Episcopal Chick

The Second Sunday of Easter - April 19, 2009

2009-04-19T11:01:00.000-07:00

John 20:19-31

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." But he said to them, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe."

A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe." Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God!" Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

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Diversity. It is the buzz word of our nation, day and time, something we promote and see as good, strengthening our nation, enriching our culture.

If you look up diversity in Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, you find several possible definitions:

Diversity may refer to:

Multiculturalism, the ideology of including people of diverse cultural and religious backgrounds
Diversity (politics), the political and social policy of encouraging tolerance for people of different backgrounds
Diversity (business), the business tactic which encourages diversity to better serve a heterogeneous customer base
Diversity training, the process of educating employees, students or volunteers to function in a diverse environment
Biodiversity, the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem
Diversity scheme, a method for improving the reliability of a message signal by using multiple communications channels
Diversity jurisdiction, a concept under which U.S. federal courts can hear suits between parties from different states

All of this sounds very good, doesn’t it? Yet when it comes down to it, while individuals today may find the idea of diversity to be good, the fact is by spending a lot of time focusing on what makes us different from one another, we end up with division instead of diversity.

In today’s gospel reading, we have an illustration of diversity. While some disciples believed in the risen Christ without seeing him for themselves, Thomas did not. He wanted proof, he wanted to see, hear, touch, maybe even smell Jesus himself. And while we only hear about Thomas as being “the doubter”, the one whose faith maybe didn’t even make it to mustard seed size, surely he was not the only one who felt that way. Thomas was probably the public face of all the disciples and followers of Jesus who didn’t immediately believe, maybe even the only one who was honest enough to say what he needed to believe, while others were saying “yes, He is risen” to go along with the flow. And with this division of belief, the disciples were not what you could call a “church” or a “movement”. They weren’t about to do anything, accomplish anything, because they lacked something that we don’t talk about much anymore: unity.

Unity, as a buzzword, seems to have gone out of fashion. Our psalm today opens with the words: Oh, how good and pleasant it is, when brethren live together in unity!

And while we find that inspiring, we usually get lost in the ideas put forward in the rest of the Psalm, that of oil running into people’s beards…to our culture that seems a bit messy, not the sort of thing we want to have happen to us. We spend a lot of money on shampoo to get rid of “oil on the head” why would we want to have it poured there, to drip down onto the collar of our new blouse or tailored shirt?

Originally, oil was used as a medicine in ancient times and by putting flowers and herbs in it, making a perfume that was used to sweeten the atmosphere in cultures where bathing was not done as often as we do today. In the psalm, though, the oil referred to is the oil of anointing, a pleasantly scented oil used to hallow the heads of kings, to confer the special blessing of God on an individual chosen for special service. Today we use a special chrism during our sacrament of baptism to do the same thing, and, like the oil in the psalm, it is a symbol of being set apart, marked as Christ’s own forever.

So unity, to God, is a special blessing, something that he gives us to help us in our work. And when we think of our church today, not just this particular church called St. Elizabeth’s, or our particular Anglican denomination, but the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, that is, the universal church, we can see how far we have strayed from the mark. We’ve got diversity, all right. Drive in either direction from our church and you will find half a dozen other churches on your way to wherever you are going. God’s church has been sliced and diced into all different kinds of forms, hasn’t it? A flavor for every palette, a creed for every comfort level. Don’t like sitting in a pew, preferably as far in the back as you can get, listening quietly, praying quietly and, alas for this music director, singing quietly too? Why, there is a church for you out there, where standing up and shouting “Amen”, dancing in the aisles is encouraged! Don’t want to believe in the actual death and resurrection of Christ? There’s a church for you out there too!

And where does this get us, this massive division in the body, this lack of unity? It gets us nowhere. The work of God goes undone while we spend our time focusing on those things that make us different.

In the reading from Acts which was our first reading today, we can see the metamorphosis that Christ accomplished when he showed himself to Thomas, that public face of the doubt and disbelief of the followers of Jesus. By breathing on, he spiritually anointed them, giving the gift of the Holy Spirit. With that gift, the disciples were united as never before. The disciples went so far as to pool every resource and put all their money together to further the church in the world, to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth. This unity allowed them to do quite amazing feats of evangelism, to continue performing the miracles that Christ himself performed and to embrace the gifts of the spirit which God has in store for everyone who believes.

So when did the wheels fall off? Why did we get to where we are now, broken and divided, our witness to the world tainted by internal squabbling, our focus dispersed because of human failings and foibles. What can we do to get back to that glorious age of spiritual unity?

There are many movements in the church today, movements which are defined by the word “ecumenism”. The ecumenical movement in the church today seeks to unite different denominations, allowing us to unite to do the work of Christ. The most profound movement in the Catholic church was made in the Second Vatican Council of 1962. Our own Anglican church seeks to further the cause of ecumenism by seeking communion with like denominations, such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Roman Catholic Church. Clearly there are signs that the through ecumenism, the church is moving in the right direction, but it seems to be taking a very long time, doesn’t it?

But while we are waiting for unity in the church as a whole, we certainly can examine our own internal church practices. We don’t need to go so far as to throw all our money into a common pot, selling our houses, possessions and cars and pooling the money, something that didn’t even work that well for the church in Judea which ended up having to be bailed out by the church in Antioch during a time of famine later on. What we do need is that unity of purpose that the early church had, the focus on what it is we are supposed to be doing here in this church, this community, at this time in our history. Unity in our purpose is important to God, as is evident further on in the gospel of John, when Jesus prayed for the disciples, saying, "As you are in me and I am in you, I pray that they can also be one in us".

That unity of purpose can only be restored to us by turning back to the origin of that unity, which is the Holy Spirit. Opening ourselves to the Holy Spirit’s guidance, we can achieve the kind of unity that allows us to move mountains. I found this prayer for unity on a website that is devoted to the week in January Christians all over the world spend focusing on Christian unity and invite you to pray with me:

O God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, our only Saviour, the Prince of Peace; Give us grace to seriously lay to heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions. Take away all hatred and prejudice, and whatsoever else may hinder us from godly union and concord: that as there is but one Body and one Spirit, and one hope of our calling, one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of us all, so we may be all of one heart and of one soul, united in one holy bond of truth and peace, of faith and charity, and may with one mind and one mouth glorify you; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen!

The Third Sunday in Lent - March 15, 2009

2009-03-15T10:56:00.000-07:00

John 2:13-22

The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, "Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!" His disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for your house will consume me." The Jews then said to him, "What sign can you show us for doing this?" Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." The Jews then said, "This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?" But he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

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It’s a rite of spring: the beginning of garage sale season, where we get rid of all the items we no longer want in our homes. We set up our tables outside, put out a sign and wait for people to come and buy our unwanted possessions.

In our gospel reading today, we see a similar process going on in God’s house. Jesus isn’t content for the merchants to finish selling their wares, though, before ridding God’s house of some unwanted accoutrements. He turns the tables of the moneychangers and animal vendors over, driving them from the courtyard with a whip; a very dramatic spring cleaning indeed.

Jesus took issue with the money-changers and animal merchants because they were gouging the people who had come from all over Israel to offer their sacrifice and pay their Temple tax for Passover. Each Jewish male aged 12 and over was expected to offer an unblemished male lamb for this sacrifice. It is thought that in Jesus’ day, it would have been impossible to bring an animal of your own, as the priests would not pass any animal that had not been purchased from the merchants in the outer court, who in turn gave a cut of the profits to the priests. The temple tax had to be paid by all worshippers, male and female, slave and free in Jewish coinage of half a shekel. In order to get the correct coinage, the money changers would change the foreign coins brought by the people and charge a fee for doing so, a cut of which would also go to the priests.

Those priests had a going concern, didn’t they? They had set up a false god, the money god, in the place of Jehovah. They were breaking the very first commandment of the God whose temple they were purporting to serve. It was time to turn the tables on these thieves, time to cleanse God’s temple.

How does this apply to us today? The answer to this question is to ask ourselves, “where is God’s temple today?” And the answer is, “Within us.”

We are all God’s temple, as his Holy Spirit lives inside of all of us. And in this season of Lent, the Lord invites us to turn over our tables and to cleanse our temples. We are meant to be examining our consciences for unconfessed sin and to examine our hearts for the hardness that may have crept in over the past year. We are to do our spiritual spring cleaning and find those idols we may have set up in our own hearts in the place where God should be.

And these idols aren’t necessarily the big ones we are all familiar with: the money god, the pride god, the anger god. Just this past Friday superstitious people all over the English-speaking world worried about having “bad luck” because the day of the week happened to coincide with the thirteenth day of the month. Superstition is a kind of idol, isn’t it? We were reminded about this last year before the election, when presidential candidates were invited to turn out their pockets for Time magazine, to see what sort of “good luck” charms they might carry. It seemed to me to be strange for men who professed the Christian faith to carry a lucky poker chip or a statue of a Hindu monkey god in their pockets and to rely on that to bring them “luck”. Here, indeed, we see the foolishness of men’s wisdom, as Paul said, in comparison with God’s wisdom. What need do we have of a piece of plastic or a carved bit of stone, when we are carrying around a piece of God right inside us? If he won’t save us from the “bad stuff”, what can?

Yet, even though we have professed faith in Christ, we still find ourselves avoiding walking under ladders, crossing our fingers and knocking on wood. Some of these superstitious habits have become so automatic, we scarcely realize we are doing them.

Will God condemn us because we happen to still have superstition or some other little idol in our lives, once we have become his? I don’t believe he will. Instead, what God is asking us to do is to get rid of anything that would get in the way of a deeper relationship with him. We are told in our Old Testament reading that God is a jealous God. He wants nothing and no one to come between him and ourselves. He intends for us to turn over those tables, to purify ourselves so that he may be closer to us. Consciously ridding ourselves of the bad habits of superstition is definitely a worthy Lenten project, as we acknowledge that the power over our lives is held by God alone.

Some scholars think that the cleansing of the temple in today’s gospel reading was one of two cleansings. John’s gospel, which we read today, places the cleansing of the temple at the start of Jesus’ ministry. Other gospels place the cleansing towards the end of Jesus’ ministry, soon before he was arrested and crucified. What would it mean if there were two cleansings, instead of just one? It would mean that the merchants in the temple courts went right back to doing what they were doing before and Jesus had to cleanse the temple again.

Sounds familiar doesn’t it? In cleansing our own temples of idols great and small, the real trick is not to turn around and cart everything back inside, once we have gotten rid of it. When we hold a garage sale, do we take everything back inside that we haven’t sold? No! We usually put it in our car and take it to the Salvation Army or call St. Vincent de Paul to come and get it. We already value the space we’ve provided in our homes by taking those things out much more than the money we might receive for selling them.

In our own temples, we need to value the space and light we create in the temple of our hearts during Lent. Let’s not let those idols and sins creep back to clutter up the beauty we’ve created, making it harder for us to draw nearer to God, so that he may draw near to us.

In the hymn “Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates”, sung during the season of Advent, we sing “fling wide the portals of your heart, make it a temple set apart, from earthly use, to heaven’s employ, adorned with prayer and love and joy.” During Advent, we flung those portals wide. During Lent, we clean our temples, making them a fit habitation for the most High God, adorning them with prayer and love and joy. So that when Easter comes, we can sing, “Redeemer come! I open wide my heart to thee, here Lord abide! Let me thine inner presence feel, Thy grace and love in me reveal.”

The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany - February 1, 2009

2009-02-01T10:51:00.000-08:00

Mark 1:21-28

Jesus and his disciples went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, "What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God." But Jesus rebuked him, saying, "Be silent, and come out of him!" And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, "What is this? A new teaching-- with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him." At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.

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We hear it from every side these days. On the television, the internet, in books, newspapers and magazines and sometimes even, God help us, in our own churches. Jesus is not the only way to God. Everyone will get there eventually, won’t they? There are many great truths in all religions, so all religions are the same in the end.

And because all religions are the same in the end, does it really matter which one you follow? After all, it’s just enough to be a “good person”, isn’t it? As long as you are a following the “golden rule” and treating people right, that is all that matters. So why do we even need religion? “Hey, Jesus, go away and mind your own business! What have you got to do with us?”

Amazingly enough that is what the demon in our gospel reading today also says to Jesus. Jesus went into the synagogue and was teaching with authority. This was an amazing thing to his listeners, because Jesus was not referring to the scriptures and prefacing his statements with “There is a teaching that reads…” as the scribes who taught in the synagogues would do. He did not bring a host of references to different scriptures or the great teachers on the scriptures to back up his statements. He simply taught with authority. He spoke as one who got his information right from the source, which is what the base word of authority, “author”, means. Jesus, you might say, wrote the book on what he taught. This was a new and entirely different thing for the listeners in the synagogue to hear and they were amazed.

And this lead to Jesus’ first miracle related in the gospel of Mark: the casting out of a demon. The demon recognizes Jesus for who he is and he says something that is literally translated as “What to me and to you?” Which you might say is an ancient way of saying, “Mind your own business!” “You have nothing to do with us!”

The demon was denying the authority of Jesus, even though he knew very well who Jesus was and said so. “The Holy One of God” is what he called him. Not denying that Jesus was the Holy One of God, only denying that Jesus had any authority over demons.

Today, our demons do it differently, don’t they? They work in much subtler ways. If they can deny that Jesus was who he claimed to be, they can work to undermine his authority here on earth. Jesus is to be presented as just another teacher, just a historical figure who said some nice things about how we could all “just get along.” In The Screwtape Letters, a work of fiction by C.S. Lewis, the story of the temptation of a soul is told through a series of letters from one demon, named Screwtape to another, called Wormwood. Screwtape counsels Wormwood that the idea of the “historical Jesus” is always to be encouraged. He writes that the aim is to lead humans to “‘Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.’ That‘s the game.” By confusing humans as to who Jesus really was, to lead us to deny his authority over us, the demons would win more souls away from God.

And the sad thing is that this ploy works so very well. I was reading a blog by a newly minted Episcopalian the other day. She has trouble with the idea that Jesus is the only way to salvation, just as many people do. But the thing that disturbed me was that she went to church and listened to her priest say, “that when Jesus said, “I am the way” he was saying,’LOOK AT ME. Watch me. You see how I am treating people? THIS is the way. This is how God wants you to be. I am here to show you this.’”

It’s what we want to hear, isn’t it? You don’t have to believe that Jesus was THE way as long as you act the way he did. Be a good person. That’s all that is necessary. It’s a fundamental denial of the cross. Jesus didn’t die for our sins, after all. He was here to show us how to behave. That cross part…that was a mistake, or at best, the only way God could show us how serious he was about getting our attention.

This blogger ended by saying, “I was so happy when he (the priest) said that. I believe that.” And that is the problem…we deny Jesus’ authority when we take away the power of the cross to save and substitute it with our own effort to save ourselves. We can’t do it. It is not in us. We reduce Jesus to a mere teacher, sent to show us one way, not THE way. And so we can ignore the things that Jesus said that we don’t particularly like, the things that make us uncomfortable. We can deny that he was the Holy One of God, the Son of God. He becomes a mere prophet, one of many.

The truth is, though, that if we really want to follow Jesus, we will hear things in church that will make us uncomfortable. If you come to church and everything you hear makes you feel happy and safe, you are in the wrong church. Jesus did not go into the synagogue and make people feel happy and safe. He did not speak comfortable words that left his listeners convinced that what they had deeply felt all along was the real truth, did he? That was why the demon told Jesus to “buzz off”. And, in the end, the uncomfortable truth, spoken with authority, is what led to the cross.

Yes, we are to be good people. We are to feed the hungry, comfort those who mourn, visit the sick, clothe the naked. Not because it will save us, but because He wants us to do it. He wants us to become His hands and His feet here, to show His love to a world starving for it, to show THE way to those who are lost. The chances are very good that we will make some people very uncomfortable in the process. And, the great thing is, that if we really want to be like Jesus, we will be treating people exactly as He did.

Second Sunday after Christmas Year B January 4 2008

2009-01-04T10:14:00.000-08:00

Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

Now after the wise men had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him." Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, "Out of Egypt I have called my son."

When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child's life are dead." Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee. There he made his home in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, "He will be called a Nazorean."

Sermon

“What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us? Just a stranger on the bus, trying to make his way home?” This song written by Eric Bazilian and performed by Joan Osbourne was very popular in 1995, because it asks a question that expresses how the idea of God, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent makes most people feel distant from him. But I don’t think that Ms. Osbourne realized that, yes, God was once one of us, just like anyone you might meet.

In our gospel reading today, Matthew declares that the prophets spoke the words“He will be called a Nazorean.”

The problem is this: what words and which prophets? Because this phrase appears no where in the books that make up what we call the “Old Testament”. So why does Matthew say this?

To know what this means, you have to understand a bit of the history of Nazareth, the town where Joseph took his small family to settle after returning from Egypt. I found the following on a travel website for Israel:

While the site was settled during the period 600-900 BCE, it was too small to be included in the list of settlements of the tribe of Zebulon (Joshua 19:10-16), which mentions twelve towns and six villages. Nazareth is not included among the 45 cities of the Galilee that were mentioned by Josephus, and her name is missing from the 63 towns in Galilee mentioned in the Talmud.It seems that the words of Nathanel of Cana, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" (John 1:47) characterized the site's seeming insignificance. It is needless to say that the people of Judea had never heard of Nazareth.

Nazareth, apparently, was synonymous with what we might call “Hicksville” in the US. It was nothing, nowhere. Pilate, when he ordered the cross to be labeled, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”, was pointing out the ridiculous nature of the idea of someone from Nazareth being a king.

So when Matthew says that the prophets said that Jesus would be Nazorean, is most likely referring to those prophecies that pointed out that Jesus would be despised and rejected by the people, such as this prophecy in the book of Isaiah:

He was despised and rejected by people,

one who experienced pain and was acquainted with illness;

people hid their faces from him;

he was despised, and we considered him insignificant (Isaiah 53:3)

By saying that the prophets declared that Jesus would be a Nazorean, Matthew meant that the prophets said that Jesus would be nobody; nobody from nowhere. There was nothing about him that would make him stand out from a crowd. Isaiah said in the verse previous to this one, “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” Jesus was truly a nobody from nowhere.

It’s truly amazing that God would choose to send his son here in the guise of nobody from nowhere, isn’t it?

But God has a history of choosing those folks who would not have been voted “most likely to” by their peers. Paul understood this very well and wrote extensively about it in his letters to the Corinthians; in his first letter he wrote.:

27but ^(C)God has chosen the foolish things of ^(D)the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of ^(E)the world to shame the things which are strong,

28and the base things of ^(F)the world and the despised God has chosen, ^(G)the things that are not, so that He may ^(H)nullify the things that are,

And in his second letter:

7To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. 8Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. 10That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

God chooses weak vessels, “slobs” like us, so that his glory may shine all the more.

Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission, also knew this secret. Once, when complimented by a friend on the impact of the mission, Hudson answered, “It seemed to me that God looked over the whole world to find a man who was weak enough to do His work, and when He at last found me, He said, ‘He is weak enough—he’ll do.’ All God’s giants have been weak men who did great things for God because they reckoned on His being with them.”

So the next time we decide that we aren’t big enough to do the things that God is asking of us, we need to remember that not only does God choose weak people to do his work, but that he sent his son to us as a “nobody” from “nowhere”. God was once just “one of us”.

Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year B, December 21 2008

2008-12-21T10:11:00.000-08:00

Luke 1:26-38

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you." But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end." Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?" The angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God." Then Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her.

Sermon

There’s a popular Christmas song called “Mary Did You Know?” written by Mark Lowry. In the song, Mr. Lowry wonders if Mary knew, when Jesus was a baby, all the things that the child she was holding would do in his lifetime. Did she know that he would walk on water, heal the sick, raise the dead?

I don’t think she did. In today’s reading we hear the angel Gabriel telling Mary that the child she would soon bear would be “holy” and would be called Son of God. He would be given the throne of his ancestor David and reign forever. But there was definitely a lack of specific details, things that would have told Mary more about what was to come. Mary was given information on a “need to know” basis.

And this was definitely a gift. As much as we might like to know the future, if we did know it, we would not act in ways which would bring it about. We would do everything differently.

One of the saddest things I have ever heard was an older woman expressing regret for the path she had chosen in her life. “If I had it all to do over again,” she said, “I would not have gotten married nor had children. I would have pursued my career instead.” This, in spite of the fact that she had more than fifty years of marriage under her belt and had raised two successful children. Yet, apparently if she had known the amount of suffering and unhappiness in store for her within the life she had chosen, she would have chosen differently.

And the sad thing was that chances are that this woman would not have had less sorrow or suffering if she had chosen differently. “In this world you will have trouble.” Jesus said in John 13. We are all bound to have trouble and the woman I am talking about, if she had chosen a different path, would have just had different trouble than she ended up having. It is much like the fable where the people in a village are complaining about their problems and how they wish they didn’t have them. The magical visitor in the story tells the villagers to lay all their problems on the ground in front of them, then invites them to take someone else’s problems instead of their own. The villagers look around, then pick up their own problems again.

