Lots of scripture read today!
Luke 9: 28-40
0Philippians 2: 5-11
Luke 22:14-23:56
The week that we call holy week—the week that begins today and contains the remembrances of the most important aspects of our faith—begins with a parade. And the parade begins with a detailed description of going to get a donkey.
Jesus clues his disciples into the perfect love that is about to be expressed in the coming week by giving them what seems to be a menial task. Why does Luke give us such a detailed description on the directions to get a donkey on the way to Jerusalem? Perhaps it is a counterweight to the delusions of grandeur that are being promoted by the disciples later around the dinner table later that week. In their mind, they are on the march to conquer Babylon, and they want to know who would sit on the right and left hand of their new Messiah. But Jesus gives these disciples a humbling task that reflects the humbling task he must undergo in the week that follows.
We oftentimes think that God’s love is expressed in power. What we consider power is usually coercive power. But what we find hard to stomach and even harder to imitate is the divine ideal of Love as totally and perfectly vulnerable.
Several years ago a beautiful movie came out called “The Green Mile.” Tom Hanks starred as the prison warden on death row in the 1930’s south, and came to know one of the inmates who had strange powers. This man was literally huge as an ox—a symbol of this character’s power—yet his real power was in his vulnerability. Through his love, he healed a mouse, a woman, and even the warden himself. Through his healing love, he became more and more vulnerable. The movie is called “The Green mile” because the hallway to the death chamber is painted green, and the inmates call it the mile because it feels like a mile when one walks it to their death. John Coffee, the character in the Green Mile, walks his path willingly even though he is innocent of the crime for which he is accused. Much like John Coffee, Jesus Christ knew that the green palms thrown at the feet of his humble donkey were paving the way to the cross. He goes willingly even though he is innocent of the crime for which he is accused.
Christ’s power comes through his perfect love. Perfect love involves a submission to vulnerability. Every welt on his back, every thorn in his brow happens because Christ’s love makes him vulnerable. He’d been telling his disciples it had to be this way for some time, and they didn’t understand. More accurately, they didn’t WANT to understand. Mark tells us in ch. 9 that they were afraid to ask him what he meant when he told them that the son of man must suffer and be killed. They were afraid to ask him because while they were arguing about who was the greatest, Jesus was sitting a little child on his lap and saying “welcome this child and you welcome God.”
This terrible, beautiful passion of our savior says to us once and for all, “this is how to love—this is how I love you.” Christ was killed because he dared to love us as we are, he dared to love those who weren’t supposed to be loved. He died to show us that true power lies in vulnerability, it lies in submission, it lies in Love.
Can we learn this perfect love? Our Methodist heritage and the theology of the Wesleys say that we can. When we Methodists are ordained for ministry, we are asked by the Bishop, “Are you going on to perfection?’ To which we are expected to answer “yes.” The following historic question, written by Wesley, clarifies, “Do you expect to be perfected in love in this life?” Not just ministers, but all of us as inheritors of this tradition, should confidently answer “yes.”
This is the heart of sanctifying grace, as our five confirmands learned this past weekend. Being perfected in love involves vulnerability, it involves reconciliation. To learn it, we must pay special attention to the events of the passion story. It may involve fetching a donkey when we really want to sit by our King in glory. It may involve walking the path though we may be taunted and derided the whole way. Jesus looked with love on the world even as the very people he was being crucified with joined in the taunts and accusations. Can you imagine? Don’t those other guys being crucified have enough to worry about?
This radical, perfect, vulnerable love might involve reaching out in embrace when we really want to slap or punch. It might involve placing a great deal of importance on the creative efforts of a little child when what we really want to do is get back to fixing dinner or writing a report or watching a tv show. That action alone could be placing the welcome mat out in front of our heart for God. Don’t you imagine that the disciples would have rather been suiting Jesus up with armor and perhaps killing a mounted Roman so that Jesus could ride in on his horse? Don’t you imagine Peter would rather have been basking in the glory of his master’s fame and respect rather than denying him as his master was being tried?
And yet Peter would later come to know, and Paul would later write to the Philippians, that it is in the very events that drive the disciples away like scattered sheep that Jesus Christ is ultimately and spiritually glorified. Paul writes, “Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. 5Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 6who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, 7but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, 8he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. 9Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, 10so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
Showing that perfect love could mean letting go of anger or feelings of betrayal or mistrust and instead opening our lives to the future, opening our hearts to new possibilities.
Perfect love embodies vulnerability. What position is more vulnerable than open arms? It is in this action, when we go to embrace, that we mirror our creator and savior’s sacrifice. What we must sacrifice is our Ego, our desires, to the one desire of God---to building the Kingdom, to the authentic life that Jesus placed in the offering plate for us.
You would perhaps rather not focus in on the story of our Lord’s betrayal and beating and crucifixion this week and instead zoom right ahead to the Easter celebration. I challenge you to observe Holy week—to be here as we plunge into the stories of the Last week of our savior. If it is not your custom to be here in worship in the middle of the week, just imagine how out of custom it must’ve felt to the original disciples to hear about the path that their Messiah was going to take—not a path of glory and military revolution, but a path of vulnerability and spiritual revolution. Together we will observe the pain and the heartache—so that together we may experience the joy and the hope in a new light--The light that accompanies the resurrection.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Lent 5 sermon, "How Beautiful are the Feet"
John 12: 1-8
300 denaraii worth of perfume! That was an average person’s whole year’s salary. In John Wesley’s notes on this passage, he concludes that Lazarus and his sisters must have been of high economic standing. He remarks, “It seems Martha was a person of some figure, from the great respect which was paid to her and her sister, in visits and condolences on Lazarus's death, as well as from the costly ointment mentioned in the next verse. And probably it was at their house our Lord and his disciples lodged, when he returned from Jerusalem to Bethany, every evening of the last week of his life, upon which he was now entered."
We hear the familiar account this morning, and if you’re like me you think, “Oh, that was Mary, Martha’s sister? I didn’t know it was her who anointed the Lord’s feet and then wiped them with her hair!” John is the only gospel writer to make this connection, the story told in the other gospels simply describe “a woman,” and over the years the tradition arose that the other Gospel writers describe an instance of Mary Magdalene performing the same act.
But John places it here, in the last week of Jesus’ life, and we hear a lot of parenthetical narration in the text as well. John also singles out Judas as the critic of this act of devotion, whereas Matthew points to the disciples in general and Mark and Luke point to the Pharisees. Why Mary? Why Judas? Why now?
In John’s narrative, we see the devotion of Mary mimicked later in the week as Jesus washes his disciples’ feet and commands them to “Love one another, as I have loved you.” In John’s narrative, this takes place on the night he is captured in the garden of Gethsemene. John’s account places what we call the “Last Supper” earlier in the career of Jesus, and gives the only account of the foot-washing. John perhaps places this story here in his telling of the Gospel to foreshadow the act of servanthood that Jesus illustrates by getting on his knees and washing his disciple’s feet.
You see, this is where it becomes difficult to get an idea of the time frame because we are reading this story piecemeal. This week we hear the story of the Saturday before the Holy week of Jesus’ passion. In the scriptures, Palm Sunday is tomorrow—it is the day following this anointing at Mary and Martha’s in Bethany. And it is only days before the events of Maundy Thursday. Maunday, by the way, comes from the Latin “mandatum,” which means mandate, and is a reference to Jesus’ new commandment to “Love one another as I have loved you.”
Easter may still seem like a long way away, but in the narrative we are hearing, it is only a week away. I hope this puts this story in perspective. It also might explain why Jesus is seemingly flippant about Judas’s protestations that this expensive perfume could have been sold and benefit the poor. Mary’s gesture of devotion is not just the recounting of an event, John placing the story here in the story has symbolic effect. It is a literary device to prepare us for the last moment of tenderness and intimacy that Jesus will be able to share with his disciples and friends. It is preparing us for what John considers is Jesus’ most important teaching of all.
And so, let us hear the recounting of this story in the light of the foot-washing. We are going to be celebrating the Passover Seder as Jesus and his disciples would have on Maundy Thursday, so we won’t have an opportunity to hear this story too, from John 13:
“Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. 2 The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper 3 Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, 4 got up from the table,a took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. 5 Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. 6 He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” 7 Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” 8 Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” 9 Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” 10 Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” 11 For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.” 12 After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? 13 You call me Teacher and Lord--and you are right, for that is what I am. 14 So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. 15 For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. 34 I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
In our scripture lesson, Mary has illustrated perfect discipleship. She is one of Jesus’ disciples, and here has the opportunity to wash her Lord’s feet: An act of servanthood and devotion that Jesus later verbally commands his disciples to show for one another. This issues a challenge to our typical mindset that when we hear the word “disciple,” we think of 12 middle aged men. No—as we see again and again in John, and repeatedly during holy week, the women disciples are often the ones who intuitively embody Jesus’ teachings. Women are the first preachers, the first to bring news of the Gospel after they discover an empty tomb, and here, in this story, it is again a woman disciple who carries out the new commandment before it has been given, and the reward for her faith is that she is the one who gets to wash the master’s feet.
In the foot washing, Jesus will wash his disciples’ feet as an expression of his love for them, as a way of drawing them into his life with God (13:8). He will also ask them to repeat this act of service for one another (13:14-15). What Jesus will do for his disciples and will ask them to do for one another, Mary has already done for him in 12:3. In Mary, then, the reader is given a picture of the fullness of the life of discipleship. Her act shows forth the love that will be the hallmark of discipleship in John and the recognition of Jesus’ identity that is the decisive mark of Christian life.
In our Ephesians text, we heard about the “eyes of our heart being enlightened,” being able to perceive the “hope and riches of our inheritance.” Mary is a model disciple because she never hesitated to focus on Jesus with the eyes of her heart. What seemed lavish to the others was in her mind a small expression of devotion and glorification.
She spares no expense in her devotion to her Lord because she is filled with the hope of eternal riches that are her inheritance. These riches aren’t substantial wealth, but the joy and love of Christ ever present in a living fellowship. She uses up the burial ointment because of her faith that death cannot contain this man’s life.
What would you do if you were to witness something like this? You may say to yourself that since it was Jesus, you would probably join right in with Mary on her knees in your worship of our Lord. But how many of us have joined Judas there on the sideline and made a snide comment when we have witnessed someone lost in the worship of our Living God? How many of us have been critical of another person’s form of worship because it doesn’t look or sound like our own?
Perhaps those are the moments when we need to hear the commandment of our Lord again—“as I have done, do ye likewise.” Love one another as I have loved you! Jesus, knowing he wouldn’t always be here in his physical form, gave his disciples a way to mirror Mary’s devotion to him after he was gone—wash one another’s feet. Be devoted to one another, that’s how people will know you’re my disciple.
How will our neighbors know we are Christians? How do we express our love for one another? Perhaps you have been scared during this sermon that I was going to suggest that we have a foot washing? I had actually planned on adapting that custom to a hand washing, but since I’m sick I decided that wouldn’t be prudent, no not at this juncture. Instead, I want you to focus the eyes of your hearts on interactions you have had with others in which you have come away knowing that the other person was a disciple of Christ? Are you able to think about similar circumstances when people would be able to intuit that you were a disciple?
Amen.
300 denaraii worth of perfume! That was an average person’s whole year’s salary. In John Wesley’s notes on this passage, he concludes that Lazarus and his sisters must have been of high economic standing. He remarks, “It seems Martha was a person of some figure, from the great respect which was paid to her and her sister, in visits and condolences on Lazarus's death, as well as from the costly ointment mentioned in the next verse. And probably it was at their house our Lord and his disciples lodged, when he returned from Jerusalem to Bethany, every evening of the last week of his life, upon which he was now entered."
We hear the familiar account this morning, and if you’re like me you think, “Oh, that was Mary, Martha’s sister? I didn’t know it was her who anointed the Lord’s feet and then wiped them with her hair!” John is the only gospel writer to make this connection, the story told in the other gospels simply describe “a woman,” and over the years the tradition arose that the other Gospel writers describe an instance of Mary Magdalene performing the same act.
But John places it here, in the last week of Jesus’ life, and we hear a lot of parenthetical narration in the text as well. John also singles out Judas as the critic of this act of devotion, whereas Matthew points to the disciples in general and Mark and Luke point to the Pharisees. Why Mary? Why Judas? Why now?
In John’s narrative, we see the devotion of Mary mimicked later in the week as Jesus washes his disciples’ feet and commands them to “Love one another, as I have loved you.” In John’s narrative, this takes place on the night he is captured in the garden of Gethsemene. John’s account places what we call the “Last Supper” earlier in the career of Jesus, and gives the only account of the foot-washing. John perhaps places this story here in his telling of the Gospel to foreshadow the act of servanthood that Jesus illustrates by getting on his knees and washing his disciple’s feet.
You see, this is where it becomes difficult to get an idea of the time frame because we are reading this story piecemeal. This week we hear the story of the Saturday before the Holy week of Jesus’ passion. In the scriptures, Palm Sunday is tomorrow—it is the day following this anointing at Mary and Martha’s in Bethany. And it is only days before the events of Maundy Thursday. Maunday, by the way, comes from the Latin “mandatum,” which means mandate, and is a reference to Jesus’ new commandment to “Love one another as I have loved you.”
Easter may still seem like a long way away, but in the narrative we are hearing, it is only a week away. I hope this puts this story in perspective. It also might explain why Jesus is seemingly flippant about Judas’s protestations that this expensive perfume could have been sold and benefit the poor. Mary’s gesture of devotion is not just the recounting of an event, John placing the story here in the story has symbolic effect. It is a literary device to prepare us for the last moment of tenderness and intimacy that Jesus will be able to share with his disciples and friends. It is preparing us for what John considers is Jesus’ most important teaching of all.
And so, let us hear the recounting of this story in the light of the foot-washing. We are going to be celebrating the Passover Seder as Jesus and his disciples would have on Maundy Thursday, so we won’t have an opportunity to hear this story too, from John 13:
“Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. 2 The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper 3 Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, 4 got up from the table,a took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. 5 Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. 6 He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” 7 Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” 8 Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” 9 Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” 10 Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” 11 For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.” 12 After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? 13 You call me Teacher and Lord--and you are right, for that is what I am. 14 So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. 15 For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. 34 I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
In our scripture lesson, Mary has illustrated perfect discipleship. She is one of Jesus’ disciples, and here has the opportunity to wash her Lord’s feet: An act of servanthood and devotion that Jesus later verbally commands his disciples to show for one another. This issues a challenge to our typical mindset that when we hear the word “disciple,” we think of 12 middle aged men. No—as we see again and again in John, and repeatedly during holy week, the women disciples are often the ones who intuitively embody Jesus’ teachings. Women are the first preachers, the first to bring news of the Gospel after they discover an empty tomb, and here, in this story, it is again a woman disciple who carries out the new commandment before it has been given, and the reward for her faith is that she is the one who gets to wash the master’s feet.
In the foot washing, Jesus will wash his disciples’ feet as an expression of his love for them, as a way of drawing them into his life with God (13:8). He will also ask them to repeat this act of service for one another (13:14-15). What Jesus will do for his disciples and will ask them to do for one another, Mary has already done for him in 12:3. In Mary, then, the reader is given a picture of the fullness of the life of discipleship. Her act shows forth the love that will be the hallmark of discipleship in John and the recognition of Jesus’ identity that is the decisive mark of Christian life.
In our Ephesians text, we heard about the “eyes of our heart being enlightened,” being able to perceive the “hope and riches of our inheritance.” Mary is a model disciple because she never hesitated to focus on Jesus with the eyes of her heart. What seemed lavish to the others was in her mind a small expression of devotion and glorification.
She spares no expense in her devotion to her Lord because she is filled with the hope of eternal riches that are her inheritance. These riches aren’t substantial wealth, but the joy and love of Christ ever present in a living fellowship. She uses up the burial ointment because of her faith that death cannot contain this man’s life.
What would you do if you were to witness something like this? You may say to yourself that since it was Jesus, you would probably join right in with Mary on her knees in your worship of our Lord. But how many of us have joined Judas there on the sideline and made a snide comment when we have witnessed someone lost in the worship of our Living God? How many of us have been critical of another person’s form of worship because it doesn’t look or sound like our own?
Perhaps those are the moments when we need to hear the commandment of our Lord again—“as I have done, do ye likewise.” Love one another as I have loved you! Jesus, knowing he wouldn’t always be here in his physical form, gave his disciples a way to mirror Mary’s devotion to him after he was gone—wash one another’s feet. Be devoted to one another, that’s how people will know you’re my disciple.
How will our neighbors know we are Christians? How do we express our love for one another? Perhaps you have been scared during this sermon that I was going to suggest that we have a foot washing? I had actually planned on adapting that custom to a hand washing, but since I’m sick I decided that wouldn’t be prudent, no not at this juncture. Instead, I want you to focus the eyes of your hearts on interactions you have had with others in which you have come away knowing that the other person was a disciple of Christ? Are you able to think about similar circumstances when people would be able to intuit that you were a disciple?
Amen.
Monday, March 19, 2007
March 18 Sermon: Arriving Where We Started
Sermon Texts:
2 Cor. 5: 16-21
Luke 15:11-32
The story we just heard is Christianity in a nutshell. It is what Charles Dickens called “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” There is more ink spilled on this parable of Jesus’ than any of the others. It captures our imagination. We can place ourselves in the story. We no doubt see ourselves at moments as the prodigal son, other moments as the son who stayed on the farm, and at other moments as the father.
