we want to know how far, or even if, the tumor has progressed. We’re waiting on the approval of insurance for that, now.

One last item: the process of obtaining medical assistance has now been completed, and she has started receiving some.

The Fruits of Freedom: July 4, 2010

2010-07-08T12:11:00.004-04:00

In an effort to boost recording signal, so the Dragon software might work better, I tried the counter-intuitive approach of turning the recording level to low. What I got was a recording of such low level I couold not even hear it with all the software's boosters. the software certainly could make no sense of it, so this sermon is a reconstruction from memory of what I said last weekend. The learning curve continues!
Galatians 5: 13-26

“For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.”

Did you know that the area that Paul is writing to, Galatia, in what we know as North Central Turkey, is named after the Celts? Apparently the story goes that some petty king or another hired mercenaries from central Germany to come down and do his fighting for him, and those german tribesmen were Celts. This may have even been before the Celts had moved west far enough to have settled Ireland. But that’s why Galatia is named that; Greek for Celt.

There’s your Bible study for the day.

The issue that Paul is addressing in Galatia is one of how to follow Christ. Paul had founded the church in Galatia, and now, other believers, with a slightly different outlook on how to follow Christ, have come along and taught the Galatians that one of the ways that you must follow Christ is to live like Christ—observe the festivals he observed, follow the rules, eat the way he ate. Paul has gotten wind of this, and has written back, in this letter, to address the issues that these “judaisers” have created.

It centers on Freedom. Yes, Jesus has freed us from the law. You don’t have to keep kosher. You don’t have to observe Passover. You get a sense that Paul’s point, stated simply is that in Christ, you can live the way jesus told us to, not as Jesus did.

As followers of Christ, Paul is saying, we have become free from the rules society has placed on us. We are not bound by our economic or social status, we are free to associate with Christians of all stripes.

What freedom doesn’t mean is to be able to live however you want, to indulge in every want and desire, knowing that we have still been forgiven in grace. The “works of the flesh” are even listed by Paul in the text.

So freedom still carries with it a responsibility, by Paul’s way of thinking.

Which brings me to today, the 4th of July, American Independence Day. And we talk about freedom an awful lot, too. But what kind of freedom is it?

For me, I think back to the history I was taught, and one of the things that Americans have always valued is the ability to make our own choices. We will live where we want, if we are willing to work for it-clearing the trees, planting the crops, or working in the factory hard enough to buy a our own house. We value being able to go to the church we prefer, choose the mate we want, raise our kids the way we think is the best.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about Self-Reliance, and I seem to remember my teachers referring to that essay as a supporting document of the ability of Americans to be able to make our own choices. That it is necessary and valuable for Americans to make their own way as much as possible.

And so, I think, it is.

But what troubles me is that Paul seems to speak of freedom a little differently.

Americans seem to claim to be free to make their own way, to forge their own path, and to heck with the people around them. At least that’s how it seems to be taken today. But in Paul’s thought Christians are free to be able to follow Christ, and care for God’s people in the way they see fit.

But they are not free to follow their baser desires. Or stated more accurately, they will not evidence the Spirit of God if they choose to use their freedom in ways that do not produce the fruits of the spirit, and that is their call, as it is ours today; to live our lives in such a way as to show God’s love as much as possible.

When you try to observe national holidays in religious contexts, it is always a bit like running a rapid. It’s an uneasy bit of paddling, with certain hazards that aren’t always visible threatening to gash your boat. If you ignore the holiday completely, certain people are offended. If you turn the elements of worship over to national symbols too easily, you threaten to worship a nation rather than God in Jesus Christ. And if you wrap the two together inappropriately, you look as if you have made America into the new Israel, the new chosen nation. And for some folks, that just fine. But it is wrong.

We hear talk an awful lot about America being a Christian nation. But if we look at the bedrock values Americans hold as their basic freedoms, and then look at the fruits of the spirit that Paul lists in today’s scripture passage, I do not see one flowing from the other.

The fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Given what we understand as American freedoms, how is that “America is a Christian Nation” idea working out, these days?

True Grace

2010-07-01T11:27:00.003-04:00

I apologize for the tardiness of this posting, but it was not a good week in my Dragon dictation software experiment, and this is also VBS week, so I had to transcribe manually when I had free moments! -FD
Luke 9: 51-62
How many of you have heard about a theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer? He was a German theologian who lived in the 20th century, died in the 1940's. He was one of a long line of Academic theologians who were German. He came to America in the 20's or the 30's, and studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Because he was a curious man, he didn't worship at the Seminary chapel, but instead would go into Harlem and worship at one of the African American congregations there, because it was so foreign to his German Lutheran experience. And he fell in love with those churches, fell in love with that style of worship, fell in love with those people. It affected his theology, affected his worldview, it affected almost everything about what he wrote.

As he was living here in the United States in the 1930's, he began to watch the politics and the news coming out of Germany; the rise of the National Socialist Party, the rise of the Nazis, the rise of Hitler. He was very troubled by this news. In the mid 1930's he made the decision to go home. For a number of people, it was an odd decision, because most of the theologians in Germany were actually leaving at this time because of the political climate. They did not want to be a part of what was starting to happen in Germany. Bonhoeffer went the opposite direction, he went back.

At this time in Germany, the national church was becoming part of the apparatus of the government. When Bonhoeffer came over, he became part of what became known as the Confessing Church, which was an underground movement of pastors and laity who sought to resist what was happening. At one point, Bonhoeffer was assigned the task of organizing and leading an underground seminary. They found this farmhouse way up in the north of Germany, and gathered up the young men from other areas, who wanted to resist this government, and resist what that national church was becoming.

They went on for a while, and then the seminary was found out; someone spied or tattled, or whatever, and all those young men were drafted into the army. Bonhoeffer wasn't caught then.

He became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, and this is what he was caught doing. He was sent to a concentration camp.

I don't know if you know this. Most folks know about a few of the symbols the Nazis used to mark different groups in the concentration camps. You know the yellow star of David that marked Jews, of course, fewer of you may know about the pink triangle that symbolized homosexuals, but there was also a symbol for dissident protestant pastors. It was a red triangle, and Bonhoeffer wore one of those. He spent two or three years in a concentration camp, and then, a couple of weeks before the camp was liberated, he was hanged.

It often seems true that you don't become a famous theologian until you've lived into your 60's and 70's. A great achievement seems to be reaching the age when you can distill all of your thought into one great masterwork. The image that pops to mind is the great 12 volume work by Karl Barth titled Apologetics, but what my seminary theology professor called “The Great White Whale”, both for it's inability to be controlled and the fact that it was bound in white leather. Bonhoeffer never got to live to the age where that sort of work became possible; the beginnings of where he thought are tantalizing, but incomplete.

When we read today's scripture, and Jesus says to one “follow me”, and he says to another “Let the dead bury the dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God”, the scripture becomes a statement about commitment, and about what grace can really do when you respond to it.

When you introduce people to Bonhoeffer in academic settings, the phrase that comes up almost immediately is “cheap grace.” One of the quotes that we have from Bonhoeffer comes from a book called “the Cost of Discipleship”, is this: “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance; baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” A man who wrote a phrase like that, a man who would make such a commitment to his faith and to his Christ, that he would return to a country, work in the underground, and eventually be killed by that government; when Jesus called him and said 'Follow me,”, he said “Yes sir.”

This is not one of those sermons where I'm going to say “Now you must make that same commitment, and who shall come forward?” This isn't like that. There's nothing about our government or church, nothing in our lives right now that is calling us to make such stark choices. But do you remember last week, when we talked about the woman who wiped Jesus' feet with her hair, and anointed his feet with oil, and how I said that this was a response to some off-camera forgiveness that she was showing gratitude for onscreen?