It would be nice to know, though, what is going to happen next, wouldn’t it? People today read their horoscopes and consult psychics, all with the hope that they will be able to figure out what is going to happen next. But God has expressly forbidden this, in the book of Deuteronomy, when he says, “You shall follow God with perfect faith [and not] hearken to astrologers and diviners.” (Deuteronomy 18:13-14)

God doesn’t want you peeking into the future for many good reasons. If we knew what the future was, we would act differently than we otherwise would have and we would definitely bolux everything up. This ignorance of the future is a gift to us, just, as I told you in my last sermon, that the ignorance of the day of Christ’s second coming is a gift. If we knew too much about what is to come, we would not act in ways that God wants us to act. We would procrastinate, act to change things to our own advantage and generally, stick a monkey wrench in the plans that God has for us. This is the power of the one of God’s other gifts: the gift of free will. We have the power to change things by the choices we make. It’s a dangerous gift and armed with the knowledge of what the choices we would make will do to the future, we would not have enough wisdom to choose as we should. Therefore, the gift of free will had to be accompanied by the gift of ignorance.

However, if we can’t know everything about what will happen to us, it still would be nice to know a little bit more about what is to come, wouldn’t it? God speaks to many people in biblical history, with angelic visitors as in Mary’s case, and through the prophets. Why doesn’t God do that for everyone?

If you think about all the people who received such announcements, for instance Zachariah in the verses before the ones in today’s reading, or Old Testament folks like Abraham and Sarah when they are told what is going to happen to them, you realize why God isn’t all that forthcoming with specifics. These folks simply did not believe God, did they? They got the word right from the source and they still did not believe. We don’t have the greatest track record for listening to God and believing what he tells us, even when those bringing the news have impeccable credentials. God, as he said in the book of Deuteronomy, is looking for perfect faith. And the Bible is a log book of people who do not have that faith, people who were given many hints, announcements and even explicit plans and directions and disregarded them. Very rarely does God find that perfect faith, people who acquiesce to God’s plans without a murmur or a “Why me?”

But here in our reading we do find that perfect faith: Mary says, “Let it be with me according to your word.” Her only question is not WHY this is happening but HOW it’s going to happen. Mary is one of the very few people God entrusts with such knowledge who simply says, “Yes, I will.” And that makes it clear why she was chosen for such a wonderful gift, yet such a heavy burden. God gave her just enough information to be going on with, without burdening her with the whole knowledge of what was to be. Because if Mary would have known all the wonders that Jesus would perform in his life, she also would have to had known the ignominious death filled with hideous suffering that was also in his future and the anguish she would suffer herself watching him die. It was God’s gift to her, the ignorance of all that was to come.

While we have only gotten the bare bones of the story in Luke’s gospel and we may never know all that Mary knew ahead of time, we can all strive to duplicate that perfect faith that she had. “In this world you will have trouble,” Jesus said in John 13, but went on to say, “But take heart, for I have overcome the world!” Take heart. Have faith. Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

Second Sunday of Advent Year B December 7 2008

2008-12-07T10:51:00.000-08:00

Mark 1:1-8

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,

"See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,

who will prepare your way;

the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

`Prepare the way of the Lord,

make his paths straight,'"

John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, "The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."

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Talk about job security. Enter John the Baptist, preaching. Obviously, here is a man who knows who he is and what he is supposed to be doing. John is one of the few people connected with Jesus who has this firm sense of identity, a supreme sense of focus on the job at hand. He not only knew who he was, he also knew just who he was NOT. I feel a bit of kinship with John, simply because my name, Janine, is the French female equivalent of John.

But that’s as far as my kinship seems to go. I go through life, trying to figure out just who I am and what I’m supposed to be doing. By contrast, John had probably been told since he was a small child that God had a job for him to do…one of these days. Did John fall right into line with the plan, right from the start? Or did he spend some time during adolescence rolling his eyes at Elizabeth every time she said, “God has a special purpose for you! Remember what I told you about when I met your Aunt Mary and felt you leap in my womb?” Did he rebel against this foreknowledge of his destiny? I’d like to think so…I don’t know many people who haven’t been dragged kicking and screaming into the purpose for which God has destined them. I know I have.

My first jolt of reality came soon after I was married. Maybe it’s not as mind-bending for men, but I think women experience a jolt when their maiden name gets changed to their married name. I can remember having a melt-down one day and tearfully telling my husband, “I don’t know who I am anymore!” Suddenly, my identity depended so much on how another person defined it. I was done making it all up myself as I went along. I probably should have gotten used to it, because discovering that I’m not who I thought I was has happened regularly ever since.

Most of us have this happen. We go through life as our parent’s child, our mate’s spouse, our children’s parent, our company’s employee. In my life I’ve been Tom & Betty’s Janine, Dan’s Janine, Laurel, Emily and William’s Mom, and at the different places I’ve worked, I’ve been their Janine or Ms. Tinklenberg, depending on how formal they liked to be.

But all of these people did not and do not define who I really am. Who I really am is something entirely more. Who we are is more than the sum of our parts.

In the novel “The Stand” by Stephen King, a story very loosely based on biblical prophecies of the Apocalypse, there is a character called Tom Cullen, who is known for spelling everything, “M-O-O-N”. In our politically correct world, these days, we would call Tom “mentally challenged”, but as some mentally challenged people do, Tom had a wisdom that occasionally came out at the most unexpected times. Towards the end of the novel, Tom is being prepared to go as a spy into the area controlled by the Antichrist by the people who oppose him. They decide that it would be best to hypnotize Tom, to better implant the directions that he would need to follow and to prevent Tom from inadvertently letting something slip that would give him away. Tom is amazingly perceptive about the reasons for this once he is under hypnosis, which startles the group. One of them asks him, “Are you the same Tom that Nick met in Oklahoma?”

And Tom answers: Yes. No. I'm God's Tom.

God’s Tom. When it comes right down to it, that IS who we are. I am God’s Janine, just as Karyn is God’s Karyn, and Pete is God’s Pete. As much as other people might lay claim to us, we are ultimately responsible most for being and becoming the person that God wants us to be.

And the truth is that we can’t be truly happy until we find out just what that is. When we bought our house, my husband and I had been married for 7 years. We had always said that we would not have children until we bought a house. All of a sudden, with the purchase of the house, the question of having children was now right in front of us. I also began to feel that, at the place where I worked, I was not valued or important. I realized that if I left, that I would be talked about for a little while, replaced quickly, and then forgotten. Was the company's Janine really who I was? I felt that my life was empty and purposeless. I spent two years struggling with depression, because I didn’t like the identity I had, but was frightened to become anything else. Finally, I decided not to decide. I would let nature decide if we would have children and I would no longer prevent it from happening. Having a child, I felt, would provide me with the purpose that was missing in my life. Once we had that child, we decided that I would leave work to become a full-time stay-at-home mom.

But by trading my employee badge in for my Mom badge, I avoided the whole question of who I really was. I traded one identity, one depression for another identity and another depression, effectively sidestepping the issue. Because once I had children, I suddenly discovered, again, that I was not who I thought I was. Motherhood was not enough for me and I was left groping for an identity that seemed ever more elusive.

When we consider the stereotypical middle aged man having an identity crisis, older couples suffering from “empty nest syndrome” or someone who has just retired from his job trying to find ways to redefine himself from “a company man” to something new and different, we see that it is very common for all of us, at different stages of our lives, to have to search for who we really are. Lily Tomlin said, “I’ve always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific.” If we really want to be specific, we should want to be God’s creation. Because we won’t be truly happy until we start moving towards that end. While having children brought joy to my life, it did not fill the void in my life that I desperately needed to fill, the knowledge of who I really was.

It wasn’t until I turned my life over to Christ in 1997 that I began to discover just who I was and I’m still in the process of discovering it. Unlike John the Baptist, I am not entirely sure what I’m supposed to be doing, but I know that I must be moving in the right direction. I find that the closer I get, the more the activities and things I used to find essential to my happiness become less essential. I find the grip that these things have on me grows weaker as the grip that God has on me grows stronger.

I am, like we all are, a work in process. Paul wrote, in his second letter to the Corinthians, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” But the new doesn’t always come as fast as we might like, does it? Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus sounds much easier, sometimes, that our struggle to make sense of what God means for us to become. John had such certainty in his mission; why can’t we have that too?

However, unlike Paul and John, God usually chooses to do his work on us gradually, conquering the strongholds that sin has established in our lives, easing us out of the lives that sin has scarred and pushing us, sometimes gently, but sometimes roughly, towards the realization of the destiny that he holds in trust for us. Paul, observing this process in the churches that looked to him for guidance, wrote in his letter to the Philippians "For I am confident in this, that He who began a good work in you will complete it until the day of Christ Jesus"

By opening ourselves up to the working of the Holy Spirit, we will find ourselves changing to become God’s people first and foremost. Our certainty and confidence in who we really are will grow. The prophet Jeremiah wrote, “For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” By following the Lord’s plans for us, we will discover our true identity, our hope and our future. We will still be our parents’ children, our children’s parents, our mate’s spouses, and, until we retire, our companies’ employees. But when we put God’s purpose first, we’ll find that these other roles become much more fulfilling than they ever were before because they will work through his purpose rather than against it. By becoming God’s people, we truly prepare the way for the coming of the Lord, for his Advent into our world. May we all make his paths straight.

First Sunday of Advent Year B - November 30 2008

2008-11-30T10:48:00.000-08:00

Mark 13:24-37

Jesus said to his disciples, "In those days, after that suffering,

the sun will be darkened,

and the moon will not give its light,

and the stars will be falling from heaven,

and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

Then they will see `the Son of Man coming in clouds' with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

"From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

"But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore, keep awake-- for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake."

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It is something I have observed on many occasions, as I am sure many of you, as parents, have also observed. You tell your children that there is a task they must do. You give them a time that it must be done by in order for something good to happen, perhaps, a visit to the library or a trip to the zoo. Then you leave them to it, walk away and get busy with tasks of your own.

You may walk back a little while later, just to check on how it’s going. To your dismay, your children not only have not started the task, they are playing a game. “Aren’t you going to do what I asked?” you say. And they reply, “Don’t worry! We’ll do it as soon as we’re done playing this game! We have lots of time!”

And of course, twenty minutes before the allotted time, you again return to see if the task is done and in panic, they look at you, look at the clock and start doing the task in a big hurry, because they have left it way too late.

Perhaps this is why the Father did not tell us, through Jesus, just when he would return. Precisely because we, as a human species, tend to put things off until it’s too late. Not everyone procrastinates as badly as children do; quite a few of us learn that putting things off until tomorrow the things that should be done today is not a good thing. So we spend a great deal of effort to try to do things that need to be done when they need to be done. But none of us are perfect at it. If we knew the time of the Master’s return, we might simply choose to do what we wanted to do, rather than those things which God wants us to do; to choose our own way over God’s way, much of the time.

But, the point is, that we don’t know precisely when Christ will return. Because God knows humans better than we know ourselves, the gift of not knowing the hour of Jesus’ return is one of the greatest gifts we have ever received. Because we do not know, we should feel the need to work at preparing for his return as if it were going to happen tomorrow, today, next week. We shouldn’t put off sharing the gospel with our family, friends or with strangers either, because tomorrow it might be too late.

The early Christians operated under this principal. That is why we see them sharing everything in common in the book of Acts. Why keep anything if the Lord would be returning at any minute? Surely there was no need to save for tomorrow, since likely tomorrow would bring the glorious return of our Savior! Didn’t Jesus say that this generation would not pass away before his return?

But their generation DID pass away and we have come to know that when Jesus said “this generation” that he didn’t mean it the way his original listeners thought he did. It is more probable that he meant that the generation that would not pass away before he returned was the generation that would see the signs of the end that Jesus gave us. Have we ceased to watch for the signs of his coming? Have we grown lax in our watchfulness? Have we forgotten the signs?

There is an interesting, though probably unintended, parallel in the the book “The Silver Chair”, one of the series The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. In the book, one of the main characters, Jill Pole, is given signs by Aslan by which she and Eustace, her companion from our world, will recognize the lost Prince Rillian of Narnia when they find him. Aslan tells Jill, “But, first, remember, remember, remember the signs. Say them to yourself when you wake in the morning and when you lie down at night, and when you wake in the middle of the night. And whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the signs. And secondly, I give you a warning. Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly: I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there.”

As you might expect, what ends up happening is that Jill eventually forgets to repeat the signs to herself. She lets the physical concerns of cold, hunger and sleeping on the ground get in the way of remembering the signs. A warm bed, a place out of the wind, and a full stomach become much more important to her. The signs are forgotten, only to be remembered when it is almost too late.

How about us? Have we spent too much of our time concerned with earthly problems like how we are going to pay the bills, mow the grass or repair the roof? How can we know when we are getting close to the return of Christ? Do we even know or remember what the signs are?

I’d like to share this, from the April 1989 edition of the devotional, “Today in the Word”:

"Biblical prophecy provides some of the greatest encouragement and hope available to us today. Just as the Old Testament is saturated with prophecies concerning Christ’s first advent, so both testaments are filled with references to the second coming of Christ. One scholar has estimated that there are 1,845 references to Christ’s second coming in the Old Testament, where 17 books give it prominence. In the 260 chapters of the New Testament, there are 318 references to the second advent of Christ—an amazing 1 out of every 30 verses. Twenty-three of the 27 New Testament books refer to this great event. For every prophecy in the Bible concerning Christ’s first advent, there are 8 which look forward to His second!"

The most amazing prophecy of the second advent has already taken place: it is the reformation of the nation Israel in 1948 as was prophesied in Isaiah 66:8, in Ezekiel 37 and in our own reading today when Jesus said, "From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates.” What is hidden in Jesus’ words for us is that the fig tree was, and still is today, a symbol for the nation of Israel.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 24 that before his return that the gospel would be preached to all nations, something which we are very close to achieving, if we have not already achieved it. He tells us that there will be wars, rumors of wars, famine, pestilence and earthquakes. Granted, these things have always been in the world, leading some to look for Christ’s return in every generation. While there may not be more of these things today, I believe what Jesus meant was that we would be more aware of them. And as anyone can see, the increasing power of the media today to report these sorts of news stories to us allows us to be aware of more of them than we ever could before.

These signs, and more that I don’t have time to mention today, were given to us, that we might know when we were getting close. Therefore, we really do need to heed the words of the reading: “Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.”

But even though we may be approaching that day, we have no need to be afraid. If we are doing what we are supposed to be doing, we have no need to fear the return of the Master. It is what we have been, in what has seemed a very slow and grinding process, working our way towards for the past 2000 years.

Now, more than ever, we must be awake. Any procrastination we may have been indulging in must be forgotten. While it may not happen today or tomorrow, next month, next year or ten years from now, we should be working as if it will happen at any moment.

In this season of Advent, as we await the symbolic coming of the Christ child, let us not forget the more important waiting that we have done for centuries: the wait for the return of Christ. “Therefore, keep awake-- for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake."

Proper 28 Year A November 16 2008

2008-11-16T10:45:00.000-08:00

Matthew 25:14-30

Jesus said, "For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master's money. After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, `Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.' His master said to him, `Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.' And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, `Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.' His master said to him, `Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.' Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, `Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.' But his master replied, `You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.' "

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“I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.”

It’s amazing what fear can keep us from doing. In the slave with one talent’s case, it kept him from using the talent and making any money with it. Instead of trading or investing with it, he hid it in the ground.

I have read commentaries on this parable that suggest that the slave with one talent was just making excuses by saying that he was afraid. But I don’t think he was. I don’t think he was afraid of the master, even though he said that he was a harsh man. I think he was simply afraid of failing.

It is interesting that this particular passage echoes another one:

So he said, 'I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.’

Fear was the first result of the original sin. Because when Adam and Eve gained the knowledge of good and evil, they gained the ability to be afraid, because they knew the worst that could happen.

Fear is the voice of the Enemy. Being afraid of what might happen causes us to be silent when we should speak, to keep our wallets closed when they should be open, to not risk being made fools of when we should use the talents God gave us in his service.

John White, 17^th century rector of Holy Trinity and St. Peter’s churches in Dorchester, England wrote this:

Anytime we are engaged in a work for God, we are likely to encounter the poison-tipped arrows of ridicule. A barrage of truth mingled with lies, innuendo, malicious gossip and implied threats is the normal experience of leaders. Malice arises from fear. And fear is a common response to someone else’s success. So expect to have your faults thrown in your face, your folly mocked and your real progress belittled. When this happens, by all means allow yourself to be cut down to size, but do not let yourself be dismayed or intimidated. Remember that the chorus of contempt has a diabolical conductor whose aim is to make your knees buckle. He likes tongue-tied, ineffective Christians and plays on your secret fears and inferiorities to make you one of them.

We must not confuse these sorts of fears with the fear of God. Proverbs says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. If the slave had simply been afraid of the master, he would have been wise enough to do as his master expected. Instead, he was afraid of failing, afraid to take a risk with what was entrusted to him. And because he chose to bury his talent, he chose to bury himself.

The master gave each slave talents according to his ability. The master knew that this particular slave didn’t have a lot of ability, but he did have enough to use the one talent that the master gave him. But the slave’s fear of failure led him to bury that talent and lose the opportunity the master gave him.

God gives us the gifts he gives us in expectation that we will use them in his service, most often, service to other people. Service to others is not a popular notion anymore, is it? We are conditioned early on these days to look out for number one and that charity begins at home. Service to others is the true meaning of using our talents wisely and bringing the increase of that use into the Master’s storehouse.

So how do we overcome this voice of the enemy? How do we stop listening to the voice that tells us that nothing we do will matter, that nobody notices, that no one will care if we stop serving at church, in our community or at home?

John White continued his sermon on fear with this:

I am full of fears and chasms of inferiority. Whenever I have listened to the enemy pointing them out I have stopped working for the kingdom. Yet in those moments when I have refused to listen to him and have feebly walked in obedience, I have been astonished at what God has done with my feeble performance.

Faith is the answer to fear. Faith is trusting God, fear is lack of trust in God. Fear damages our relationship with God, faith builds it.

Dr. E. Stanley Jones, Methodist Christian missionary, said this:

I am inwardly fashioned for faith, not for fear. Fear is not my native land; faith is. I am so made that worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life; faith is the oil. I live better by faith and confidence than by fear, doubt and anxiety. In anxiety and worry, my being is gasping for breath—these are not my native air. But in faith and confidence, I breathe freely—these are my native air.

A John Hopkins University doctor says, “We do not know why it is that worriers die sooner than the non-worriers, but that is a fact.” But I, who am simple of mind, think I know; We are inwardly constructed in nerve and tissue, brain cell and soul, for faith and not for fear. God made us that way. To live by worry is to live against reality.

The wonderful thing we have to remember is that when we step out in faith, as the slaves with five and two talents did, God rewards our efforts by increasing our abilities, but only if we are able to drown out the voice of fear.

Paul said in his second letter to Timothy, “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and of a sound mind.” Listening to that spirit, which is the Holy Spirit, is the only way to drown out the voice of fear.

By trusting in God and listening to the Holy Spirit, we can truly inherit the kingdom meant for us from the beginning. I’d like to end with this interesting piece I found online by an anonymous author:

Fear paralyzes, faith empowers
Fear discourages, faith encourages
Fear sickens, faith heals
Fear makes us useless, faith makes us serviceable
Fear feels hopelessness, faith is full of hope.
To laugh is to risk appearing the fool
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental
To reach our for another is to risk involvement
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self
To place your ideas, your dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss
To love is to risk not being loved in return
To live is to risk dying
To hope is to risk despair
To try is to risk failure
But risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing
The person who risks nothing does nothing, has nothing, and is nothing
They may avoid suffering and sorrow but they cannot learn, feel, change, grow, love, live
Chained by their certitudes they are a slave, they have forfeited their freedom
Only a person who risks is free,"

All Saints Sunday Year A November 2 2008

2008-11-02T10:41:00.000-08:00

Matthew 5:1-12

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

"Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

"Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

"Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

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The internet is an amazing place, isn’t it? I remember back in 1996, when we first got online, there was a book you could buy called, “The World Wide Web Yellow Pages” that was supposed to list most of the sites online and what they were for. And it was only about an inch thick! Today, no one could afford to buy a Yellow Pages for the internet because it would probably have several volumes! You can find a site for just about anything on the internet, both serious and funny. I am addicted to a website that is called “Icanhazcheeseburger.com.” If you’re not familiar with this site, it is a site that has mostly images of cats, though there are some other animals represented in the photographs hosted on the site. The sole purpose of the site is to put funny captions on these photographs, captions that are written in a silly version of English called “LOLspeak”. There are some captions that get used over and over again in many different ways. One of my favorites is the caption that always ends, “Ur doin’ it wrong.” For instance, here we have:

“Baby Blanket – Ur doin it wrong”

“Facebook – Ur doin it wrong”

And “surfin the net – ur doin it wrong”

As funny as these are, I have to wonder if somewhere, someone one day might end up with a picture of me that says, “Christianity – ur doin it wrong.” Because, unlike the saints that we celebrate today on All Saints Sunday, I certainly have not been persecuted in any big way. And being persecuted is a sign that you are “doin it right.”

In Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the first part of which is our gospel reading for today, Jesus enumerates the qualities of those who can be counted among his followers, commonly called the Beatitudes………:

Poor in spirit – humble, acknowledging that they are not worthy to enter the presence of God

Mourning – filled with sadness for the sin of the world, both their own and others

Gentle – in control of their emotions, not judging others since they are aware of their own sins

Hungering and thirsting after righteousness – knowing that they cannot achieve the kingdom on their own and desiring to become righteous

Merciful - helping others who are suffering, forgiving those who sin against them

Pure in heart - sincere and open before God and man

Peacemakers - freely sharing the peace of God with those who seek it

Courageous – willing to endure persecution for the sake of righteousness

Jesus ends this list with the extraordinary statement "Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” The people listening to this statement might have been nodding their heads up to this point, thinking, “Yep, that’s me…mmm hmmm, me…uh huh, me again…” and all of a sudden, “WHOA NELLIE! I don’t want that to be me!”

This last statement is a bit of a shock for most of us, who were told as children that treating others with kindness and compassion would assure the same in return. The Golden Rule, originally found in the book of Leviticus and repeated by Jesus on different occasions, including this one, has been taught to many children, even those who aren’t Christian. I can hear the voice of my mother saying, “Just be nice to them and they’ll be nice to you!” Most people who say they live by “The Sermon on the Mount” think that the Golden Rule is what it’s all about. It’s not. It’s about living the Christian life and how hard that is going to be for us. And, most importantly, how the rest of the world will react to us when we live the way we are supposed to live.

If you are “doin’ it right”, you’ll have the qualities listed in the beatitudes. And persecution will come, because darkness is offended by light. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow it throws.

Before I became a Christian, I started attending a group for mothers called “MOPS”, or Mothers of Preschoolers. It’s a wonderful Christian group with chapters all over the country and I learned a lot while I was there. One thing I was struck by was the woman who was the moderator of the group. She possessed the qualities listed in today’s gospel reading. She was gentle, humble, merciful and pure in heart. I remember thinking to myself that she seemed a little too “good to be true.” Have you ever noticed that about some Christians? She was so nice, so sweet, that it made me feel a little angry, to be honest. How could anybody be that nice? Didn’t this person ever stumble? Didn’t she ever feel angry or upset with people? Especially people who were just plain stupid or nasty?

That was the darkness within me trying to find fault, trying to tear down someone who was “doin’ it right.” And now that I’m a Christian, I often see the world doing the same thing to other Christians that are “doin’ it right. Sometimes I see people who start out “doin’ it right” who end up stumbling because the world is so offended by their light that the world sets out to put stumbling blocks in their way.

I think of Mother Teresa, now passed to glory. You’d think that this wonderful woman would be universally admired, but amazingly, there were people who didn’t like Mother Teresa and attacked her in print, such as Germaine Greer, noted feminist and Christopher Hitchens, a prominent atheist. Greer wrote in an article in Newsweek, “I first met Mother Teresa 25 years ago, when we were both being flown first class to collect awards from the Kennedy Foundation for services to humanity. I knew I didn't deserve any such thing and felt very awkward. Mother Teresa was right at home. She took not so much as a sip of champagne or a bite of caviar 'but sat, head bowed, motionless in her enormous seat, while the cabin staff knelt to speak to her in reverently hushed tones, ignoring the rest of us, who were too embarrassed by our un- regenerate sensuality to dare to ask for extra champagne. She was wafted from the aircraft on a tide of obeisance, a celebrity of celebrities whose feet did not seem to touch the ground. She lugged no luggage. God, a.k.a. the Kennedy Foundation, was providing.” Here is a prime example of how light offends darkness, how darkness will do anything to tarnish and dim the light shining from those who live a Christian life.

So, where does that leave us? Maybe we need to ask, as a former mayor of New York routine did, “How am I doing?” Are we “doin’ it right?” A good measure of that might be how many people who treat us badly because of our faith. If we’ve gotten some of that negative attention, Jesus says, we should rejoice, because we’re “doin’ it right. And if we haven’t made someone mad because of our faith, if we’ve never upset anyone and if we seek to fade into the woodwork instead of standing up for our faith, we’re not “doin’ it right.”

One brave Christian in China is Pastor Zhang Xinghuan, also known as Pastor Bike because he travels across China to preach the gospel. For the past 22 years, Pastor Bike has been persecuted by the Chinese government. Recently he and his wife were imprisoned just before the Olympics started and were only released after thousands across the world signed a petition for their release. Since then, his oldest son was badly beaten by the police. Those who know Pastor Bike say that “the love of Christ is evident in his outreach”. Pastor Bike is “doin’ it right”.

It is this type of courage in the face of adversity that draws people to Christ. Leighton Ford, in his book, “Good News is for Sharing” relates this story:

From boyhood, one of my favorite stories has been the forty martyrs of Sabaste. These forty soldiers, all Christians, were members of the famed Twelfth Legion of Rome's imperial army. One day their captain told them Emperor Licinius had sent out an edict that all soldiers were to offer sacrifice to the pagan gods. These Christians replied, "You can have our armor and even our bodies, but our hearts' allegiance belongs to Jesus Christ."

It was midwinter of A.D. 320, and the captain had them marched onto a nearby frozen lake. He stripped them of their clothes and said they would either die or renounce Christ. Throughout the night these men huddled together singing their song, "Forty martyrs for Christ." One by one the temperature took its toll and they fell to the ice.

At last there was only one man left. He lost courage and stumbled to the shore, where he renounced Christ. The officer of the guards had been watching all this. Unknown to the others, he had secretly come to believe in Christ. When he saw this last man break rank, he walked out onto the ice, threw off his clothes, and confessed that he also was a Christian. When the sun rose the next morning, there were forty bodies of soldiers who had fought to the death for Christ.

It is precisely this willingness to endure persecution, yes, even to the point of death, that makes our faith ring true for those who witness it.

But we aren’t called to that kind of martyrdom, because we do live in such a free country. So how can we know we are “doin’ it right?” While we don’t risk our lives, we are called to risk our friendships, jobs and family relationships. Perhaps it’s because these risks are nothing compared to imprisonment, torture and death, that it makes it harder for us to sacrifice them to God. It’s easy to reason away our reluctance to share the gospel with friends or our turning away from a family member’s hospital bed with the words of God unsaid on our lips. The lack of persecution takes away the sense of immediacy that we should share the gospel NOW, speak those words of God NOW. We can do that another time, we tell ourselves. But, if life teaches us nothing, it should teach us that there may not be another time.

We’re not meant to sit comfortably in our churches, waiting for people to show up here in church so we can tell them about God. We’re meant to be pedaling our bikes out, being bold in the face of persecution, telling everyone we meet about the truth of God’s love. If we aren’t, we’re not “doin’ it right”. That’s not to say we have to be obnoxious about it. Timing can be everything. By opening ourselves to the Holy Spirit’s leading, by listening for that still, small voice that prompts us to “tell the greatest story ever told” we will know when we are “doin’ it right”.

I’m going to end with a beautiful poem by Amy Carmichael, who was a missionary in India for 55 years. It’s called “No Scar?”

Hast thou no scar?
No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?
I hear thee sung as mighty in the land;
I hear them hail thy bright, ascendant star.
Hast thou no scar?

Hast thou no wound?
Yet I was wounded by the archers; spent,
Leaned Me against a tree to die; and rent
By ravening beasts that compassed Me, I swooned.
Hast thou no wound?

No wound? No scar?
Yet, as the Master shall the servant be,
And piercèd are the feet that follow Me.
But thine are whole; can he have followed far
Who hast no wound or scar?

Proper 24 Year A October 19 2008

2008-10-19T10:38:00.000-07:00

Matthew 22:15-22

The Pharisees went and plotted to entrap Jesus in what he said. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, "Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?" But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, "Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax." And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, "Whose head is this, and whose title?" They answered, "The emperor's." Then he said to them, "Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's." When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.

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Nobody likes to pay taxes, as the current “hot story” in the news these days shows. Whether we are Joe or Josephine the Plumber, we like to keep everything that we work hard to get. Giving the government our hard earned money seems to be so wrong, when we look around and see that a few of the people who are receiving that money don’t seem to deserve it at all.

I find it kind of funny that the story of Joe the Plumber and the question he asked Senator Obama about taxes should occur just before we read the story of Jesus and the question asked about taxes by the Herodians and the Phariesees. While Joe the Plumber is understandably concerned about whether, if he is successful in purchasing the business he is thinking about buying, he will have to give more of the money he earns to the government under Senator Obama’s plan, the Herodians and the Pharisees had something entirely different in mind: putting Jesus in between a rock and a hard place.

We don’t hear much about the Herodians in the gospels. They are mentioned only three times: once here in Matthew and twice in the book of Mark. To understand the dilemma that Jesus was presented with, you have to know that the Herodians were completely supportive of Roman rule in Israel.

So by bringing the Herodians along when the Pharisees wanted to ask Jesus about paying taxes, they wanted to trap him. If Jesus said it was not lawful to pay taxes to Rome, he would be incriminating himself with the Herodians, since he would be rejecting Rome’s claim of authority over Israel. If Jesus said it WAS lawful to pay taxes, then he would be losing the support of those who opposed the Roman subjugation of Israel.

But Jesus confounded these aims by simply saying, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's." This reply, the gospel narrative says, amazed both the Herodians and the Pharisees. Why?

Listening to these words as our translation reads would make you think, initially, that Jesus had pretty much said that it was lawful to pay taxes. However, though “Give therefore” is what our translation says, the actual words of the gospel translate into something more like, “Give back”. Give back to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and give back to God the things that are God’s.” To the emperor belonged the shiny gold coin with his picture on it, since to obtain that coin meant that you had dealings with Rome. At some point, Rome will want its coin back. Give back to God those things which belong to Him. It was a brilliant answer to the Pharisees and the Herodians; foiling their aim in discrediting him before the crowds that followed him so avidly.

“But,” you argue, “Doesn’t everything we own come from God anyway? So giving money in the form of taxes to the government would be diverting that money from God, wouldn’t it?”

Not necessarily. The Pharisees, for instance, would have thought as much, and scrupulously paid all the tithes required by Levitical law: tithes that would amount to as much as 30% of their income. In the eleventh chapter of Luke, verse 42, Jesus rebukes them: "But woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and every herb, and neglect justice and the love of God. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others."

Jesus’ kingdom, as he pointed out on another occasion, is not of this world. Money is not the coinage traded there, but justice and the love of God. What God wants most is we ourselves. We belong to him and we should give ourselves back to him.

So where does that leave us and our money? Obviously, God is aware that we must submit ourselves to government and that taxes are as certain as death, as Benjamin Franklin said. But what about tithing? Does God want our money too?

You can spend a lot of time online, investigating the legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of the idea of tithing in the church today: some sites will blithely tell you that tithing is what God requires of you in order to obtain “favor” and some sites will give you strong scriptural evidence that tithing was meant for Israel only under the Law and that we, as free Christians, do not owe our church anything whatsoever.

I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle. We are not, indeed, required to tithe to the church as the Israelites were required under Levitical Law. We live under grace and do not need to give a scrupulous 10% of our income to God in order to obtain favor. If a church implies that, there is something very wrong and you should hang onto your wallet tightly as you back slowly out there door. God’s favor is not something you buy in church.

I don’t think God is up in heaven with a calculator, watching our incomes with a gimlet eye, making sure we tithe exactly 10% of our income. But God does want us to give back to him that which is his. And that would definitely include ourselves, in the form of worship and praise performed in this building.

So here we are in this building, our church. It is a good building, comfortable to sit in. It gives us a place to gather together to worship. Certainly, we don’t need anything elaborate to do that, but it is a beautiful space in which to worship our Creator. Unfortunately, it costs money for the electricity to keep the lights on and, as we are all very much aware of in the summer, the fans running. In the winter, it costs money to heat it. It costs money to mow the grass in the summer and plow the snow in the winter. It costs money to buy the candles for the altar, to have the building cleaned, to copy the pew bulletin and to pay the musicians who play the hymns we sing each Sunday.

This is the time of year we begin to think about our pledge and how much we can afford to give to the church. Some of us can afford to pay 10% of our incomes. On the other end of the spectrum, some of us struggle to find something to give each week. Some of us give generously with our money and some of us give generously with our time and effort: serving at the altar, setting the liturgy, paying the bills, pulling the weeds, and something that will be very important in about 20 minutes: making the coffee and baking muffins or buying donuts. Some of us do both, giving time and money. It is that giving of time and money that makes our church community work, that keeps the lights on and the heat piping out of the registers, that keeps this space comfortable and beautiful for us to worship God in each Sunday.

And I have to say, as Scottie said in Star Trek: The Voyage Home, “Is that worth somethin’ to ye?”

Proper 21 Year A September 28 2008

2008-09-28T10:35:00.000-07:00

Matthew 21:23-32

When Jesus entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him as he was teaching, and said, "By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?" Jesus said to them, "I will also ask you one question; if you tell me the answer, then I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?" And they argued with one another, "If we say, `From heaven,' he will say to us, `Why then did you not believe him?' But if we say, `Of human origin,' we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet." So they answered Jesus, "We do not know." And he said to them, "Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.

"What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, `Son, go and work in the vineyard today.' He answered, `I will not'; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, `I go, sir'; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?" They said, "The first." Jesus said to them, "Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him."

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In music, ironically enough, it’s called “soul”. You can have all the chops, licks, and technical skill in the worlds, but if you ain’t got soul, your music will sound flat. If you were asked to define what soul is, you might say, “I can’t tell you what it is, but I know it when I hear it.” Soul is the indefinable ability to transcend the rules of music and inject emotion and feeling into it. People who stick to the rules, playing each note exactly when they should play it in rigid time, can’t achieve soul. They will only ever be proficient players, without making anything that we can listen to with pleasure, without making music that will touch our emotions. They hold something back of themselves, relying on the skill of their hands to create music, but never achieving the true aim of music.

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus is talking about something very similar. He provides an illustration of two brothers, one who refused to go work in the vineyard as requested by his father, but later relented and went and another brother who agreed to go, but didn’t. It was an illustration of the difference between true faith and religion. The Pharisees followed all the rules, but never opened themselves up to be truly changed by their relationship with God. They felt that if they could just live each day, following along the course that had been laid out by other Pharisees, that they would please God. But it doesn’t work that way.

As Christians, we also have a set of rules that we follow. We have liturgy and ways of doing things that go back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And we can get very hung up on following those rules. Like all humans, we love rules and traditions. They allow us to feel comfortable and safe in a world that can be anything but. Our problems come when we start leaning on the rules, instead of leaning on God. We become the son that agreed to go work, yet did not.

The 19th-century Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard described two kinds of religion—Religion A and Religion B. The first is “faith” in name only as described by Paul in his second letter to Timothy: “having a form of godliness but denying its power.” It’s the practice of attending church without having genuine faith.

Religion B, on the other hand, is a life-transforming experience. It’s a firm commitment Jesus Christ, which creates a permanent relationship between ourselves and a gracious and forgiving God.

For many years British author C. S. Lewis had great difficulty in becoming a Christian, which can be attributed to the difference between the two religions. Religion A had blinded him to Religion B. His brother Warren wrote that his conversion was “no sudden plunge into a new life, but rather a slow, steady convalescence from a deep-seated spiritual illness—an illness that had its origins in our childhood, in the dry husks of religion offered by the semi-political churchgoing of Ulster, and the similar dull emptiness of compulsory church during our school days.”

God wants relationship. He wants us to let down our guard and let Him in. He wants to change us, to heal us, not lock us into the same place we were when we found Him.

We resist the change that God wants to make in us because it’s not safe, because it’s not comfortable. We like to feel safe, we like our rules. How can we get past being a religious rule follower and break free to become all that God wants us to be?

Throwing out all the rules is not the answer. Linda Brown Holt, an independent scholar in the field of comparative religious literature, said this:

Ideally, spirituality emanates from religion, religion creates a safe, encouraging environment in which spirituality emerges and grows. Religion is form: tradition, doctrine, rites and rituals. Spirituality is content: communion with the divine, seeing the holy in all creatures and objects. In reality, this is not always the case. Religion gone bad results in the triumph of form over content resulting in rituals without meaning and the exaltation of dogma. Spirituality at its worst is mindless drivel, the egotism of the individual believer, even madness.

Clearly, we need a place where people can feel safe to explore their developing relationship with God. Our forms of worship can provide that safe place. But we are not meant to stay safe. We are meant to change.

David Roher provides this illustration about change:

The motor home has allowed us to put all the conveniences of home on wheels. A camper no longer needs to contend with sleeping in a sleeping bag, cooking over a fire, or hauling water from a stream. Now he can park a fully equipped home on a cement slab in the midst of a few pine trees and hook up to a water line, a sewer line and electricity. One motor home I saw recently had a satellite dish attached on top. No more bother with dirt, no more smoke from the fire, no more drudgery of walking to the stream. Now it is possible to go camping and never have to go outside.

We buy a motor home with the hope of seeing new places, of getting out into the world. Yet we deck it out with the same furnishings as in our living room. Thus nothing really changes. We may drive to a new place, set ourselves in new surrounding, but the newness goes unnoticed, for we’ve only carried along our old setting.

The adventure of new life in Christ begins when the comfortable patterns of the old life are left behind.

Is your faith like the motor home, allowing you to stay safe and comfortable? Or has it changed you, challenging you to become more than you are, greater than the sum of your parts, more like Christ? How can we tell if we are?

Our primary measuring tool for spiritual transformation is this: has our faith brought us more joy? Has it enabled us to be kinder to those around us? Have we found peace despite our struggle with the burdens that weigh us down? Can we praise God, even in the midst of all the bad things that happen to us? If we can’t say yes to these questions, we probably haven’t grown much as Christians.

So how do we go about putting “soul” into our religion? Just as in studying music we train ourselves by playing scales and arpeggios, we have to train ourselves in the sorts of spiritual disciplines that allow us to overcome the sins that is our primary obstacles in the process of our transformation. How do we do that?

Dallas Willard wrote in The Spirit of the Disciplines (Word, 1988) that spiritual disciplines can be divided into two corresponding categories: disciplines of engagement, like worship or study or prayer; and disciplines of abstinence, like fasting or solitude or silence.

Sins of commission, such as gossip, need a discipline of abstinence like silence. Sins of omission, such as not making an effort to find the joy that God meant each of us to have, require the discipline of worship. By praising God daily for all that he has provided for us, we can find that joy.

I’m sure that we all know what the sins that we each need to work on, those areas that give us that uncomfortable twinge in our conscience, the ways we have grieved God “by we have done and by what we have left undone”. Sound familiar?

There is an interested story called the “Musgrave Ritual” by Arthur Conan Doyle, which was one of the stories he wrote featuring his famous character, Sherlock Holmes. The story was about a missing butler, who had been very interested in a family ritual of his employers that had been handed down from father to son for hundreds of years. The family faithfully taught this ritual to the oldest son to be repeated when he inherited. This was how it went:

"'Whose was it?'
"'His who is gone.'
"'Who shall have it?'
"'He who will come.'
"'Where was the sun?'
"'Over the oak.'
"'Where was the shadow?'
"'Under the elm.'
"How was it stepped?'
"'North by ten and by ten, east by five and by five, south by two and by two, west by one and by one, and so under.'
"'What shall we give for it?'
"'All that is ours.'
"'Why should we give it?'
"'For the sake of the trust.'

The family had repeated this ritual faithfully for many years, even though they no longer knew what it meant. Sherlock Holmes, with his superior powers of deduction, was able to figure out, as the butler had, that this cryptic message was meant to keep the memory of where the royal crown of Charles I had been hidden on the family property when that monarch was fleeing from the armies of Oliver Cromwell.

Like the Musgrave Ritual, the words of our liturgy hold the keys to the treasure we seek. The danger we face is in investing too much into the ritual of repeating them, without really getting to the reason why we say them to begin with. By really listening to those words as we say them, by allowing the Holy Spirit to invest them with meaning and reality, and then by moving that reality out of the church building and into our daily lives, we can train ourselves to build up our spiritual “muscle”. And instead of a cage that traps us, our liturgy becomes a cocoon that nurtures the spiritual life growing within us, so that it eventually emerges as the butterfly that God meant it to be: changed, free, beautiful.

Proper 19 Year A September 14 2008

2008-09-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

Matthew 18:21-35

Peter came and said to Jesus, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.

"For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, `Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.' And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, `Pay what you owe.' Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, `Have patience with me, and I will pay you.' But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, `You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?' And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart."

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God designed our bodies in miraculous ways. Not only did he give us the capacity to remember the hurts we experience in every day life, he also gave us the capacity to forget.

It’s easy to take this capacity for granted. I am reading a book right now called, “The Woman Who Can’t Forget” by Jill Price. Ms. Price’s memory is unique. She has exact literal recall of every day of her life since the age of 14, and exact recall of most or many days of her life from the age of 2. She not only remembers what happened on any given day, she can tell you what day of the week any particular date fell, what she was doing on that day and any significant events she may have heard of on the news that day. But not only that, she remembers how she felt about what was happening to her. All of it. For her, memory is like rerunning the movie of her life and reliving it. She remembers exactly how she felt when someone hurt her. It is as fresh in her memory as if it had just happened. Think about that. Imagine what that must be like.

Ms. Price describes it as hell and wonders what her life would be like if she would be able to forget things. She finds the idea both tremendously appealing yet also very horrifying. She doesn’t want to be able to forget, yet she longs to forget. Her happy memories are havens for her, allowing her to live the best moments of her life over again. Yet the memories of times that brought her pain and sadness are impossible to remove. One of the features of her memory is that she cannot control the flow of memories into her conscious thinking. So she simply cannot avoid remembering every slight, hurt, and argument she’s ever had. It makes it even harder for her to forgive.