The story is so powerful because it is a story of the most important idea in our faith tradition. It is the story of Grace. And the beautiful thing about this story’s communication of Grace is that the grace that is shown and expressed in this story is not just the grace that we see with the Father running out into the road to welcome home his son. It is also the story of grace shown to the other son who we are left with there outside the party. The father not only wants to share forgiveness with his wayward son, but he wants to share the joy of forgiving with his loyal son.
This story illustrates for us perfectly the Wesleyan idea of three-fold Grace, which is a distinctive idea in our faith tradition. You see—our heritage is that we don’t merely celebrate the grace of justification. We worship a God who is bubbling over with Grace. As soon as we are bowled over by this amazing act of forgiveness narrated by Jesus as a father running out into a road to welcome us home, we also can see that this is only one element of the story. There is more grace in this story than that one beautiful image!
John Wesley was interested in loosening the idea of grace from a single experience of justification or salvation, to instead be conceptualized as a stream of experience, a whole lifetime of salvation. A path of human and divine relationship that led toward humans realizing and manifesting the image of God—what Wesley called utter sanctification, or perfection.
Our scriptures today illustrate three very important aspects of Grace. We believe that humans have fallen into a state of Sin. But we are never so far from God that he can’t reach us. This is prevenient Grace. We believe that this God grabs hold of us, either in a dramatic change of life, or in a gradual process. This is justifying grace
We believe that God molds us after the moment of justification. This is sanctifying Grace.
In our story, Jesus tells of a son who misunderstands what his father has to offer. He thinks of his father merely as the source of his inheritance and he doesn’t want to wait for the old man to die to get what’s coming to him. So, as we heard, his father split the inheritance between the two sons, and the younger son takes off.
Andrew Marr, a Benedictine monk who wrote on this parable, clued me into the fact that “The Greek phrase that in English is translated as: the younger son "squandered his property" is actually much stronger and richer in the original. Literally, the phrase means: he "scattered his substance." That is, the younger son completely lost himself in his dissolute living.”
Yes, in an effort to do things “his way” and “be out on his own,” the younger son instead “scatters his substance.” He forgets his identity to the extent that when he is in the pig pen and he envisions going back to his father, he sees himself signing on as one of his father’s slaves.
He only sees this potential because he is still motivated by his own needs and wants. What compels him to go back to his father is his own hunger when he looks at the pig slop. He still sees “with a human point of view” as Paul puts it in our first reading. But even though his longing for home is tainted with self preservation, we would proclaim that it still contains God’s grace.
Wesley said that prevenient, or preventing grace is responsible for “all the drawings of the Father, the desires after God, which if we yield to them, increase more and more.” And one of the subtle shifts in the story illuminates exactly how this prevenient grace leads to a deeper understanding of the “new creation” that we become when we return the Father’s arms!
If we look closely at the text, just look at it there with me. You see what the son has told himself he is going to say when he gets home. You see what is missing when he actually gets there? His father is overwhelmed with compassion for his son and runs out into the road to meet him when he is still half a mile away, and throws his arms around him. The son stammers out part of his pre-rehearsed speech, but leaves off the part about being hired on as one of the servants. You see, in his father’s arms, he reclaims his identity as a son.
That the part of grace that we call “justification.” It means accepting the forgiveness of a father longing to give it. In our relationships, we have probably had a positive experience of admitting our guilt. It is a positive experience when we come to terms with our own recklessness with someone’s love and then, because they love us, they forgive us. It is a freeing experience. Admitting means “letting in.” When we admit our sin. When we “let it in” and accept that it is our condition, we also admit God’s grace that had equalized this sin. It is being embraced by the arms of a tearful, happy father.
Admitting that sin does not earn us the forgiveness. Notice what happens first: the father runs out and embraces the son, then the son confesses. Confession is not a motivation for God’s forgiveness, it is a response to it. This time, the son’s speech is not just inspired by his own needs, it’s not just another plan as to how he can once again manipulate his father. This time, the son’s confession is a response to his father’s love.
This is why in our tradition, we mark each individual uncovering of justifying grace by responding with a “profession of faith.” Those of us who are full members of this church are called “professing members,” and that profession of faith is that no amount of working on Dad’s farm with the servants can earn us what God gives us freely as a gift!
Our profession of faith does not earn the justification we receive. Grace, like God, is three in one. Grace is lavish. It is like a father killing the fatted calf and putting his ring on his sons finger and giving him the best robe. Grace is too magnificent and overwhelming to simply have one connotation. There’s not three different kinds of grace, there is one Grace that is understood by us in three different ways.
T. S. Eliot put it like this: "The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." The prodigal son, who had been out in the far country “scattering his substance” is now in his father’s arms re-substantiated. Upon arriving at that same farm where he had shook the dust off his feet and abandoned his family, he comes there again and feels the unyielding love of his father, and he sees home again for the first time.
And then, the controversial party….If we take a look at Jesus’ parables, we might begin to notice that every time he talks about the Kingdom of God, he usually describes it as a party—it is a feast with an open invitation. At the end of our parable today, we see the same thing—a party. And then we see one of our characters, who is actually the main character considering who Jesus is speaking to when he tells this story, we see him sulking outside the party, whining that his father has been unfair.
We see him distancing himself from his brother, “this son of yours,” he says. "The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." This doesn’t just apply to the prodigal son, it applies to the older son as well. The older brother is faced with a decision. He chose not to go exploring. He chose not to have parties with his share of the inheritance. Instead he chose to silently stay and fester. How he came to utilize his father’s inheritance evidently came to weigh him down with the burden of resentment.
For all those years, he directed his resentment toward his long lost brother—that selfish, head in the clouds, squanderer. But when the boy returns home and he refuses to go in and join the party, the resentment boils over onto his father as well, doesn’t it! “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends.”
So, the older brother too finds himself in a new/old environment. He is home where he has always been, but now his father has cracked the door open a little bit so he can see his old relationships in a new light. He can view his brother not from a “human point of view” as Paul puts it in his letter to the Corinthians, but instead as a “new creation!” The power and glory of grace is that if he looks at his brother in the light of his father’s love and acceptance, he will see his father’s abiding love for himself too! He will arrive at the place he started and know it again for the first time.
But then again, our older brother may withdraw from his father and run off into the dark night, listening to the faint echoes of the party from his own private hiding place, sinking deeper and deeper into the hell of resentment.
Jesus, master storyteller, leaves us hanging. He doesn’t give us an ending because the story itself is a call to action. He doesn’t just tie up the story in a pretty little bow and say, “And they all lived happily ever after.” Jesus was telling the story to the Pharisees. He probably intended for them to see themselves as the older brother, and he was giving them a choice: stay out here and sulk and turn you nose up at the people I am embracing, or come on in and enjoy the party!
Back to the image of that older brother standing outside the party, scowling and resenting—has to do with why we are going to respond to the sharing of the word this morning by saying the traditional Apostles creed, with footnote and all! You see, if you turn to page 881 and look through the creed, you come to the line where it says, “was crucified dead and buried” * and that asterisk points you down to the bottom of the page where it says “Traditional use of this creed includes these words: “He descended into hell.”
Resentment can poison a heart. It colors one’s whole perspective, and turns a celebration into reason for jealousy. But Grace pursues us, even into the depths of hell, trying to get us to turn around and peek through that cracked door. Part of our most central creed had the notion of Grace pursuing even those in Hell. And because the parable ends with the Father out there on the porch, we are led to the conclusion that God’s grace chases us wherever we go—endlessly hopeful in our persuasion.
And this is a key to sanctifying grace. It offers us the framework of saying that Grace is journey. It is a process. It is not a ring put on our finger, it is not something to possess or earn. It is a dynamic, evolving relationship between us and our Heavenly Father.
Grace, even sanctifying grace, isn’t compulsive. God will run out and welcome us as we return home, but notice you don’t see the Father down there in the far country, grabbing Prodigal Son by the ear and fetching him back home. He will come out in the courtyard and cajole and plead with us to come on in to the party, but there must be some element of response. This is why Wesley hated the idea of predestination. Predestination said that God’s grace and salvation was forced into the lives of some and not even offered to others. There was no dynamic relationship to respond to—Grace under predestination was a commodity: you either had it or you didn’t.
But though Grace isn’t forced upon us, it is never withdrawn from us. God cajoles and pleads with us to walk in the Light, but we are stubborn. We are “stiff-necked” people, to use an Old Testament description, who are too resentful to have fellowship with our brother.
Sanctification is a reconciling grace. It is “striving toward perfection,” as Wesley said. This striving toward perfection is what Paul called being “ambassadors for Christ.” And that perfection isn’t some kind of Yoda-esqe wisdom or some kind of Super-man invincibility, it is the perfection of Love. It is growing into the inheritance of a Father’s heart which would propel us down a road to welcome someone who has done us wrong or miss the party because we are pleading with the world to reconcile. “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! 18All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; 19that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. 20So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” In other words, come on in and enjoy the party!
2 Cor. 5: 16-21
Luke 15:11-32
The story we just heard is Christianity in a nutshell. It is what Charles Dickens called “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” There is more ink spilled on this parable of Jesus’ than any of the others. It captures our imagination. We can place ourselves in the story. We no doubt see ourselves at moments as the prodigal son, other moments as the son who stayed on the farm, and at other moments as the father.
The story is so powerful because it is a story of the most important idea in our faith tradition. It is the story of Grace. And the beautiful thing about this story’s communication of Grace is that the grace that is shown and expressed in this story is not just the grace that we see with the Father running out into the road to welcome home his son. It is also the story of grace shown to the other son who we are left with there outside the party. The father not only wants to share forgiveness with his wayward son, but he wants to share the joy of forgiving with his loyal son.
This story illustrates for us perfectly the Wesleyan idea of three-fold Grace, which is a distinctive idea in our faith tradition. You see—our heritage is that we don’t merely celebrate the grace of justification. We worship a God who is bubbling over with Grace. As soon as we are bowled over by this amazing act of forgiveness narrated by Jesus as a father running out into a road to welcome us home, we also can see that this is only one element of the story. There is more grace in this story than that one beautiful image!
John Wesley was interested in loosening the idea of grace from a single experience of justification or salvation, to instead be conceptualized as a stream of experience, a whole lifetime of salvation. A path of human and divine relationship that led toward humans realizing and manifesting the image of God—what Wesley called utter sanctification, or perfection.
Our scriptures today illustrate three very important aspects of Grace. We believe that humans have fallen into a state of Sin. But we are never so far from God that he can’t reach us. This is prevenient Grace. We believe that this God grabs hold of us, either in a dramatic change of life, or in a gradual process. This is justifying grace
We believe that God molds us after the moment of justification. This is sanctifying Grace.
In our story, Jesus tells of a son who misunderstands what his father has to offer. He thinks of his father merely as the source of his inheritance and he doesn’t want to wait for the old man to die to get what’s coming to him. So, as we heard, his father split the inheritance between the two sons, and the younger son takes off.
Andrew Marr, a Benedictine monk who wrote on this parable, clued me into the fact that “The Greek phrase that in English is translated as: the younger son "squandered his property" is actually much stronger and richer in the original. Literally, the phrase means: he "scattered his substance." That is, the younger son completely lost himself in his dissolute living.”
Yes, in an effort to do things “his way” and “be out on his own,” the younger son instead “scatters his substance.” He forgets his identity to the extent that when he is in the pig pen and he envisions going back to his father, he sees himself signing on as one of his father’s slaves.
He only sees this potential because he is still motivated by his own needs and wants. What compels him to go back to his father is his own hunger when he looks at the pig slop. He still sees “with a human point of view” as Paul puts it in our first reading. But even though his longing for home is tainted with self preservation, we would proclaim that it still contains God’s grace.
Wesley said that prevenient, or preventing grace is responsible for “all the drawings of the Father, the desires after God, which if we yield to them, increase more and more.” And one of the subtle shifts in the story illuminates exactly how this prevenient grace leads to a deeper understanding of the “new creation” that we become when we return the Father’s arms!
If we look closely at the text, just look at it there with me. You see what the son has told himself he is going to say when he gets home. You see what is missing when he actually gets there? His father is overwhelmed with compassion for his son and runs out into the road to meet him when he is still half a mile away, and throws his arms around him. The son stammers out part of his pre-rehearsed speech, but leaves off the part about being hired on as one of the servants. You see, in his father’s arms, he reclaims his identity as a son.
That the part of grace that we call “justification.” It means accepting the forgiveness of a father longing to give it. In our relationships, we have probably had a positive experience of admitting our guilt. It is a positive experience when we come to terms with our own recklessness with someone’s love and then, because they love us, they forgive us. It is a freeing experience. Admitting means “letting in.” When we admit our sin. When we “let it in” and accept that it is our condition, we also admit God’s grace that had equalized this sin. It is being embraced by the arms of a tearful, happy father.
Admitting that sin does not earn us the forgiveness. Notice what happens first: the father runs out and embraces the son, then the son confesses. Confession is not a motivation for God’s forgiveness, it is a response to it. This time, the son’s speech is not just inspired by his own needs, it’s not just another plan as to how he can once again manipulate his father. This time, the son’s confession is a response to his father’s love.
This is why in our tradition, we mark each individual uncovering of justifying grace by responding with a “profession of faith.” Those of us who are full members of this church are called “professing members,” and that profession of faith is that no amount of working on Dad’s farm with the servants can earn us what God gives us freely as a gift!
Our profession of faith does not earn the justification we receive. Grace, like God, is three in one. Grace is lavish. It is like a father killing the fatted calf and putting his ring on his sons finger and giving him the best robe. Grace is too magnificent and overwhelming to simply have one connotation. There’s not three different kinds of grace, there is one Grace that is understood by us in three different ways.
T. S. Eliot put it like this: "The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." The prodigal son, who had been out in the far country “scattering his substance” is now in his father’s arms re-substantiated. Upon arriving at that same farm where he had shook the dust off his feet and abandoned his family, he comes there again and feels the unyielding love of his father, and he sees home again for the first time.
And then, the controversial party….If we take a look at Jesus’ parables, we might begin to notice that every time he talks about the Kingdom of God, he usually describes it as a party—it is a feast with an open invitation. At the end of our parable today, we see the same thing—a party. And then we see one of our characters, who is actually the main character considering who Jesus is speaking to when he tells this story, we see him sulking outside the party, whining that his father has been unfair.
We see him distancing himself from his brother, “this son of yours,” he says. "The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." This doesn’t just apply to the prodigal son, it applies to the older son as well. The older brother is faced with a decision. He chose not to go exploring. He chose not to have parties with his share of the inheritance. Instead he chose to silently stay and fester. How he came to utilize his father’s inheritance evidently came to weigh him down with the burden of resentment.
For all those years, he directed his resentment toward his long lost brother—that selfish, head in the clouds, squanderer. But when the boy returns home and he refuses to go in and join the party, the resentment boils over onto his father as well, doesn’t it! “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends.”
So, the older brother too finds himself in a new/old environment. He is home where he has always been, but now his father has cracked the door open a little bit so he can see his old relationships in a new light. He can view his brother not from a “human point of view” as Paul puts it in his letter to the Corinthians, but instead as a “new creation!” The power and glory of grace is that if he looks at his brother in the light of his father’s love and acceptance, he will see his father’s abiding love for himself too! He will arrive at the place he started and know it again for the first time.
But then again, our older brother may withdraw from his father and run off into the dark night, listening to the faint echoes of the party from his own private hiding place, sinking deeper and deeper into the hell of resentment.
Jesus, master storyteller, leaves us hanging. He doesn’t give us an ending because the story itself is a call to action. He doesn’t just tie up the story in a pretty little bow and say, “And they all lived happily ever after.” Jesus was telling the story to the Pharisees. He probably intended for them to see themselves as the older brother, and he was giving them a choice: stay out here and sulk and turn you nose up at the people I am embracing, or come on in and enjoy the party!
Back to the image of that older brother standing outside the party, scowling and resenting—has to do with why we are going to respond to the sharing of the word this morning by saying the traditional Apostles creed, with footnote and all! You see, if you turn to page 881 and look through the creed, you come to the line where it says, “was crucified dead and buried” * and that asterisk points you down to the bottom of the page where it says “Traditional use of this creed includes these words: “He descended into hell.”
Resentment can poison a heart. It colors one’s whole perspective, and turns a celebration into reason for jealousy. But Grace pursues us, even into the depths of hell, trying to get us to turn around and peek through that cracked door. Part of our most central creed had the notion of Grace pursuing even those in Hell. And because the parable ends with the Father out there on the porch, we are led to the conclusion that God’s grace chases us wherever we go—endlessly hopeful in our persuasion.
And this is a key to sanctifying grace. It offers us the framework of saying that Grace is journey. It is a process. It is not a ring put on our finger, it is not something to possess or earn. It is a dynamic, evolving relationship between us and our Heavenly Father.
Grace, even sanctifying grace, isn’t compulsive. God will run out and welcome us as we return home, but notice you don’t see the Father down there in the far country, grabbing Prodigal Son by the ear and fetching him back home. He will come out in the courtyard and cajole and plead with us to come on in to the party, but there must be some element of response. This is why Wesley hated the idea of predestination. Predestination said that God’s grace and salvation was forced into the lives of some and not even offered to others. There was no dynamic relationship to respond to—Grace under predestination was a commodity: you either had it or you didn’t.