To truly be disciples of Christ, we have to be open with Christ. We have to be available with our full selves to what we are called to do. We can't hold ourselves back because of secrets we may have. I'm not saying that you must have some great emotional repentance scene, something like the guy in the tent revival who runs down the center aisle pouring whiskey out of bottles in both hands. I'm not saying that you should have anyone else present; but somehow between you and God, there has been, or at some point will be, a time when you will be laid open and affirming, and fully available with God about everything.

And then you will find out what “there can be no grace without discipleship” means. It is only when we are fully open with God that we can truly become full disciples. Then there will be nothing holding us back. Nothing. God knows it all, he probably did from the beginning, but it is important for us to have shared it with God, so that whatever that thing is, those things are, whatever troubles we have, we are being honest with ourselves, so it is no longer in the way.

There can be no grace without discipleship. No real grace. Repentance isn't “I’m sorry for having gotten bad grades; I’ll try better in the future.” Repentance is “This is something I am being honest about with you, God, and through it, I can serve you better.” It's a change of direction.

I'm not saying that it doesn't take courage, but it also doesn't necessarily require drama. It must be done, however, for us to be true disciples, and for us to respond with true gratitude in the way of the woman who washed Jesus' feet. It must be done in order to follow Christ completely.

True grace isn’t cheap. But it is free.

Seek the Grace

2010-06-17T12:56:00.001-04:00

Luke 7: 36-50

When you are living as a Pharisee, by definition in that culture, you're going to live a largely blameless life. When Jesus says to the man later on in the story "when you sin little, you need to be forgiven little," he's not kidding. By that society's terms, this guy hasn't sinned much. We know people like this now; men and women, people who just seem to always do the right thing, are very wise in their choices, they never get out of hand with their money, they always get their oil changed on time, you know, those kind of folks. We know lots of folks like that, a lot of you all are those folks. The Pharisee is one of those kind of guys. He lives according to the strictures of his culture; he is largely doing what he supposed to do to be blameless and holy in his world.

He is successful in that, but even when people are living right, as we like to say, there are still sins that are wrestled with, and this guy has them too. One wonders what the motivation is to invite Jesus to lunch. Perhaps it's to be an advance look out, or, I don't want to say "spy", but the one who says "okay, I’m going to find out about this guy and I'll report back to my friends." Maybe that's what he's doing and he's reporting back to the other leaders of the town about this guy in their midst. Or maybe he's thinking "Ooh, I'm going to be the first one to get this new interesting hot figure in our town into my house and I will gain prestige from that!" Maybe he is honestly inviting a person into his house, inviting this new interesting teacher named Jesus, this possible prophet, because there may be something that he can learn from this guy. That may be his motivation. Luke is not real clear about why the invitation is made. He's just clear that it is.

So Jesus comes to lunch with his Pharisee. Commentators of this Scripture taught me a lot this week. They taught me, for instance, that when you go to dinner in this century, you're not sitting in chairs around a table. You're leaning on your left arm and eating with your right, and your feet are stuck out behind you at a 45° angle. That's the way it is all the way around the table. You're eating little bite size stuff, like dates or maybe rice pilaf, as you talk around the table. You use flatbread to pick up food and eat it, so your fingers aren’t in the common dishes. Jesus is laying at that angle with his feet sticking out backwards, so it's not immediately obvious that there's somebody messing with his feet because she's behind the person next to Jesus. Simon the Pharisee doesn't automatically see her.
　
So they are talking, and I'm sure Jesus is being probed on various theological topics, and then Simon notices the woman. The woman has taken her hair down, we're talking long hair, and she's wiping her hair on Jesus' feet to clean them. Remember, if these men and women have shoes at all, they are sandals, so their feet are always dusty. It's a custom, so as to not bring that stuff into the house, to have your feet washed or to do it yourself. Not only is she washing his feet, she's using her tears as water, and she's rubbing oil into his feet to soothe them because, as you know, when you wear sandals all the time, your feet do crack. Even Jesus' feet.

Simon knows who this woman is. The Scripture says that she is a sinner. It doesn't say what the nature of the sin is, but centuries and centuries of people thinking a certain way kind of have led us to understand to what they think that sin is. Let me be clear; it is not stated in Scripture what the sin is. But because she is a sinner, she is separated a certain degree from Simon, and Simon looks down on her. Okay there's another sin for Simon. We've got two now, possibly. He's looking down on her; he essentially considers her less of a human being, and he judges Jesus (the other is the possible issue of pride at inviting Jesus to the meal.) He says "Well, if Jesus really was a prophet, he would know what kind of woman that was, and he wouldn't allow her to touch him at all, anywhere!" In that culture, touching anybody who is in the status that she's in makes you a sinner, too.

So Simon has all kinds of cultural boundaries and cultural taboos going around in his head, and Jesus is merely simply receiving the gratitude of woman who realizes that her sins are forgiven. That's all that is really going on over here, and Simon's all kinds of twisted up and spun around with judgments and all that stuff. We're looking at a situation here where the person who seems to be the one who leads a more blameless life is sitting in a prison of his own resentments, and the woman who is supposedly a lower class citizen is a sinner or a taboo person, someone who's not to be touched, she is in the midst of feeling some amazing grace. We don't know what happened before she comes in; the Scripture leads us to believe that whatever forgiveness that she's feeling gratitude for, she already received outside the picture of the story. What we're seeing now is her response and gratitude to something that happened off stage. But here she is, feeling an amazing amount of gratitude and love and everything that comes with truly knowing that you are forgiven for your sin and that you are loved. Isn't it ironic that the person who is the blameless person in the society has no idea what that love feels like, and looks at it and doesn't know what it is? She knows what grace feels like, and she's responding to it.

Do you?

Most of us have lived long enough lives that we've done something once. We know what shame feels like. I do. I'm a human being, I've done dumb stuff. I'd be willing to bet that everyone in here has done something once, at least. Do you know what shame feels like? I'd say we all do. But do you know what grace feels like? To know that whatever that dumb thing was that you did, that you truly have indeed been forgiven for that, and for everything else? Do you know? Is that why you're here this morning, because you have felt that and you are here out of gratitude? Sometimes you're here on a Sunday thinking "I'm here out of gratitude because I love God. I don't know what that doofus up there is saying, but I'm here because I'm feeling gratitude!"

The basic truth of our faith is that we are forgiven for our sins. I don't know how much more basic you can get that that. It seems to me that Jesus dying on the cross and being resurrected is pretty central to our faith, but at root, it starts with "You are forgiven for your sins." I think there are people that don't believe that. "Well, sure, whatever that woman did must've been really bad, I guess, and Jesus has already forgiven her, but hey, you know what, Jesus was right in front of her, and he cast his spell. She knew that she was forgiven because he was standing right in front of her, and I'm just not that lucky." Or even more basic, "Yeah, but my sins are pretty bad." You hear that all the time.

Folks, trust me. And if you don't want to trust me, some 42-year-old native Californian who has come in your midst for a certain time because the Bishop sent me, trust what you read in the Bible. Your sins are forgiven. Period. Now it takes a certain amount of strength to say, "Okay you know what, that is a sin and I need forgiveness," but everybody's got that much strength. Everybody has enough strength to get to the place where Grace is.

Here is my challenge for you all this week; everybody's got that thing that they have in the back of their minds that they don't want anybody to know about. They're not sure they can be forgiven for that one thing. Well, maybe this is the week that you trust God that you are forgiven for that sin, too. Maybe this is the week, and I encourage you to wrestle with it. Seek the grace this week.

And I pray that my words are the Lord's intention this day. Amen.