According to the latest medical and psychological research, forgiving is good for our souls—and our bodies. People who forgive:

benefit from better immune functioning and lower blood pressure.
have better mental health than people who do not forgive.
feel better physically.
have lower amounts of anger and fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression.
maintain more satisfying and long-lasting relationships.

“When we allow ourselves to feel like victims or sit around dreaming up how to retaliate against people who have hurt us, these thought patterns take a toll on our minds and bodies,’ says Michael McCullough, director of research for the National Institute for Healthcare Research and a co-author of To Forgive is Human: How to Put Your Past in the Past (IVP, 1997).

Jill. Price volunteered her time to physicians who spend their time researching how memory works and in the process learned a lot about memory herself. She relates how one of the mechanisms of memory is persistence: that is the tendency of some folks to replay negative memories over and over again. It is a major mechanism in post-traumatic stress disorder. People who spend their time replaying negative memories are called “ruminators”. This mechanism can be extremely damaging to our emotional health. People who are depressive tend to be ruminators. Ms. Price writes: “A horrible irony about this finding is that ruminators often think that their intense attention to whatever bad experience they’re dwelling on will help them gain some valuable insights, when in fact, rumination tends to undermine critical thinking of that sort.”

Because we are able to forget, it is clear that God designed us to be able to forgive. But that can be so hard to do!

When I first became a Christian, God made me aware of my list: that is, my list of people that I had to forgive. Some of you may have a similar list. It wasn’t a very long list, thankfully, because as a “baby” Christian, a long list would have been overwhelming and would have seemed impossible to even start, much less finish.

However, it was a list of about five people that I had had a hard time forgiving. I ruminated over the wrongs they had done me. In the cases where I was still in relationship with these people, my constant replaying of the memories of how they had hurt me damaged my relationship with them. Even if they weren’t aware of how I resented their actions, the small things I did to exact revenge on them must have been apparent in a subconscious way. God made it clear that if I wanted to be a Christian, I had to stop doing that, that it hurt my relationships with those people.

For people that I was no longer in contact with, the work of forgiving was even harder. I found myself amplifying and magnifying the wrong that was done by them to me, because I had nothing new to replace it with, no subsequent good feelings about them to water down the poison of my unforgiveness. Forgiving these people was hard work, sometimes I had to go through the process of forgiving them over and over again. Corrie Ten Boom, the author of “The Hiding Place”, once related a story about how she was not able to forget a wrong that had been done to her. She had forgiven, but she kept reliving the incident in her mind. Corrie cried out to God for relief from her rumination over the incident. She wrote:

“His help came in the form of a kindly Lutheran pastor,” Corrie wrote, “to whom I confessed my failure after two sleepless weeks.” “Up in the church tower,” he said, nodding out the window, “is a bell which is rung by pulling on a rope. But you know what? After the sexton lets go of the rope, the bell keeps on swinging. First ding, then dong. Slower and slower until there’s a final dong and it stops. I believe the same thing is true of forgiveness. When we forgive, we take our hand off the rope. But if we’ve been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we mustn’t be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while. They’re just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down.”

“And so it proved to be. There were a few more midnight reverberations, a couple of dings when the subject came up in my conversations, but the force—which was my willingness in the matter—had gone out of them. They came less and less often and at the last stopped altogether: we can trust God not only above our emotions, but also above our thoughts.”

I found this to be true when dealing with my list. I could choose to forgive, but completing the process took asking God for help. Over time, my rumination over the wrong that those people on my list had done to me ceased. I was able to let go of the wrongs that had been done to me. And in the process I discovered something amazing.

The amazing thing I discovered was that the wrong that had been done to me was sometimes caused by something wrong I had done myself. Isn’t that amazing? By dwelling on the wrong that had been done to me, I had lost perspective about what I had done to cause that wrong.

Of course, there are people who do wrong to us despite the fact that we never wronged them. Perhaps these people are the hardest to forgive. But we still must forgive. Because holding onto the wrong, the hurt, only damages us. It does not damage the person we do not forgive nearly as much, if at all. Often people who make a habit of hurting others are oblivious to the fact that they have done something wrong. Holding on to the hurt and pain they have caused does not cause them any pain whatsoever. The only people it hurts is ourselves.

And there are also people in our lives whom we endeavor to forgive, but we have to keep forgiving over and over, because they keep on doing the same hurtful things over and over. That’s why, in our gospel reading today, Peter wanted a limit, a place to draw the line. And Jesus answered, “Not seven times, but seventy times seven.”

Seventy times seven, or 490 seems to be a finite number to us, but in reality, for the Jewish people of the time, it represented infinity. It had a historical link to the Babylonian exile, as seen in the book of Daniel:

Dan 9:20 While I was still speaking and praying, confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel and presenting my request before the LORD my God concerning his holy mountain —
21 yes, while I was still praying, the man Gabriel, whom I had seen previously in a vision, was approaching me in my state of extreme weariness, around the time of the evening offering.
22 He spoke with me, instructing me as follows: "Daniel, I have now come to impart understanding to you. 23 At the beginning of your requests a message went out, and I have come to convey it to you, for you are of great value in God's sight. Therefore consider the message and understand the vision:24 "Seventy weeks have been determined concerning your people and your holy city to put an end to rebellion, to bring sin to completion, to atone for iniquity, to bring in perpetual righteousness, to seal up the prophetic vision, and to anoint a most holy place.

During the period of exile, once a year the High Priest would offer an atonement to God for the forgiveness of Israel’s sin. God forgave them every time. Every time. If the exile had lasted longer, God still would have forgiven them every single time.

So when you ask, “Where can I cut the forgiveness short? When can I stop doing all this work, which clearly isn’t doing any good because they keep on doing what they are doing, Lord? “the answer is we can’t stop. We have to keep forgiving, because that’s what God keeps doing for us.

We’re supposed to be more like him. So we have to forgive…like him. We have to love…like him. Because we were designed to forgive, we were designed to love.

Proper 17 Year A August 31 2008

2008-09-11T09:15:00.000-07:00

Matthew 16:21-28

Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, "God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you." But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."

Then Jesus told his disciples, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

"For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom."

Sermon

It’s a famous experiment conducted in the 1960’s: a group of four year olds are given a marshmallow and told that if they can delay eating it for 20 minutes, they will get a second one.

Some of the four year olds could wait to eat the marshmallow…others could not. The researchers then followed these children for some years and were able to demonstrate that those who were able to wait fared better in many ways, including when they took their SAT’s. They had demonstrated something psychologists call “delayed or deferred gratification”, that is, the ability to wait to obtain something one wants. People who have this ability are more successful than those who don’t. It is an ability that increases as we get older, though some people never get much better at it than the four year olds in the study.

In our gospel reading today, Jesus gives us the ultimate chance at showing how good we are at practicing delayed gratification. Those who are successful at denying themselves, taking up their cross and following Jesus will find their life. Those who wish to save their lives; that is, the pleasures and safety of their lives as they exist without Christ, those people will lose their lives.

One of the problems that we all have with this is that we have a hard time imagining the goal which we are all working towards: eternal life with our Father in heaven. It’s so hard for us because, for the most part, we don’t know what it will be like, since those who get there don’t come back to tell us about it, at least, not usually. We have to imagine it. The four year olds in the experiment had the example right in front of them: the marshmallow. They could see it, smell it and touch it. Probably almost all of them had eaten a marshmallow before, so they knew what it would taste like when they got it.

But as for us, we have only a vague concept of what heaven might be like: streets paved with gold, heavenly choirs signing praises to God…stuff like that. Some of us have been told stories when we were children about getting white robes, halos and harps.

Quite a few people I know find this idea tremendously boring and frankly, if that was all that heaven would hold for us, it would be. But luckily, this scenario is pretty unscriptural. Yet if we don’t know what heaven will be like, how will we willingly chose our cross, take it up and follow Him?

It seems to me to be vital for Christians to KNOW as much about the hope that God promises us, the hope of eternal life with Him. If you do not know what it is you are delaying gratification for, you will have a hard time delaying it. By studying scripture, we can glean much information about heaven: it will not be so much a place, but a person: God. We will be in his presence always. There will be no pain, no death or dying, nor sorrow or suffering. We will know for the first time the answers to questions we could never answer ourselves. We will be doing the things that we spend our time doing in church now: worshiping, learning, and serving. And these things will not be a burden, but a joy.

This is a book that I have bought more than once: 90 Minutes in Heaven by Don Piper. I have bought it more than once because I end up giving it to people who I think would get comfort from it. In it, Mr. Piper, a Baptist preacher, tells the story about the car accident that almost took his life. He was, indeed, pronounced dead on the scene and amazingly, revived 90 minutes later. He tells about his experience of going to heaven for those brief 90 minutes, describes meeting those loved ones who had gone before him, the sound of the music outside the gates. He writes: "I felt loved--more loved than ever before in my life. They didn't say they loved me. I don't remember what words they spoke. When they gazed at me, I knew what the Bible means by perfect love. It emanated from every person who surrounded me.

"I stared at them, and as I did I felt as if I absorbed their love for me. At some point, I looked around and the sight overwhelmed me. Everything was brilliantly intense. Coming out from the gate--a short distance ahead--was a brilliance that was brighter than the light that surrounded us, utterly luminous. As soon as I stopped gazing at the people's faces, I realized that everything around me glowed with a dzzling intensity. In trying to describe the scene, words are totally inadequate, because human words can't express the feelings of awe and wonder at what I beheld."

This is the hope that God holds out to us. It is going to be more awesome than we can imagine. So when Jesus tells us to pick up our cross and follow him, we have to “keep our eye on the prize” as the old spiritual says. Are you willing to delay gratification for the ultimate reward? Are you going to choose your cross over your life?

Because it is always a choice; God does not compel. He does not violate the gift of free will He gave us in the beginning. God allows us to make the choice to pick up that cross. We are free to refuse. But by refusing, we will lose that hope he holds out to us: that death need hold no fear for us, that something better awaits us.

What is your cross? Is it turning away from fame? From riches? From comfort and ease? Is it learning to overcome your fear, your dislike of some people, your shyness? Probably it is all of these things and more. Because a cross, I will remind you, is not made of one piece of wood: it is composed of several pieces, large and small, wood, nails and maybe some rope. Your cross will probably not be just one thing, but all the things that get in the way of your being what God wants you to be.

Even Don Piper, having been shown a glimpse of heaven, found it hard to pick up his cross. The book is not just about the sweet, brief glimpse of heaven he had, but goes on to detail his struggle with the pain of his injuries, the depression which weighed him down, the agony of learning to walk again. His life did not become easier because of that brief glimpse: in fact, in many ways it became harder. Having glimpsed what awaited him beyond death, it was hard for Mr. Piper to return to this life, so full of pain and suffering, having experienced just a taste of what heaven will be like.

Yet he did take up that cross, as must we all. Just as Mr. Piper’s experience, written and shared in this book, has inspired and encouraged those of us who are Christians and perhaps even brought new people to Christ, our own experience may be an inspiration and encouragement to those who witness it. We may never know in this life who we have helped by bearing our cross, but we will surely be greeted by them outside the gates of heaven.

So pick up that cross. It’s heavy, it’s rough and it’s going to make us use muscles we didn’t even know we had. We’re going to get some splinters in our hands. We will get tired and we will have sweat running in our eyes. We will stumble as we drag it along and sometimes we will fall to our knees. But if we keep our eyes on the prize, it will all be worth it.

Proper 15 Year A August 17 2008

2008-08-17T09:04:00.000-07:00

Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28

[Jesus called the crowd to him and said to them, "Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles." Then the disciples approached and said to him, "Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?" He answered, "Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit." But Peter said to him, "Explain this parable to us." Then he said, "Are you also still without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile."]

Jesus left Gennesaret and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, "Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon." But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, "Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us." He answered, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." But she came and knelt before him, saying, "Lord, help me." He answered, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." She said, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table." Then Jesus answered her, "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed instantly.

Sermon

It seems, at face value, a story that does not fit in with what we know of Jesus: a man of pure racial lineage with followers of the same race; a chance encounter with a woman of a mixed race; the man calling the woman a dog; the woman not taking offense, but speaking up for herself; the man relenting in spite of the followers wishes to dismiss the woman. The story seems much more in keeping with Nazi Germany, or the deep South of the 1950’s. But there is more going on here than there seems to be: this is not just a story of racism, but in actuality, a story of good management principles.

The first thing you have to realize is that this was not a chance encounter. One of the other translations of this passage says that “Jesus withdrew from Gennesaret”. Jesus frequently would withdraw from Judea at moments when things seemed to be heating up between himself and the Pharisees. He did not want things to come to a head too soon. So he would withdraw into another region to let things cool off a little before returning and continuing with his work. It was a high wire act of precise timing, a management of time and events precisely calculated to bring matters to a head at just the right time and the right place.

And so Jesus withdrew to Tyre and Sidon, the area that used to be known as Canaan. There is a long history of conflict between the Jewish people and the Canaanite people, but at the time of Jesus, very few of the original Canaanites actually lived in Canaan. They had long disappeared from the stage of history, to be replaced with people of many different races. In this woman’s case, the gospel of Mark is more specific in saying that she was a Greek born in Syrian Phoenicia. Matthew calls her a Canaanite, pretty much the way you or I are called Americans…we live here, though our ancestors may have come from many different places.

Yet the woman was still not a Jew, not one of the chosen people. As the disciples illustrated, those not of the Jewish race were not highly regarded by Jews. They had forgotten why they had been chosen: to be the people who would be the means of salvation for the entire world, the people amongst whom the Messiah would be born. The prophecies in the ancient texts we call the Old Testament had been twisted to point towards a purely Jewish salvation, an earthly kingdom.

So when the Canaanite woman started pestering Jesus, the disciples asked Jesus to send her away. They were typical men of their time, with the racism of their time engrained in their thoughts and actions. And, at first, Jesus seems to go right along with them. What is up with that?

The second thing to remember is that Jesus’ ministry was first and foremost to the Jews. Like any good manager, Jesus knew that you have to train the supervisors before the supervisors can train the employees. He very rarely even addressed people of other races and always emphasized that his mission was to the Jews, as he does here when he says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” The time was short, and his main mission was to save Israel, so that it in turn could save the world. So, on the surface, while Jesus’ initial aloofness to this woman might seem racist in origin, there is really more going on here.

Jesus was doing two things: one, he was testing the faith of the Canaanite woman. You’ll notice that Jesus often did this when he is confronted by people who want things from him. He wanted to see how persistent they are, how great their faith was. And the woman here is certainly very persistent, persistent even in the face of the insult of being called a dog. We need to know, though, that the word for dog here is not a word that means a mangy dog on the street. It is the word that is used for lap dogs, pets that are pretty much helpless without human aid. So Jesus, while insulting her, was not insulting her as badly as you might think. Yet still, it is an insult.

The woman’s faith is so great and her desire for her daughter’s healing is so great that she has one of the best comebacks you could ever hear: "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table." How many of us have been insulted, only to realize hours later exactly what we SHOULD have said? She certainly was very quick witted. And her quick wit and persistence are rewarded. Jesus says, “Woman, great is your faith” and grants her desire for healing for her daughter. But there is still more going on here.

The second thing Jesus is doing is laying the ground work for the redemption of the Gentiles by breaking down the racist attitudes of the disciples. This was no chance encounter. Jesus knew that the disciples were still stuck in the mire of their Jewish ethnocentrism. In this encounter as well as others, he slowly introduced to the disciples the notion of the Gentiles’ worthiness of redemption. This would be their mission in the future, the mission of the early church. Until the disciples learned to view Gentiles as worthy of salvation, Jesus’ broader mission to redeem the world could not take place. Racial barriers must be broken down. The woman, initially ignored by Jesus and urged by the disciples to be sent away, goes from “dog” to “woman” in the space of a few minutes. Jesus plainly regarded her as equally worthy of redemption and the disciples took note.

Truly, it is not a story of recent origin, but sadly a story as old as time itself. We are continually putting up barriers between ourselves and our fellow men. We invent more ways of dividing ourselves from other people than is ever necessary or desirable. It is encoded in our frail human nature, the nature flawed by original sin, the nature that Jesus came to redeem us from, saving us from ourselves.

In the end, the disciples are sent out into the world, to make disciples of all nations. As Paul said in his letter to the Galatians, “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.”

In our own lives, we must live according to this promise, breaking down barriers, offering the word of God to all alike. We must fight against our tendency to reject those who do not dress as we do, talk as we do, look like we do, or come from the same place we do. It is truly one of the hardest tasks in our Christian “job description” but it is one that must be done if the church is to continue spreading the gospel of Jesus to every nation. Not one of us can hold ourselves to be better than our fellow men, for as Paul said in our second reading from his letter to the Romans, “For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.”

Proper 13 Year A August 3, 2008

2008-08-03T05:43:00.000-07:00

Matthew 14:13-21

Jesus withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, "This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves." Jesus said to them, "They need not go away; you give them something to eat." They replied, "We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish." And he said, "Bring them here to me." Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

Sermon

My mom has a funny story about the first time she met my dad’s family as his fiancée. She was invited to dinner. The dinner they had was a pot roast which was a real treat because it was a rare occurrence. When the platter of meat was brought to the table, the younger kids all touched a piece of the meat. Doing this guaranteed that they would get the piece they wanted since no one wanted to eat a piece of meat that someone else had touched.

My mom thought that it was funny that kids would go to this extreme, but there was really another side to the story. To understand the what was really going on, you have to know that my dad is one of thirteen children and he was born in the middle of the great Depression. You also have to understand that my grandfather was an alcoholic and that my grandmother supported the family until the oldest kids (of which my father is one) were old enough to work.

So when my aunts and uncles touched the meat to make sure they got a piece, it wasn’t only to make sure that they got the piece they wanted. It was to make sure that they got a piece at all. They were all worried that they would not get any meat; that there would not be enough to go around.

In our gospel lesson today, we heard about a miracle called “The Feeding of the Five Thousand” or, as it is more often called in Sunday School lessons, “The Miracle of the Loaves and the Fishes”. It is much more than a story about feeding hungry people. Like most miracles that Jesus performed, it had a literal meaning: that of showing God’s power and grace in multiplying the amount of food to feed more than could possibly be fed with the meager amount available.

Some people will go so far as to argue that there was no miracle: that the willingness of one person to share out the little that he had shamed everyone else into bringing out the food they had brought with them and were hoarding so they wouldn’t have to share it with everyone else. I remember a bible story in a book somewhere with this scenario; probably someone’s attempt to teach children how to share. But teaching people how to share with each other was not the point of this miracle. Like most miracles that Jesus performed, it not only had the literal meaning we’ve already noted, it also had a figurative meaning. There was more to it than just feeding people miraculously. It was about having “enough.”

Most of us are worried about not having “enough” too. We worry about not having enough to eat, certainly, but we also worry about not having enough possessions, enough friends, and most of all, enough love.

How many of us can remember (if we were not the only child in our family) thinking that our parents loved one of our siblings more than they loved us? I know I can. I think every child with siblings believes at some point that their parents love one child more than another. Once we have children of our own, we realize that it doesn’t work that way. We love each of our children differently than each other, because they are all different people. “More” love or “less” love doesn’t come into the equation at all.

But children think that if their parents love one child “more” that means that they must have “less” love for their other child or children, as if a parent’s love could be quantified and have a set limit. By the time we’re adults and have children of our own, we should realize that that is not true at all. But do we really?

When it comes to God’s love, don’t we often act as if there was a limit for that love? How many times have I heard people express the thought that God couldn’t love someone who murdered thousands of people like Hitler did? I’ve even heard some folks express the idea that if God could love and forgive someone as awful as Jeffrey Daumer, they wouldn’t want any part of him. Surely there has to be a line drawn somewhere, somewhere where the love stops.

Because we can’t understand the infinite love that God has for all of humanity, we try to put our own limits on it. Sadly, not only do we try to set a limit for the amount of love God has for people whose sins we do not approve of, we also set limits on the love God has for we ourselves. How many of us have thought that if God really knew us, exactly as we are, that he simply couldn’t love us? We certainly have a hard time loving ourselves, so maybe God has the same trouble?

But the truth is, God’s love is limitless and unconditional. He has enough love for every single person who has ever lived and has love to spare, as is symbolized by the 12 baskets of loaves and fishes left after the feeding of the 5000. Nothing we can do can ever stop God from loving us…all of the barriers between God and ourselves are of our own making.

There is also another meaning to the miracle of the loaves and fishes. In the story, Jesus instructs the disciples to feed the people. He blesses and breaks the bread and the disciples distribute it to the hungry people. It symbolizes the role of the church in the world; by sharing out the love of Christ to those who are hungry to receive it, we feed them spiritually. We show them that God will be “enough” for them.

As we can see all around us, the world is hungry for what God has to offer. There is a quote popularly attributed to Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher, but which is actually from an early church father, St. Ambrose. He said, “There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.”

Pascal himself said something similar: “What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.”

God is the only one that can fill the space inside each of us, the space we so often try to fill with possessions, food, drugs, alcohol, and the love of other people. None of these things can truly satisfy us as God can. And the miracle is we don’t have to worry about having “enough” to go around.