But though Grace isn’t forced upon us, it is never withdrawn from us. God cajoles and pleads with us to walk in the Light, but we are stubborn. We are “stiff-necked” people, to use an Old Testament description, who are too resentful to have fellowship with our brother.
Sanctification is a reconciling grace. It is “striving toward perfection,” as Wesley said. This striving toward perfection is what Paul called being “ambassadors for Christ.” And that perfection isn’t some kind of Yoda-esqe wisdom or some kind of Super-man invincibility, it is the perfection of Love. It is growing into the inheritance of a Father’s heart which would propel us down a road to welcome someone who has done us wrong or miss the party because we are pleading with the world to reconcile. “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! 18All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; 19that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. 20So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” In other words, come on in and enjoy the party!
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Softball season!
Oil up those gloves! Softball season is coming our way. We have been invited to field a team with First UMC Okmulgee--so let's see who's interested in playing. They plan on beginning practice the first week of April. In the past, they have practiced on Wednesday nights at 6pm. The season begins the last week of April, so let's get ready. The league will have a meeting on March 26, so let's try and get an idea of how many of us are excited about playing. If there are enough, perhaps we can field our own team.
Send the church an email, or simply comment on this post to get the ball rolling.
Send the church an email, or simply comment on this post to get the ball rolling.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Lent 3 Sermon: Light, Darkness, and Dusk
Scriptures:
Ephesians 2: 1-10
John 3: 14-21
You’ve heard stories from people for whom the experience of salvation was so impacting that it turned their life around completely. It is usually the case that they sink to a certain depth and then ask God for redirection, and they mark that experience as the distant reminder of what they had been and now are. It is like they are one of those wind up toys which hits the wall, spins around and zooms off in the opposite direction. The wheels don’t turn, they just stay on course.
Tom Long, professor at Emory, wrote in a recent issue of Christian Century about the conversion stories that Chrisitians often tell. He described a musician who was on Larry King talking about his faith who from an early age was blessed with a vibrant faith and a musical gift. Eventually, shaking the dust off his little town, he took his faith and his keyboard and headed toward the bright lights of Nashville. He found some success, but he also found drugs—lots of them. A life once young and hopeful soon spiraled out of control: a faith once alive soured into despair. One desperate night, he came apart emotionally and found himself lying face down on the linoleum floor of his kitchen, sobbing uncontrollably, crying out to God for salvation. He told Larry King “I woke up the next day,and I haven’t been the same since. That was 28 years ago. I give credit to the Lord.” Reflecting on three decades of sobriety and productivity, he said “I think God just rescued me.”
I have to agree with Tom Long when he admits that he doesn’t have much patience for hearing pastors give this kind of testimony about themselves in the pulpit. Seems simplistic and naïve. It somehow turns the faith walk into a long jump. Growing up in a Baptist town without a story of redemption like this musician’s was trying at times. My mother and father gently suggested that perhaps salvation isn’t an event, but that perhaps it began when I was born into a community of faith and baptized among them as an infant. They would tell me that salvation is a continuing process. Perhaps it is a lifelong experience instead of a moment of clarity.
Tom Long suggests that frankly though, the real reason why such stories of sin and salvation cause us discomfort may well be that they bring us too close to the molten core of the Christian faith. We prefer to leave the control rods in the reactor, but as much as we might like to domesticate the gospel, to make the faith about spiritual enlightenment or ethical ideals or the broad love of God that inspires tolerance, the fact of the matter is that the gospel is at root a rescue story. Even Jesus’ name, as theologian William Placher reminds us, means “the Lord Saves.”
I feel somewhat convicted. The majority of what I have said to you from this pulpit is about spiritual enlightenment and ethical ideals and the broad love of God which inspires tolerance. Perhaps part of the problem is that I don’t usually see myself as ever having been “bogged down in the depths of sin.” God hasn’t helped me kick any habits. I haven’t had any radical changes of heart. Christ hasn’t miraculously caused me to love some group of people I once hated, because I’ve never really hated a particular group of people. The point of me saying all this is not for you to admire how great an example I am, it is to ask the question, perhaps for more than just myself, what do you do when your religion is about rescue, but you don’t really feel adrift at sea. Is it akin to throwing a life preserver to someone who already sits in the lifeboat? “Oh, thanks—I appreciate that. Hope I don’t need to use it!?”
John uses drastic dualisms to communicate to us the mystery and the power of salvation. Specifically, a favorite motif of John’s is the Light and the Dark. Well, if I just take John’s imagery to heart I might assume that there is a reason I don’t feel in need of rescue—there at the end of today’s passage, it says very clearly, “For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” I knew I was on the right track—it feels good to be in the light. Sorry to all of you who “hate the light” and would rather creep around with your addictions and your predjudices and your shame. Come on into the light, the water’s fine!
There is a beautiful short story by Ernest Hemingway called “A clean, well lighted place.” The anecdote revolves around the difference between a clean, bright cafe and a dark, not-so-clean, bar as a place for lonely men to spend the long, sleepless nights. Two waiters discuss a lingering patron in a cafe who overstays his welcome as the night wears on. The old man gets quietly drunk each night; just last week he tried to kill himself, but was rescued.
Tonight he tries to pass the night in a clean, well-lighted place. The young waiter, impatient, to get home to his wife, does not comprehend the importance of this place to this old man's survival. The older waiter, who does understand, walks into the night himself, unable to find his own clean, well-lighted place in which to pass a lonely and sleepless night.
Perhaps the duality that Jesus uses for Nicodemus and that Hemingway uses in his own story is more an illustration of an experience of salvation rather than a sustained mode of being though. I don’t feel like I live in the gleaming light of righteousness, even though I don’t have any rescue stories. Perhaps the reality is that we live in the dusk. There is always the looming darkness, there is always a long shadow. If we are sustained in the bright noonday light, we may not be able to see our shadows lurking directly underneath us. As the day moves on, we become more aware of our shadows, the darkness that each and every one of us projects onto the world around us. Paul tells the Romans, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We may dwell in the light as church-going, open hearted, people trying to do well, but the fact is that we all cast a shadow, and the closer we get to the darkness, the more apparent that shadow becomes.
Paul tells the Ephesians, “You were dead through trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, but now by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing.” Prof. Long continues, “To see this statement as applicable to us, to swallow even one ounce of this claim, we must admit a cluster of truths about ourselves we would rather not face—that we are captive to cultural and spiritual forces over which we have no control, that they have drained the life out of us, that we are unable to think or feel or crawl our way free, and that we are in urgent need of a God who comes to rescue. IN short, we need saving. We can accommodate this perhaps, in a 12 step program, but to encounter it as a description of our true and basic selves sends us scrambling for safer ground.
This is why our spiritual father, John Wesley, prayed fervently for conviction. He could buy the idea that the world needed a savior, but wasn’t convinced that Christ saved him. It isn’t about being egotistical or humble. I don’t think it is egotistical to be honest about our perception that we stand in the light of God, we may very well have had experiences of sanctification in which we did feel bathed in God’s magnificent light. It is more about attention—some of you may be at a point of noonday light right now in your lives, some of you may be helpless in the darkness—most of us I would venture to say are living in between, in the early morning fog, waiting for the sun’s rays to burn away our confusion and doubt—hoping it is right around the corner. Some of us are probably in the waning hours of the afternoon, the late day light giving us the ability to see our long shadows stretching across our world and determined to do something to “turn back the clock” to those brighter hours when that shadow wasn’t there.
Jesus is clear to Nicodemus about one thing—the light isn’t in the world to judge it—the light falls out into the open, it illuminates everything, it is available to all who step out of the shadows. It doesn’t condemn what it reveals, it saves what it warms. In bringing to light our mistakes and transgressions, we can see them ourselves—and through this recognition, we can let go of them, we can drop them on the ground and stretch our hands and face toward the light. The judgment is that we love the darkness more than the light—we don’t want to see, we don’t want the world to see our mistakes—we want to pretend like they aren’t there.
Perhaps my own mistake about believing I don’t have any need for “rescue” is the idea that some “thing that I do” would keep me from salvation in the first place. Perhaps orienting myself in the light just because I haven’t had some crisis or secret shame that I have to relinquish IS the reason I need saving. Such works righteousness is a clear problem of the Pharisees like Nicodemus, who comes to Jesus in the darkness, seeking enlightenment.
Instead of righteousness, the light that falls all over the ground is grace—you all know people who live in the midst of that grace, soaking it up, squeezing it out into the shadows where people live in fear and shame. That is what it is to live in the light, not some degree of “morality.”
Light-lovers soak up God’s grace through every pore of their being. They have sometimes come out of the darkness of despair and trespasses, and they have sometimes come out of the dusk of self-evaluation and confession.
The promise of God is that the Grace of Light is ever-present—it is always daytime without a cloud in the sky—we may be fearful about leaving behind our comfortable darkness, our false sense of security that gives us a sense of belonging or power. We step out naked into the light—the promise of God is that we are accepted by God just like a mother accepts and nurtures and loves the child that comes out of the darkness of the womb and into the light of the world. We should have no fear, because in the light we see our true purpose and our true nature—we are children of God and we are Kingdom builders! Amen
Ephesians 2: 1-10
John 3: 14-21
You’ve heard stories from people for whom the experience of salvation was so impacting that it turned their life around completely. It is usually the case that they sink to a certain depth and then ask God for redirection, and they mark that experience as the distant reminder of what they had been and now are. It is like they are one of those wind up toys which hits the wall, spins around and zooms off in the opposite direction. The wheels don’t turn, they just stay on course.
Tom Long, professor at Emory, wrote in a recent issue of Christian Century about the conversion stories that Chrisitians often tell. He described a musician who was on Larry King talking about his faith who from an early age was blessed with a vibrant faith and a musical gift. Eventually, shaking the dust off his little town, he took his faith and his keyboard and headed toward the bright lights of Nashville. He found some success, but he also found drugs—lots of them. A life once young and hopeful soon spiraled out of control: a faith once alive soured into despair. One desperate night, he came apart emotionally and found himself lying face down on the linoleum floor of his kitchen, sobbing uncontrollably, crying out to God for salvation. He told Larry King “I woke up the next day,and I haven’t been the same since. That was 28 years ago. I give credit to the Lord.” Reflecting on three decades of sobriety and productivity, he said “I think God just rescued me.”
I have to agree with Tom Long when he admits that he doesn’t have much patience for hearing pastors give this kind of testimony about themselves in the pulpit. Seems simplistic and naïve. It somehow turns the faith walk into a long jump. Growing up in a Baptist town without a story of redemption like this musician’s was trying at times. My mother and father gently suggested that perhaps salvation isn’t an event, but that perhaps it began when I was born into a community of faith and baptized among them as an infant. They would tell me that salvation is a continuing process. Perhaps it is a lifelong experience instead of a moment of clarity.
Tom Long suggests that frankly though, the real reason why such stories of sin and salvation cause us discomfort may well be that they bring us too close to the molten core of the Christian faith. We prefer to leave the control rods in the reactor, but as much as we might like to domesticate the gospel, to make the faith about spiritual enlightenment or ethical ideals or the broad love of God that inspires tolerance, the fact of the matter is that the gospel is at root a rescue story. Even Jesus’ name, as theologian William Placher reminds us, means “the Lord Saves.”
I feel somewhat convicted. The majority of what I have said to you from this pulpit is about spiritual enlightenment and ethical ideals and the broad love of God which inspires tolerance. Perhaps part of the problem is that I don’t usually see myself as ever having been “bogged down in the depths of sin.” God hasn’t helped me kick any habits. I haven’t had any radical changes of heart. Christ hasn’t miraculously caused me to love some group of people I once hated, because I’ve never really hated a particular group of people. The point of me saying all this is not for you to admire how great an example I am, it is to ask the question, perhaps for more than just myself, what do you do when your religion is about rescue, but you don’t really feel adrift at sea. Is it akin to throwing a life preserver to someone who already sits in the lifeboat? “Oh, thanks—I appreciate that. Hope I don’t need to use it!?”
John uses drastic dualisms to communicate to us the mystery and the power of salvation. Specifically, a favorite motif of John’s is the Light and the Dark. Well, if I just take John’s imagery to heart I might assume that there is a reason I don’t feel in need of rescue—there at the end of today’s passage, it says very clearly, “For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” I knew I was on the right track—it feels good to be in the light. Sorry to all of you who “hate the light” and would rather creep around with your addictions and your predjudices and your shame. Come on into the light, the water’s fine!
There is a beautiful short story by Ernest Hemingway called “A clean, well lighted place.” The anecdote revolves around the difference between a clean, bright cafe and a dark, not-so-clean, bar as a place for lonely men to spend the long, sleepless nights. Two waiters discuss a lingering patron in a cafe who overstays his welcome as the night wears on. The old man gets quietly drunk each night; just last week he tried to kill himself, but was rescued.
Tonight he tries to pass the night in a clean, well-lighted place. The young waiter, impatient, to get home to his wife, does not comprehend the importance of this place to this old man's survival. The older waiter, who does understand, walks into the night himself, unable to find his own clean, well-lighted place in which to pass a lonely and sleepless night.
Perhaps the duality that Jesus uses for Nicodemus and that Hemingway uses in his own story is more an illustration of an experience of salvation rather than a sustained mode of being though. I don’t feel like I live in the gleaming light of righteousness, even though I don’t have any rescue stories. Perhaps the reality is that we live in the dusk. There is always the looming darkness, there is always a long shadow. If we are sustained in the bright noonday light, we may not be able to see our shadows lurking directly underneath us. As the day moves on, we become more aware of our shadows, the darkness that each and every one of us projects onto the world around us. Paul tells the Romans, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We may dwell in the light as church-going, open hearted, people trying to do well, but the fact is that we all cast a shadow, and the closer we get to the darkness, the more apparent that shadow becomes.
Paul tells the Ephesians, “You were dead through trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, but now by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing.” Prof. Long continues, “To see this statement as applicable to us, to swallow even one ounce of this claim, we must admit a cluster of truths about ourselves we would rather not face—that we are captive to cultural and spiritual forces over which we have no control, that they have drained the life out of us, that we are unable to think or feel or crawl our way free, and that we are in urgent need of a God who comes to rescue. IN short, we need saving. We can accommodate this perhaps, in a 12 step program, but to encounter it as a description of our true and basic selves sends us scrambling for safer ground.
This is why our spiritual father, John Wesley, prayed fervently for conviction. He could buy the idea that the world needed a savior, but wasn’t convinced that Christ saved him. It isn’t about being egotistical or humble. I don’t think it is egotistical to be honest about our perception that we stand in the light of God, we may very well have had experiences of sanctification in which we did feel bathed in God’s magnificent light. It is more about attention—some of you may be at a point of noonday light right now in your lives, some of you may be helpless in the darkness—most of us I would venture to say are living in between, in the early morning fog, waiting for the sun’s rays to burn away our confusion and doubt—hoping it is right around the corner. Some of us are probably in the waning hours of the afternoon, the late day light giving us the ability to see our long shadows stretching across our world and determined to do something to “turn back the clock” to those brighter hours when that shadow wasn’t there.
Jesus is clear to Nicodemus about one thing—the light isn’t in the world to judge it—the light falls out into the open, it illuminates everything, it is available to all who step out of the shadows. It doesn’t condemn what it reveals, it saves what it warms. In bringing to light our mistakes and transgressions, we can see them ourselves—and through this recognition, we can let go of them, we can drop them on the ground and stretch our hands and face toward the light. The judgment is that we love the darkness more than the light—we don’t want to see, we don’t want the world to see our mistakes—we want to pretend like they aren’t there.
Perhaps my own mistake about believing I don’t have any need for “rescue” is the idea that some “thing that I do” would keep me from salvation in the first place. Perhaps orienting myself in the light just because I haven’t had some crisis or secret shame that I have to relinquish IS the reason I need saving. Such works righteousness is a clear problem of the Pharisees like Nicodemus, who comes to Jesus in the darkness, seeking enlightenment.
Instead of righteousness, the light that falls all over the ground is grace—you all know people who live in the midst of that grace, soaking it up, squeezing it out into the shadows where people live in fear and shame. That is what it is to live in the light, not some degree of “morality.”
Light-lovers soak up God’s grace through every pore of their being. They have sometimes come out of the darkness of despair and trespasses, and they have sometimes come out of the dusk of self-evaluation and confession.
The promise of God is that the Grace of Light is ever-present—it is always daytime without a cloud in the sky—we may be fearful about leaving behind our comfortable darkness, our false sense of security that gives us a sense of belonging or power. We step out naked into the light—the promise of God is that we are accepted by God just like a mother accepts and nurtures and loves the child that comes out of the darkness of the womb and into the light of the world. We should have no fear, because in the light we see our true purpose and our true nature—we are children of God and we are Kingdom builders! Amen
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Giving up "choice" for Lent
Here's an article about Lent I found interesting.
GEN-X RISING: Giving up our right to choose for Lent Andrew C. Thompson, Mar 5, 2007
Andrew C. Thompson By Andrew C. Thompson Special Contributor (From UMC portal) Andrew is a friend of mine from college and a member of the Arkansas conference.