Dividends

2010-06-09T12:11:00.003-04:00

Luke 7: 11-17

This story is the last of the first part of the stories of Jesus's teachings and healings throughout Galilee in the Gospel of Luke. What happens immediately after this is that a message is sent from John the Baptist. It says: "Are you the one we're looking for?"

Immediately before this passage is the story of the Roman centurion who sends for Jesus to heal one of his slaves. Jesus is on his way to him, and this Centurion says, "You know what? I don't think I am worthy for you to come in my house. But if you'll just do what you do from right there, I'm sure it'll be fine." Jesus says "Wow! This kind of faith from this guy? Okay, your slave is healed!"

I've kind of been messing around in this topic the last couple times i've preached, about the fact of what a healing or a teaching of Jesus tells us, the people who are watching from afar; the people who are reading the story. Why is it that Jesus goes out and does his healings; for what possible purpose could it serve for Jesus to go around and heal people? It seems to me like a false promise; this person gets healed but this person doesn't. These people get to hear a teaching of Jesus, but the people in the next town over never hear of the guy going through. What possible purpose could Jesus walking around serve?

Why would Jesus be walking into a little town called Nain, see a funeral procession coming out towards him, stop the funeral procession, touch the funeral bier that they're carrying the body on, and bring the young man who's on it back to life? Is he showing off? If someone were to be doing that now, if these kind of things were happening, that's where our heads would go, whouldn't they? "Who is this guy?" As they say in the Valley, "This guy is being bold."

But when you look at these stories, and especially this particular story, what he's doing isn't showing off. What Jesus is doing is taking an example of something that happens in an ordinary life, and using it. Not to show off, but to show the love of God. I am sure you've heard of your previous preachers talk about how widows were treated in first century Israel, first century Galilee. There is a specific reason why Luke tells us she had no other children, and she was a widow. Why does that matter?

Because that means she has no one to support her.

She will go hungry. She will be destitute. There will be no one for her except for the occasional charity of her neighbors. Yeah, it's all well and good that a young man gets to come back to life, but Jesus is going for a twofer here. Not only is he saying "young man, you are now returned to life", he's also saying ". . . and your mother will no longer be in danger of poverty." He's restoring two lives, not just one

There is a dividend to acting in the love of God. I'd be willing to bet (not that United Methodists bet, but you know what I mean), I would be willing to stand by the assumption that, if we were to go back through all of these stories in Luke, and look at all the stories of healings and teachings, at their core is always the sentiment of Jesus saying to someone, eye to eye, face to face, "God loves you." I'd stand by that assumption.

Lately, i've also been talking an awful lot about how we, if we are to be the people of God, the people who believe in Jesus Christ, we are to act in his image. So that means, without necessarily having the power that Jesus has, We are to act with love to all people. Even to centurions. There's nothing about a centurion that Jesus should trust. This is a soldier of an invading army subjugating the people of whom Jesus is a member. And yet, when the centurion comes to him and says "I would love for you to come to my house, but I don't think I'm worthy for you to come to my house; I know that you can do healings, can you heal my slave from here?" "Jesus says wow." When we can be impressed by the people that we don't like, we are acting in the image of Christ. When we can say to someone, "we are going to help you", and when we help that one person, four or five other people are, for instance, kept out of Child Protective Services, we are acting in the image of Christ.

This is my challenge to you all this week. We all have it within us to act in the image of Christ. We're called to it, we have the means to do it. Like I said in my last sermon, we have every thing that Jesus had, plus we have Jesus himself, in the form of the Holy Spirit. It is within us to speak the love of God to the world. Each of us lives a different life. Each of us is in a different place; each of us goes to different places in the week. Some of us spend a lot of time at home, and go out occasionally, and some others have homes that are only there to provide the bed and the roof that we can collapse into at the end of the day.

But in each of those lives, there is the opportunity to speak the love of God to someone. As St. Francis of Assisi said, "Sometimes, even use words!"

This is my challenge for you all this week, and may my words have been the Lord's intention this day. Amen.

What If it Were Really True?

2010-05-25T13:34:00.002-04:00

John 14: 8-17, 25-27

A note about this sermon. The last sermon I posted was at the end of March. I have preached since then, but without manuscript. This is a style that I have held to for the last 2 months. I have therefore started recording my sermons and using voice recognition software to transcribe the recordings to the written word. This has taken a bit of a learning curve, and so sermons were not always reproducible. You may notice a certain change in the style of this sermon, and that is because it more directly reflects my speaking, not my writing, style. I have edited for content and mistakes the software makes.

The art for this blog entry comes from a photograph found on the website of the First United Methodist Church of Greenfield, Ohio.

Today is Pentecost. Happy birthday, church! This is the third big day of the church year; the first of course being Christmas, the second of course being Easter (not of course in importance, but in chronological order) and a third one is today! This is the birthday of the church. Now, we know the story of Pentecost, we know the story from Acts, the second chapter, the first 21 verses.

We know the story of all of the disciples and the others gathered in one place, and we know the sound of a great big wind coming along, and we know the story of great tongues of fire flickering over each person's head, and we know the story of all of the people who were surrounded by a group of people hearing testaments to the greatness of God being spoken to them in their own language; and we know (I can't think of the right word that would be appropriate for right now so I'll just say) "the guy" who decides that everyone being able to hear the witness to the greatness of God being spoken in their own language is the evidence of someone who has been drinking too much.

I don't get that guy, do you? It seems to me that if someone's been drinking, they would be less articulate in their own language rather than more articulate in a language that they never spoke, wouldn't it be to you? I don't know where that guy comes up with that. But it gives Peter the opportunity to tell everyone "of course they're not drunk, it's only nine o'clock in the morning!" and then he proceeds to tell them what exactly this is, and the prophecy from the prophet Joel about what this means.

We know the story. We know what Pentecost is.

John has a different Pentecost, did you know that? There is a Pentecost according to John. It's actually in the 20th chapter of the Gospel and so I'll go ahead and read to you. Chapter 20 verse 22: "when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them 'receive the Holy Spirit." That's it. But John has a Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, as well. There is also the smaller Pentecost that happened in later chapters of Acts at Cornelius's house, where Cornelius and all his household received the Holy Spirit, after the big vision that Peter has about the sheet coming down and all the food up there that's all un-kosher, and the voice says “Kill and eat”, and Peter says “I can't do that, it's not allowed to me”, and the voice says "whatever God has created you will not call profane," and then it does the same thing three times, and then the sheet goes back up. Then he goes to Cornelius's house and the Holy Spirit comes again, to the Gentiles. Each one of these three things illustrates what Pentecost seems to mean. It is that the Holy Spirit has come to a people.

Now let's talk a little bit about what the Holy Spirit is. It seems to me that what the Holy Spirit is, is the presence of Jesus that is available to us, all of us, all the time, everywhere we go. Fair? Okay. Now, what makes it different, of course, is that when Jesus was a human being on earth, Jesus was not necessarily able to be with everybody all the time and every place, right? He was a human being. I'm here with Christopher right now; that means that I'm not with Sue, to a certain degree, and I am certainly not with the folks who are not here, who have all gone on to their separate places by now. Jesus has limitations when he was a human being because when he was a human being, he can only be right here right now, or, now I'm with you, now I'm with you. But the Holy Spirit allows us to be in the presence of Christ no matter where we go. This is why I say at the end of every service; "Christ above you, Christ below you, Christ on your left and the right." It's to remind us that the presence of Christ is with us no less than when he was next to his disciples 2000 years ago.