Proper 11 Year A July 20, 2008

2008-07-20T05:42:00.000-07:00

Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

Jesus put before the crowd another parable: "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, `Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?' He answered, `An enemy has done this.' The slaves said to him, `Then do you want us to go and gather them?' But he replied, `No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.'"

Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, "Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field." He answered, "The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!"

Sermon

It’s an odd thing, but most Christians today really don’t like to talk about hell.

We like to accentuate the positive, and hell is certainly not a positive place. But how can we avoid talking about it when Christ preached about hell 22 times?

John F. MacArthur, in his book Ashamed of the Gospel relates this:

“One survey of evangelical seminary students revealed that:

Nearly half—46 percent—felt preaching about hell to unbelievers is in “poor taste.”
Worse yet, three out of every ten self-professed “born again” people surveyed believe “good” people will go to heaven when they die—even if they’ve never trusted Christ.
One in every ten evangelicals say they believe the concept of sin is outmoded.”

So whatever happened to our concept of hell? Research shows that only 32 percent of Americans believe that hell is a real place of torment. Is hell passé?

In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus talks about the sons of the evil one being thrown into a fiery furnace at the end of the world. This is a reference to the fires of Gehenna, also referred to in the book of Revelation as the “lake of fire”. Gehenna was different that Sheol, a place where the dead pretty much just hang out waiting for the final judgment. Gehenna was actually a name of a garbage dump outside of Jerusalem. There were fires there constantly, burning the garbage of the city. They never went out. Jesus used it as an illustration of what would happen to those who reject God at the time of the last judgment.

Some biblical scholars feel that Gehenna is an actual place of fiery torment; others speculate that it is a symbolic metaphor for eternal separation from God. But whatever we believe about the nature of the punishment that is to come to those who reject God, we cannot deny that Jesus himself said that there would be such a punishment. Martin Luther said, “What hell is, we know not; only this we know, that there is such a sure and certain place.”

Once we come to such a conclusion, we often ask ourselves why a God of love would send anyone to such a place as Jesus described.

James Packer, in his book Your Father Loves You, says this:

Why do men shy away from the thought of God as a judge? Why do they feel unworthy of him? The truth is that part of God’s moral perfection is his perfection in judgment. Would a God who did not care about the difference between right and wrong be a good and admirable being? Would a God who put no distinction between the beasts of history, the Hitlers and Stalins (if we dare use names), and his own saints be morally praiseworthy and perfect? Moral indifference would be an imperfection in God, not a perfection. And not to judge the world would be to show moral indifference. The final proof that God is a perfect moral being, not indifferent to questions of right and wrong, is the fact that he has committed himself to judge the world.

It is clear that the reality of divine judgment must have a direct effect on our view of life. If we know that retributive judgment faces us at the end of the road, we shall not live as otherwise we would. But it must be emphasized that the doctrine of divine judgment, and particularly of the final judgment, is not to be thought of primarily as a bogeyman, with which to frighten men into an outward form of conventional righteousness. It has its frightening implications for godless men, it is true; but its main thrust is as a revelation of the moral character of God, and an imparting of moral significance to human life.

There will be a judgment. To deny that would mean that God would be not have placed much importance on what we do or do not do. It would negate the whole necessity of the sacrifice of God’s only son to save us from such a fate. What would be the point of Jesus’ death on the cross if God were just going to say, “oh all right…you can come in anyway!”?

Anglican Bishop J.D. Ryle said,

A flood of false doctrine has lately broken in upon us. Men are beginning to tell us “that God is too merciful to punish souls for ever...that all mankind, however wicked and ungodly...will sooner or later be saved.” We are to embrace what is called “kinder theology,” and treat hell as a pagan fable...This question lies at the very foundation of the whole Gospel. The moral attributes of God, His justice, His holiness, His purity, are all involved in it. The Scripture has spoken plainly and fully on the subject of hell... If words mean anything, there is such a place as hell. If texts are to be interpreted fairly, there are those who will be cast into it...The same Bible which teaches that God in mercy and compassion sent Christ to die for sinners, does also teach that God hates sin, and must from His very nature punish all who cleave to sin or refuse the salvation He has provided.

God knows that I never speak of hell without pain and sorrow. I would gladly offer the salvation of the Gospel to the very chief of sinners. I would willingly say to the vilest and most profligate of mankind on his deathbed, “Repent, and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” But God forbid that I should ever keep back from mortal man that scripture reveals a hell as well as heaven...that men may be lost as well as saved.

Jesus’ death on the cross is the most incontrovertible proof of the existence of a final judgment; without that judgment, there would be no need for salvation.

So what are we to do with our knowledge of the reality of hell? Do we rush about, pointing fingers, telling people to get to church or they will go to hell? Do we spend our time telling sinners that they will burn if they do not become Christians?

Critics of Christianity often call it a religion of fear, as if we have all become Christians because we are afraid of going to hell. But I have to wonder how many people become Christians because of the fear of hell. While Christians who were polled by ChristiaNet.com came in with a 95% belief in the existence of hell, if the first number I quoted, that of the number of Americans who believe in hell, is any indication, the number of people who have become Christians because of the fear of hell is probably a fairly low number. I believe, though, that that number probably rises the closer people come to the end of their lives.

My personal reason for becoming a Christian had nothing to do with fear of an afterlife in hell. My concern was more for my life here and now. If Christianity had nothing more to offer than an escape from hell, it wouldn’t be much of a way of life, would it? And really, why would anyone choose to believe in God because of the threat of an afterlife that they could choose NOT to believe in instead? Reading anecdotal accounts of people who have turned from Christianity to atheism, it’s often because of the doctrine of hell. People would rather not believe in God at all so that they can avoid believing in hell as well. One could easily say that atheism is religion of fear: fear of a belief in hell.

But, as Christians, we know that Christianity is more than an escape route from hell. It is the way we, as humans, can become whole again. It is the only way we can repair the damage that sin does to our lives and the damage we do to those we love. It is all about raising us above ourselves, not keeping us from falling lower than we are.

The only motivation that hell should have for Christians today is to encourage them to spread the gospel freely among family and friends. It’s impossible to motivate people to believe through fear, yet our fear for their fate should be one of our motivating factors.

When you read today’s gospel lesson, you’ll see that God does not give us the responsibility of judging who will end up in hell…it is reserved for the angels to gather up those who will be cast into the fiery furnace. The primary message we need to bear to the world is that God loves us and that he has provided a way for us to be with him in heaven someday through the sacrifice of his Son. People who are ready for what the gospel has to offer will crave that message.

Jesus used the imagery of seeds and sowers very wisely. We can only spread the seed. The Holy Spirit provides the water and light that helps the seed to grow. We can only be the means of distributing that seed. We are not the ones to decide how well it is growing and where it will end up, as our gospel lesson illustrates. We can’t tell which is the rocky ground, the hard path or the good soil. We can only spread the seed and trust God to do the rest.

Proper 9 Year A July 6, 2008

2008-07-06T20:34:00.000-07:00

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Jesus said to the crowd, "To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another,

`We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;

we wailed, and you did not mourn.'

For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, `He has a demon'; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, `Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds."

At that time Jesus said, "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

"Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

Sermon

The image of a yoke is often used in the Bible to indicate servitude and bondage. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus talks about his yoke being easy and his burden light. In contrast with the pharisaical law, what Jesus offered must have seemed very light indeed.

The Pharisees had developed a system of 613 different laws, including 365 negative commands and 248 positive laws. To follow all of these laws to the letter was a very heavy burden indeed.

By contrast, Jesus offered two laws: love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself. This must have seemed like being free indeed to the law-burdened Jewish people.

So why do we make such a heavy burden out of following Christ?

One of the most dangerous fallacies that followers of Christ fall into is legalism, that is, the tendency to focus on the mechanism of faith rather than the substance.

Throughout the history of our faith, certain beliefs and practices have drawn criticism as being too legalistic, including:

Fasting
Keeping the Sabbath
Not dancing, playing cards or drinking
Belief that the King James Version of the Bible is the only valid version
The use of statuary in the church
The belief that the only way to pray is in tongues and only those that do are true believers

Yet this has been going on since the very beginning of Christianity. Christian schools in the 2^nd century commonly instructed the believer to wear only white clothing, sell their musical instruments, to stop sleeping on a soft pillow and to not eat white bread, shave their beards or to take warm baths. The list has had additions and subtractions over the years.

All of these restrictions observed by various denominations all focus on the mechanism of faith rather than the substance. They turn what was meant to be freedom from observing a suppressive law into yet a new suppressive law. We lose our freedom in Christ and our yoke is no longer easy or light.

We may be patting ourselves on the back at this point, saying, “We don’t do any of this.” I hate to tell you, but being an Episcopalian can bring its own special brand of legalism.

For instance, when I was first attending this church, I read a book called Introduction to the Episcopal Church. In it, there were some rules about how to take communion, including the fact that you should not eat anything before taking communion, which would be rather a burden for someone with problems with their blood sugar who happened to enjoy attending a later morning service. In addition, the book instructed that you should never let the host touch your teeth after it was placed in your mouth…it was supposed to dissolve slowly on the tongue. I find that rule impossible to keep when singing in the choir: I simply cannot wait for the host to dissolve on my tongue because I have to return to the choir and sing the anthem before that could possibly happen. I have to chew and swallow. There seems to be no good reasons for these rules, but I imagine at some point someone thought there was a good reason. And that is the true mark of legalism: following a rule because it is there, even if it no longer makes sense, much as that often repeated story about the woman who cut the end off the ham, because her mother always had done it, only to find when her mother was asked why she cut it off, it was because her mother had always done it. And when grandma was asked why she cut off the end of the ham, she said it was because her roasting pan was too small to fit the ham unless she cut off the end.

We also have a tendency to cling fairly rigidly to our liturgy. Some of our churches insist that the 1928 prayer book is the only valid prayer book. Part of the reason is that liturgy that is familiar can be very comforting in a world of rapidly changing technology, morals and values. But that very familiarity can become dull and uninspiring, leading our thoughts not to God, but to mental listing of what is needed to buy at the grocery store or if it’s time to change the oil in our cars.

But apart from the unique legalism of being an Episcopalian, we also create our own private legalism. We wonder how long we should pray, how much we should pray, what words we should use when we pray.

Should we read the Bible every day? How much of it should we read? Should we attend church every Sunday, or can we miss some Sundays? Should we take communion every Sunday, or is it okay not to have a Eucharist every Sunday? By focusing on such questions, it’s very easy to forget why we are in church to begin with.

Charles Spurgeon, that most famous of 19^th century preachers, wrote:

“I have found, in my own spiritual life, that the more rules I lay down for myself, the more sins I commit. The habit of regular morning and evening prayer is one which is indispensable to a believer’s life, but the prescribing of the length of prayer, and the constrained remembrance of so many persons and subjects, may gender unto bondage, and strangle prayer rather than assist it.”

We want to do the right thing, so we try to conform ourselves to some sort of discipline. Yet in conforming to that discipline, we often lose the very reason why we are doing what we are doing in the first place. Bible study and prayer are both wonderful and essential to the believer who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God. But when we force ourselves to study and pray when we can’t give all your attention to it, we lose the joy of study and prayer, it becomes burdensome. We feel guilty when we can’t follow the rigid course we laid down for ourselves. We can tell ourselves we aren’t “good Christians” so it becomes easier, as Charles Spurgeon noted, to sin since we are already convinced we are not that good at being Christians anyway.

The flip side of the legalism coin can cause us to place too much emphasis on what we do to please God in comparison to what others do.

In searching out articles on legalism online, I came across an interesting blog called The Shepherd’s Scrapbook. One of the posters on this blog, who goes by the user name of Spurgeon, said this about legalism:

“Legalism is the damning lie that says God’s pleasure and joy in me is dependent upon my obedience.

It is legalism that causes the Pharisee to look proudly into the sky in the presence of a tax collector. It is legalism that causes a missionary in Africa to think God is more pleased with him than the Christian businessman in America. And it is legalism that causes the preacher behind the pulpit to think God is more pleased with him than the tatooed Christian teenager sitting in the back row.”

We need to be aware of our tendency to fall into legalism as we try to live our lives as Christ would have us live them. Our focus should be not what we (or others) do in church or the world, but why we do what we do. Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” By putting our focus on Christ and listening to the direction of the Holy Spirit, we can prevent ourselves from placing too much emphasis on the mechanisms of our faith and can rediscover the joy that awaits us as we discover the abundant life that Christ promises us. F. F. Bruce, one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century, said that “Doing the will of God is not a matter of conformity to outward rules but of giving expression to inward love, such as the Spirit begets.” By listening to the Holy Spirit, we can discern what God’s will is for our life, rather than relying on rules and regulations.

Proper 7 Year A June 22, 2008

2008-06-23T07:39:00.000-07:00

Matthew 10:24-39

Jesus said to the twelve disciples,

"A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master; it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household!

"So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.

"Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.

"Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

"For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one's foes will be members of one's own household.

"Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."

Sermon

Today I want you to make some mental lists. First, I want you to list 5 people you really love to be around. Second, 5 things you really enjoy doing. Now list one thing that causes the most pain and trouble in your life and that you wish you could get rid of.

Okay. Let’s imagine at this point that you now have to give up being around those 5 people you love and to give up those 5 things you really enjoy doing in order to be a Christian. What about the thing that causes the most pain and trouble? You have to keep that, sorry.

So, are you willing to give all that up? Are you willing to lay it down and follow Jesus?

In our country these days, we have it pretty easy. We usually do not have to give up much of anything to be a Christian. The same is not true for other countries around the globe. Christians in North Korea, China, Iraq, Pakistan and other parts of the world are suffering for their faith. They have to surrender their livelihoods, turn their backs on family and friends, are driven out of their homes and lose everything they own, sometimes even their lives, in order to follow Jesus.

You can read their stories on websites like the Voice of the Martyrs and International Christian Concern. I printed off this report from the latter site that lists the top 10 countries that persecute Christians. It makes for sobering reading.

This is what Jesus is describing to the disciples in our gospel reading today. This is what the early church faced as it struggled to spread the gospel. The fact that these saints succeeded despite everything they suffered speaks volumes for the strength of their belief in what they were doing. It is one of the most powerful reasons for realizing that Jesus was really who he claimed to be. How many people do you know who would willingly die for a lie? These witnesses were willing to lay down their lives because they KNEW that Jesus was the Son of God. They believed wholeheartedly in the truth of what they preached. They gave their all.

And this powerful witness is what spreads the gospel, even today. It is the reason why Christianity is growing in the very countries that seek to repress it. The gospel has always resonated in places where there is little hope, because of the hope that it offers.

So how can we hope to match that? We live in a country with the greatest freedom of religion that the world has ever seen. Most of us never will be persecuted for our faith, other than in subtle social ways. So how does the message in our reading pertain to us?

We have a harder time making disciples in our country simply because we have it so easy. It’s hard to witness the awesome power of belief in something when you won’t lose anything by that belief. So what do we do to show people the difference that our belief makes in our lives?

That’s where we come to that last item: the one thing in your life that causes you the most pain and sorrow. Sorry…you don’t get to turn your back on it. You have to pick it up and follow Jesus. That is your cross. The most effective witness you can make to the indifferent world we live in is to show how your faith allows you to live with your pain and sorrow. One of the most deceptive theologies alive in our country to day is the so-called “Prosperity Doctrine”. It teaches that if you believe in God, that you can get whatever you want just by “claiming it”, that is, speaking the words aloud. As if God was some sort of giant vending machine that will spit out what you want if you only put in the right amount of money and press the right buttons.

Such a doctrine is dangerous, not only because it is false, but because it does not make disciples. It produces followers that will leave at the first disappointment when they do not get what they want. In order to make truly strong disciples in our country, the only thing we can do is to show how our faith allows us to cope with disease, sorrow and want.

By living our faith through our suffering, we can make effective witnesses for the gospel today. St. Francis said, “Preach the gospel always, when necessary use words.” Our lives and how we live them will always be our most effective witness to the world.

D. L. Moody said, “A holy life will make the deepest impression. Lighthouses blow no horns, they just shine.”

Proper 5 Year A June 8, 2008

2008-06-08T07:37:00.000-07:00

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, "Follow me." And he got up and followed him.

And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" But when he heard this, he said, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, `I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners."

While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader of the synagogue came in and knelt before him, saying, "My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live." And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, "If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well." Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, "Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well." And instantly the woman was made well. When Jesus came to the leader's house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a commotion, he said, "Go away; for the girl is not dead but sleeping." And they laughed at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. And the report of this spread throughout that district.

Sermon

In a couple of weeks, it will be exactly halfway to Christmas. Sound good today? Cold? Snow? Looking forward to it? No?

I bring up Christmas today because of one of my favorite movies that I watch at Christmas time every year, A Miracle on 34^th Street. This classic Christmas movie, staring Maureen O’Hara and Natalie Wood, is a movie about faith. And faith is what our gospel reading is all about today.

In the gospel reading, we see two wonderful examples of people who had faith. The leader of the synagogue had faith that Jesus could raise his daughter from the dead. The woman with hemorrhages had faith that Jesus could heal her. They both got what they asked for, because they had faith.

In the movie, Fred Gailey, the lawyer played by John Payne, tells Doris Walker, played by Maureen O’Hara, that “faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to.” Doris had let her bad experiences with men color her outlook on life, causing her to raise her daughter, Susan, to not believe in anything except that which she could see.

A lot of people today also do not believe in anything except that which they can see. They scorn faith as a crutch and a delusion. Their “common sense” tells them that God does not exist.

It’s often hard to discuss God with such people, because there really is no way to prove conclusively to such people that God exists. And you’ll find that most of them have tried to find out whether God exists, but since they can’t find enough evidence, they will not believe. They read as much as they can on the subject and finally they come to the same conclusion that I came to, when I was conducting a similar search:

There is no way to reason ourselves into faith in God. We can’t read enough books, we can’t conduct experiments, we can’t do anything except DECIDE to believe. That decision to believe is faith. Faith is not a feeling. It is not something we receive from God. It is truly deciding to believe in something IN SPITE of the lack of evidence or evidence to the contrary.

So what does this have to do with us? We’re all sitting here in church, believing in God, right? Why do we need to talk about faith at all, since we obviously have it?

Ah, but do we? We have faith that God exists, but what kind of God do we believe in? Do we believe in a personal God, who will actually care whether we get the job we need, or give us healing for our diseases, or find a buyer for our house? Or do we lack that faith, believing instead in a God who is impersonal, uninterested in us and our daily lives? Do we lack the faith that would let God help us or do we struggle on trying to solve our own problems without God’s help?

In our gospel reading, the women with hemorrhages only wanted to touch the fringes of Jesus’ garment, believing that that was all she would need to do. Her faith in a personal caring God led her to believe that she not only didn’t need to touch Jesus himself, she didn’t even need his whole attention. She made a choice to believe in a God that was so powerful that even touching the fringe of his garment would heal her. Even as this timid approach was enough to get Jesus’ attention, so we do not need to fear approaching God with problems that seem trivial to us when compared with others’ greater problems. Everything that concerns us, concerns God.

Catherine Marshall, in her book “Beyond Ourselves” relates how she was struggling to create a curtain for her door such as she’d seen in a women’s magazine. It had an hourglass shape and looked like it would be easy to copy, but try as she might she simply could not figure out how it was made. She writes:

“Finally, in great disgust, I gave up, went upstairs and flopped down on a bed. After I had been lying there a few minutes the inner Voice said very quietly, “You do it this way.” There followed a set of simple directions involving graduated tucks. The directions worked easily, perfectly.”

She goes on to say that while this help she received may seem trivial, that it is a “mistake to think of God’s intervention only in terms of great events and dramatic circumstances—a sudden healing, or the saving of a life in jeopardy. After all, most of our days are full of ordinary events and common experiences. Are we to believe that God has no interest in these?”

In the movie, Doris is finally convinced that it is important to have faith. Doris tells Susan she should believe that Santa Claus will bring her the present she asked for. Susan repeats to herself, “I believe, I believe; it’s silly, but I believe” and is rewarded by getting her heart’s desire.

Just like that first step in faith in God, we also have to take the step of faith in believing in a personal God. We need to decide that God IS interested in our daily lives, in helping us with our daily concerns, large and small. No, it doesn’t make sense that God would have time for us, with as many problems as the world has today and with the sheer numbers of people on the earth. “What is man that you are mindful of him?” the psalmist said. It’s a question that we have been asking ourselves for centuries. But when we realize that God can pay attention to all our needs big and small, all of us, all the time, we only begin to know how incredibly powerful, awesome and loving God is, a God that has every hair of our heads numbered and knows when every sparrow falls.

Common sense would say, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Ramona C. Carroll, a Christian author, said, “Faith is putting all your eggs in God's basket, then counting your blessings before they hatch.” May we all have that kind of faith.

Proper 3 Year A May 25, 2008

2008-05-25T07:33:00.000-07:00

Matthew 6:24-34

Jesus said, "No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you-- you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, `What will we eat?' or `What will we drink?' or `What will we wear?' For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

"So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today."

Sermon

He brought the fruit to his mouth, marveling at its fragrance, the tautness of the skin and the beauty of its coloring. He opened his mouth to take a bite…and all hell broke loose.