The pastor's voice was gentle but determined: "I am asking the church to fast every Friday during Lent. I want you to spend the noon hour in prayer and to give the money you would have spent on lunch to the poor." "Wow," I thought as I sat in the pew on the Sunday before Lent. "She's not giving me an option. She's telling me what to do." In our tradition, it was not always rare for pastors to tell their congregations what they should do for the good of their souls. In fact, it was expected. But, oh, how times have changed. Nowadays, it is seen as presumptuous for a pastor to actually tell his people how they should go about living holy lives. Living in a world that relentlessly sends us the message that we deserve to get what we want, we tend to balk at anything resembling a command. That's the case even in the church, where the whole idea is that we are coming as sinners who stand in need of serious help. And that presents a real dilemma for pastors, who are charged to preach a gospel that is foreign to notions of selfish individualism and self-oriented pride. Unfortunately for the people called Methodists, our willingness to buy into the rabid individualism of American culture has contributed to the decline of our church life. Instead of coming together in an attitude of self-sacrifice and self-giving, we tend to gather as individuals who never get past thinking of our individual "needs." When some prophet in the church actually has the audacity to speak an honest word from God, we become indignant. Then there's Lent. Traditionally, Lent is a time of sacrificial preparation for Easter. We give up things we enjoy to remind us of Christ's sacrifice for us. Or we take on a spiritual discipline to draw us closer to God. But the creativity of our sin knows no bounds. We are so geared to think about ourselves that our "sacrifice" often becomes something we've been wanting to do for ourselves anyway: "I need to lose weight, so I'll give up chocolate for Lent!" Or if we want to take on a new discipline, we sample from what we find interesting on the buffet of Christian practices: "I want to be more spiritual, so I'll commit to reading the Bible three times a week!" Ironically, that's not really sacrifice. It is just a creative form of self-indulgence. We may not admit that we're doing it for ourselves. But if we look candidly at our motivations, we'll see a whole lot more "us" than "Jesus." Choosing our own spiritual practices -- whether giving up a vice or taking on a virtue -- plays into our worst tendencies. We inevitably choose in a way that reinforces our already egocentric desires. That's not an exaggeration. It's just the reality of sin. So it was particularly odd to find myself on the receiving end of a pastoral instruction on that Sunday before Lent. My pastor didn't ask us to choose something to give up for Lent. She didn't encourage us to think about what spiritual discipline we might try out for the next 40 days. And so, to her credit, she didn't play into the most subtle tendencies of our pride. She just told us what to do. As our shepherd (because that's what "pastor" means, after all), she told the sheep in the room what was good for them. And she expects us to do as we're told. That's refreshing. And it's gutsy, too. Just imagine a person going to her pastor or trusted friend and saying, "I want to be a disciple of Jesus, but I don't know how to make the right choices on my own. Will you tell me what to do to live a life of personal piety and social holiness?" Think how strange that appears for our typical Christian practice. How out of step it seems with our culture of individual choice. Now imagine that such an attitude might be exactly what we need to become true disciples.
GEN-X RISING: Giving up our right to choose for Lent Andrew C. Thompson, Mar 5, 2007
Andrew C. Thompson By Andrew C. Thompson Special Contributor (From UMC portal) Andrew is a friend of mine from college and a member of the Arkansas conference.
The pastor's voice was gentle but determined: "I am asking the church to fast every Friday during Lent. I want you to spend the noon hour in prayer and to give the money you would have spent on lunch to the poor." "Wow," I thought as I sat in the pew on the Sunday before Lent. "She's not giving me an option. She's telling me what to do." In our tradition, it was not always rare for pastors to tell their congregations what they should do for the good of their souls. In fact, it was expected. But, oh, how times have changed. Nowadays, it is seen as presumptuous for a pastor to actually tell his people how they should go about living holy lives. Living in a world that relentlessly sends us the message that we deserve to get what we want, we tend to balk at anything resembling a command. That's the case even in the church, where the whole idea is that we are coming as sinners who stand in need of serious help. And that presents a real dilemma for pastors, who are charged to preach a gospel that is foreign to notions of selfish individualism and self-oriented pride. Unfortunately for the people called Methodists, our willingness to buy into the rabid individualism of American culture has contributed to the decline of our church life. Instead of coming together in an attitude of self-sacrifice and self-giving, we tend to gather as individuals who never get past thinking of our individual "needs." When some prophet in the church actually has the audacity to speak an honest word from God, we become indignant. Then there's Lent. Traditionally, Lent is a time of sacrificial preparation for Easter. We give up things we enjoy to remind us of Christ's sacrifice for us. Or we take on a spiritual discipline to draw us closer to God. But the creativity of our sin knows no bounds. We are so geared to think about ourselves that our "sacrifice" often becomes something we've been wanting to do for ourselves anyway: "I need to lose weight, so I'll give up chocolate for Lent!" Or if we want to take on a new discipline, we sample from what we find interesting on the buffet of Christian practices: "I want to be more spiritual, so I'll commit to reading the Bible three times a week!" Ironically, that's not really sacrifice. It is just a creative form of self-indulgence. We may not admit that we're doing it for ourselves. But if we look candidly at our motivations, we'll see a whole lot more "us" than "Jesus." Choosing our own spiritual practices -- whether giving up a vice or taking on a virtue -- plays into our worst tendencies. We inevitably choose in a way that reinforces our already egocentric desires. That's not an exaggeration. It's just the reality of sin. So it was particularly odd to find myself on the receiving end of a pastoral instruction on that Sunday before Lent. My pastor didn't ask us to choose something to give up for Lent. She didn't encourage us to think about what spiritual discipline we might try out for the next 40 days. And so, to her credit, she didn't play into the most subtle tendencies of our pride. She just told us what to do. As our shepherd (because that's what "pastor" means, after all), she told the sheep in the room what was good for them. And she expects us to do as we're told. That's refreshing. And it's gutsy, too. Just imagine a person going to her pastor or trusted friend and saying, "I want to be a disciple of Jesus, but I don't know how to make the right choices on my own. Will you tell me what to do to live a life of personal piety and social holiness?" Think how strange that appears for our typical Christian practice. How out of step it seems with our culture of individual choice. Now imagine that such an attitude might be exactly what we need to become true disciples.
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Lent 2 Sermon: "the Devil Made Me Do It"
Hebrews 13: 1-3
Luke 4: 1-13
I stared down at the black marks on the pavement left there by the worn black tires of busses that every day rounded this culd-e-sack before lining up in front of the doors of Happy Hollow Elementary. A long string of 5th grade boys had their toes on the edge of a spray painted line in the cracked asphalt on this balmy early March morning.
It was try-out day for the inter-school track meet, and I was determined. I wasn’t determined to win—I didn’t have the illusion that I was a great runner. In fact, I had been told year after year by this after that PE teacher that I “didn’t run right.” Instead of the graceful movement of tucking your leg under your body as you pushed it forward to take the next step in a running motion, I tended to flail my legs out as I’d churn across the pavement.
No, I wasn’t determined to win the race, I was simply determined not to lose. There were at least 10 or 15 boys lined up on that spray-painted line, so I should at least be able to beat one of them. The PE teacher standing at the line bent over with the silver whistle pinched between her lips as if Arnold Swartzenegger himself couldn’t pull it out of her mouth, and then let out a sudden and short trill.
Off we went, and I saw the majority of the pack lurch out in front of my vision. Every muscle in my body was tense, I was willing my scrawny body to somehow channel the soul of a Cheetah, and then I noticed I wasn’t alone! Right beside me, in a dead heat for last place, was Clint.
If it weren’t for Clint, this would just be one more race in my life that I would lose and then forget as my self-perception began to be bolstered and defined by other things than “running funny” or being a “class clown” or “nerd” or “gay.” (I suppose some of my classmates thought that I was gay because I wore glasses and tie-died shirts—that perhaps made a little more sense to a fifth grader). But, because Clint was there beside me, this would become a race that I would never forget. I wouldn’t lose this race, but I would lose it in a way that I had never lost before.
Those legs flailing out that I had worked on and practiced to correct would this day come in quite handy. It would just look like, or so I imagined, that because of my funny style of running, Clint had just run into my leg flailing. I continued running on after I felt Clint’s shoe hit my leg and then get tied up. I heard him hit the ground, but I didn’t turn around until I had crossed the finish line, second to last!
My forth grade teacher, Mrs. Guinn, came running over to me. I remember the feeling of her fingernails in my cheeks as she squeezed my face to look up at her. “What on earth did you do that for!” she said, voice quivering with disgust and rage. I suppose it didn’t look like one of my legs had just flailed out after all, I suppose it looked like I just blatantly tripped him.
I looked back at Clint, crying and rolling around on the pavement clutching his forearm, the PE teacher huddled over him. I looked around the pavement. All was still and quiet. There were no basketballs bouncing, no sounds of feet or laughter from the Big Toy. Everyone was staring at me, Second to Last place.
I didn’t know what to say. “The Devil made me do it,” I shrugged. Mrs. Guinn swallowed, perhaps not knowing what to say to this response. By the way that she had treated me in the fourth grade, I now think that she had probably believed me, being that I was the closest thing she had in her mind to Satan’s little Demon.
She pulled me by my ear into the school office, and plopped me down on an orange plastic chair right by the hallway. I remember wanting to move, because as the kids all filed in after recess was over, I was right there on display. I remember the judgment and puzzlement in their eyes as they passed.
It turned out that Clint had a hairline fracture in his arm. I had a compound fracture in my heart—I wasn’t quite sure why I had done what I had very intentionally done. Clint never forgave me for tripping him. I moved away from Fayetteville, but ran into him before my senior year at Boy’s state. I was standing in line waiting for lunch when I felt someone staring at me. I turned around and knew it was him, he was glaring at me. I said, “Clint, right. I’m Nathan Mattox. Do you remember/” “Yes,” he interrupted. I don’t remember the conversation after that, I’m sure that I told him that I had thought about that a lot since then, but you probably get the sense that we didn’t become fast friends there at boy’s state.
Temptation is, by nature, seductive. We are seldom tempted by “bad” things, but – as Jesus’ temptations reveal – “good” things that stand in the way of realizing our true vocation. In that race, I wasn’t tempted to trip Clint, I had been tempted to not lose the race. When you heard the story and the things that went into that moment for me, I’m sure you can identify with the complexity of temptation.
When Jesus is shown the kingdoms of the world and was offered them, the price to pay was to bow down and worship the Imposter. Not losing the race was my “kingdoms of the world,” and the repulsive price I paid was sticking my foot out to trip another boy.
Evil makes it easy on us you see. Sticking with God, for some reason, is more difficult. We probably find it hard to picture Jesus bowing down and worshipping the Devil—but we no doubt find it pretty easy to picture him ruling over the Kingdoms of the Earth! We may find it difficult to imagine ourselves behaving in certain ways, but often times in our pursuit of some goal or desire, we act in unusual ways to get there.
This is why we see Jesus being tempted by some seemingly harmless things on his sojourn in the wilderness. The text tells us that Jesus has completed his 40 day fast and is famished. The Greek is not just “hungry,” it is “famished” or “ravenous.” Certainly a state of mind when we would all perfectly understand if Jesus were to zap a rock or two and turn them into bread. Why not? The fast is complete, right?
And the ability to have power over nations? Imagine all the good that could have come from that! Jesus displacing the cruel dictators, ensuring that the hungry were fed, the oppressed lifted up, the slaves freed. Imagine how life would be different right now!
And jumping off of the temple and letting the angels catch him—that would have accomplished two things—first, the Temple authorities would have witnessed and probably had the proof they needed to get in line behind the Messiah, and secondly Jesus would have been assured in the confidence that God was always right there, ready to save him. After all, the Devil himself knows its right there in Psalm 91, “9Because you have made the LORD your refuge, the Most High your dwelling place,
10no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent.
11For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.
12On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.
13You will tread on the lion and the adder, the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot.
14Those who love me, I will deliver; I will protect those who know my name.
There is nothing inherently wrong with security, power, and comfort, except when we put our trust in these things, when we make them our ultimate goal, they tend to alienate us from others and from God’s vision for our lives. Jesus, we are shown here, struggled with what he felt called to do and what he saw the scriptures saying about God’s protection.
Jesus, no doubt, desired the security of knowing that that promise would be kept. Our own quest for security in this country has compelled us to distrust anyone who doesn’t look, worship, eat, or pray like we do. Security has become an obsession, and it has distracted us from our heritage and faith that walls should be torn down, not erected.
Power infects us personally and collectively. It is no doubt preferable to have power rather than being powerless, but we know in our hearts and souls that power must be handled with care. It must be shared as quickly as it is received. If power is not used to clothe the naked and feed the starving and build up the weak and free the oppressed, then it is usually dangerous to the soul of the one who possesses it.
And lastly, if we make comfort our ultimate goal, we tend to insulate ourselves from the world and from God’s call on our lives. The picture in my mind is me laying on our nice bed with God standing at the foot trying to wake me up, but I’m content enough to put my head between the pillows and muffle his voice. Being comfortable is good, no doubt, but it can also be a trap.
Indeed, facing temptation can strengthen our spiritual lives if we, following the example of Jesus, place our temptations prayerfully before God. I chose the first scripture passage from today because I thought it was a funny parallel to the story I had to tell, but I also knew it would help us put our goals in perspective. The author of Hebrews speaks of running the race and keeping our eyes on “Jesus Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”
The miraculous thing about Jesus is that he is standing there at the finish line, waiting to welcome us to the throne of God, the Kingdom of God, but he is also setting the pace for us, he’s also leading us along the path. We hear about what he endured on that race in Luke’s witness today and in Paul’s witness today. But what we are assured of is that Christ is the goal and Christ is a running partner. We may be second to last or we may be second to first, but we know that Christ is in first place, and that he shares his victory with all of us!
Luke 4: 1-13
I stared down at the black marks on the pavement left there by the worn black tires of busses that every day rounded this culd-e-sack before lining up in front of the doors of Happy Hollow Elementary. A long string of 5th grade boys had their toes on the edge of a spray painted line in the cracked asphalt on this balmy early March morning.
It was try-out day for the inter-school track meet, and I was determined. I wasn’t determined to win—I didn’t have the illusion that I was a great runner. In fact, I had been told year after year by this after that PE teacher that I “didn’t run right.” Instead of the graceful movement of tucking your leg under your body as you pushed it forward to take the next step in a running motion, I tended to flail my legs out as I’d churn across the pavement.
No, I wasn’t determined to win the race, I was simply determined not to lose. There were at least 10 or 15 boys lined up on that spray-painted line, so I should at least be able to beat one of them. The PE teacher standing at the line bent over with the silver whistle pinched between her lips as if Arnold Swartzenegger himself couldn’t pull it out of her mouth, and then let out a sudden and short trill.
Off we went, and I saw the majority of the pack lurch out in front of my vision. Every muscle in my body was tense, I was willing my scrawny body to somehow channel the soul of a Cheetah, and then I noticed I wasn’t alone! Right beside me, in a dead heat for last place, was Clint.
If it weren’t for Clint, this would just be one more race in my life that I would lose and then forget as my self-perception began to be bolstered and defined by other things than “running funny” or being a “class clown” or “nerd” or “gay.” (I suppose some of my classmates thought that I was gay because I wore glasses and tie-died shirts—that perhaps made a little more sense to a fifth grader). But, because Clint was there beside me, this would become a race that I would never forget. I wouldn’t lose this race, but I would lose it in a way that I had never lost before.
Those legs flailing out that I had worked on and practiced to correct would this day come in quite handy. It would just look like, or so I imagined, that because of my funny style of running, Clint had just run into my leg flailing. I continued running on after I felt Clint’s shoe hit my leg and then get tied up. I heard him hit the ground, but I didn’t turn around until I had crossed the finish line, second to last!
My forth grade teacher, Mrs. Guinn, came running over to me. I remember the feeling of her fingernails in my cheeks as she squeezed my face to look up at her. “What on earth did you do that for!” she said, voice quivering with disgust and rage. I suppose it didn’t look like one of my legs had just flailed out after all, I suppose it looked like I just blatantly tripped him.
I looked back at Clint, crying and rolling around on the pavement clutching his forearm, the PE teacher huddled over him. I looked around the pavement. All was still and quiet. There were no basketballs bouncing, no sounds of feet or laughter from the Big Toy. Everyone was staring at me, Second to Last place.
I didn’t know what to say. “The Devil made me do it,” I shrugged. Mrs. Guinn swallowed, perhaps not knowing what to say to this response. By the way that she had treated me in the fourth grade, I now think that she had probably believed me, being that I was the closest thing she had in her mind to Satan’s little Demon.
She pulled me by my ear into the school office, and plopped me down on an orange plastic chair right by the hallway. I remember wanting to move, because as the kids all filed in after recess was over, I was right there on display. I remember the judgment and puzzlement in their eyes as they passed.
It turned out that Clint had a hairline fracture in his arm. I had a compound fracture in my heart—I wasn’t quite sure why I had done what I had very intentionally done. Clint never forgave me for tripping him. I moved away from Fayetteville, but ran into him before my senior year at Boy’s state. I was standing in line waiting for lunch when I felt someone staring at me. I turned around and knew it was him, he was glaring at me. I said, “Clint, right. I’m Nathan Mattox. Do you remember/” “Yes,” he interrupted. I don’t remember the conversation after that, I’m sure that I told him that I had thought about that a lot since then, but you probably get the sense that we didn’t become fast friends there at boy’s state.