The scripture that we have today talks about the fact that Jesus was in the presence of the Lord when he was on earth, and he is telling the disciples, in that upper room space, "you can do this too." "Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Very truly I tell you that the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and in fact will do greater works than these because I am going to the Father." "But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you."
Now, I've read Daniel. I've read the apocalyptic section, all the scary stuff. I've read Revelation from first to last. I've read all that stuff in between. I've read apocalyptic literature up and down but it seems to me this scripture, "Very truly I tell you the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and in fact will do greater works than these. . ." That's the scariest scripture in the Bible! Jesus is saying not only are you going to do everything I did, you are going to do more than I did. Yikes!

Jesus did healings. Jesus did teachings. He went to people in need, and forgave them. He went to the woman at the well and said "you know what? I know everything that you've done and God still loves you. Just stop what you're doing." All he did, all he ever did, from his first healing to the day he died on the cross was demonstrate that God loved the people of the world. Everything could be boiled down to just that. And that's what we can do, too. When Jesus came into the world he came into a world where the religious culture was problematic, at best. There were people who are doing things just because they felt like they should, just so that they could score points and end up going and being with God in heaven. There were many, many different beliefs in the world and there were lots and lots of people who were kinda "eh" about religion. He came to earth and he would go up to people and he would say; "God loves you. This is how much God loves you," and he would do something to show them and the people around them that that person was valued in the face of God. He would forgive people that were unforgivable into the religious strictures. He would bring people up from the dead. He was demonstrating the love of God to everybody whom he met.

We are not in such a different culture now. Question-and-answer: when people look at the church, people who aren't churched people; never mind what they may feel about God; but what do they feel about the church? One answer from the early service was "They think we're boring", and I said, "no, not the church services" and she said "yeah I know; they think we're boring." Okay. They think perhaps we are too judgmental. Ever heard that one? Have you ever heard that we are irrelevant? Have you heard that we're perhaps parasitic? Do you know what that word means? We suck the life out of everything around us so that we can continue to survive. Ever heard that one? How we get to there from being in the image of Jesus who went around saying "you know what? God loves you!" How did we get there? And how can we get back to what it is that we're supposed to be doing?

We are the people who are supposed to exhibit extraordinary grace in the face of a cruel world. We're the people who were supposed to say "I know someone who loves you and I'm going to act in that person's stead so that you know that God loves you." We're considered judgmental. We're considered irrelevant. We're considered behind the times. We're considered cliquish, we stay with our own.
Folks, we know that God loves us, right? That's why we're here! Now, let's go out of this place and act as if we believe it tomorrow morning, not just when we're in here! This is what Pentecost is. Pentecost is the coming of the Holy Spirit so that the world would know of God's love. We say it in here, now let's go out and exhibit God's love out there. Pentecost +1. Tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon.

Jesus said, "very truly I tell you the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and in fact will do greater works than these because I am going to the father"; In other words we had all the tools that Jesus did, plus we've got him!

What if? What if it were really true? What if we really could be the people that God wants us to be? The people who exhibit the extraordinary grace and the love of God in the world? We know we have all the tools Jesus had. What if we could actually do the work Jesus did?

What if?

B.A.M.N.

2010-03-28T22:33:00.002-04:00

Philippians 2: 5-11

This is the amazing time. During most of the year, except maybe at Christmas, Transfiguration and Pentecost, we hear stories of a very earthly Jesus when we come to church. We hear about a Jesus who taught ethics, who was responsible for miracles, but rarely let people talk about them. No, when Jesus was on earth, the things he wanted people talking about were his teachings: who God was, what he was really like, and how there time was now here for people to expand their understanding.

The story we are going to embark upon this week, this Palm Sunday, is a story that is missing miraculous elements, missing dramatic healings, but is chock full of the teachings. Until the very end. It is the central story of our faith. Christmas has more of a grip on the public, secular imagination, but Easter is where we truly live. It is wall to wall Jesus teaching about the character of God; not as the judgmental list checker that the Gospels portray the Pharisees and Sadducees as believing in, but as the loving, all powerful and all giving Creator.

It is the story of a man teaching about the great love he knew that God has. His teaching style was By Any Means Necessary. He would tell you about God, he would show you through healing a loved one, he would put himself into a position that only God could get him out of. And the whole way teaching, modeling trust in the God he knew.

When we talk about the divinity of Jesus, as the second person of the Trinity, it isn’t that we should understand Jesus as God on earth. Jesus was fully human. He made choices, the same choices that face us. He took as his purpose in life, at some point, the purpose God had for him. At some point, he chose to accept the birth story his mother had always told him. In a culture like his, there was no adolescent struggle with purpose and identity. Jesus accepted who he was and what he was to do.

This is not to say that he was born to die. But he was born to be God’s son, and to be for the world the one who shows love in a way not ever seen before, the fullness of God’s love.

So he taught. So he healed. So he asked questions. So he sent others out to tell the story. And So, knowing it had to happen, he set his path on Jerusalem. The greatest number of people present at Passover, the most possibility of ruckus that would set people talking. Did he know that he would die there? I don’t know. It means more to me if he doesn’t. If he had the faith in God to allow whatever happened to happen, that’s a better lesson for me in my daily life than that Jesus allowed himself, in all his power, to be killed by small-mindedness and prejudice, the thirst for power and ambition.

The look on his face as he enters Jerusalem, coats spread before him, palms waving in the air, may be something akin to enjoying the moment than tradition may care to admit. When one has faith in the Lord that Jesus did, the certainty, it is absolutely true that one can live in the moment, because God has control of the world. So I think he’s smiling as he enters Jerusalem.

The frowns will come soon enough. Palm Sunday is about the potential of God’s people; Holy Week is about how we fall short. It is about the spreading of malicious rumors; it is about using situations to further ones’ political ambitions. It is about reacting in fear rather than with courage. Holy Week is about imperfect and incomplete human beings, it is about us as we too often are, as scared and stubborn, wanting so often to break through to compassion and grace filled people of God, but too frightened about what others will say to make the jump. And when we are not courageous and compassionate, the one who was sent to show us that love is hidden. Because of the fear of the people, because of the ambitions of the leaders, because of the prejudice and indifferent nature of the government, Jesus is killed for preaching unlimited love and grace.

It is that love and grace that we reach for now, as Christians. This is what we mean when we say “What Would Jesus Do?” It doesn’t mean who Jesus would vote for. It doesn’t mean who Jesus would send political contributions to. It doesn’t mean what news network Jesus would watch.

It means how can you show your neighbor the love of God as you have learned about it, as you have experienced it? How can you live in the moment, trusting God has his hand on the future?

Jesus showed God’s love by doing what he was called to do. All we are called to do is show God’s love, to neighbors, friends, strangers, ourselves. When the wider society hates certain people, we are called to love them. When our towns distrust people who are different, we are called to love them, welcome them, knit them into our communities. When people don’t like that, then comes the rub; God’s love against the world. The pain doesn’t come from God. The pain comes from people who don’t want to or can’t understand love, and God gives us the strength to endure and overcome. Sometimes, there are people who have loved so much like God that they have died, too, but God has never called anyone to die. They have just been called to love, and the world has responded with hate and violence.

We are called to love by any means necessary. The way Jesus did. And God has the future in his hands. This is what Easter teaches us. His love will be shown in the end. If we are faithful, God will take care of the rest.

The Congregation of the Older Brother

2010-03-14T15:51:00.003-04:00

Luke 15: 11-32

The Parable of the Prodigal Son is one of the more well known stories in the Bible. I’m sure anyone who has been more than a couple years in Sunday school can tell me a story they’ve heard related to this parable.

It’s even reached the stage of common reference in the wider culture—even un-churched people all know what it means when someone says “the prodigal returns home!” It’s a story that’s very high on the Biblical Literacy scale.