If we had been there, knowing what we know, we would have struck it from his hand before he took that first bite. Because with that first bite, all manner of sins were let loose in the world and one of those sins was worry.

If you stop any Christian on the way into church and asked them, “Is worrying a sin?” probably most of them would say no.

However, if you look at any account of sin in the old or new testaments, you’ll find that sin can be categorized in three ways:

1) Sin damages our relationship with God.

2) Sin hurts other people and damages our relationships with them.

3) Sin damages our bodies.

Worry, when you evaluate it, is a double-barreled sin. It fits into two of these categories. Worry damages our relationship with God. Because when we worry, we do not trust God to care for us. Jesus points this out in today’s gospel lesson when he says,

“Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”

Jesus goes on to say,

“And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?”

The fact is that not only can you not add an hour to your life by worrying, you actually shorten your life. Worry, also known as anxiety, damages our bodies and shortens our lives. It is a contributing factor in diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension. It is bad for us, plain and simple. Our own bodies are wiser than we are, because when we worry, it feels bad. All sorts of warning signals flare. Our hearts race, our muscles clench, we can’t sleep, and we can’t eat; all these are signals that something is wrong and we need to stop it.

“But I can’t help myself!” many people will say when it comes to worry. And it does seem that some people are more prone to worrying than others. Plus, as we get older, we are more likely to worry because we know more about what can go wrong. Knowledge is at the root of worry and that is what happened back in the Garden. The fruit was on the tree and it was the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. And knowing what evil is brings fear of what it can do to us. If Adam had never bitten into that apple, if Eve had not listened to the serpent, we would all be better off. Worry is fear in casual clothing.

In the series of books by Jan Karon called the Mitford Series, Father Tim’s wife, Cynthia, tells Father Tim: “Fear is of the Enemy” When we listen to what the Enemy, or Satan, has to tell us, that’s when we start worrying. We listen to the Enemy instead of God, just as Adam and Eve did. We sin.

Yes, it’s hard not to listen to that voice. And God knows it is hard for us, but we have to keep trying to drown out the voice of the Enemy, because if we don’t, soon the voice of the Enemy will be only one we hear.

It takes a lot of effort to wrench your mind away from the contemplation of all that can go wrong and turn it to God. But like anything, using the mental muscles that turn our inward ear towards God gets easier with use. We will be sore and weary for a while each time we do it. But as we go on, it will be easier and easier.

In the book of Proverbs, Solomon tells his son:

1 My son, do not forget my teaching,
but keep my commands in your heart,

2 for they will prolong your life many years
and bring you prosperity.

3 Let love and faithfulness never leave you;
bind them around your neck,
write them on the tablet of your heart.

4 Then you will win favor and a good name
in the sight of God and man.

5 Trust in the LORD with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;

6 in all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make your paths straight. ^[a]

7 Do not be wise in your own eyes;
fear the LORD and shun evil.

8 This will bring health to your body
and nourishment to your bones.

Trust the Lord, let love and faithfulness never leave you and worry will be far from your door. Mary C. Crowley, a Christian business woman said, “Every evening I turn my worries over to God. He's going to be up all night anyway.” Good advice, indeed!

The Day of Pentecost Year A May 11, 2008

2008-05-11T07:30:00.000-07:00

John 7:37-39

On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, `Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water.'" Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.

It’s nice to know that in a country like ours, in this day and age, water is so easy to obtain. Very few of us have ever been really thirsty. Water is available everywhere: by bottle at the nearest convenience store, from the tap in our homes, drinking fountains at the mall and even the garden hose in our yards.

So it’s probably harder for us to understand the analogy that Jesus was drawing when it came to thirst. Water, in ancient Israel, was certainly not the easily obtainable commodity it is in our own country. People then knew what thirst was, REAL thirst. Here’s a description of thirst from Christ’s Call to Discipleship by J.M Boice, who relates the experience of a soldier in the British liberation of Palestine:

‘Driving up from Beersheba, a combined force of British, Australians and New Zealanders were pressing on the rear of the Turkish retreat over arid desert. The attack outdistanced its water carrying camel train. Water bottles were empty. The sun blazed pitilessly out of a sky where the vultures wheeled expectantly. “Our heads ached,” writes Gilbert, “and our eyes became bloodshot and dim in the blinding glare...Our tongues began to swell...Our lips turned a purplish black and burst.”’

Most of us have never been in any danger of dying of thirst. But to the people that Jesus was addressing, “thirst” meant something entirely more profound than a mildly irritating physical symptom easily satisfied by a visit to the kitchen.

Of course, the “living water” that Jesus refers to is the Holy Spirit, which we celebrate the church receiving today, the Day of Pentecost. We celebrate this every year, but do we really understand what receiving the Holy Spirit means? Are we really THIRSTY for it? Do we really want it, the way that someone in the desert really desires water in a way that we may never experience?

It’s a vital question. A lot of us dabble our feet in the fountain of Christianity, but we don’t really drink. We hold ourselves back from complete commitment. We are afraid to drink, afraid of what it might demand of us.

What are we so afraid of? Jesus, in the fourth chapter of John describes living water. Tired from his journey through Samaria, he sits by a well:

7When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, "Will you give me a drink?" 8(His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

9The Samaritan woman said to him, "You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?" (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.^[a])

10Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water."

11"Sir," the woman said, "you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?"

13Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

Imagine drinking water that filled your every desire for water for eternity! This is what the Holy Spirit does for us spiritually. By receiving the Spirit, the deepest desires of our hearts are all satisfied. All the things we thought would satisfy pale in comparison, and God becomes all in all to us. Yet we cling to those desires instead of receiving the living water that would satisfy us so completely. Why are we so resistant?

D.L. Moody, the 19^th century American evangelist said, “I believe firmly that the moment our hearts are emptied of pride and selfishness and ambition and everything that is contrary to God’s law, the Holy Spirit will fill every corner of our hearts. But if we are full of pride and conceit and ambition and the world, there is no room for the Spirit of God. We must be emptied before we can be filled.”

And that’s it in a nutshell. We are afraid to let go of the things we think make us who we are. We can’t be filled until we surrender it all to God. And deep down we are worried; we think, “Will I still be myself if I surrender it all to God? What will be left of me?”

In my own experience and in many whom I have spoken with regarding this act of surrender, this is the main stumbling block to the complete Christian commitment. It is the fear of trading the known for the unknown, of being asked to do things that we don’t want to do, to give up things which we very much like and don’t want to have to give up. Yet what choice do we have? These things that we hold on to so tightly will never fill us in the way that the Holy Spirit can. Most of us turn to God when we find our lives are not working, when we realize that the way we have been running them is flawed and empty. Obviously if we were doing such a great job before, we wouldn’t need God as we do, we would not thirst for the living water that he offers.

The truth is, surrendering our innermost selves to God will not negate us as a person. Instead we are made over, a new creation created from the best parts of ourselves, enhanced with new and special features. Instead of the old Janine, I become “maxed-out” Janine, a “high definition” Janine; the difference between water and living water.

So on this Day of Pentecost, let us open our hearts and minds to the gift of the Holy Spirit. Let the barriers fall, let the worries that are holding us back fall away, and let the living water flow through us. It is truly the only water that can satisfy our thirst, once and for all. Dr. William Bright, the late founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, wrote this prayer for those wishing to be filled by the Holy Spirit and I invite you to pray it with me now:

"Dear Father, I need You. I hunger and thirst for a more vital relationship with You. I admit that I have been in control of my life. As a result, I have sinned against You.

"Thank You for forgiving my sins through Christ's death on the cross for me. I now confess and turn from my sins and surrender the control of my life to the Lord Jesus. By faith I invite You to fill me with the Holy Spirit as You commanded me to be filled. You promised to fill me if I ask according to Your will. I pray this in the authority of the name of Jesus Christ.

"To demonstrate my faith, I now thank You for filling me with Your Holy Spirit and for taking control of my life. Amen."

Sixth Sunday after Easter Year A - April 27, 2008

2008-04-28T05:22:00.000-07:00

John 14:15-21

Jesus said to his disciples, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

"I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them."

Sermon

(Opening a bag of Cheetos and starts looking inside, shaking the bag to shift the Cheetos around)

What am I doing? Why, I’m looking for Jesus, of course! Isn’t everyone?

Well, sure, most people wouldn’t expect to find Jesus in a bag of Cheetos! But just recently a youth group minister in Houston, Texas revealed “Cheesus”, a Cheeto he believes holds the image of Jesus. He found it a couple of years ago and has kept it ever since.

For centuries, people have claimed to see images of Jesus in all sorts of ordinary objects.

In 2005, people in Rochester, NY claimed to see the face of Jesus in the bark of a silver maple tree on North Clinton Ave.

In the same year, a man in Pittsburgh claimed that Jesus appeared in a stain on a plaster wall in his shower. He subsequently removed the section of plaster containing the image and sold it on Ebay for $1999.

Another Ebay member claimed miraculous intervention occurred in his life because the face of Jesus appeared on his grilled ham and cheese sandwich.

As entertaining as all this is, I don’t think that it is at all what Jesus meant when he said that he would reveal himself to those who love him and keep his commandments.

In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus tells the disciples that he will be leaving them and the world will see him no longer. But because the disciples believe in him, they will see him. But the world will not see him, because they do not believe. While most of us have heard the phrase “seeing is believing” in this case, it should be “believing is seeing.”

Jesus outlines the steps for moving from believing to seeing. First, you love Jesus and you keep his commandments. Then Jesus will send you an Advocate, which is the Holy Spirit or the spirit of truth. And when the spirit of truth dwells with you, Jesus will reveal himself to you.

If that seems a little complicated, you are not alone. Wouldn’t it have been easier for God to just show up one day and say, “Here I am…now you know that I exist and you don’t have to worry about it any more”? My guess is that God is all too aware of how the human mind works. Josh McDowell, Christian apologist, explains it this way in his book Answers to Tough Questions:

“People refuse to believe that which they don’t want to believe, in spite of evidence. When explorers first went to Australia they found a mammal which laid eggs; spent some time in water, some on land; had a broad, flat tail, webbed feet, and a bill similar to a duck.

Upon their return to England, they told the populace of this, and all felt it was a hoax. They returned to Australia and found a pelt from this animal and took it back to England, but the people still felt it was a hoax. In spite of the evidence, they disbelieved because they didn’t want to believe.”

God knows that there will always be people who do not want to believe that he exists, in spite of evidence to the contrary. There are many examples in biblical history of this. God lead the people of Israel out of Egypt through many miraculous events, yet they abandoned him at the foot of Mt. Sinai as soon as Moses left them there to seek God on the mountain. These were the people who had seen with their own eyes the parting of the Red Sea, the provision of manna and quail, as well as many other miracles. Yet, in spite of all these miracles, they still made a decision to deny God.

In the book of Deuteronomy, God speaks to the Israelites through Moses saying:

“Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live.”

Obviously, God is aware of our tendency to deny him in spite of evidence to the contrary. And this problem grows worse as we grow older, which is why Jesus said that in order to come to him, we needed the faith of a child. The older we get, the more we think we know. The more we think we know, the harder it is to take that leap of faith that is required to pass from believing into seeing. So how do we do this?

Alexander Maclaren was a famous 19^th century Baptist preacher. He wrote:

“Important lessons are given by this alternation of the two ideas of faith and unbelief, obedience and disobedience. Disobedience is the root of unbelief. Unbelief is the mother of further disobedience. Faith is voluntary submission within a person’s own power. If faith is not exercised, the true cause lies deeper than all intellectual reasons. It lies in the moral aversion of human will and in the pride of independence, which says, “who is Lord over us? Why should we have to depend on Jesus Christ?” As faith is obedience and submission, so faith breeds obedience, but unbelief leads on to higher-handed rebellion. With dreadful reciprocity of influence, the less one trusts, the more he disobeys; the more he disobeys, the less he trusts. “

When you think about this link between faith and obedience, you will see how impossible it is to have faith without submission to God’s authority. We cling to our will, not wanting to give up going our own way, making our decisions independently of what God may want us to do. By denying God’s authority over us, we become unable to believe. And because we can’t believe, we cannot see him. That is why Jesus says, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” By submitting ourselves in obedience to him, we have faith that God really does know what is best for us. And our faith brings us a dividend, for by it we will receive the spirit of truth that will enable us to see Jesus.

But does that mean that we will actually get a visit from Jesus? What does it mean, to “see” Jesus?

As you come to know Jesus, as the Holy Spirit guides you to a deeper relationship with him, you probably will not see Jesus physically. In fact, I think that many people waste a lot of time trying to see Jesus physically, when instead they should be seeking him elsewhere. Have you ever noticed that none of the authors of the gospels ever described Jesus physically? We don’t know what he looked like, simply because what he looked like was not important. It was the spirit of God manifested in Jesus that was the important thing. So if we aren’t looking for the image of Jesus, how can we see Jesus these days?

The key actually lies in the reading today. Jesus says, “keep my commandments”, which surely refers to the admonition to love one another. After all, Jesus told us that the greatest of all the commandments is to “love God with all your heart and all your mind and to love your neighbor as yourself.” By loving our neighbor as ourselves, we will see Jesus.

No one epitomized the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves better than Mother Teresa of Calcutta. She said, "I see God in every human being. When I wash the leper's wounds, I feel I am nursing the Lord Himself. Is it not a beautiful experience?"

She also said, “If now we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten how to see God in one another. If each person saw God in his neighbor, do you think we would need guns and bombs?”

So let’s look around and see Jesus. He may be in the person in the next pew, in the driver in the car beside ours on the freeway, in the waitress taking our order at the restaurant we visit, in the nurse taking our blood pressure at the doctor’s office or in the homeless person just looking for a warm place to sleep. Sure beats looking for him in a bag of Cheetos, doesn’t it?

Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A, April 13, 2008

2008-04-13T05:32:00.000-07:00

You’ll find many unbelieving people who think it’s funny that Christians refer to themselves as sheep, since sheep are supposed to be very stupid animals. To call someone a sheep is to infer that they are blind followers, people who park their brains at the door and allow themselves to be led.

But actually sheep are pretty intelligent. In fact, they are almost as intelligent as pigs, which are regarded as one of the most intelligent animals around. They have the ability to recognize human faces and will remember them for years. They can also recognize human emotion through our facial expressions. They have very good hearing and can be taught to respond to their names if you work with them for a while. And, as Jesus stated in today’s gospel reading, they can differentiate between human voices. They know the voice of their shepherd and will respond to that voice.

In today’s gospel reading, we have two kinds of shepherds: the good shepherd and the bad shepherd. The shepherd as a symbol for religious leadership is found throughout the old and new testaments of the Bible. In the 34^th chapter of the book of Ezekiel we find a description of what a bad shepherd is:

1 And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2 “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, prophesy and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD to the shepherds: “Woe to the shepherds of Israel who feed themselves! Should not the shepherds feed the flocks? 3 You eat the fat and clothe yourselves with the wool; you slaughter the fatlings, but you do not feed the flock. 4 The weak you have not strengthened, nor have you healed those who were sick, nor bound up the broken, nor brought back what was driven away, nor sought what was lost; but with force and cruelty you have ruled them. 5 So they were scattered because there was no shepherd; and they became food for all the beasts of the field when they were scattered. 6 My sheep wandered through all the mountains, and on every high hill; yes, My flock was scattered over the whole face of the earth, and no one was seeking or searching for them.” 7 Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the LORD: 8 “as I live,” says the Lord GOD, “surely because My flock became a prey, and My flock became food for every beast of the field, because there was no shepherd, nor did My shepherds search for My flock, but the shepherds fed themselves and did not feed My flock”

The good shepherd feeds the flock. He strengthens the weak, heals those who are sick, binds up the broken, brings back what was driven away, and seeks what was lost. This good shepherd is Jesus and we are to heed his voice and his voice alone.

In Jesus’ day, the bad shepherds were the priests and Pharisees, who had bound the Jewish people so tightly to the law that it was impossible to follow. They had lost sight of what was important to God and had become bound up in rules and regulations. They had ceased to feed the flock and care for it.

In our own day, there are also bad shepherds that seek to lead the sheep astray. It can be hard to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd among the babble of voices that claim to be speaking for him. These days New Age practitioners attempt to redefine Jesus, taking away the words he spoke that they find disturbing, and remaking Jesus into a God more to their tastes. Just recently a very famous talk show host featured some of these practitioners on her show and set up an online course to introduce their teaching to a wide audience. Thousands of people are taking this course, following a voice that is not the Good Shepherd’s voice. So how do we discern the voice of our Shepherd amongst those who would attempt to lead us astray? Why are so many people unable to discern the true voice of their Shepherd?

The voice of our Shepherd is found in God’s Word. And amazingly enough, even though the average Christian owns 3 copies of the Bible, he or she may not even have read them. A recent Gallup poll indicated that only 16 percent of Christians polled read the Bible daily. According to Gallup, less than half of those claiming to be born-again Christians can list five of the Ten Commandments. Only three out of five Christians could recall the names of the first four books of the New Testament. Only half of the Christians who were polled could correctly identify the person who delivered the Sermon on the Mount. Without a good knowledge of what Jesus actually said, how can the sheep be able to hear the voice of their Shepherd?

A good knowledge of the Bible will allow us to hear that voice clearly and to discern the falseness of teachings that do not fit in with what Jesus said. Too many times we listen to the bad shepherds who try to rewrite the bible to make it more palatable for a world that seeks to follow its own way. As God told the Israelites when he gave them the commandments in the book of Deuteronomy:

6 These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

By spending time reading the Bible, by studying it, either by ourselves or by participating in Bible studies, and by taking the instructions God gave to the Israelites to heart and putting Bible verses around our homes, even if it’s just a simple post-it note put on the refrigerator, we can take the voice of the Good Shepherd into ourselves, insuring that we will listen only to the voice of He who would feed us, strengthen those of us who are weak, heal those who are sick, bind up those who are broken, bring back those who were driven away, and seek those who are lost.

Today we read the Venite, which is part of Psalm 93. I think that the last few verses would be a wonderful way to remember to listen to the voice of our Shepherd:

Come, let us bow down, and bend the knee

And kneel before the Lord our Maker,

For he is our God,

And we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.

Oh, that today you would hearken to his voice!

Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year A, March 9, 2008

2008-03-09T05:00:00.000-07:00

John 11:1-45

Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, "Lord, he whom you love is ill." But when Jesus heard it, he said, "This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God's glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it." Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.

Then after this he said to the disciples, "Let us go to Judea again." The disciples said to him, "Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?" Jesus answered, "Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them." After saying this, he told them, "Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him." The disciples said to him, "Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right." Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, "Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him." Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, "Let us also go, that we may die with him."

When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him." Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again." Martha said to him, "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day." Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?" She said to him, "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world."

When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, "The Teacher is here and is calling for you." And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, "See how he loved him!" But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?"

Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, "Take away the stone." Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, "Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days." Jesus said to her, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, "Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me." When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!" The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him, and let him go."

Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.

Sermon

Let’s play a little game today. I call this game, “Fill in the blanks.” Ready?

Consider the statement of Mary to Jesus: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Let’s add something to the end of that: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died and I would not ____________________.” Fill in the blank. What would Mary have said?

Now that you’ve had a chance to think of your answer, I imagine that many of them are one of the following:

a) I would not have been left here to struggle on alone.

b) I would not be grieving for him.

c) I would not face an uncertain future without my brother’s protection.

d) I would not now be faced with a loss of faith in your love for me.

It’s fairly certain that Mary’s greeting to Jesus was in the nature of a rebuke. If only Jesus had come sooner, everything would be different. She was totally focused on what this event had done to her, losing sight of the bigger picture.

Martha’s greeting, on the other hand, started out with the exact same sentence, yet she followed it with a strong statement of her faith in Jesus. But even Martha was concentrating on the wrong motives. Jesus is not some sort of on-call miracle worker, there to fix whatever life has thrown at you, like a plumber or electrician.

But that is how we often think of God, isn’t it? Someone to step in and rescue us when the going gets tough, just as it did for Mary and Martha.

But, guess what? It’s not all about you. It’s not all about me. If you’d like to be more factual, we are all about HIM.

When Jesus hears that Lazarus is ill, it’s almost like he was expecting it to happen. He was not worried and he took his time getting there. Why? He says, "This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God's glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it" and “I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me." The illness was there, not to punish Lazarus for sin or to punish Mary and Martha, but for no other reason than that it was God’s plan for Jesus to show the glory of God through raising Lazarus from the dead.

When Mary and Martha concentrate on what is happening to them personally, they lose sight of what Jesus was there for. Yes, he worked miracles. But the purpose of the miracles was not the miracles themselves, but the reflection of God’s glory so that those beholding them could see and believe, and so be saved. And we, in our Christian lives, often make the same mistake. In our self-centeredness, we concentrate on what God should be doing for us, rather than what we should be doing for God.

Max Lucado, in the book “It’s Not About Me” talks about the error of self-centeredness with the analogy of a symphony orchestra. If every instrumentalist was out to grab their place in the spotlight, the result would be cacophony. He describes it like this:

“Tubas blasting nonstop. Percussionists pounding to get attention. The cellist shoving the flutist out of the center-stage chair. The trumpeter standing atop the conductor’s stool tooting his horn. Sheet music disregarded. Conductor ignored. What do you have but an endless tune-up session!”