Temptation is, by nature, seductive. We are seldom tempted by “bad” things, but – as Jesus’ temptations reveal – “good” things that stand in the way of realizing our true vocation. In that race, I wasn’t tempted to trip Clint, I had been tempted to not lose the race. When you heard the story and the things that went into that moment for me, I’m sure you can identify with the complexity of temptation.
When Jesus is shown the kingdoms of the world and was offered them, the price to pay was to bow down and worship the Imposter. Not losing the race was my “kingdoms of the world,” and the repulsive price I paid was sticking my foot out to trip another boy.
Evil makes it easy on us you see. Sticking with God, for some reason, is more difficult. We probably find it hard to picture Jesus bowing down and worshipping the Devil—but we no doubt find it pretty easy to picture him ruling over the Kingdoms of the Earth! We may find it difficult to imagine ourselves behaving in certain ways, but often times in our pursuit of some goal or desire, we act in unusual ways to get there.
This is why we see Jesus being tempted by some seemingly harmless things on his sojourn in the wilderness. The text tells us that Jesus has completed his 40 day fast and is famished. The Greek is not just “hungry,” it is “famished” or “ravenous.” Certainly a state of mind when we would all perfectly understand if Jesus were to zap a rock or two and turn them into bread. Why not? The fast is complete, right?
And the ability to have power over nations? Imagine all the good that could have come from that! Jesus displacing the cruel dictators, ensuring that the hungry were fed, the oppressed lifted up, the slaves freed. Imagine how life would be different right now!
And jumping off of the temple and letting the angels catch him—that would have accomplished two things—first, the Temple authorities would have witnessed and probably had the proof they needed to get in line behind the Messiah, and secondly Jesus would have been assured in the confidence that God was always right there, ready to save him. After all, the Devil himself knows its right there in Psalm 91, “9Because you have made the LORD your refuge, the Most High your dwelling place,
10no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent.
11For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.
12On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.
13You will tread on the lion and the adder, the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot.
14Those who love me, I will deliver; I will protect those who know my name.
There is nothing inherently wrong with security, power, and comfort, except when we put our trust in these things, when we make them our ultimate goal, they tend to alienate us from others and from God’s vision for our lives. Jesus, we are shown here, struggled with what he felt called to do and what he saw the scriptures saying about God’s protection.
Jesus, no doubt, desired the security of knowing that that promise would be kept. Our own quest for security in this country has compelled us to distrust anyone who doesn’t look, worship, eat, or pray like we do. Security has become an obsession, and it has distracted us from our heritage and faith that walls should be torn down, not erected.
Power infects us personally and collectively. It is no doubt preferable to have power rather than being powerless, but we know in our hearts and souls that power must be handled with care. It must be shared as quickly as it is received. If power is not used to clothe the naked and feed the starving and build up the weak and free the oppressed, then it is usually dangerous to the soul of the one who possesses it.
And lastly, if we make comfort our ultimate goal, we tend to insulate ourselves from the world and from God’s call on our lives. The picture in my mind is me laying on our nice bed with God standing at the foot trying to wake me up, but I’m content enough to put my head between the pillows and muffle his voice. Being comfortable is good, no doubt, but it can also be a trap.
Indeed, facing temptation can strengthen our spiritual lives if we, following the example of Jesus, place our temptations prayerfully before God. I chose the first scripture passage from today because I thought it was a funny parallel to the story I had to tell, but I also knew it would help us put our goals in perspective. The author of Hebrews speaks of running the race and keeping our eyes on “Jesus Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”
The miraculous thing about Jesus is that he is standing there at the finish line, waiting to welcome us to the throne of God, the Kingdom of God, but he is also setting the pace for us, he’s also leading us along the path. We hear about what he endured on that race in Luke’s witness today and in Paul’s witness today. But what we are assured of is that Christ is the goal and Christ is a running partner. We may be second to last or we may be second to first, but we know that Christ is in first place, and that he shares his victory with all of us!
Monday, February 26, 2007
Lent 1 Sermon-- "A Pregnant Pause"
Scriptures:
Jeremiah 18:1-6
John 3: 1-8
Let me begin this morning by simply thanking you. Thank you for being who you are in this community. Thank you for embracing our family and shaping my ministry. I want to share with you today some of our journey to and through ministry in part because you are part of that journey. But I also want to tell you how you have shaped my ministry because this is one of the essential themes of Lent—for us to examine and understand how we have been shaped and molded in faith.
There is a passage of scripture in Jeremiah where he visits a potter’s house. The potter is busy at the wheel, and at some point the clay is distorted, so the potter simply moves his hands and keeps spinning the wheel until the clay has resumed the shape that he wants it to be in. Jeremiah hears the voice of God saying, “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does? Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.” You’ve heard this scripture recently in this church, but it spoke to me again this week—so you get it again, okay?
Lent is a season of introspection, of attentiveness to prayer and discipline. It can be a time of great re-molding. In our church tradition, it is the time when we seek to mirror the time that Christ spent in the wilderness, fasting and praying. It is a time to come to terms with who we are, and what has made us what we are.
One of the events that I experienced while youth minister a few years ago that really contributed to my sense of “who I am” happened on a trip we took with the youth to Worlds of Fun in Kansas City. We had spent the whole day there. Lara and I and some parents had taken a group Jr. and Sr. High youth as a reward trip for having the most consistent attendance at Sunday school. We had spent the day riding roller coasters…but the real roller coaster was waiting for us on the highways of Kansas. I was driving a van with a shell top, so don’t have to crouch down to get to the back seats.
Unfortunately, I’d always noticed the shell on the van caught the wind like a sail, and it was unsettling to drive if there was any wind at all. Heading west on the interstate in Kansas, I began to notice the sky in front of us was dark, and the wind that I dreaded was picking up. 18 wheelers were careening in their lanes, trying to stay within their bounds, and many cars were beginning to pull over as sheets of rain began to pummel my windshield.
I glanced from my white knuckles to the rearview, amazed to see my youth laughing and carrying on and flirting with each other, oblivious to the torments that I saw ahead of me. On the radio, I heard the distinctive beeps that proceeded a weather alert. It was a tornado warning—but I had no Kansas map, and the locations of touchdowns meant nothing to me.
In the middle of Kansas, there aren’t many places to seek shelter in a storm, but I found a gas station and pulled in to see. I remember the big plastic garbage cans at the gas station flying around the parking lot as I ran back to the van. I knew the ramshackle old gas station wouldn’t do anything to shelter us from the approaching storm, and the kid’s parents would already be waiting an hour or two past our estimated time of arrival because the hard rain had slowed our travel down significantly.
We were pretty close to being able to make it to our highway going south before the tornados made it to us. My prayer was more a demand than a petition. “These are your children God, and I’m the only one you’ve got to get them home safely. Now I need you to show me that you’re with me!” I pulled out of the gas station, back onto the interstate and toward our southbound highway. Not 5 minutes after I’d said the prayer, a lightning bolt crashed into a tree out in a pasture 100 yards outside my driver’s window. The tree exploded into flames, and my hair stood up on my arms.
A resounding “coooooool” was mixed with shrieks of fear voiced by the teenagers in the seats behind me. It was like I had not been riding in the van all along, my mind had been racing with possibilities of all the things that could go wrong. After I witnessed my own “burning bush” though, I had a new sense of confidence in God’s presence. The rain didn’t let up, the wind still rocked the van, the wet road continued to slow us down, but now my grip on the wheel relaxed, the blood rushed back into my knuckles, and I was able to feel the road better because I had loosened up enough to actually feel it.
We made it home safely. The sign of God’s presence that I had prayed for was actually presented to me in an unmistakable way. Though God had been answering prayers in a more subtle way for me for my whole life, this particular instance gave me a renewed sense of purpose and promise as a steward of God’s church.
If I am a chunk of clay being molded by God, then this experience is part of my spinning wheel. This is one of those things that contributed to who I am. God used this experience to mold me into the form that He has in mind. Lent comes from an Old English word “Lencten” which means “Spring.” Spring is a time of new growth, a time of taking shape, of coming into bloom. It is a time of preparation.
We observe Lent for 40 days for the most part because it was the early church’s custom to observe a total fast for 40 hours proceeding Easter morning. On the morning of Easter, new initiates into the faith were baptized and were allowed to take the sacrament of communion for the first time. The whole community of faith would participate in the 40 hour fast to prepare for this event. The number 40 carries great significance in the scriptures—The Israelites are in the wilderness for 40 years, the flood in Genesis begins with a period of rain for forty days and nights. Elijah sits on Mt. Horeb waiting for the voice of God for forty days and nights. Moses spends forty days on Mt. Sinai with God, Jesus spends forty days in the wilderness preparing for his ministry.
Now, why 40? Did the Hebrew people consider it a holy number? Did God just like to do things in 3’s 7’s 12’s and 40’s? I’ve heard a compelling reason that the number 40 is Biblical literature. We hear the number so often because it is also the number of weeks that a baby is in gestation in her mother’s womb. Forty weeks is the amount of time that women are pregnant. It takes 40 weeks to shape us into who we are—and at the far end of 40 weeks, we are born!
This puts a new perspective on the stories in the Bible that feature the number 40. The Israelites were indeed re-born at the end of their journey in the Promised Land. They were a new people, they were no longer slaves, but free. Noah saw the whole world re-born through the floodwaters, which themselves are reminiscent of birth. Elijah, Jonah, Moses—all needed to go through a gestational period before they went on with their mission.
Jesus emerges from his forty days in the wilderness proclaiming, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring good news!” Lent is indeed a time of Spring. It is the pregnant pause before the exclamation of the empty tomb. It is strange for me to begin thinking of Lent in this way—I have always thought of it as a somber time, a frame of darkness that accentuates the unbelievable light of Easter.
Viewing Lent as the gestational period for our new birth in Easter brings a new meaning to the season for me—it recasts the agony of Good Friday as the birthpangs of Easter. It re-molds the sorrowful Last supper as that reluctant sadness women sometimes feel at the end of pregnancy, knowing that soon they will give up the intimate bond of carrying their child within them.
And so I invite you to view these 40 days with me as a period of gestation, when we focus on the fact that we are “wonderfully made” and the things that go into making us who we are. I shared with you one story of how my ministry in the church shaped me and my calling—the truth is that my calling is like a string of Christmas lights—moments throughout my life all connected along a tangled and luminescent string, that together shed light on my decision to enter ordained ministry. This church is responsible for a number of those Christmas lights.
What are some of yours? In what ways has God shed light on your purpose in life? Sometimes our understanding God’s activity of shaping us takes continued and disciplined focus. This is why I would encourage you to use the Lenten season as one of insight and meditation and prayer. You may find a spiritual practice that involves “giving up” some kind of creature comfort. Perhaps you have given up chocolate or soda. If you have decided to take this course, you may remind yourself of God’s presence and activity and shaping presence in your life every time you have a hankering for a coke or a kit-kat.
But perhaps you have never been that successful at making this kind of practice stick. If not, why not trying to add something to your life. A couple weeks ago, we received a letter from a lady at the Bartlesville church asking us to write a letter for a woman that would support her during her Emmaus walk.
I so enjoyed writing a letter and having the opportunity to write the letter to her that I thought—why don’t I just do this? Why do I need a “reason” to write a letter to someone letting them know what they’ve contributed to my walk with Christ? Well, perhaps this could be a Lenten discipline! Simply putting a pen to paper once a day and writing to someone we want to thank or acknowledge.
I left instructions for you on our church website on the practice of Lectio Divina—which is “Divine Reading,” a monastic practice of intentionally reading a passage of scripture and then re-reading and re-reading until a particular word or phrase jumps out and grabs us, and then sitting with that word in silence and contemplating why it is that God would have us hear that particular word or phrase. It can be a very powerful practice.
Perhaps you are attracted to the labyrinth—I’ve also posted an online Labyrinth on our church website that you can utilize as a devotional tool. Lent is a journey toward the center, and a Labyrinth can be very helpful for those of us who find it difficult to find silence and solace in our busy heads. I’ll never forget the time that I walked the labyrinth with the youth I mentioned before, and an 8th grader came up to me after he walked and said with wonder and gratitude, “For the first time in my life, my mind was quiet.”
Lent can be a Springtime for our souls. It can be a gestational period when we are formed and molded into the people whom God would have us be. God carries us in the womb of life, hoping for that day when we experience the second birth—the Spiritual birth when we open our eyes to the world around us and see God’s handiwork, when we look at the people next to us in the pew or the people who annoy us at work and we see brothers and sisters. When we look at ourselves in the mirror and see purpose and potential and promise.
This is the Lenten journey—a period of gestation as we await the new birth of humanity at the empty tomb.
Jeremiah 18:1-6
John 3: 1-8
Let me begin this morning by simply thanking you. Thank you for being who you are in this community. Thank you for embracing our family and shaping my ministry. I want to share with you today some of our journey to and through ministry in part because you are part of that journey. But I also want to tell you how you have shaped my ministry because this is one of the essential themes of Lent—for us to examine and understand how we have been shaped and molded in faith.
There is a passage of scripture in Jeremiah where he visits a potter’s house. The potter is busy at the wheel, and at some point the clay is distorted, so the potter simply moves his hands and keeps spinning the wheel until the clay has resumed the shape that he wants it to be in. Jeremiah hears the voice of God saying, “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does? Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.” You’ve heard this scripture recently in this church, but it spoke to me again this week—so you get it again, okay?
Lent is a season of introspection, of attentiveness to prayer and discipline. It can be a time of great re-molding. In our church tradition, it is the time when we seek to mirror the time that Christ spent in the wilderness, fasting and praying. It is a time to come to terms with who we are, and what has made us what we are.
One of the events that I experienced while youth minister a few years ago that really contributed to my sense of “who I am” happened on a trip we took with the youth to Worlds of Fun in Kansas City. We had spent the whole day there. Lara and I and some parents had taken a group Jr. and Sr. High youth as a reward trip for having the most consistent attendance at Sunday school. We had spent the day riding roller coasters…but the real roller coaster was waiting for us on the highways of Kansas. I was driving a van with a shell top, so don’t have to crouch down to get to the back seats.
Unfortunately, I’d always noticed the shell on the van caught the wind like a sail, and it was unsettling to drive if there was any wind at all. Heading west on the interstate in Kansas, I began to notice the sky in front of us was dark, and the wind that I dreaded was picking up. 18 wheelers were careening in their lanes, trying to stay within their bounds, and many cars were beginning to pull over as sheets of rain began to pummel my windshield.
I glanced from my white knuckles to the rearview, amazed to see my youth laughing and carrying on and flirting with each other, oblivious to the torments that I saw ahead of me. On the radio, I heard the distinctive beeps that proceeded a weather alert. It was a tornado warning—but I had no Kansas map, and the locations of touchdowns meant nothing to me.
In the middle of Kansas, there aren’t many places to seek shelter in a storm, but I found a gas station and pulled in to see. I remember the big plastic garbage cans at the gas station flying around the parking lot as I ran back to the van. I knew the ramshackle old gas station wouldn’t do anything to shelter us from the approaching storm, and the kid’s parents would already be waiting an hour or two past our estimated time of arrival because the hard rain had slowed our travel down significantly.
We were pretty close to being able to make it to our highway going south before the tornados made it to us. My prayer was more a demand than a petition. “These are your children God, and I’m the only one you’ve got to get them home safely. Now I need you to show me that you’re with me!” I pulled out of the gas station, back onto the interstate and toward our southbound highway. Not 5 minutes after I’d said the prayer, a lightning bolt crashed into a tree out in a pasture 100 yards outside my driver’s window. The tree exploded into flames, and my hair stood up on my arms.
A resounding “coooooool” was mixed with shrieks of fear voiced by the teenagers in the seats behind me. It was like I had not been riding in the van all along, my mind had been racing with possibilities of all the things that could go wrong. After I witnessed my own “burning bush” though, I had a new sense of confidence in God’s presence. The rain didn’t let up, the wind still rocked the van, the wet road continued to slow us down, but now my grip on the wheel relaxed, the blood rushed back into my knuckles, and I was able to feel the road better because I had loosened up enough to actually feel it.
We made it home safely. The sign of God’s presence that I had prayed for was actually presented to me in an unmistakable way. Though God had been answering prayers in a more subtle way for me for my whole life, this particular instance gave me a renewed sense of purpose and promise as a steward of God’s church.
If I am a chunk of clay being molded by God, then this experience is part of my spinning wheel. This is one of those things that contributed to who I am. God used this experience to mold me into the form that He has in mind. Lent comes from an Old English word “Lencten” which means “Spring.” Spring is a time of new growth, a time of taking shape, of coming into bloom. It is a time of preparation.
We observe Lent for 40 days for the most part because it was the early church’s custom to observe a total fast for 40 hours proceeding Easter morning. On the morning of Easter, new initiates into the faith were baptized and were allowed to take the sacrament of communion for the first time. The whole community of faith would participate in the 40 hour fast to prepare for this event. The number 40 carries great significance in the scriptures—The Israelites are in the wilderness for 40 years, the flood in Genesis begins with a period of rain for forty days and nights. Elijah sits on Mt. Horeb waiting for the voice of God for forty days and nights. Moses spends forty days on Mt. Sinai with God, Jesus spends forty days in the wilderness preparing for his ministry.