We’ve come to understand the word “prodigal” to mean someone who has made bad choices and needs to be forgiven. But that isn’t the actual definition, I discovered! To be prodigal means that you spend lavishly, or “are characterized by wasteful expenditure”. So the younger son isn’t prodigal because he went away and then came back looking for forgiveness; he’s prodigal because of, as Peterson’s Message says, he was “undisciplined and dissipated, he wasted everything he had.”

At various times in our lives, I think, we’ve fit into one or another of the characters of the story. It’s easy in some phases of our lives to identify with the younger son. There is no better teacher than experience, and sometimes the best way to learn a lesson is by doing the wrong thing, despite the advice we’re given. Those mistakes can sometimes be costly, but we learn because they’ve been made. I’m not really going to spend a lot of time on that brother, today, because while we all may have been there at one point or another, rarely does someone resemble that brother consistently. Most of the time, when you get to a certain age, making prodigal choices is pretty rare.

When it comes to resembling the father, well, that may seem presumptuous, because that character is usually understood to be God. Some of us may have had opportunities to be magnanimous when others have hurt us—children who have made bad choices and seek to return to our way of thinking, and sometimes literally return to our houses. It’s a common interpretation of this story to see the father as God, and great hay can be made about the character of God as Jesus understands him, running toward the younger son while he is still far off, graciously and extravagantly giving the younger son a new robe and a new ring. And indeed, Jesus is telling us about the reaction God has when we have earnestly and honestly repented of our sins, a message not to be lost during the time of repentance that is Lent.

But this morning, I am thinking that our normal way of living, our default way of life, resembles most closely the older brother. We get up, we do our jobs, we feed our families, we do our homework; in general, we do the best we can, each and every day, and rarely make a hash of it. We don’t expect to be congratulated for what we do, we just do it because that is what life is. Provide for our families, support our church with our prayers, presence gifts service and witness, do what it expected of us, not because we are mindless robots, but because this is the life we know.

We live in the older brothers’ world, most of the time. We’re prudent, we’re reasonable, we don’t seek attention. As the Boy Scouts say, we do our best to do our duty to God and our country.

And that is a good way to be.

But every now and again, if we’re so good and practical and solid, I get what the older brother says; wouldn’t it be nice to be recognized for not being an idiot? For being pragmatic and reasonable? Like the older brother says, not necessarily a big blowout down at a downtown hotel, but maybe a little cake and coffee in the church basement? You know what I mean?

We work, we buy groceries, we try to buy good food for ourselves and our children, we worry about fat and cholesterol and trans fats and fiber in our foods, we live in houses that are warm and safe, and when they aren’t we work as best we can to make them so. We come to church, we volunteer on committees, we show up for mission projects, some of us have even gone on mission trips. We take time on Friday nights to come practice music. We try to study the Bible, we try to pray.

We are the Congregation of the Older Brother. And sometimes, the hullabaloo that’s made over people who aren’t living right makes us angry. Sometimes we want to say “So, you’re an out of control popstar. Would have been better had you not put yourself in that position in the first place.” Every now and again, we speak up like the older brother does (again from The Message): “Look how many years I’ve stayed here serving you, never giving you one moment of grief, but have you ever thrown a party for me and my friends?”

And what is the Fathers’ response? “You are always with me”.

At first glance you might say, I am always with you? Whoop de ding!

But think about it. Being all of those things, prudent and reasonable and practical, providing for our families, doing the work that is expected of us, including homework and practice if we go out for sports, that is what this story tells us being with God is like. Not getting addicted to things is what being with God is like. Providing safe space for our children to grow and thrive, that is what being with God is like. When we are with God, we construct a mesh of safety that benefits all of us. With God’s help, we construct the very thing that the younger sons (and daughters) among us leave. And when someone leaves that mesh, it is cause for sadness and concern. It is indeed our love for them that causes us sadness, and that love (another aspect of the character of God) drives us to seek their return.

And when they return, love is what they need. This is what Jesus tells us by having the father react so extravagantly; someone returning to God is indeed cause for celebration!

So don’t get bent out of shape when you don’t get congratulated with a big party for living like you should.

It is then when you are the closest to God.

Trusting in the Major Keys: On The Unneccesariness Of Being Reminded Of One’s Mortality This Year.

2010-02-21T10:48:00.003-05:00

Psalm 130

One of the blessings of growing up a choir kid is that I was able to hear and sing some fine music, growing up. One of my favorite all-time composers is a twentieth century Englishman named John Rutter. Several times, I have had the pleasure of singing his Requiem.

Now when I was younger, I gravitated toward the prettier bits, the bits that sounded like movie themes. Like most callow youth, the music that is not immediately accessible, the stuff in minor keys, is “boring”. Rutter’s main theme, the Requiem theme, is exactly one of those prettier bits. In singing the Requiem in choirs, I always assigned the second movement, called Out of the Depths, into the boring bin. It begins with a pretty intense cello solo, but what I remembered most about that solo was the intensity of the soloist at the concert I sang in.

I am many things, but I am no longer callow. In talking with my colleagues Monday about preaching texts for Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, the phrase “out of the depths I cry to you” came to me, and I’ll choose to credit the Holy Spirit for that. It is the opening line of Psalm 130, and that boring section of Requiem came to mind again.

It is no longer boring.

If music is the speech of emotion, I get that cello solo now. I can see the musician that played it so long ago in the chancel at Newark UMC, working so hard to express the emotion of the music. I get the low voices singing “Out of the Depths”. I’ve been there. When you are in the depths, screaming and crying is sometimes too much to muster, and all you can manage is a low rumble, but one should never mistake a low rumble for a lessening of emotion over a scream. God knows the groans too deep for words.

I listened to this piece while writing this, and where it breaks into major key at verse 5, the text says “in the Lord my soul trusts” (they are using the King James for the text). From then out, it stays major, stays hopeful, stays trusting.

Lent, and especially Ash Wednesday, is usually an exercise in the reminder of one’s mortality. It is the beginning of a six week suite in a minor key. It behooves us to be reminded periodically that we are not the be-all and end-all, that there were people thousands of years ago who experienced the sorrow and angst we feel. As long as there have been clans and tribes, there have been mothers and wives and children who are consumed by anguish at the loss of their loved ones who have gone off to be soldiers. It is only a minor change in that to say that husbands and fathers now feel that angst, too. As long as there have been families and lovers, there has been pain and suffering because of the loss of loved ones because of disease.

Ash Wednesday is usually a prudent reminder that for all of us, the end result is not immortality. It is death. And we are all headed over that waterfall. And for Christians, historically, death does not bring oblivion, but union with Jesus Christ in heaven. But it does mean the end of all that we know and love.

There will be Ash Wednesdays in the future when I will be caught up short by the reminder that I too will die and no longer be present on earth. This wonderful existence of music and food and love will cease to exist. So will this horrible existence of disease and suffering and war and prejudice and hatred. Our lives on earth are mixtures of all of the above, and sometimes the juxtapositions of good and bad give rise to awareness of the absurd.

But this year, I need not be reminded of the shortness of life, the value of real life over counterfeit. Because of Donna’s disease, I value things differently. I’d like to say that I will be changed forever, but I am not that optimistic. I know that I will still be drawn into things that feel important at the time, but ultimately aren’t. I know that I will be unable to escape 3 hour meetings and political arguments and the ethics of steroids in baseball, and I might even find that stuff important. Shame on me, then.

Let Ash Wednesday always be a rebuke. May it always yank my leash back to the truth that love, tangible and demonstrated, is all that matters. We live a life of the senses, our experience of the world is only obtained through our senses.