Mr. Lucado points out that playing in such a group would not make any musician happy. Yet this is exactly what the world teaches us to do for ourselves every day. He goes on to say:

“No wonder our homes are so noisy, business so stress-filled, government so cutthroat, and harmony so rare. If you think it’s all about you, and I think it’s all about me, we have no hope for a melody.”

Mr. Lucado’s suggestion is one that would have served both Mary and Martha well: stop thinking about what *I* want and concentrate on what *God* wants. But this is very hard to do.

When you think about it, the way that Mary and Martha greeted Jesus on the day of Lazarus’ resurrection is often the way we greet him. We can fill in the blanks differently this time:

“Lord, if you had been here, (fill in the blank) would not have happened.”

“Lord, if you loved me, you would not allow (fill in the blank) to have happened.”

“Lord, if you really are God, you would not let (fill in the blank) to do (fill in the blank) to (fill in the blank.) You would do something to stop that from happening.”

By shifting our attention away from ourselves and towards God, we can see things entirely differently. Mr. Lucado’s conclusion points the way towards doing that. He says:

“The God-centered life works. And it rescues us from a life that doesn’t.

“But how do we make the shift? How can we be bumped off self-center? Attend a seminar, howl at the moon, read a Lucado book? None of these (though the author appreciates that last idea). We move from me-focus to God-focus by pondering him. Witnessing him. Following the counsel of the Apostle Paul: “Beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, [we] are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord’ (2 Corinthians 3:18 KJV).

Beholding him changes us. Couldn’t we use a change? Let’s give it a go. Who knows? We might just discover our place in the universe.”

Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year A, March 2, 2008

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

John 9:1-41

As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes, saying to him, "Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, "Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?" Some were saying, "It is he." Others were saying, "No, but it is someone like him." He kept saying, "I am the man." But they kept asking him, "Then how were your eyes opened?" He answered, "The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, `Go to Siloam and wash.' Then I went and washed and received my sight." They said to him, "Where is he?" He said, "I do not know."

They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, "He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see." Some of the Pharisees said, "This man is not from God, for he does not observe the sabbath." But others said, "How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?" And they were divided. So they said again to the blind man, "What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened." He said, "He is a prophet."

The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, "Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?" His parents answered, "We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself." His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. Therefore his parents said, "He is of age; ask him."

So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, "Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner." He answered, "I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see." They said to him, "What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?" He answered them, "I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?" Then they reviled him, saying, "You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from." The man answered, "Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing." They answered him, "You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?" And they drove him out.

Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him, he said, "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" He answered, "And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him." Jesus said to him, "You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he." He said, "Lord, I believe." And he worshiped him. Jesus said, "I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind." Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, "Surely we are not blind, are we?" Jesus said to them, "If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, `We see,' your sin remains."

Sermon

The proverb, “There are none so blind as those who will not see” is probably based on the scripture in Matthew 13:13, “Therefore I speak to them in parables: because they seeing
see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.”

In preparing my sermon for this Sunday, I spent some time “googling” this phrase and the results were amusing. Every website that came up in my search had a different spin on it…liberal pundits decrying conservative blindness, conservative pundits decrying liberal blindness, atheists decrying those whose “blind faith” deprives them of using their brains, vegetarians decrying people who could not see the cruelty of eating animals, pro-life people lamenting the blindness of pro-choice people to the killing of babies. Each one of these groups felt that it had the monopoly on sight, that they and only they knew what it meant to see. They have constructed a view of what is right and proper in the world, some correctly, some incorrectly. Anyone who does not agree with them is someone who “will not see”, that is, someone who is blind.

In today’s gospel reading we see a perfect example of this in the Pharisees. The Pharisees had constructed a world view for themselves, a world view in which they were the only ones who could see what was right and wrong. Anyone who did not fit into this world view was rejected and even excommunicated from the synagogue. Above all they were legalists, who believed that their carefully constructed, highly elaborate methods of obeying God’s law were the only way to salvation. They were wrong…they were blind.

When Jesus burst on the scene, plucking grain on the Sabbath and now having the temerity to heal someone on the Sabbath, he definitely did not fit into the world view of the Pharisees. In their view, even if it had not been wrong to heal on the Sabbath, even the act of mixing saliva and dust as Jesus did when he anointed the eyes of the blind man, would have been a violation of levitical law. It was considered “work” and thus not to be done at all on the day that the Lord had specified was to be kept holy.

In addition, the Pharisees considered infirmity, disability and disease to be a sign of divine displeasure. Hence the disciples’ question, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Someone must have done something, or this man would see! Who screwed up? Who can we blame? They wanted to see this infirmity as a consequence of violating levitical law.

One of the remarkable things about Jesus is that he healed so many blind people, yet he did it differently every time. Sometimes he simply touched the eyes of the blind, sometimes he simply spoke words that restored site. This time he chose to obscure the eyes of the blind man with mud, which when it was washed away, would also wash away his blindness. Why did Jesus choose this way over any other?

We can only conclude that it was a message to the Pharisees, that only by washing away the mud that covered their own eyes, would they be able to “see” the truth before them. Sadly, they did not do this. They refused to see our Lord as the Messiah, the light of the world. So they chose to defend their world view because it was comfortable to them; they were used to it, and let’s face it, it let them “win” salvation through their own efforts. And that is always the problem with us, isn’t it? We like to depend on our own efforts to get to heaven, because we simply can’t “let go and let God”.

C.S. Lewis, the great Christian apologist, illustrated this very aptly in one of the books in his children’s series, The Chronicles of Narnia, named “The Last Battle”. The great Lion Aslan and the children from our Earth that appear in the stories have come to the end of days and are standing in the New Narnia. At their feet are several dwarves that have rejected belief in Aslan and the Emperor Over The Sea. They have decided that these powerful beings are just stories and that from now on, “The dwarves are for the dwarves.” They will not listen to the children from Earth who attempt to persuade them to open their eyes to the beauty around them. Though they are sitting in paradise, with beautiful trees and flowers around them, yet they can only see the mean stable in which they think they are sitting. To them it is dark and the fragrant trees and flowers only so much hay and horse manure. Because they turn their backs on faith in the creator of their world, they are blind to its true beauty and power.

C.S. Lewis would have known all about being blind to faith. As a teenager he rejected his faith and became an atheist. It was only when he began to rethink what he called “The Christian Myth” that his return to faith began. He said, “I came into Christianity kicking and screaming” and described his last struggle in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. (Lewis 1966)

Two years later, in 1931, Lewis converted to Christianity. Lewis, certainly, understood the proverb “No one is so blind as those who will not see.”

Fortunately for Lewis, he received his spiritual sight back from the Great Healer. Unfortunately, for the Pharisees, they did not choose to see the Messiah standing before them, the Light of the World.

Jesus came to give that light, which is still shining in the world, our world, though some still do not want to see it. We sometimes have trouble seeing it ourselves, when we let the darkness of the world overcome us.

In our prayer book, there is a beautiful “prayer for light” which is given at the beginning of the Order for Evening. I thought it would be appropriate to end with it here, so turn to page 110 in your prayer books:

Let us pray.

(read from Prayer for light)

Second Sunday of Lent, Year A, February 17, 2008

2008-02-17T19:00:00.000-08:00

John 3:1-17

There was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God." Jesus answered him, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above." Nicodemus said to him, "How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?" Jesus answered, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, 'You must be born from above.' The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." Nicodemus said to him, "How can these things be?" Jesus answered him, "Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

"Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

"Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him."

Sermon

It is a classic sci fi novel made into a major motion picture: a man lives an ordinary life, doing an ordinary job, but feels there is something missing, some sense of adventure. He seeks for what is missing and ends up going to an agency that will allow him to experience adventure from the comfort of a chair in an office. But once he submits to the machinery that will induce his imaginary adventure, he finds himself recalling his true self, the real self that was there all along underneath the cloud of false memories that covered it.

He has been reborn. And that is the process that Christ is asking us to undergo in today’s gospel: we are to be born again of water and of spirit.

When we go back in the Bible to the book of Genesis, we see the spirit of God hovering over the face of the water. The entire material world was created in this way, of spirit and water.

But with the rebirth referred to by Jesus in today’s gospel, the rebirth that each of us must experience is a spiritual, rather than material, rebirth. Nicodemus was puzzled: as a member of the Jewish religious establishment, he probably thought, as he had been taught, that Messiah would complete the material kingdom of Israel, establishing himself on the throne and rewarding all those people who had been trying to “do it right” for so long. The Jews of the day believed that the Messiah would return when all of Israel followed all of the law for only one day. Just one day! But they had found, to their sorrow, that it was very hard, if not impossible, to do this. But surely one day they would manage and their efforts would be rewarded.

Jesus’ mission had nothing to do with “getting it right”. One of my favorite authors is Jan Karon. In her novel “These High Green Hills” Father Tim, the loveable Episcopal priest, and his wife, Cynthia, are lost in a cave. Unable to find their way out, Father Tim admits that he just “can’t get it right.” And his wife reminds him that “getting it right” is God’s job and that He doesn’t like it when we try to do it for him.

“Getting it right” is not going to provide us with a one-way ticket to heaven. All our efforts to perfect ourselves by the way we talk, walk, dress, worship and etc. are not going to get us to heaven. It would be impossible for us to get ourselves “good enough” or to “get it right” enough to get there. So we must be reborn by water and by spirit. But what does that mean?

It clearly does not mean that we will “get it right” here on earth. We can strive for justice and mercy, “do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with our God” but that does not save us from our well-deserved fate.

I have heard it said that “the gospel was not given to save civilization from wreckage, but to save man from the wreckage of civilization”. Christ’s life and death were for a purpose: not to create a new material kingdom on earth or to fix all the holes in the world we already have, but to prepare all of us who accept his sacrifice for the new spiritual life in the kingdom to come. So how can we accept this gift and be reborn?

We must:

1) Cast off our previous lives by repenting of our sins.

2) Believe that God loves us so much that he would send his only son to die for our sins

3) Accept the forgiveness of God through the gift of salvation given by Jesus’ death on the cross.

4) Receive our new lives through the gift of the Holy Spirit, by turning our lives over to God.

We have a religious ceremony that marks the acceptance of our rebirth in Christ in the sacrament of baptism. But sprinkling water on the outside no more makes us Christians than walking through a car wash would make us cars. The work of the spirit must be done first or baptism means nothing.

Only by accepting the gift of spiritual rebirth that is God’s gift to every person on earth can we be saved, a gift that we can only receive if we open our arms and take it. If you haven’t yet opened your arms to this gift, I invite give you this prayer, which is the Believer’s Prayer from Jan Karon’s book, “At Home in Mitford”:

"Thank you, God, for loving me, and for sending your Son to die for my sins. I sincerely repent of my sins and receive Christ as my personal Savior. Now as your child, I turn my entire life over to you."

Amen.

Last Sunday after the Epiphany, Year A, February 3, 2008

2008-02-03T18:57:00.000-08:00

Matthew 17:1-9

Six days after Peter had acknowledged Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, "Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, "This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!" When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, "Get up and do not be afraid." And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.

As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, "Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead."

Sermon

It’s a story we see played out on television very often these days: the owners of a new home go up into the attic and find an old painting, covered with grime. Or a suburban housewife comes across an old vase at a garage sale. Or a young man is given a trunk of treasures at the death of his grandmother with an old brooch inside it. All these items are unremarkable, even ugly, when they are found. But once these items are cleaned and toted off to Antiques Roadshow or the half dozen other television programs that are like it, the owners find that the object, previously thought to be worthless, is actually a beautiful antique, worth thousands of dollars.

So too, is the kingdom of heaven. It often lies under years of grime, not allowing the light within show through. Because the light is really the key, it shows that something good is going on under the dirt. But where do we find the light?

In our gospel reading, we find the disciples having a “mountain-top” experience. Jesus is transfigured before them and the light is so bright that it hurts to look at it. It’s clear where the light is. It is inside of Jesus. The disciples couldn’t see it clearly until Jesus let it shine through so they could see it. The light was the manifestation of the Shekhinah glory, which means “settle, inhabit or dwell” in relation to the spirit of God.

When the Israelites traveled through the wilderness with the Ark of the Covenant, the Shekhinah traveled before them as a pillar of cloud. After Moses goes up on Mt. Sinai to talk with God, he comes away with his face shining so brightly that he has to wear a veil over it. Unlike the glory that shines around Christ, Moses’ shining face was a reflection of the glory, not the actual glory itself.

Instead of showing reflected glory as Moses did, Jesus is the source of the light shining from his face on the mountain top. In the light the three apostles see Moses and Elijah, the two great prophets of the Hebrew people. Peter suggests to Jesus that they build booths to shelter them, something that was traditionally done to celebrate the Feast of the Tabernacles, which was a commemoration of the time the Jews spent wandering in the wilderness. We don’t know whether Peter thought it was time to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles, but possibly he thought that this moment was IT, that the kingdom was starting here and now, and since Zechariah had prophesied the Feast of Tabernacles would be celebrated at the beginning of the kingdom, it was a great idea to build some booths. But the kingdom was not yet to come, Jesus would have to pass through death first.

This glorious light around Jesus lasted for just a little while. Where did it go once they came down from the mountain? Where is it now?

The answer is: it is within you. As a believer in Christ, we are filled with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is also part of the Shekinah glory, the dwelling of the spirit of God, therefore we are all filled with the light of God, the very same light that shone around Jesus on the mountain top. It is an awesome responsibility.

A Hindu trader in India once asked a missionary, "What do you put on your face to make it shine?" With surprise the man of God answered, "I don't put anything on it!" His questioner began to lose patience and said emphatically, "Yes, you do!" All of you who believe in Jesus seem to have it. I've seen it in the towns of Agra and Surat, and even in the city of Bombay." Suddenly the Christian understood, and his face glowed even more as he said, "Now I know what you mean, and I will tell you the secret. It's not something we put on from the outside but something that comes from within. It's the reflection of the light of God in our hearts.”

Most of us don’t let our light shine. We close the curtains, pull the shades, let the dirt and grime of the world build up over our priceless treasure. Instead we are meant to let it shine forth, the light of God in a dark world.

Don’t let the Holy Spirit be the hidden treasure in the attic. In Matthew 5: 14 – 16, Jesus said,

"You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”

Open the curtains, pull up the shades, get out your spiritual Windex and let the light of Christ shine out in you today.

The Feast of the Epiphany, Year A, January 6, 2008

2008-01-06T18:55:00.000-08:00

Matthew 2:1-12

In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, "Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage." When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, "In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet:

`And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,

are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;

for from you shall come a ruler

who is to shepherd my people Israel.'"

Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, "Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage." When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

Sermon

Enter the wise men, stage right. In their hands they bear frankincense, gold and myrrh. The Holy Family receives them graciously, illumined by the bright star overhead. The cows moo, the sheep baaah. It’s a scene that is played out in hundreds of Nativity plays in churches all over the world.

We don’t know much about the wise men. We know they came from the East, which could have been Persia or Parthia. We don’t know how many of them there were, though we guess at least 3 because there were three gifts. And we know that they followed a star, which might have been anything from the conjunction of two planets, a super nova, or a manifestation of the Shekinah glory of God. We know that they arrived in Jerusalem probably at least a year, maybe two years, after Jesus was born, making our traditional manger scene a pleasant piece of fiction. By the time the wise men arrived, Jesus, Mary & Joseph were living in a house in Bethlehem. The sheep, the donkey, were back in the stable where they belonged and the star did not shine above it, but above the house where Jesus was living. The wise men, after a brief detour in Jerusalem, came there to offer their gifts.

Matthew’s word for the wise men was “magi”. Magi was a kind of generic name for all sorts of men, from those who professed to do magic to astrologers, philosophers, and scientists. These “wise guys” were probably the intelligentsia of their day. They probably knew as much as anyone could know in those days about science and philosophy. They must have been very well read, well enough read that they had read the Jewish scriptures contained in what we call The Old Testament. Knowledgeable enough to know what the sight of that particular star must mean, once they saw it.

Yet there were other men in Jerusalem, who had access to the same knowledge and they were not at Jesus’ feet worshiping him. We know that when the wise men arrived in Jerusalem, the star disappeared. So they asked around…where is the child who was born to be King of the Jews? And the people there honestly had no idea. “King? What king? The only king we know is Herod!” And Herod didn’t know either. Only by consulting HIS wise men was he able to find out where this child was supposed to be, Bethlehem. The wise men from the East set out for Bethlehem after Herod told them and the star rose yet again to guide them on their way.

These wise men of Herod’s, these priests and scribes of the people were not out looking for Jesus, in spite of the fact that they probably knew about him. Jesus, after all, was brought to the temple in Jerusalem by his parents so that he could be ritually circumcised as was required by the law of Moses. There Simeon proclaimed him the one prophesied as the light of revelation for the Jewish nation. The prophetess, Anna, foretold great things in store for the baby. So the rumors about Jesus would have been circulated widely by the time the wise men from the East appeared on the scene. The appearance of these men should have confirmed to the priests and scribes that God had sent the Messiah as promised, after all, we see in our Old Testament reading that the prophet Isaiah foretold that at the advent of the Messiah,

“all those from Sheba shall come.

They shall bring gold and frankincense,

and shall proclaim the praise of the LORD.”

So why weren’t the priest and scribes headed out to Bethlehem to find the babe where he lay? Didn’t they know the same things that the wise men knew? Weren’t they as wise as these guys from the East?

The answer lies in the nature of wisdom. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran pastor and leader of the German resistance movement in Nazi Germany said this:

To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depth of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom.

The priests and scribes of the people had all the facts. But they missed the essential nature of what was happening. These wise men from the East were not Jews, after all. Why should they pay any heed to what Gentiles said? Obviously, God was not going to reveal the Messiah to anyone but his Chosen people. They had all the pieces of the puzzle in front of them, but they could not put it together to find the significant in the factual. They were well informed, but not wise.

In our own time, we see a lot of false wisdom. We see it in well-regarded scientists, philosophers, thinkers, and writers who stubbornly insist that there is no God; those who refuse to believe in a God they cannot see. These are people who do not perceive the essential nature of things, despite all their knowledge.

But we, ourselves, also fail. We fail to perceive the significance of God’s gift to us of Jesus, our Savior. We put our emphasis in the wrong place, worrying over things that are trivial while the greater wisdom of God eludes us. We hold on to the little that we know, rejecting all that does not fit into the feeble framework we build out of “facts”. We choose facts over faith and fail to fully live the abundant life promised to us in the gospel. We put limits on what God can do in our lives by refusing to have faith in all that he can do for us and through us. We lack the wisdom of faith.

Unless we come to the wisdom of faith, where we lean on and trust God to fill in the blanks, we end up missing the point entirely. The wise men set out on a journey consisting of hard travel of hundreds of miles in a countryside that was infested with robbers, into a land where the people distrusted and despised them, following a star that wasn’t exactly as precise as a glowing Motel 6 sign might be in guiding them to our destination. They had the wisdom of faith. And through their faith, the Holy Spirit guided them to the place where Jesus lay. These men were truly “wise”.

We, too, can heed the call of the star. We, too, can find the babe underneath its guiding rays. All it takes is the wisdom of faith, a faith that lets us see the significant in the factual, indeed, sometimes in spite of the factual. Arise! Shine! For your light has come!

Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year A, December 23, 2007

2007-12-23T18:53:00.000-08:00

Matthew 1:18-25

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,

and they shall name him Emmanuel,"

which means, "God is with us." When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

Sermon

I enjoy listening to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion monologues. In one of them he talks about Christmas being run by women and how it has always been that way. He said, “Joseph didn’t do much…he said, ‘Why me? Why now? Why couldn’t it have been 5 months from now?” Mr. Keillor was, of course, going for a laugh, but it can’t have been far from how Joseph actually reacted. Here he thought he had everything planned out and everything changed in a moment.

John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.” We would like to think we are in control of what happens to us. We’re not and never have been.

It can be hard for us to understand, in our modern society, exactly what it was that Joseph was facing. Back in those days, they had a word for men like him and it was “cuckold”.

The word “cuckold” is a reference to the cuckoo. Most members of this species are what are called “brood parasites”, which means they lay their eggs in other birds nests so that the other birds will have the burden of hatching and raising young that are not their own. The cuckold was a man whose wife was unfaithful, particularly apt when the woman bore a child that was obviously not her husband’s. Such men were ridiculed and shamed in almost all societies in history.

So it’s not very surprising that when Joseph found a cuckoo’s egg in his nest, his first reaction was to quietly put his betrothed away, that is, to divorce her even before the marriage was celebrated. No one wants to be humiliated. Not only was Joseph protecting Mary’s reputation, he was protecting his own. It was life happening to Joseph in spite of the plans he had made. Time for damage control…with the emphasis on “control”.

Most of us have experienced this sort of situation in our own lives. Something happens that changes everything. A job is lost. A loved one dies. A home burns to the ground. And sometimes, just as it happened to Joseph, a child comes along that is not expected. We feel lost and confused. Why is this happening now? And if we are spiritual people, we ask God “What are you doing to me? Why are you doing this to me?” We want to have a say in what happens to us, thinking we know better than God what is good for us. We want to be in charge, to be in control.

As Christians we’re called to surrender control to God. He’s the one that is calling the shots in our lives, not us. But it is very hard to do this. It is very hard to lay those burdens down and walk away.