Now, why 40? Did the Hebrew people consider it a holy number? Did God just like to do things in 3’s 7’s 12’s and 40’s? I’ve heard a compelling reason that the number 40 is Biblical literature. We hear the number so often because it is also the number of weeks that a baby is in gestation in her mother’s womb. Forty weeks is the amount of time that women are pregnant. It takes 40 weeks to shape us into who we are—and at the far end of 40 weeks, we are born!
This puts a new perspective on the stories in the Bible that feature the number 40. The Israelites were indeed re-born at the end of their journey in the Promised Land. They were a new people, they were no longer slaves, but free. Noah saw the whole world re-born through the floodwaters, which themselves are reminiscent of birth. Elijah, Jonah, Moses—all needed to go through a gestational period before they went on with their mission.
Jesus emerges from his forty days in the wilderness proclaiming, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring good news!” Lent is indeed a time of Spring. It is the pregnant pause before the exclamation of the empty tomb. It is strange for me to begin thinking of Lent in this way—I have always thought of it as a somber time, a frame of darkness that accentuates the unbelievable light of Easter.
Viewing Lent as the gestational period for our new birth in Easter brings a new meaning to the season for me—it recasts the agony of Good Friday as the birthpangs of Easter. It re-molds the sorrowful Last supper as that reluctant sadness women sometimes feel at the end of pregnancy, knowing that soon they will give up the intimate bond of carrying their child within them.
And so I invite you to view these 40 days with me as a period of gestation, when we focus on the fact that we are “wonderfully made” and the things that go into making us who we are. I shared with you one story of how my ministry in the church shaped me and my calling—the truth is that my calling is like a string of Christmas lights—moments throughout my life all connected along a tangled and luminescent string, that together shed light on my decision to enter ordained ministry. This church is responsible for a number of those Christmas lights.
What are some of yours? In what ways has God shed light on your purpose in life? Sometimes our understanding God’s activity of shaping us takes continued and disciplined focus. This is why I would encourage you to use the Lenten season as one of insight and meditation and prayer. You may find a spiritual practice that involves “giving up” some kind of creature comfort. Perhaps you have given up chocolate or soda. If you have decided to take this course, you may remind yourself of God’s presence and activity and shaping presence in your life every time you have a hankering for a coke or a kit-kat.
But perhaps you have never been that successful at making this kind of practice stick. If not, why not trying to add something to your life. A couple weeks ago, we received a letter from a lady at the Bartlesville church asking us to write a letter for a woman that would support her during her Emmaus walk.
I so enjoyed writing a letter and having the opportunity to write the letter to her that I thought—why don’t I just do this? Why do I need a “reason” to write a letter to someone letting them know what they’ve contributed to my walk with Christ? Well, perhaps this could be a Lenten discipline! Simply putting a pen to paper once a day and writing to someone we want to thank or acknowledge.
I left instructions for you on our church website on the practice of Lectio Divina—which is “Divine Reading,” a monastic practice of intentionally reading a passage of scripture and then re-reading and re-reading until a particular word or phrase jumps out and grabs us, and then sitting with that word in silence and contemplating why it is that God would have us hear that particular word or phrase. It can be a very powerful practice.
Perhaps you are attracted to the labyrinth—I’ve also posted an online Labyrinth on our church website that you can utilize as a devotional tool. Lent is a journey toward the center, and a Labyrinth can be very helpful for those of us who find it difficult to find silence and solace in our busy heads. I’ll never forget the time that I walked the labyrinth with the youth I mentioned before, and an 8th grader came up to me after he walked and said with wonder and gratitude, “For the first time in my life, my mind was quiet.”
Lent can be a Springtime for our souls. It can be a gestational period when we are formed and molded into the people whom God would have us be. God carries us in the womb of life, hoping for that day when we experience the second birth—the Spiritual birth when we open our eyes to the world around us and see God’s handiwork, when we look at the people next to us in the pew or the people who annoy us at work and we see brothers and sisters. When we look at ourselves in the mirror and see purpose and potential and promise.
This is the Lenten journey—a period of gestation as we await the new birth of humanity at the empty tomb.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Welcome to the world Trent!
Congratulations to Ken and Karen Morris, who now have a baby grandson, thanks to son Jonathan and his wife Alyssa. Trent Wesley Morris was born on Monday, February 19, 2007 at 11:19 am, weighing in at 8 lbs and 13 oz and 20 inches long. Isn't he great!
Monday, February 19, 2007
Transfiguration Sunday Sermon--Living the Transfiguration
2 Cor. 3:12=4:2
Luke 9: 28-43
I don’t know about you, but when I read this scripture, I am intrigued by Peter’s idea of setting up three tents. What is the meaning behind this seemingly ridiculous act? Mark was evidently as confused about Peter’s actions as his modern day readers—he comments on Peter’s idea by saying, “he did not know what to say, because he was terrified.” Luke shortens Mark’s comment simply to “not knowing what he had said.” Matthew seems to be the only gospel writer to think Peter is up to something worthwhile, because he leaves out commentary entirely. So, in the spirit of Matthew, I assumed that Peter wasn’t a complete fool, and looked for his meaning.
I believe that these tents in some ways symbolize our impulsive response to the divine. When the divine becomes apparent, we try to build it shelter. Instead of basking in the light of the transfiguration, we want to put it under canvas. Sure, we think this is best for the divine. God is in need of our protection!
We want to protect God under the tents of our dogmas, our customs, and our explanations. Douglas John Hall writes in a book I have been reading, The Cross in Our Context….“One suspects that our Western concepts of God are the answers that we give to depth experiences that are too basically unsettling to remain undefined, unnamed. Better name it straightaway—otherwise what control can we claim?”
The tents that we build as a response to the divine experience are our attempts to define and name the divine. Our human tendency is to feel uncomfortable with the divine. We can’t just stand with our mouths agape. Though ignorance breeds fear, the inverse is true as well: We are afraid of our ignorance—or at least I am anyway. I don’t like to think that “I don’t know.”
A friend of mine named Belden Lane is a teacher and author on the Spirituality of Landscape. IN a book titled The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, he writes about visiting Mt. Tabor—the traditional location of Christ’s transfiguration—and soaks up his surroundings. Lane is also perplexed by Peter’s idea. He writes:
“The disciples had been asking Jesus to reveal his glory as coming Messiah. They chafe under his resistance to declare openly before others that hidden truth. Peter rebukes him for predicting instead the suffering and death he must endure (Mark 8: 27-33). IN what seems to be a sudden reversal of Jesus’ reticence to display his grandeur, he takes a handful of disciples up the mountain and shows them a vision of his messianic glory to come. Everything they had longed for appears in dazzling splendor before them. The mountain is flooded with light.
Lane goes on to say……But their response is no better than those who built the golden calf after Moses’ theophany. Peter’s impulse, like theirs, is to reach for the knowable and speakable, wanting to preserve the experience artificially in a monument, building a cluster of shrines to commemorate a lost memory. He longs to sustain this display of mind boggling power that will forever demand the respect of others. Lost on him entirely is the deeper unspeakable significance of what happened on Tabor.
Finally, Lane says….This is the hardest truth for the disciples to bear. Their vision has no permanence. It can not be preserved in stone. Its ultimate fulfillment lies only on the far side of suffering, a suffering which inescapably awaits their Lord—and themselves. The way to glory is unavoidably the way of the cross, the path toward emptiness.”
This is why we celebrate the Transfiguration the Sunday before we begin our observation of Lent. Glory and striving are tied together in our expression of faith.
Christ isn’t waiting for us to put a box around him so that we can define him and control him: the Christ of the Transfiguration grabs our hearts and wrings them out. Sometimes Christ approaches us with arms open—other times Christ overturns our tables. Christ doesn’t ask us “Who do you say that I am?” so that we can define him for the world—he asks us so that we might profess him to the world.
When the disciples respond to the Transfiguration as we might, God appears in a cloud. Throughout the scriptures, and especially in the Exodus story, God is portrayed appearing in a cloud—and that is one reason we have this image in the Transfiguration. But Perhaps it is best for us to picture this cloud as a visual ignorance. A veil of missed comprehension. Christ stands before us transfigured, and all we can do (through Peter) is to suggest our tent-building. God doesn’t seem to be too interested in our tents. God seemingly interrupts Peter without justifying his idea with a response. Instead, God is bubbling over with adoration. “This is my son, IN whom I am well pleased.” Should we make a tent for him then God? No---“Listen to Him.” Listening to him entails us confronting our fears. Are we afraid to live our lives the way that he perceives is possible in us? IN other words: He asks us “Do you mind if I always love you?” Most of us know that being loved by someone means yielding ourselves to them and allowing them inside our lives. We talk a lot about “loving Jesus.” Perhaps the real difficult thing to do is being loved by Jesus.
Christ’s love is a transformative love. I can’t open myself to Christ’s love without being transfigured myself. The transfiguration burns our worldly eyes. IN a later experience of the transfigured Christ, Paul experienced this transformation as so reformative that it blinded him. After seeing a bright light and being questioned by the Risen Christ, Saul “could see nothing, and had to be led by the hand to Damascus, where he was healed by Ananias and scales fell from his eyes. Our eyes are burned by this vision as well. The love of Christ transcends our worldly vision.
. Are you afraid to live your life the way that I perceive? That’s how Jesus enters our hearts: that introspection that causes us to see what Christ perceives is possible in our lives. “Do you applaud fear?” Christ challenges us to do all that he has done. He perceives greatness in us when we perceive weakness. Christ is the fulfillment and potential for all humanity. Paul writes about the transfiguration in 2nd Corinthians “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.” Christ perceives Christ in our hearts, and that’s how Christ enters. The law is written on our hearts. Christ taking hold of our hearts is not an act of filling an empty space, it is an unveiling of what is already there.
Belden Lane has this unveiling experience of being included in the transfiguration when he visited Mt. Tabor. He writes,
I wandered into the ruins of a Benedictine monastery. There I opened my Bible to Matthew. A harsh, cold wind rustled the pages, making them hard to hold. Dark clouds were gathering. But the words of the gospel went right through me as I stumbled over the passage. I heard them spoken by God not only to Jesus, but also, it seemed, to me. “You are my son,” the voice was saying, “the one I love.
I’m pleased with you; I take pleasure in who you are. Listen (and attend carefully)…to my glory within you.” There were no lights flashing at the time, no extraordinary vision. God knows, I was half freezing to death. But I couldn’t get away from the embarrassed, almost heretical feeling that in all my ordinariness—a foreigner with cold feet and anxiousness about the weather—I was somehow in that moment included in the transfiguring light once revealed in that place. A father was saying words I’d been longing to hear all my life.
Lane continues….While such a reading of the text may seem presumptuous to Western ears, I’d learn later that it follows exactly the Greek fathers’ understanding of the transfiguration event. The disciples’ vision of Jesus’ deified human flesh on Mount Tabor revealed to them not only the glory of God, but also what it means most fully to be human. Part of their amazement at the transfiguration was that, in seeing Jesus, they also saw themselves anew. Summarizing John of Damascus and Gregory Palamas, John A. McGuckin says, “When the disciple comes before the mystery of the Transfiguration he sees an image of his true face that he has known but long since forgotten.”
Jesus shows the disciples the glorious nature of the Christ. Even though we are disciples of Christ, we can never quite wrap our minds around the simple light and beauty of the transfiguration. It is out of the ordinary. Right when we think we have the right answers to the question “Who do you say that I am?” the reality of the Christ melts our minds and envelops us like a cloud.
We try to build appropriate shrines, and we don’t even begin to get it. The cloud forces our knees to buckle. What is this grand vision? This awe inspiring light? Is it a taste of some transcendent deity? No—it is pure humanity. It is fearless, unbounded love. Christ never lets us disciples off the hook—He asks us if we would like to join him on Golgotha. He tells us that we will do all he has done and more. Christ’s radiant face is the potential for all creation.
Now I’m going to play a song by Thievery Corporation. This is secular music, but I agree with Madeline L’Engle that “nothing is so secular that it can’t be sacred.” Imagine the words of the singer coming from the mouth of Jesus on the ascent of the mountain of transfiguration. Can you see the transfiguration in the mirror, as Paul asks us in 2nd Corinthians? If not, what are the things that are holding you back? Where do you see Christ’s face changing into something unexpected? What metamorphosis must you undergo to be the face of Christ in this world for others? What have you built in an attempt to shelter God? If you wish, you may come and light a candle as a sign of reverence and prayer. As the chancel begins to be filled with candlelight, perhaps we might see our own purpose as God’s children to be reflections of that magnificent light which give us hope. How can we be lights to this community. Come and light a candle in hopes that we may be transfigured to this purpose.
Luke 9: 28-43
I don’t know about you, but when I read this scripture, I am intrigued by Peter’s idea of setting up three tents. What is the meaning behind this seemingly ridiculous act? Mark was evidently as confused about Peter’s actions as his modern day readers—he comments on Peter’s idea by saying, “he did not know what to say, because he was terrified.” Luke shortens Mark’s comment simply to “not knowing what he had said.” Matthew seems to be the only gospel writer to think Peter is up to something worthwhile, because he leaves out commentary entirely. So, in the spirit of Matthew, I assumed that Peter wasn’t a complete fool, and looked for his meaning.
I believe that these tents in some ways symbolize our impulsive response to the divine. When the divine becomes apparent, we try to build it shelter. Instead of basking in the light of the transfiguration, we want to put it under canvas. Sure, we think this is best for the divine. God is in need of our protection!
We want to protect God under the tents of our dogmas, our customs, and our explanations. Douglas John Hall writes in a book I have been reading, The Cross in Our Context….“One suspects that our Western concepts of God are the answers that we give to depth experiences that are too basically unsettling to remain undefined, unnamed. Better name it straightaway—otherwise what control can we claim?”
The tents that we build as a response to the divine experience are our attempts to define and name the divine. Our human tendency is to feel uncomfortable with the divine. We can’t just stand with our mouths agape. Though ignorance breeds fear, the inverse is true as well: We are afraid of our ignorance—or at least I am anyway. I don’t like to think that “I don’t know.”
A friend of mine named Belden Lane is a teacher and author on the Spirituality of Landscape. IN a book titled The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, he writes about visiting Mt. Tabor—the traditional location of Christ’s transfiguration—and soaks up his surroundings. Lane is also perplexed by Peter’s idea. He writes:
“The disciples had been asking Jesus to reveal his glory as coming Messiah. They chafe under his resistance to declare openly before others that hidden truth. Peter rebukes him for predicting instead the suffering and death he must endure (Mark 8: 27-33). IN what seems to be a sudden reversal of Jesus’ reticence to display his grandeur, he takes a handful of disciples up the mountain and shows them a vision of his messianic glory to come. Everything they had longed for appears in dazzling splendor before them. The mountain is flooded with light.
Lane goes on to say……But their response is no better than those who built the golden calf after Moses’ theophany. Peter’s impulse, like theirs, is to reach for the knowable and speakable, wanting to preserve the experience artificially in a monument, building a cluster of shrines to commemorate a lost memory. He longs to sustain this display of mind boggling power that will forever demand the respect of others. Lost on him entirely is the deeper unspeakable significance of what happened on Tabor.
Finally, Lane says….This is the hardest truth for the disciples to bear. Their vision has no permanence. It can not be preserved in stone. Its ultimate fulfillment lies only on the far side of suffering, a suffering which inescapably awaits their Lord—and themselves. The way to glory is unavoidably the way of the cross, the path toward emptiness.”
This is why we celebrate the Transfiguration the Sunday before we begin our observation of Lent. Glory and striving are tied together in our expression of faith.
Christ isn’t waiting for us to put a box around him so that we can define him and control him: the Christ of the Transfiguration grabs our hearts and wrings them out. Sometimes Christ approaches us with arms open—other times Christ overturns our tables. Christ doesn’t ask us “Who do you say that I am?” so that we can define him for the world—he asks us so that we might profess him to the world.
When the disciples respond to the Transfiguration as we might, God appears in a cloud. Throughout the scriptures, and especially in the Exodus story, God is portrayed appearing in a cloud—and that is one reason we have this image in the Transfiguration. But Perhaps it is best for us to picture this cloud as a visual ignorance. A veil of missed comprehension. Christ stands before us transfigured, and all we can do (through Peter) is to suggest our tent-building. God doesn’t seem to be too interested in our tents. God seemingly interrupts Peter without justifying his idea with a response. Instead, God is bubbling over with adoration. “This is my son, IN whom I am well pleased.” Should we make a tent for him then God? No---“Listen to Him.” Listening to him entails us confronting our fears. Are we afraid to live our lives the way that he perceives is possible in us? IN other words: He asks us “Do you mind if I always love you?” Most of us know that being loved by someone means yielding ourselves to them and allowing them inside our lives. We talk a lot about “loving Jesus.” Perhaps the real difficult thing to do is being loved by Jesus.
Christ’s love is a transformative love. I can’t open myself to Christ’s love without being transfigured myself. The transfiguration burns our worldly eyes. IN a later experience of the transfigured Christ, Paul experienced this transformation as so reformative that it blinded him. After seeing a bright light and being questioned by the Risen Christ, Saul “could see nothing, and had to be led by the hand to Damascus, where he was healed by Ananias and scales fell from his eyes. Our eyes are burned by this vision as well. The love of Christ transcends our worldly vision.