This Ash Wednesday, 2010, the most important thing in the world, right now, is making sure Donna is comfortable, loved, clean and fed. The most important thing in the world is that Josiah is learning how to be successful in the world-not “rock star” successful, but able to love and take care of himself by himself in the world. Can he cook for himself? Can he clean for himself? Will he have the emotional aptitude to love well and support, emotionally and materially, those whom he loves?

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Let Donna know her worth and value in my life as long as she lives. Let Josiah grow up to be a true man, emotionally grounded, capable and giving.

Let the cello play those groans too deep for words. They need not be ignored, any more than a minor key should be avoided. To live life perpetually in a major key is to live a lie. Stuff happens. But let me always be able to be hopeful and trusting of what comes, trusting in God, even in the face of death, the ultimate unknown.

Breadmaking

2010-02-14T16:13:00.004-05:00

Luke 9: 28-36

Since I have become such a homebody, and because I am trying to eat better, I decided to make bread this week. I used a recipe that calls for a three day process. The recipe even said that “you would hardly notice that you were making bread, because you do so little each day!”

So, the first day, I gather up the ingredients-some yeast, some flour, and water. The expiration date on the yeast says April 2010, so I think I am ok. I mix warm water, yeast, and a little bit of flour, and as per the directions, put it somewhere cool. The recipe said that a cool rise helps get a better textured bread, so it goes down into the storeroom. I go down to check it several times, but not having done this recipe before, I have no idea what to look for.

The next day, I bring the bowl up to the kitchen, and add some whole wheat flour and some regular bread flour, more water, and some salt. I mix it all up and put it back into the storeroom.

The third day is supposed to be baking day, but when I go to get the dough, it has hardly risen at all. I’m pretty bummed, but I get distracted with having to take care of other things for Donna or Joe or something, and leave the bowl on the counter overnight. I’ll just toss the dough when I get back to it, I think. But there it sits.

And the next day, which is now the fourth day of a three day recipe, what do you think happened? The dough did rise after all! So I went ahead and finished the adding of the rest of the flour and the kneading, forming it into two loaves and letting them rise for 3 hours (the recipe calls for a half to one hour). And I put both of the loaves into the oven to bake—15 minutes at 500, 35 minutes at 350. Putting both loaves in puts one too close to the top heating element, though, and the top burns. I pull that one out, and finish the other one, then put the burnt top one back in.

The first loaf comes out, and it is a very nice loaf—pretty yummy, in fact! Dense, almost a meal in itself. The second one, the burnt top one, when it cools, I think is too hard to cut into.

But I have made bread! I would have loved to take the second loaf, lacquer it or something, and keep it on the wall as a reminder of the value of a little bit of work each day getting the job done, as a lesson about not throwing something away too quickly, a lesson in patience.

But it is after all, just a loaf of bread. It is not a sculpture that took months and years of work and is meant to stay in a city park. It is made as food, is meant to be food, and will spoil, even though it has such a hard shell.

But making this loaf of bread as a symbol of my experience is very tempting. I understand Peter a little better now when he wants to build three little altar-sheds for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah up on the mountain. He is the first, along with John and James, those old Boanerges boys, to see what Jesus truly is, who he truly belongs with. And he wants an altar built, something that will have people come to that spot and know what happened, maybe even make it a pilgrimage spot. It’s a normal human impulse, to memorialize significant events in someone’s life. Women keep roses from long ago dances in their Bibles, pressed between the pages for 60 years. The baseball that Barry Bonds hit into the stands which gave him the home run record became the focus of bizarre court case, all because the ball itself was important.

We all have, somewhere, mementoes of the things that are important to us. And that’s Ok. But Peter James and John witnessing Jesus dazzling white, and up in the air talking with the two greatest heroes of the faith those four men share is an even that is really like bread. Neither are supposed to be lacquered and kept like a museum piece. Bread is the staff of life—in it is everything that keeps us alive. It’s not meant to be kept. Jesus as a man who is of the same importance as Moses and Elijah is a fact that is meant to be told, and Jesus becomes more important to us, because he is not just a teacher or a miracle worker. It’s not meant to be marked like a roadside historical plaque, or even like that grotto on Pierce Street across from Kings’ College. It’s meant to be talked about the story shared, and the importance of the event is not where it happened, it is that it did happen. Just like learning how to make bread.

We don’t know where the moment of the Transfiguration was, on which mountain. We don’t know where Moses is buried. But we remember both people anyway, because of the importance of their stories. What they said and did and what happened to them are central to our faith. Something had to have happened for there to be a story about it, but what separates this from a legend, what separates it from stories we tell and retell, like Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill or Dwight Clark’s catch in the end zone from Joe Montana, is that we expect to be changed by the telling.

It doesn’t matter where it happened, just like it doesn’t matter which loaf was the first one. It’s still food, and it is only as useful as it is edible. It’s ability to be used is what makes it important. We say to each other What Would Jesus Do, because we point to his life and his example as our goal in life. How can we be like Christ? How can we imitate Christ? We do it best when we imitate the story and tell the story.

We give it away.

The next sermon will be posted on or after Feb. 28.

Strong Proclamations in Quiet Tones

2010-02-09T12:33:00.003-05:00

1 Corinthians 15 1-11

In this whole experience that my family is going through, I have had cause to think about work. My trade, if you will, is “preacher”, but the modern day minister also has a large amount of administration that must be handled, and there are also demands to counsel, to provide care and spiritual guidance, and to teach.

None of us do all of these things excellently, there are always things that are less interesting to preachers than others. Sometimes, even, people prefer the pastoral counseling and do not enjoy the preaching bit. But we are called to it all when we are called to the job, and where we are not good or talented, we find ways to get the job done, or ask others to do it.

I expect that every job is the same way. I expect that there are aspects of farming that people do better than others, and some aspects are more enjoyable.

Plant work?

Dog sitting?

Serving in the military?

My work by training is as a minister. In seminary, people take great care in saying that it is a professional career, and must be minded as a career. Indeed, I do think of it as a career.

But right now, I am not ministering to a congregation. At least not in any way I visualized when I graduated. I am ministering to a very small group of people, which by any professional standard is a failure. I spend my daily work in service to two or sometimes three people. And the service I provide is a very mundane one; driving to school, picking up from school, cooking. It is a very earthy one; laundry, trash, helping with personal care.

Seminary did not train me for any of these things. Seminary did not teach me how to love, and what sometimes we must physically do because we love. It did not teach me that I needed to set myself aside in order to be able to do what is necessary in this situation. It did teach me that I am supposed to be the “expert” in my field. It did not teach me that asking for help is necessary and vital to survival.
And yet, despite all of my training, it is the work that I do now that shows love. It is the help that I ask for that shows love. It is the things that I cannot do, the expectations I cannot meet, that show God’s love for us in the most important ways. I hope that, by making the choices I’ve made, using the help that has been given to me, that the love of God is shown most clearly to those who need to see it most.

For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle. But by the grace of God, I am what I am, and His grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is within me.

I will expect that when I look back on my career as a minister, the time when I was the least available to my congregation was when my witness was at it’s strongest. That the work that I did, completely domestic and out of the view of my community, out of newspapers and denominational magazines, that was my strongest witness.

That the love of God was seen at its sharpest light was when I was the most invisible, when I needed the most help.

Paul wrote to the Corinthians that his work was his witness. Sure, he taught them the proper way to think about Christ, what he did for all of humanity, but he hoped that he would be remembered for how the work he did reflected the God and the savior he believed in, even though he had persecuted them in the beginning.

My wish is similar-that somehow, in ways that I cannot even imagine, the love and the grace of God has been shown through this experience to you. By the grace of God, I am what I am, and his grace to me has not, I hope, been in vain. I am working harder than I ever have in my life, and so little of it has been on what Seminary told me was the professional aspects of ministry. But the grace of God, the love of God is at its’ clearest right now, and I call your attention to it. I also pray that, by the grace of God, it can be seen strongly enough to matter.