. Are you afraid to live your life the way that I perceive? That’s how Jesus enters our hearts: that introspection that causes us to see what Christ perceives is possible in our lives. “Do you applaud fear?” Christ challenges us to do all that he has done. He perceives greatness in us when we perceive weakness. Christ is the fulfillment and potential for all humanity. Paul writes about the transfiguration in 2nd Corinthians “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.” Christ perceives Christ in our hearts, and that’s how Christ enters. The law is written on our hearts. Christ taking hold of our hearts is not an act of filling an empty space, it is an unveiling of what is already there.
Belden Lane has this unveiling experience of being included in the transfiguration when he visited Mt. Tabor. He writes,
I wandered into the ruins of a Benedictine monastery. There I opened my Bible to Matthew. A harsh, cold wind rustled the pages, making them hard to hold. Dark clouds were gathering. But the words of the gospel went right through me as I stumbled over the passage. I heard them spoken by God not only to Jesus, but also, it seemed, to me. “You are my son,” the voice was saying, “the one I love.
I’m pleased with you; I take pleasure in who you are. Listen (and attend carefully)…to my glory within you.” There were no lights flashing at the time, no extraordinary vision. God knows, I was half freezing to death. But I couldn’t get away from the embarrassed, almost heretical feeling that in all my ordinariness—a foreigner with cold feet and anxiousness about the weather—I was somehow in that moment included in the transfiguring light once revealed in that place. A father was saying words I’d been longing to hear all my life.
Lane continues….While such a reading of the text may seem presumptuous to Western ears, I’d learn later that it follows exactly the Greek fathers’ understanding of the transfiguration event. The disciples’ vision of Jesus’ deified human flesh on Mount Tabor revealed to them not only the glory of God, but also what it means most fully to be human. Part of their amazement at the transfiguration was that, in seeing Jesus, they also saw themselves anew. Summarizing John of Damascus and Gregory Palamas, John A. McGuckin says, “When the disciple comes before the mystery of the Transfiguration he sees an image of his true face that he has known but long since forgotten.”
Jesus shows the disciples the glorious nature of the Christ. Even though we are disciples of Christ, we can never quite wrap our minds around the simple light and beauty of the transfiguration. It is out of the ordinary. Right when we think we have the right answers to the question “Who do you say that I am?” the reality of the Christ melts our minds and envelops us like a cloud.
We try to build appropriate shrines, and we don’t even begin to get it. The cloud forces our knees to buckle. What is this grand vision? This awe inspiring light? Is it a taste of some transcendent deity? No—it is pure humanity. It is fearless, unbounded love. Christ never lets us disciples off the hook—He asks us if we would like to join him on Golgotha. He tells us that we will do all he has done and more. Christ’s radiant face is the potential for all creation.
Now I’m going to play a song by Thievery Corporation. This is secular music, but I agree with Madeline L’Engle that “nothing is so secular that it can’t be sacred.” Imagine the words of the singer coming from the mouth of Jesus on the ascent of the mountain of transfiguration. Can you see the transfiguration in the mirror, as Paul asks us in 2nd Corinthians? If not, what are the things that are holding you back? Where do you see Christ’s face changing into something unexpected? What metamorphosis must you undergo to be the face of Christ in this world for others? What have you built in an attempt to shelter God? If you wish, you may come and light a candle as a sign of reverence and prayer. As the chancel begins to be filled with candlelight, perhaps we might see our own purpose as God’s children to be reflections of that magnificent light which give us hope. How can we be lights to this community. Come and light a candle in hopes that we may be transfigured to this purpose.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Feb. 11 Sermon: Rooted by the Water
Sermon Texts:
Rooted by the Water
I told you last week that there was a pond down the street from my house where I used to go fishing. Well, at this pond there was also a beautiful, flowing willow tree. There was a big rock under the willow tree, and I have fond memories of walking through the curtain of branches into the “room” created by the tree. I remember the sense of comfort and contentment I experienced under that willow tree. The willowy branches spread out over the pond a bit, so a bit of the water fell under the curtain of willow branches.
Those branches would also come in handy when taking shelter under the willow tree during a BB gun war. Nestled under the protective fingers of this motherish tree, I knew whatever BBs came my way would be somewhat deflected.
Whenever I read the passage we heard from Jeremiah this morning, I always think of this willow tree. This tree that “put down roots by the water.” It’s a comforting image, isn’t it? Perhaps there are trees in your experience which have provided similar sanctuaries for you.
The Psalmists and the prophets use trees to describe our spiritual lives. Throughout the ages, Christian mystics and theologians have also described who we are in relationship to God by referring to trees. Brother Lawrence, a French mystic, wrote of himself, “That in the winter, upon seeing a tree stripped of its leaves, and considering that within a little time the leaves would be renewed, and after that the flowers and fruit appear, he received a high view of the Providence and Power of God, which has never since been effaced from his soul.” A very wise man I have met named Satish Kumar wrote of a similar experience in the company of a tree:
“The churches, cathedrals, mosques and synagogues, shrines and temples are not the only holy places, but the whole of creation is divine and sacred. My pilgrimage is in every moment and in every place. Sometimes I come a cross a tree which seemed like a Buddha or a Jesus: loving, compassionate, still, unambitious, enlightened, in eternal meditation, giving pleasure to a pilgrim, shade to a cow, berries to a bird, beauty to its surroundings, health to its neighbors, branches for the fire, leaves to the soil, asking nothing in return, in total harmony with the wind and the rain. How much I can learn from a tree! The tree is my church, the tree is my temple, the tree is my mantra, the tree is my poem and my prayer.
Standing under a tree by the Gapping River, I realized that the law of nature is to create energy and life by uniting. A seed united with the soil creates a tree; water united with the earth produces crops. When man and woman are united in love, they create a child. Wherever there is unity, sacred and positive energy is generated.”
Once, I was given a vision of how a tree is a mirror of our human connection with God. In my imagination I saw a tree as the community of faith. We were rooted and grounded in the creator, with our roots being our tradition and especially our holy scriptures. The trunk that gave us a connection to the Creator ground was Christ, our branches were the different cultural and denominational expressions of the Christian Church, some bisecting and branching off into many smaller branches, and the individual believers were the tiny sprouts that spring out of each small branch. The fruit that we bear—the actions in which we give life to our faith, were represented by leaves, and the movement of the wind through the tree, which caused the leaves to shimmer, was the Holy Spirit.
Now, I suppose you could also find the presence of some aspect of God in the sunshine that gave the tree nutrients and causes the leaves of the tree to produce life giving chlorophyll for the whole of the tree—perhaps the sunshine could be God’s grace, since it is by and through grace that our works have any effect on the tree as a whole.
Also, using today’s narrative to further elaborate on the tree motif, I would say that the water by which this tree is planted would also be the Holy Spirit—since Spirit is commonly pictured as Wind and Water. If our tree, if our faith life and community, is planted near the water, near the life-giving resources of the Holy Spirit, then not only will the Spirit move through our branches in the activity of the Spirit’s presence now, but we may also draw on the Spirit’s presence through the roots of our faith—particularly, as our liturgical tradition puts it, through the voices of the prophets.
The presence of the Spirit, especially through the prophets, gives our tree a source of freshness and coolness even in the heat and dryness of draught. Even when it seems the breeze doesn’t stir our branches, we can still tap into the wellsprings of the spirit if we are planted by the water. Now, how and why does this matter? How is this information intended to help you mold your life in the Way of Christ or help you live your life in the light of Christ? It is simply intended to be a visualization—a way for you to see our connection to the creator and our place in the life of God. We have something to give—our fruit that we bear in our lives, the fruits of service and love and compassion and kindness and joy and hope—these are the leaves that bring energy to the tree as a whole. We’re not intended to simply be connected to the tree—God intends for us to contribute!
Relationship with God is intended to nurture and inspire creativity and action, rather than passive acceptance of the status quo. God needs partners not puppets in healing the world. This blessed interdependence inspires grace toward our fellow creatures as a response to the grace we have received.
Jeremiah points to something rather curious—it is a motif that he uses quite a bit in his message to Israel—it is the distrust of the human heart. This may sound like an odd passage to read right before Valentine’s Day, when we typically celebrate the action of the human heart. But as we know, and perhaps have experienced in romantic love, the human heart is fickle. It is finicky. It is frustrating! Jeremiah says, “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse— who can understand it?” Some of us this Valentine’s Day may say a resounding “Amen!” to that sentiment! Why is that? Why doesn’t Jeremiah trust the heart?
Perhaps Jesus knew why! Jesus came down from the mountain and began ministering to the people—He was sharing his power with the crowd, Luke puts it, “Power was going out from him.” Now here was a man rooted near the water—IN fact, here is a man who is so closely attuned with the water and the ground that he becomes the source and connection for millions upon millions of people throughout the ages to that water and that ground! Here is a man from whom a whole tree sprouts forth! Here is a man who embodied the Logos—that Divine Word “through whom all else came to be!”
But, here too is a man who knows the hearts of people. Jeremiah says in the Spirit, “I the Lord test the mind and search the heart, to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings.”
Jesus begins preaching to the people there on the plain. He says, “Blessed are those….” And here is where things go a little counter to what we would naturally think—“Blessed are you who are poor—for yours is the Kingdom of God!” “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.” “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. 22“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. 23Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.”
You see, this is where our heart gets it wrong sometimes, because you know what...I really want to be rich. My heart would rather that than be poor. And, there is nothing quite as filling as a full stomach, now is there? And, my heart hurts when I weep, and when others hate me. God gave me a heart for a reason, right? Shouldn’t I feel this way!
That is difficult. That is counter-intuitive. That doesn’t seem like Good news to me! Especially when Jesus goes on—he doesn’t end there! He says, “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. 25“Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. 26“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
You see, I told you that my heart would love to be rich—that I can feel that desire pulling from my guts—from my chest. And perhaps that is the problem—you see, I am rich! Compared to ½ the population of the whole world, who live on less than $2 per day, I’m a millionaire! And yet, in what country is the desire for wealth, the intense grabbing, and groping for the trappings of wealth so gluttonously gobbled than in our own culture, which is rich off the backs of others to begin with?
We lavish ourselves with stuff and then hesitate to give to others. We keep up with the Joneses while walking over the poor. “Might as well make the most of this life,” we tell ourselves, “because it’s the only one you’ve got!” “Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. 6They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.”
Perhaps Jesus simply saw how wealth and fullness and popularity tend to turn us in on ourselves. They tend to make us preoccupied with the satisfaction of our own hearts rather than being life-giving to the whole tree. This is why he says, “They have had their reward.” Wealth, and power and popularity don’t have to be our reward. Even for those of us who possess these things, they don’t have to be our “endpoint.”
This type of life Jeremiah compares to the hot, salty desert. If we put our trust in the things of this world, if we bank on the things that eventually come to an end, then we are dwelling in an ultimately lifeless place. This is why Jesus praised the poor, the hungry, the hated, the mourning. These people have had the distractions of this world stripped from them by society, and are left only with God to cling to.
God’s blessing echoes in the heart of those who have lost much, who have nothing transitory to stuff into their hearts to begin with. God’s preference for the poor, the hurting, the hated, the mourning, is apparent in the ministry of Jesus. If we don’t find ourselves in any of those camps, perhaps we too can be blessed by Christ by helping him minister to those people.
If we find ourselves planted in the desert—if we wake up one day and see that we have put our trust in things that don’t last—then the good news for us is that we can be transplanted. The Hebrew verb used in this passage is “transplanted” not “planted.” The truth is that we are all at some point withering out in the desert. The good news can be opened up in our lives when we turn from putting our faith and trust in money and power and everything else that doesn’t last, and decide that instead we should put our trust in God. That means turning our lives over to be transplanted by the water.
Once we are transplanted by the water, we will be nourished by the Spirit, we will be strong and fresh in the heat of the hardships which face us, we will be a haven for the world around us, and as the old song goes, “Like a tree, planted by the water…we shall not be moved.”
Amen.
I told you last week that there was a pond down the street from my house where I used to go fishing. Well, at this pond there was also a beautiful, flowing willow tree. There was a big rock under the willow tree, and I have fond memories of walking through the curtain of branches into the “room” created by the tree. I remember the sense of comfort and contentment I experienced under that willow tree. The willowy branches spread out over the pond a bit, so a bit of the water fell under the curtain of willow branches.
Those branches would also come in handy when taking shelter under the willow tree during a BB gun war. Nestled under the protective fingers of this motherish tree, I knew whatever BBs came my way would be somewhat deflected.
Whenever I read the passage we heard from Jeremiah this morning, I always think of this willow tree. This tree that “put down roots by the water.” It’s a comforting image, isn’t it? Perhaps there are trees in your experience which have provided similar sanctuaries for you.
The Psalmists and the prophets use trees to describe our spiritual lives. Throughout the ages, Christian mystics and theologians have also described who we are in relationship to God by referring to trees. Brother Lawrence, a French mystic, wrote of himself, “That in the winter, upon seeing a tree stripped of its leaves, and considering that within a little time the leaves would be renewed, and after that the flowers and fruit appear, he received a high view of the Providence and Power of God, which has never since been effaced from his soul.” A very wise man I have met named Satish Kumar wrote of a similar experience in the company of a tree:
“The churches, cathedrals, mosques and synagogues, shrines and temples are not the only holy places, but the whole of creation is divine and sacred. My pilgrimage is in every moment and in every place. Sometimes I come a cross a tree which seemed like a Buddha or a Jesus: loving, compassionate, still, unambitious, enlightened, in eternal meditation, giving pleasure to a pilgrim, shade to a cow, berries to a bird, beauty to its surroundings, health to its neighbors, branches for the fire, leaves to the soil, asking nothing in return, in total harmony with the wind and the rain. How much I can learn from a tree! The tree is my church, the tree is my temple, the tree is my mantra, the tree is my poem and my prayer.
Standing under a tree by the Gapping River, I realized that the law of nature is to create energy and life by uniting. A seed united with the soil creates a tree; water united with the earth produces crops. When man and woman are united in love, they create a child. Wherever there is unity, sacred and positive energy is generated.”
Once, I was given a vision of how a tree is a mirror of our human connection with God. In my imagination I saw a tree as the community of faith. We were rooted and grounded in the creator, with our roots being our tradition and especially our holy scriptures. The trunk that gave us a connection to the Creator ground was Christ, our branches were the different cultural and denominational expressions of the Christian Church, some bisecting and branching off into many smaller branches, and the individual believers were the tiny sprouts that spring out of each small branch. The fruit that we bear—the actions in which we give life to our faith, were represented by leaves, and the movement of the wind through the tree, which caused the leaves to shimmer, was the Holy Spirit.
Now, I suppose you could also find the presence of some aspect of God in the sunshine that gave the tree nutrients and causes the leaves of the tree to produce life giving chlorophyll for the whole of the tree—perhaps the sunshine could be God’s grace, since it is by and through grace that our works have any effect on the tree as a whole.
Also, using today’s narrative to further elaborate on the tree motif, I would say that the water by which this tree is planted would also be the Holy Spirit—since Spirit is commonly pictured as Wind and Water. If our tree, if our faith life and community, is planted near the water, near the life-giving resources of the Holy Spirit, then not only will the Spirit move through our branches in the activity of the Spirit’s presence now, but we may also draw on the Spirit’s presence through the roots of our faith—particularly, as our liturgical tradition puts it, through the voices of the prophets.
The presence of the Spirit, especially through the prophets, gives our tree a source of freshness and coolness even in the heat and dryness of draught. Even when it seems the breeze doesn’t stir our branches, we can still tap into the wellsprings of the spirit if we are planted by the water. Now, how and why does this matter? How is this information intended to help you mold your life in the Way of Christ or help you live your life in the light of Christ? It is simply intended to be a visualization—a way for you to see our connection to the creator and our place in the life of God. We have something to give—our fruit that we bear in our lives, the fruits of service and love and compassion and kindness and joy and hope—these are the leaves that bring energy to the tree as a whole. We’re not intended to simply be connected to the tree—God intends for us to contribute!
Relationship with God is intended to nurture and inspire creativity and action, rather than passive acceptance of the status quo. God needs partners not puppets in healing the world. This blessed interdependence inspires grace toward our fellow creatures as a response to the grace we have received.
Jeremiah points to something rather curious—it is a motif that he uses quite a bit in his message to Israel—it is the distrust of the human heart. This may sound like an odd passage to read right before Valentine’s Day, when we typically celebrate the action of the human heart. But as we know, and perhaps have experienced in romantic love, the human heart is fickle. It is finicky. It is frustrating! Jeremiah says, “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse— who can understand it?” Some of us this Valentine’s Day may say a resounding “Amen!” to that sentiment! Why is that? Why doesn’t Jeremiah trust the heart?
Perhaps Jesus knew why! Jesus came down from the mountain and began ministering to the people—He was sharing his power with the crowd, Luke puts it, “Power was going out from him.” Now here was a man rooted near the water—IN fact, here is a man who is so closely attuned with the water and the ground that he becomes the source and connection for millions upon millions of people throughout the ages to that water and that ground! Here is a man from whom a whole tree sprouts forth! Here is a man who embodied the Logos—that Divine Word “through whom all else came to be!”
But, here too is a man who knows the hearts of people. Jeremiah says in the Spirit, “I the Lord test the mind and search the heart, to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings.”
Jesus begins preaching to the people there on the plain. He says, “Blessed are those….” And here is where things go a little counter to what we would naturally think—“Blessed are you who are poor—for yours is the Kingdom of God!” “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.” “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. 22“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. 23Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.”
You see, this is where our heart gets it wrong sometimes, because you know what...I really want to be rich. My heart would rather that than be poor. And, there is nothing quite as filling as a full stomach, now is there? And, my heart hurts when I weep, and when others hate me. God gave me a heart for a reason, right? Shouldn’t I feel this way!
That is difficult. That is counter-intuitive. That doesn’t seem like Good news to me! Especially when Jesus goes on—he doesn’t end there! He says, “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. 25“Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. 26“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
You see, I told you that my heart would love to be rich—that I can feel that desire pulling from my guts—from my chest. And perhaps that is the problem—you see, I am rich! Compared to ½ the population of the whole world, who live on less than $2 per day, I’m a millionaire! And yet, in what country is the desire for wealth, the intense grabbing, and groping for the trappings of wealth so gluttonously gobbled than in our own culture, which is rich off the backs of others to begin with?
We lavish ourselves with stuff and then hesitate to give to others. We keep up with the Joneses while walking over the poor. “Might as well make the most of this life,” we tell ourselves, “because it’s the only one you’ve got!” “Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. 6They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.”
Perhaps Jesus simply saw how wealth and fullness and popularity tend to turn us in on ourselves. They tend to make us preoccupied with the satisfaction of our own hearts rather than being life-giving to the whole tree. This is why he says, “They have had their reward.” Wealth, and power and popularity don’t have to be our reward. Even for those of us who possess these things, they don’t have to be our “endpoint.”
This type of life Jeremiah compares to the hot, salty desert. If we put our trust in the things of this world, if we bank on the things that eventually come to an end, then we are dwelling in an ultimately lifeless place. This is why Jesus praised the poor, the hungry, the hated, the mourning. These people have had the distractions of this world stripped from them by society, and are left only with God to cling to.
God’s blessing echoes in the heart of those who have lost much, who have nothing transitory to stuff into their hearts to begin with. God’s preference for the poor, the hurting, the hated, the mourning, is apparent in the ministry of Jesus. If we don’t find ourselves in any of those camps, perhaps we too can be blessed by Christ by helping him minister to those people.
If we find ourselves planted in the desert—if we wake up one day and see that we have put our trust in things that don’t last—then the good news for us is that we can be transplanted. The Hebrew verb used in this passage is “transplanted” not “planted.” The truth is that we are all at some point withering out in the desert. The good news can be opened up in our lives when we turn from putting our faith and trust in money and power and everything else that doesn’t last, and decide that instead we should put our trust in God. That means turning our lives over to be transplanted by the water.
Once we are transplanted by the water, we will be nourished by the Spirit, we will be strong and fresh in the heat of the hardships which face us, we will be a haven for the world around us, and as the old song goes, “Like a tree, planted by the water…we shall not be moved.”
Amen.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Effective Ministry in the Small membership church
Are we considered a small membership church? Actually no, but some of the lessons at this conference would probably prove helpful for us. IF you are interested in attending, let us know and your way is paid.
Monday, February 05, 2007
Feb. 4 sermon--Out of the Depths
Sermon Texts'
Psalm 130
Luke 5: 1-11
One afternoon when Lara and I lived out in California, I decided to take up an offer by a guy I had met recently to teach me how to surf. We drove up to Santa Barbara that morning, and met the guy at the beach. He was a student at UC Santa Barbara—the home of the Banana Slugs—where you can surf in the morning before class because the school is right on the beach. Lara sat on the beach as the guy pointed to a longboard and said—“those are easiest to learn on, lets go.” Let me tell you, surfing is a sport that the pros (and even those who have the hang of it) make look easy. Just paddling out into the water is a challenge! Speeding up with the wave enough to actually catch it exausts the arms. And then there is the matter of standing up!
Also, there is the hanging around to wait for the wave. You see, breakers are caused when the natural wave movement of the ocean comes into contact with the shelf of land we call the beach. Surfers (and yours truly) have to get used to hanging out on our surfboards, or letting our legs dangle off the boards into the deep blue below us.
I love the ocean—but I think it is jarring to just about anyone to swim out to that point where the water begins getting cold on our toes, and things unknown whip past our feet. I remember as a kid going to the Gulf of Mexico and trying to balance the desire to swim far enough to make my mother nervous and jumpy with my own terror at the seaweed licking the bottoms of my feet.
There in Santa Barbara, leaning on that surfboard, It took some getting used to knowing that the shelf plunged down into an abyss just yards from where I was waiting. The Santa Barbara Basin, an oddity of oceanography, is a deep channel between the mainland and the channel islands just off the coast. Its reaches depths that usually aren’t found so close to the mainland.
The depths can be terrifying to us, can’t they? They represent our fears, our pain and suffering, or the unknown. The Psalmist this morning uses the imagery to articulate his suffering. This beautiful Psalm is often used in the funeral liturgy, where it is a fitting song of lament for those who experience the fear and bewilderment that surrounds the loss of a loved one.
Our comprehension of Hell and suffering is inexorably tied to the idea of a pit, a deep crevasse, or at the very least somewhere “down there.” Our archetype for pain and suffering indeed provokes us to cast our eyes downward. We have the sense that the power of these difficult emotions is under our feet, unseen, troubling. Perhaps it is that sense we get in our stomach, that overwhelming feeling of discomfort and disorientation, when our toes come to the edge of a canyon, and our end is a footstep away.
Yes, the Psalmists love the metaphor of the depths—and it is used often in those songs of our faith to speak of the incomprehensible powers of fear and darkness and hopelessness. In Psalm 88 we hear, “O Lord, God of my salvation, when, at night, I cry out in your presence, 2 let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry. 3 For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. 4 I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; I am like those who have no help, 5 like those forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. 6 You have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep. 7 Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves.”
But into the deep, dark waters of our woe and misery, Christ comes with a boat. Into the world of the disoriented and despairing, Christ throws out a net. “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch!” Christ, the great fisher of people, has a particular catch in mind. He goes to the depths—God incarnate goes first to the shadowy depths of our most hidden vulnerabilities. Christ throws down his net into the depths and enfolds all of us in the strong net of his all encompassing love.
It is as if Christ gives his mission to his disciples. Go to the depths—go to the sinning world—go to the castaways, the dregs of society. Go to the lame and the suffering. Go and suffer with them!
Even in the abyss of our hopelessness and the fathoms of our sin and despair, we also find the “Depths of Mercy” that resounds in the mysterious heart of God. You’ve heard that sometimes it takes someone hitting “rock bottom” before they seek out help and community and love and healing. In Paul’s 2nd letter to the Corinthians, he tells of a “thorn in his flesh” that kept him from dwelling on the heights of a divine encounter. He writes, “Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, 9 but he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power F46 is made perfect in weakness." So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. 10 Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.” God’s power is made perfect in our weakness. I’m not just preaching to people who feel like they’ve done something wrong and are in the depths of guilt, or have experienced great loss or difficulty and are in the depths of despair. I’m preaching to all of us this morning. I’m preaching to myself this morning too!
I tend to place a lot of confidence in my own profession of faith and my exemplification of spirituality. I find it hard to find fault in myself, and I end up coming across to those I love most as bull-headed, proud, and unconscious of my own faults. Why don’t I see that God’s presence and power are expressed in my weakness! Why don’t I see that the doctor is making house-calls, and I’m disguising a cough while pretending I don’t hear the doorbell.
The depths aren’t only despair in our tradition—they also convey the unfathomable mystery of God. God’s grace is sufficient for all of us, for power is made perfect in weakness. We can be most filled by God’s power and presence if we empty ourselves of the notion that we have any power or control to begin with. The more we empty out, the more grace can be put in.
John Wesley, founder of our tradition, found comfort in the following German Hymn that he translated into English as the following.
1 O GOD, thou bottomless abyss!Thee to perfection who can know?O height immense! What words sufficeThy countless attributes to show?Unfathomable depths thou art;O plunge me in thy mercy's sea!Void of true wisdom is my heart;With love embrace and cover me:While thee, all-infinite, I setBy faith before my ravished eye,My weakness bends beneath the weight;O'erpowered I sink, I faint, I die.
The mystery conveyed in this poem is certainly an apt description of the table that will be prepared before you this morning. The depth of this sacramental meal is unfathomable, but by the grace of God, we are given a taste of Christ’s real presence with us. Our God, that bottomless abyss, comes to us and swallows the depths of our sin and death and shame and suffering. The incomprehensibility of God becomes tangible flavors—everyday flavors that we typically encounter—and in so doing, we believe these elements, this simple bread and juice of the grape, nourishes our spirits in a literal communion with God.
The mystery of the Lord’s table is given to us in the context and remembrance of the unimaginable and irrational story of how God achieved the salvation that we could have never deserved. We hear a story where a betrayal, an executioner’s cross, and an all but unbelievable story of an empty tomb conquers the reality of our sin and brokenness and estrangement. Jesus pours out his life for us in the meal we are about to receive.
But finding Jesus isn’t just about being pulled up from the depths by the graceful nets of God. It is about being a fish and allowing ourselves to be caught up in the grace of God, but our call of faith doesn’t end with the image of us being fish flopping around in a boat, it is also about helping Jesus with those heavy nets.
Jesus calmly suggests to his new friends that they row out to the deep waters and cast out their nets. Though they hadn’t caught anything all day, they obliged him his ridiculous request. Astonished, they began hauling in so many fish that they had to call their friends from the shore to come and help take in the catch. Helping Jesus catch fish sometimes requires our obedience and determination in the face of repeated failure. It is from the places of unease that great things may come.
Peter stands and looks at Jesus after he makes his request. “Master,” he says “we haven’t caught anything all day, but I will let down my nets.” So many fish were caught by Peter and James and John that the two boats began to be swamped. Peter fell to his knees in devotion. “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!” But Jesus pulled him back up. “From now on, we will be fishing for people.”
Christ is pushing out to the deep waters, he is fishing for people who are in the depths. May we be swept up in the nets of this Gospel—so that we shall know the greater depths: the depths of mercy which can bring joy and wholeness to our lives. Let us not stop there—may we bring this hope to others. May we make this hope real in love and fellowship and service.
Amen
Psalm 130
Luke 5: 1-11
One afternoon when Lara and I lived out in California, I decided to take up an offer by a guy I had met recently to teach me how to surf. We drove up to Santa Barbara that morning, and met the guy at the beach. He was a student at UC Santa Barbara—the home of the Banana Slugs—where you can surf in the morning before class because the school is right on the beach. Lara sat on the beach as the guy pointed to a longboard and said—“those are easiest to learn on, lets go.” Let me tell you, surfing is a sport that the pros (and even those who have the hang of it) make look easy. Just paddling out into the water is a challenge! Speeding up with the wave enough to actually catch it exausts the arms. And then there is the matter of standing up!
Also, there is the hanging around to wait for the wave. You see, breakers are caused when the natural wave movement of the ocean comes into contact with the shelf of land we call the beach. Surfers (and yours truly) have to get used to hanging out on our surfboards, or letting our legs dangle off the boards into the deep blue below us.
I love the ocean—but I think it is jarring to just about anyone to swim out to that point where the water begins getting cold on our toes, and things unknown whip past our feet. I remember as a kid going to the Gulf of Mexico and trying to balance the desire to swim far enough to make my mother nervous and jumpy with my own terror at the seaweed licking the bottoms of my feet.
There in Santa Barbara, leaning on that surfboard, It took some getting used to knowing that the shelf plunged down into an abyss just yards from where I was waiting. The Santa Barbara Basin, an oddity of oceanography, is a deep channel between the mainland and the channel islands just off the coast. Its reaches depths that usually aren’t found so close to the mainland.
The depths can be terrifying to us, can’t they? They represent our fears, our pain and suffering, or the unknown. The Psalmist this morning uses the imagery to articulate his suffering. This beautiful Psalm is often used in the funeral liturgy, where it is a fitting song of lament for those who experience the fear and bewilderment that surrounds the loss of a loved one.
Our comprehension of Hell and suffering is inexorably tied to the idea of a pit, a deep crevasse, or at the very least somewhere “down there.” Our archetype for pain and suffering indeed provokes us to cast our eyes downward. We have the sense that the power of these difficult emotions is under our feet, unseen, troubling. Perhaps it is that sense we get in our stomach, that overwhelming feeling of discomfort and disorientation, when our toes come to the edge of a canyon, and our end is a footstep away.
Yes, the Psalmists love the metaphor of the depths—and it is used often in those songs of our faith to speak of the incomprehensible powers of fear and darkness and hopelessness. In Psalm 88 we hear, “O Lord, God of my salvation, when, at night, I cry out in your presence, 2 let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry. 3 For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. 4 I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; I am like those who have no help, 5 like those forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. 6 You have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep. 7 Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves.”
But into the deep, dark waters of our woe and misery, Christ comes with a boat. Into the world of the disoriented and despairing, Christ throws out a net. “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch!” Christ, the great fisher of people, has a particular catch in mind. He goes to the depths—God incarnate goes first to the shadowy depths of our most hidden vulnerabilities. Christ throws down his net into the depths and enfolds all of us in the strong net of his all encompassing love.
It is as if Christ gives his mission to his disciples. Go to the depths—go to the sinning world—go to the castaways, the dregs of society. Go to the lame and the suffering. Go and suffer with them!
Even in the abyss of our hopelessness and the fathoms of our sin and despair, we also find the “Depths of Mercy” that resounds in the mysterious heart of God. You’ve heard that sometimes it takes someone hitting “rock bottom” before they seek out help and community and love and healing. In Paul’s 2nd letter to the Corinthians, he tells of a “thorn in his flesh” that kept him from dwelling on the heights of a divine encounter. He writes, “Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, 9 but he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power F46 is made perfect in weakness." So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. 10 Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.” God’s power is made perfect in our weakness. I’m not just preaching to people who feel like they’ve done something wrong and are in the depths of guilt, or have experienced great loss or difficulty and are in the depths of despair. I’m preaching to all of us this morning. I’m preaching to myself this morning too!
I tend to place a lot of confidence in my own profession of faith and my exemplification of spirituality. I find it hard to find fault in myself, and I end up coming across to those I love most as bull-headed, proud, and unconscious of my own faults. Why don’t I see that God’s presence and power are expressed in my weakness! Why don’t I see that the doctor is making house-calls, and I’m disguising a cough while pretending I don’t hear the doorbell.
The depths aren’t only despair in our tradition—they also convey the unfathomable mystery of God. God’s grace is sufficient for all of us, for power is made perfect in weakness. We can be most filled by God’s power and presence if we empty ourselves of the notion that we have any power or control to begin with. The more we empty out, the more grace can be put in.
John Wesley, founder of our tradition, found comfort in the following German Hymn that he translated into English as the following.
1 O GOD, thou bottomless abyss!Thee to perfection who can know?O height immense! What words sufficeThy countless attributes to show?Unfathomable depths thou art;O plunge me in thy mercy's sea!Void of true wisdom is my heart;With love embrace and cover me:While thee, all-infinite, I setBy faith before my ravished eye,My weakness bends beneath the weight;O'erpowered I sink, I faint, I die.
The mystery conveyed in this poem is certainly an apt description of the table that will be prepared before you this morning. The depth of this sacramental meal is unfathomable, but by the grace of God, we are given a taste of Christ’s real presence with us. Our God, that bottomless abyss, comes to us and swallows the depths of our sin and death and shame and suffering. The incomprehensibility of God becomes tangible flavors—everyday flavors that we typically encounter—and in so doing, we believe these elements, this simple bread and juice of the grape, nourishes our spirits in a literal communion with God.
The mystery of the Lord’s table is given to us in the context and remembrance of the unimaginable and irrational story of how God achieved the salvation that we could have never deserved. We hear a story where a betrayal, an executioner’s cross, and an all but unbelievable story of an empty tomb conquers the reality of our sin and brokenness and estrangement. Jesus pours out his life for us in the meal we are about to receive.
But finding Jesus isn’t just about being pulled up from the depths by the graceful nets of God. It is about being a fish and allowing ourselves to be caught up in the grace of God, but our call of faith doesn’t end with the image of us being fish flopping around in a boat, it is also about helping Jesus with those heavy nets.
Jesus calmly suggests to his new friends that they row out to the deep waters and cast out their nets. Though they hadn’t caught anything all day, they obliged him his ridiculous request. Astonished, they began hauling in so many fish that they had to call their friends from the shore to come and help take in the catch. Helping Jesus catch fish sometimes requires our obedience and determination in the face of repeated failure. It is from the places of unease that great things may come.
Peter stands and looks at Jesus after he makes his request. “Master,” he says “we haven’t caught anything all day, but I will let down my nets.” So many fish were caught by Peter and James and John that the two boats began to be swamped. Peter fell to his knees in devotion. “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!” But Jesus pulled him back up. “From now on, we will be fishing for people.”
Christ is pushing out to the deep waters, he is fishing for people who are in the depths. May we be swept up in the nets of this Gospel—so that we shall know the greater depths: the depths of mercy which can bring joy and wholeness to our lives. Let us not stop there—may we bring this hope to others. May we make this hope real in love and fellowship and service.
Amen
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