And I invite you to think for yourself; How is the work you do, how is the life you lead, showing the love of God? There are no better or no worse ways. Each way is individual, and half of the witness is realizing that it’s there.

Love Never Ends

2010-01-31T13:17:00.002-05:00

1 Corinthians 13: 1-13

I hear this scripture differently than I used to. In my mind, as well as the mind of many others, this is the “wedding” scripture, because it very handily talks about love. And even though hearing it just at weddings is a little disappointing, sometimes for many people this is the only scripture they hear for months and months. It’s not too bad a one to hear, if that is the case.

But in the context of the letters Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, love is more than romantic, more than starlight and roses. Love is to be our way of operating in the world. To all whom we meet, we are to love. Not get all starry-eyed for everyone, not to leave love notes or buy them those little Sweetheart candy hearts with the little sayings, but love in the tough-to-do, lunch-pail and hard-hat, hard-to-do-but-we-do-it-anyway sort of way.

Loving everyone you meet is hard work. We have to overcome prejudices, first impressions, and sometimes just pure fatigue.

In First Corinthians, this passage is placed very strategically, addressing issues that the Corinthian church is struggling with. Before it comes the “One Body with Many Members” section, the reminder that, in all their individuality, each member of the church in Corinth is valued and a child of God with no classification above or below anyone else. After the love section, Paul talks about Spiritual gifts, and specifically the gift of tongues, which is a gift not practiced in this church to the best of my knowledge.

That a discussion of love is connected between these two tells me that love, to Paul in these letters, is something not fallen into, but bonded with and worked at, like any other relationship with people, be it a union, a club, a place of employment or a family. Or, as in Paul’s original meaning, a church. We are all bonded together here, we come together to worship God in this place and these people, and those who grew up here and have known no other church are of the same importance as those who are recent move-ins to the area. Indeed, those who may visit us are of the same importance as the life time members. To all, patience and kindness should be the rule, not the exception. There should be no boastfulness, and we definitely should not be rude to each other. Disagree, sure, but do you know what you call a group where everyone agrees with each other? A cult.

Of course we’re doing to disagree with each other. But this is a church, a part of the Body of Christ. And everyone here has value in the eyes of God. Everyone from the oldest and most infirm member all the way down to the newest baby. Everyone from the longest standing member, someone who knew someone who knew the founders of the church, all the way to the person who just stepped in here today.

Now, that is the Bible study portion of this sermon. I said at the beginning that I hear this scripture differently than I used to. Especially verses 4 to the first part of 8.

I have not referred to my family’s current struggle in my recent sermons in any particular way, because I am not willing to make that struggle constant fodder for sermons. My sister quotes the Greek philosopher Plato as saying we are to be gentle with each other, because everyone we meet is fighting a hard battle. The seriousness and horribleness (if that is a word) of what my family faces together, as singular and exceptional as it is, does not demand that I speak about it constantly. Others in this church have had this experience, some very recently, and some are in it now.

But these verses ring a different note for me then they always have before, a much more minor chord.

Love is patient; when you’re tired, and the one you take care of is tired and gets confused and walks into corners without reason, and can’t get out of them, love has to be patient.

Love is kind; gently redirecting her with words and hands, sometimes, saying the same thing a lot of times, love has to be kind.

Love isn’t rude. Love does not insist on its own way. Of course my way would be that this all not have happened, but a tantrum isn’t going to solve it. Stamping my foot and holding my breath in the face of a terminal illness is futile, anyway.

Love is not irritable or resentful; Hogwash. In this case, sometimes it is. You just can’t avoid it. You are tired all the time and things just don’t go the way you want. Children are going through their own sadness and fear processes; they sometimes just don’t have the energy for homework, even when it is the only thing they have to do. Thank goodness the teachers get this better than I do, some days.

Love rejoices in the truth. The truth, told judiciously and with clarity, truly is freeing for us all, and takes much less energy to pay attention to than secrets. Never mind lies told to “save someone’s feelings”.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. Love never ends. True enough. But love marks you, scars you, changes you, and it is something you need to recover from. Loving and care-giving in these situations takes a toll, and sometimes people don’t recover from the price they pay.

I’ve spoken once or twice before about miracles with regard to Donna. I’ve said that I will play my part, and not expect the miracle of healing; so that if it would happen, it would indeed be the unexpected event miracles are. All too often, people pray for miracles, and our limited imaginations demand one kind only-full restoration of health of our loved one, and a return to the life we knew beforehand. Didn’t happen that way for Job, and it won’t here, either. When that doesn’t happen, our faith is crushed, and we are mad at God.

I never wanted to be in that position, so I did not pray for that; it didn’t seem wise to test God. Rather, I wanted to watch and wait and see what God would do, because God has never forgotten Donna.

Last night, Donna and I talked about this, and we agreed; though we know the tumor is spreading and growing now, she is able to be more closely herself than at any point in this whole journey since last July. This is God’s work. This is our miracle.

Love indeed never ends.

Baptism

2010-01-10T18:11:00.004-05:00

Acts 8 14-17
Luke 3 15-17, 21-22

As far as I can tell, Jesus never did perform a baptism. For all of the language that we use concerning baptism, as in becoming member of his body, he never did bring anyone into the body of believers. There was not a body of believers in that sense when he was on earth, that came at Pentecost, when the believers were all gathered into one place in the Temple, and were baptized by the blue flame of the Holy Spirit.

I don’t even know if everyone who was there that day, and are indisputably part of the original church, were ever baptized, even by John the Baptist and his baptism of repentance.

One does not need to be baptized to believe in Jesus, but one who believes in Jesus should be baptized. Why? Because it is the symbol of the joining of our community. To be a member of the Body of Christ, one should have been baptized. Does baptism guarantee salvation? Is a baby safer from the fires of hell because they have been baptized? No.

I can say that because of the wide variance about how baptism is practiced. Some churches will baptize infants, put them into big frilly dresses, and pass them over to the pastor who holds them as he or she sprinkles water on their heads. Some will baptize only adults, or people who have reached a certain age of majority. Some re-baptize people every time they join a new local church.

Some will re-baptize someone coming to them from another denomination of Christian sect (we don’t, though there is an expectation from the denominational tall cotton that we will baptize those coming from Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons. Actual on the ground practice seems to vary from Pastor to Pastor.) Are there some methods that are unacceptable to the Lord? We’ve not heard back, yet, and so we, as Methodists, are willing to accept a wide diversity of practice, both of people transferring in and the practice of our own practitioners.

Some will sprinkle water on the one receiving it, some will have water poured over their heads, and some will be fully immersed, and churches will actually have small swimming-pool type appliances installed in their churches, up behind the altar, that are heated and have a glass wall so you can see the whole thing happen. Others will only baptize in “living water”-lakes and rivers. I saw a few pictures posted a while ago by a childhood friend of mine who now is a pastor in Santa Cruz, CA, and their baptism ceremony on the beach, with the people being baptized in the Pacific ocean. That looked amazing!

So, some of you can remember your baptism, some of you were too young when you were baptized to remember.

I remember mine.

I was not baptized in the United Methodist Church, and I was not baptized as an infant. I came to Christ as a man in my early 20’s. 23, to be exact. My baptism date is October 11, 1991, and it was in an independent, semi-charismatic church in Napa, California that no longer exists. I was baptized with at least 2 other people that day, one of whom I still am in contact with. It was in the backyard of a parishioner, and there was a barbeque and music playing from the praise band of the church. The actual baptisms happened in a swimming pool, an above ground one, and we wore, men and women both, board shorts and t-shirts. It seemed to go without saying that modesty was expected.

But what did it mean for me?

At the time, it meant that I belonged to something. I had made a decision. California, then as now, is a place where almost every spiritual expression is available to you, if you look hard enough, everything from straight up Roman-Catholicism to native American peyote ingesting. You can easily find, especially in the cities and the suburbs around San Francisco and LA, Muslim Mosques, Hindu Temples, Jewish Synagogues, and Christian churches of so many stripes and flavors you begin to wonder if each person isn’t their own church. By my being baptized, I was signaling to the world that I had chosen a path. I was going to express my experience of the divine as a Christian; I was going to find my wisdom and my tools for solving the problems of life in a Christian language, using the Christian religion and Holy texts.

That was the first of many decisions, because as it turns out, I was not in that church for very long at all. I moved from Napa back to Delaware in January 1992, and I did so for other reasons than religious. It was a convenient way to leave a that particular congregation, which had become very rigid and not amenable to where my mind was growing. When I got to Delaware, I was despairing of what I should do. I was a newly baptized Christian who did not agree with many of the positions and attitudes that I had been taught. What I needed to find was a group that agreed with that I was reading in the Bible, or at the very least a place that would allow me to work out my questions freely, without feeling like I was “getting in trouble” for every question I asked.

I found that in the Wesley Foundation campus ministry at the University of Delaware, and in a very real sense, they kept me from falling away. I am not Christian because of the Methodists, but the Wesley Foundation is why I am Methodist. And the original baptism I received, from what was essentially a personality driven storefront church teaching doubtful doctrine, was still good enough. No one’s hands are perfect enough to truly convey the Spirit of the Lord, but all hearts are worthy to receive it, so as Jesus said to John, “let it be so for now.”

To me, the Christian church should be all inclusive; as one author named Eric Elnes writes:
The label “Christian” should stand for people of extravagant grace and generosity; people of unusual courage and compassion, who stand for justice and are known for being far more loving than the norm; far more forgiving. Instead, being a Christian seems to have become synonymous with (being ignorant and selfish).

I’m pretty sure that when Peter and John showed up in Samaria, hearing that Samaria had received the word of God, they didn’t come looking for statistics about numbers converted, souls saved, numbers on rolls. They came looking for people practicing exstravagant grace and generosity, they came looking for people being far more loving than the norm. They came looking for the spirit already moving, and when they did see fruits of the Spirit, they laid hands on them. “they had already been baptised into the Lord Jesus”. Now, through Peter and John came the Holy spirit. I assume that what came with Peter and John was the permission to act as the people of God with the leaders’ blessing.

Baptism may just be that and nothing more-permission to act far more generously and with radical grace, who stand for justice, God’s justice in this world. But what it certainly means is that when you do act, you do so in the name of Jesus Christ.

(The next sermon from Fryer Drew will be posted on or aftar January 31. for updates on Donna, please continue to use this web address.)

Keeping After It

2010-01-03T13:58:00.003-05:00

Colossians 3: 12-17, Luke 2: 41-52

I’m in the middle of a book right now called Three Cups of Tea, which is about a man named Craig Mortenson’s efforts to build a school in the Pakistani village that nursed him back to health after a disastrous attempt to climb K2, the second highest mountain in the world. Every class in Joe’s school is reading it in some form by the end of the year, and I want to be in the loop!

It’s a very interesting story. Like most climbers, Mortenson idolizes the man who was the first Western man to climb Mt. Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary, (a Sherpa man named Tenzing Norgay, one of the local tribesmen, accompanied him) and Mortenson quotes him at one point from a speech as saying this: “I was just an enthusiastic mountaineer of modest abilities who was willing to work quite hard and had the necessary imagination and determination.”

Many had tried to climb Mt. Everest before Hilary, and all had failed. I remember an article a few years back about the recovery of the body of man who had made an early attempt about 80-90 years ago.

A mountain climb is an effort of singular significance. Elsewhere in the book it is said that a mountain climb of the sort that Hilary and others mount is like planning a war. And like most projects, things have to develop over time. People have to get used to the idea, and if not see the need, at least understand the reasons for the project. Awareness and understanding sometimes has to mature or develop, like a tree has to grow for a few years before it can yield fruit.

Our Gospel story this morning is one that parents can sometimes chuckle at. Jesus, who is 12 years old in this story, goes missing after a family pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the holy feast of Passover. He’s not immediately missed because of the large body of people traveling together for safety, his parents just assume he’s in with the scrum of children running around the caravan. But a day goes by and he’s still not around, they do get worried, and return to Jerusalem. And, after three days of searching the city, there he is, in the temple, asking questions and learning. Asking really good questions, according to Luke. So, of course Mary and Joseph are a little tense about his being gone and all, and Mary says, “Boy, where have you been? We’ve been worried sick!”

Now, as I’ve gotten older and now have a intelligent son of my own, I hear Jesus’ response differently. No longer is it the pious tone of an angelic voice saying “Why, of course, I was in the temple the whole time. I am Jesus, the Son of God, where else would I be?”
No, what I hear now is: “Jeez, mom, of course I’d be in the temple. Duh! Where else would I be?”

Our only story of Jesus as anything other than a baby or an adult is a story of rebellion. That phase really is inescapable, isn’t it?

Isn’t it interesting to note that Jesus stayed back in Jerusalem, without his parents’ knowledge, to learn. Not to go to some shop or bazaar that his parents wouldn’t let him go to, not because of a girl he met, but because he needed to learn. Is it odd for you to think that Jesus, the son of God, needed to learn? That there was something that the elders of the temple could teach him? That Jesus wasn’t ready to go right out of the box? That he needed to learn and mature? Even Jesus needed to grow into his job?

If it is true for Jesus, then how much more so is it for us? This first Sunday of 2010, what is it that we are growing into? What is it we are maturing toward? And let me ask this; if you don’t feel like you are maturing toward anything, what would you like to do? And how does coming here every week or however often you come, help that?

I would submit that people come to church for all different reasons. Not everyone comes because they need to refresh their souls at the well before continuing to evangelize the world for Christ. Some come just to hear something good or positive in a very hard life, some come just to be with people. It’s not always about preaching Christ for those who are lost for everyone; for many of us, it is “can I get a word of encouragement and confidence in my life?”

Yes. But I will also say to you that hoping for a word of encouragement about a life that is standing still isn’t going to be satisfying for long. Life is change. Life is learning. Life is planning and attempting to climb a mountain.

What is the mountain that you need to climb? Is it to build a school in a town halfway around the world? Is it to preach the gospel? Is it the ambition of promotion at a job? Is it to work in order to be a good provider to the children that have been entrusted to you by God? Is it to leave an abusive relationship? Is it to provide a comfortable loving environment to a loved one who is sick or dying?

Whatever it may be, such efforts take time, and choices must be made. In writing his commentary for the gospel passage, John Wesley writes this:
“It plainly follows, that though a man were pure, even as Christ was pure, still he would have room to increase in holiness, and in consequence thereof, to increase in the favor as well as the love of God.”
Though this is Jesus we’re talking about, he was a twelve year old Jesus. He still smarts off to his mom. He came to be human, and stages have to be passed through. Growth still has to occur, even for the Savior of the Universe.

Your personal goal may or may not be growth in Christ. But you are still here, (or still reading this), so let me suggest this as a goal, no matter what else you have in mind:

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

I’m pretty confident in being able to say that this will help you, no matter what your goal is. No matter your resolution for the New Year, clothing yourself with love will help you be successful. Allow yourself to grow, and to have time to grow. Just keep after it, with an attitude of forgiveness and patience.

It takes time to climb a mountain.