Joseph required a heavenly intervention. God sent an angel to clue Joseph in on what the bigger picture was. Both fortunately and unfortunately, our choices are usually far less earth-shaking, so we aren’t entitled to this sort of communication. We’re supposed to be listening to that still small voice of the Holy Spirit, the one that says, “Wait…it’s going to turn out okay. This is something God will use for good, if you will only let him work through you.”

One of my favorite verses from the bible is Psalm 46:10 “Be still and know that I am God.” This is far more polite than “shut up and listen” isn’t it? But it comes to the same thing. Be still. Listen for the voice of the Holy Spirit in your heart. Surrender control to God.

The Christian band FFH has a great song about this. Here is the chorus:

You take the wheel
I will work the radio
You take the wheel
We'll go where You want to go
You take the wheel
Take it fast, take it slow
Whatever you choose I'm fine
You drive, I'll ride
You drive, I'll ride

Third Sunday of Advent Year A - December 16, 2007

2007-12-16T14:59:00.000-08:00

Richard Lovelace, an Elizabethan poet, wrote these lines:

“Stone walls do not a prison make

Nor iron bars a cage.”

This is part of a poem called “To Althea, from prison” that the poet wrote while he was imprisoned in 1642 during England’s period of civil war between the Royalists and the Roundheads. The meaning of the lines, as he wrote them, is to show that while you are in prison, as long as your soul is free then you are free.

In today’s gospel we hear another message from prison. John the Baptist, in prison, sends a message to Jesus asking him, "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” This seems strange to us, because in the third chapter of Matthew we see Jesus coming to be baptized by John. John knew exactly who Jesus then. So why is John asking this question now?

Some bible scholars think that John is sending a little reminder to Jesus. John is in prison and, naturally, wants to be set free. Since Jesus is the Messiah and has come to fulfill the prophecy we read today in Psalm 146, John is reminding Jesus that:

“The LORD sets the prisoners free;
the LORD opens the eyes of the blind;
the LORD lifts up those who are bowed down”

So the scholars think this is a little reminder, kind of “Hey, Jesus! I’m a prisoner…aren’t you going to set me free?”

But Jesus does not set John free. Instead he replies:

"Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me."

This last sentence I found very puzzling. What did Jesus mean, “blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me”? I spent some time reading different commentaries on this passage. Basically, Jesus meant, “no I’m not going to set you free from prison, John, and if you can accept that, you will be blessed.”

Personally, I don’t believe that John was sending a reminder to Jesus. I think that John had fallen prey to doubt, just like we all do. I can imagine that in prison, shut away from the crowds who had come seeking John’s wisdom and baptism at his hands, away from the center of the action, John began to doubt whether he really HAD prepared the way for the Messiah. What if Jesus was just another prophet? What if John had messed up? Obviously Jesus was not doing what he was supposed to be doing, setting the prisoners free, since Jesus had not set John free. Had it all been for nothing? When was Jesus going to get on with establishing his kingdom and doing all the things that everyone expected him to do?

The answer is, of course, that John, just like all the disciples, got the whole idea of Messiah wrong. They all believed Jesus was supposed to establish a Jewish state with himself at the head, drive out the Romans and re-establish the nation Israel as it ought to be. But the Messiah was not going to do that. His kingdom was not of this world.

John was in prison physically, but his doubt had also put him in a mental prison. John was guilty, as we all are, of expecting God to do what we want him to do. John had read the same scriptures that everyone else had and had built a set of expectations based on what he read, the way that John himself interpreted them. So when God did not behave according to expectations, John lost faith and doubted.

We all do this. We build a box and try to put God in it. Then when he doesn’t go quietly and nicely as we expect him to, we end up in that box ourselves. Because we doubt God can do for us what we think he ought to do, we limit the effectiveness of what the Holy Spirit *can* do THROUGH us. This *is* the prison that the Messiah came to free us from, the prison of our own doubts, fears and expectations.

So Jesus’ message, ending with “blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me” told John, “Yes, I am the Messiah. And if you have faith in me, you will be blessed.” It shows that Jesus understood that John was experiencing doubt and despair. In choosing faith over doubt, John would be set free from prison, though not in the way he was expecting.

Only through letting go and allowing the power of God to flow through us in the person of the Holy Spirit, can we be free from the prison we construct of our own doubts and expectations. The power of the Holy Spirit can be the wind beneath our wings, lifting us free from the burdens that weigh us down. Allowing God to work through us will mean that we shall be “free indeed”.

Richard Lovelace’s poem, “To Althea, from Prison”, which is considered a love song, actually acknowledges God as the source of spiritual freedom. Here is part of it:

When (like committed linnets) I

With shriller throat shall sing

The sweetness, mercy, majesty,

And glories of my king;

When I shall voice aloud how good

He is, how great should be,

Enlarged winds, that curl the flood,

Know no such liberty.

Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage;

Minds innocent and quiet take

That for an hermitage;

If I have freedom in my love,

And in my soul am free,

Angels alone that soar above,

Enjoy such liberty.

May we all know and enjoy this liberty.

First Sunday of Advent Year A - December 2, 2007

2007-12-02T14:57:00.000-08:00

I’m lousy at waiting. That’s why I knit, honestly. As the mother of three kids, I have spent a lot of time waiting outside the school when I’m picking them up, sitting in a lawn chair at soccer games and t-ball, and outside the classroom for dance classes. As the steward of my children’s health, I have spent a lot of time in emergency rooms, as well as doctors’, dentists’, orthodontists’, and optometrists’ waiting rooms. As the steward of my own and, sometimes, my husband’s health I have done the same. Knitting keeps me sane all through this, because at least I feel like I’m doing SOMETHING. And it helps while away the time. Time drags by very slowly in waiting rooms

This is the time of year to think about waiting. Advent is all about waiting. Symbolically, we are waiting for the coming of the Christ child, a wait that spans four weeks in our liturgical cycle, which has it’s echoes in our day to day life in our wait for Christmas day, particularly our children.. We are also waiting for our Lord’s return to earth, something for which we have been waiting for almost 2000 years. Advent symbolizes both of these things, the wait for the Christ child and the wait for the return of Christ our King. Today we begin our season of waiting. What does it mean to wait?

The American Heritage Dictionary has 4 different definitions for the word “Wait”

To remain or rest in expectation: waiting for the guests to arrive. See Synonyms at stay¹.
To tarry until another catches up.

To remain or be in readiness: lunch waiting on the table.
To remain temporarily neglected, unattended to, or postponed: The trip will have to wait.
To work as a waiter or waitress.

Clearly what Jesus’ message relates to us today has to do with definition number two, to be in readiness. He warns us very specifically that we will not know the hour of his return so we should always be ready. So what are we supposed to be doing while we wait?

If we add one word to the verb “wait”, we get “wait on”. Let’s turn to the dictionary again to see what this means:

wait on/upon

To serve the needs of; be in attendance on.
To make a formal call on; visit.
To follow as a result; depend on.
To await: They're waiting on my decision.

I think we could easily use more than one of these definitions to decide what to do while waiting. We can serve the needs of the Kingdom of God. We can be in attendance on God and making ourselves available to do the work he needs us to do. And we can follow and depend on God. Clearly, if we do all of these things, we don’t have to worry about what the master will find us doing when he returns. Whenever that may be, which is not entirely clear. Jesus didn’t give us a date and asked us to jot it down on our calendars or put it in our Palm Pilots or Franklin Planners. Why not? Wouldn’t it be nice to know?

There are plenty of people who have tried to set a date for Jesus’ return. In the 19^th century, there was a noted preacher named William Miller, who set a date for Christ’s return on April 3, 1843. Unfortunately, that date came and went, as did 2 other dates set by the same preacher.

Jesus was purposefully obscure about the date of his return; in our reading today, he says:

"But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” God set the date, but not even Jesus knew what it is. And even if he did know what it is, we can be sure he wouldn’t have told us. Because if there as many people who procrastinate spiritually as there are those that procrastinate about cleaning, paying bills, and doing anything else that requires a bit of effort, there would be a lot of people who would wait until the last minute to repent of their sins and do God’s work here on earth.

What Jesus was not obscure about was what you and I ought to be doing when he returns. We’re not supposed to be waiting by the door, looking at our watches and complaining about how long it’s taking. We’re not supposed to write the date on our calendar and then go do whatever we like until a day or two before he comes back, when we can clean our spiritual houses. We’re supposed to live our lives, every day, as if we can expect Jesus to show up at any time. Are you ready?

Proper 28 Year C - November 18, 2007

2007-11-18T14:55:00.000-08:00

We all know people who probably would score very well on standard IQ tests, but when it comes to dealing with other people, they are as dumb as rocks. “Just goes to show,” we mutter to ourselves smugly, “That there’s more to life than how fast you can solve a math equation.”

In fact, several years ago, researchers began to identify a new factor in our psychological make-up that can determine how well we do in life. They called this factor Emotional Intelligence and created a new measure called the Emotional Intelligence Quotient or EQ to measure this intelligence. This intelligence involves the ability to perceive, assess or manage the emotions of oneself, others or groups of people. Unlike IQ, EQ can be increased by learning how to deal with your own emotions or those of others. Dale Carnegie, with his popular book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” and his series of courses based on it probably made a mint off of this concept.

Today I’d like to identify a new factor in our psychological make-up that can determine how well we do in the next life. Let’s call it “Spiritual Intelligence.” Spiritual Intelligence is the ability to discern “spiritual value” over “material value”. We could easily make up a test that would measure your Spiritual Intelligence Quotient, or SQ, because Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament were mostly about this discernment of spiritual over material.

In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus is giving the disciples a teaching that combines this discernment with a prophecy about the end times. The disciples are admiring the temple, which from all reports of the time was an incredibly opulent building. Josephus, a Jewish historian at the time of Christ, describes it this way:

The whole of the outer works of the temple was in the highest degree worthy of admiration; for it was completely covered with gold plates, which when the sun was shining on them, glittered so dazzlingly that they blinded the eyes of the beholders not less than when one gazed at the sun’s rays themselves. And on the other sides, where there was no gold, the blocks of marble were of such a pure white that to strangers who had never previously seen them (from a distance they looked like a mountain of snow’” (v, 14), p. 534.

This temple was the 3rd temple built by the Jewish people and was, during the times of Jesus, still under construction. It was being built by Herod the Great and would be finished in 60 AD. Herod, by all we learn of him in the Bible, was not a particularly pious king. But he was filled with pride and arrogance. This temple was more a monument to HIS power and glory than God’s.

The disciples were from the very rural province of Galilee, you might say they were “country bumpkins.” They were very impressed by the sight of this gorgeous building. Maybe they were even planning which offices would be theirs when Jesus came into his kingdom. After all, wouldn’t he be making the Temple his headquarters? To fishermen from Galilee, it must have looked like a building that dropped right down from heaven. Obviously, they had made it to the Big Time. It was time to pick out that corner office and live in style.

However, just before the passages in today’s lesson, Jesus points out the contribution of the widow, who gave her few coins in offering, compared to the more showy donations of richer people. Because she gave from her heart, not holding back for fear of what the lack of her small savings might bring her, hunger or sickness with no money to pay the doctor, she demonstrated trust and faith in God. She showed a very high SQ.

So when the disciples start exclaiming over the opulence of the temple, Jesus warns them that the whole temple will be destroyed. “Not one stone will be left upon another,” he said. Jesus’ prediction came to pass in 70 AD, when the Roman army sacked the temple, literally pulling all the stones down to remove their gold plating and ornaments. Not one stone remained on another. As startling as this prediction was, the real message was far more startling. The disciples were not to put their faith in something that man had made for God, something with more material value than spiritual value. The kingdom that was coming was not one that would need a temple like this. The kingdom was to deal with the spiritual changes of the heart, not physical locations like buildings, cities or even countries. And, as usual, the disciples missed the whole point.

We see the same struggle going on in our day, our eternal tendency to choose style (or material) over substance (or spirit). One only need drive around the Metro Detroit area and look at the showy churches, the big crosses erected over them, the amount of glamour and style these churches put into their worship spaces and the amount of people who staff the worship team. Churches do this to attract members, because members give money and money pays for more renovations and more things to “attract” more members, which give more money and it goes on and on. Some churches have a coffee bar in the lobby so that worshippers can get that cappuccino before the service. Others have ATM machines in the lobby so that cash may be available to all who want to toss some money in the plate.

But if there is no substance, the substance being the true love of God and devotion to the mission of spreading the gospel, the mission that will bring persecution and danger into the lives of those who choose discipleship, these churches are no more holy places than the mall down the street. A church can be falling down, but if the love of God lives in the members and they continually seek to serve Him through spreading the gospel and showing God’s love through caring for the poor, both those who are poor in spirit and those who are poor in material things, then that church has a high SQ indeed.

Like EQ, we can change our SQ. We don’t need to study a lot of books or take a course titled, “How to Win Souls and Reject the Material.” All we need to do is listen for that still small voice of the Holy Spirit, the one who will give us the words to say when we are defending our faith, the one who can help us find the spiritual value of the choices we have available to us. St. Anthony of Padua wrote the following prayer for the help of the Holy Spirit, which I invite you to pray with me now:

O God, send forth your Holy Spirit into my heart that I may perceive, into my mind that I may remember, and into my soul that I may meditate. Inspire me to speak with piety, holiness, tenderness and mercy. Teach, guide and direct my thoughts and senses from beginning to end. May your grace ever help and correct me, and may I be strengthened now with wisdom from on high, for the sake of your infinite mercy. Amen.

All Saints Day - November 4, 2007

2007-11-04T14:53:00.000-08:00

What does it mean to be a saint in 21^st century America?

Most of us, when we hear the word saint, think of martyrs; people who died rather grisly deaths to witness to the world the love of Jesus Christ. And most of us, if we are truthful, don’t really want to be a saint if that is what is required. Who would want to die like Saint Sebastian, shot with arrows? Or like Saint Stephen, stoned to death? We shy away from the thought of being a saint if that is what is required.

The other connotation of the word saint is someone inhumanly good, so good that we cannot ever measure up to them, someone like Mother Teresa. Who can be that good? What use is it even to try?

But we are wrong. Mostly because we do not understand the term “saint” and what it really means to be one. Almost every denomination defines saint differently, but to Protestant Christians it generally means anyone who makes it to heaven. And since we have made the decision to accept Jesus as our savior and we are on our way to heaven day by day, then technically, we are saints as well.

So what are we doing about it? What do saints do and how can we tell if we are living up to the word “saint”? Jesus gives us a laundry list, commonly known as the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:1-12 that can probably tell us more about what a saint is like than any other source. What is that he says?

Jesus says that we should be meek, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, merciful, pure in heart, peacemaking, righteous, and willing to endure persecution in his name. If we do all these things our reward will be great in heaven. It doesn’t mean that if we don’t do all these things that we will not get to heaven, just that our reward will be great. So how do we do them? Let’s go over them one at a time:

Meek: Most of us think of meek as being someone who is afraid to speak up for themselves, someone that other people walk on, if the truth be told. Originally, however, as used in the Bible, it meant gentle and kind. We certainly can choose to be more gentle, more kind with our fellow man.

Hungering & Thirsting for Righteousness: we are supposed to DESIRE righteousness. I think we all desire to be righteous, the problem is in achieving it. But as long as we desire to be righteous, we have fulfilled this requirement…but we need to desire it so much that we cannot rest until we get it. We need to hunger and thirst after it so much that choosing anything else will make us feel terrible, much as making a bad food choice at dinner will make us queasy.

Merciful: this one is easy to understand, we need to choose to be compassionate to other people, as well as to ourselves.

Pure in heart: To me this speaks of single-mindedness, the “gladness and singleness of heart” spoken in the General Thanksgiving. It means not allowing our love for God to be watered down or tainted with other desires.

Peacemaking: Choosing harmony over discord, when discord will not accomplish God’s will. Not making peace at any cost, as is sometimes thought. Sometimes pursuing mercy and righteousness means not choosing a peaceful course.

Willing to endure persecution: not necessarily choosing to suffer physical degradation, for us in 21^st century America it usually means choosing to risk losing friends because God comes first or because you will not keep your beliefs “under wraps” so as not to offend others. For other people around the world, though, persecution is a very real danger in professing the faith that in America we follow fairly risk-free.

For us, though, all of these qualities, as enumerated by Jesus, involve, not intentionally seeking out opportunities to practice them, but simple choices that every day living entails. We can choose to be compassionate. We can choose to be kind, gentle, pure in heart, loving peace, and willing to endure the social losses that come from speaking out and sharing our faith. We can choose to cultivate the desire to follow God more closely and reject the values that our culture teaches are acceptable. We have opportunities every day to embrace the qualities Jesus lists in the Beatitudes, to show God’s love in the world we live in today, to be saints in every sense of the word.

The hymn we sang just a few minutes ago really says it all. This is the third verse, which is a more Americanized version than we sing:

They lived not only in ages past;

there are hundreds of thousands still.

The world is bright with the joyous saints

who love to do Jesus' will.

You can meet them in school, on the street, in the store,

in church, by the sea, in the house next door;

they are saints of God, whether rich or poor,

and I mean to be one too.

May we all be saints, every day of our lives. Amen.

Proper 22 Year C - October 7, 2007

2007-10-07T14:45:00.000-07:00

It has been a long time since I have had to do any algebra. So when my oldest daughter, Laurel, asked me if I knew how the distributive property worked, I drew a blank. I simply did not remember.

I had studied algebra in junior high and again in college, where it was necessary for my general education requirement. But it had been a long time since then, and I had found, as many school students complain about when they are learning algebra, that it had little impact on my life after college. I didn’t use it. And, as is said about many things, if you don’t use it, you lose it.

I did my best to help Laurel and I actually found it came back to me rather quickly, maybe because I’ve always liked math. But at first I thought that it might be a totally different algebra than I had studied, much as parents in the 60’s discovered when the “New Math” was introduced to their children. They found themselves totally unable to help their children with their homework, because it was all so different than they remembered.

So what does algebra have to do with Jesus talking to his disciples about faith? What it comes down to is, much like the New Math, Jesus had a New Faith equation that was different than the faith equation that the disciples had been brought up with.

In the verses in Luke that precede the gospel lesson, Jesus tells the disciples that they need to forgive people over and over and over and over again. The idea of forgiving people who may have just said, “Oh, sorry!” for doing something wrong, something that these people did wrong many times over, was hard for the disciples to accept. In fact, it seems quite unacceptable to most of us, doesn’t it? They couldn’t grasp it. It was a radical idea. Somewhere, they reasoned, there had to be a place where you could say, like the Soup Nazi on the television show, Seinfeld, “No forgiveness for you!”

But Jesus told them the disciples had to forgive many more times than seemed reasonable or necessary. They figured that they needed more faith to grasp this idea, because obviously they didn’t have “enough”. So they asked Jesus to increase their faith.

The disciples’ faith equation was the one that most of us mistakenly have, the one that is even flogged by many denominations who preach “health & wealth theology”. This is how it goes:

Me + Righteousness + Faith = God doing what I ask Him to do

It is a “just add water” type of theology, indeed, sometimes a “just add money” theology. All we have to have is “enough” faith, to follow all the rules, and we can move mountains. With this equation, the emphasis is on WE. WE move mountains because that is what WE want to do. It’s like making a movie: God’s the producer and puts up the money, but we are the ones directing the movie.

This is why, when Jesus challenged the disciples with the hard teaching on forgiveness, that the disciples asked Jesus to increase their faith. But the disciples weren’t really asking for more faith. Their equation was really this:

Me + Faith + More Faith = Wisdom

This is what the disciples asked for. They thought that with more faith they would then understand why God wanted them to forgive…they would be wise like God and then it would become what THEY wanted to do. It would still be what THEY wanted, rather than what God wanted. Of course, this solution came with a nice bonus: God would agree with them. And so “enough” faith is really “enough” wisdom. And when you start to think that you can be as wise as God, your equation becomes quite unbalanced indeed. It becomes an algebraic equation:

Me + x(faith) = God doing what I want

With x representing “enough”, which is an unknown quantity. How much faith would be “enough” to make you as wise as God?

The idea that if we only have “enough” faith that God will do what we want him to is a big reason that some of us may lose the faith that we have. “I had faith,” we cry, “Yet God didn’t listen! He didn’t heal my child!” or “He didn’t save my marriage” or “He didn’t give me a baby or a promotion or a new job”…well, you fill in the blank! “Didn’t I have enough faith for Him to do that for me?” we cry. And then we either turn from God because we are angry that our faith wasn’t “enough” for Him because His standards must be impossibly high, much too high for us to reach, or we spend our lives blaming ourselves and sometimes our loved ones for not having enough faith. And our equation looks like this:

My faith < Enough faith for God

Me – Faith = Me - God

But real faith, as Jesus’ illustration of the mustard seed shows, is a highly powerful, concentrated thing. A little goes a long way. The kind of super-concentrated, new and improved formula that could cause a mulberry tree, a tree with a very large root system that makes it almost impossible to move, to move itself. The problem wasn’t in the quantity of faith that the disciples had. It was in the quality of faith that they had.

Jesus makes it clear that the equation the disciples were operating under, the same equation that the Pharisees, those sticklers for strict observance of the Law, had been teaching for years, was the wrong faith equation.

Jesus gives us the new faith equation in the gospel lesson when he says “"Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, `Come here at once and take your place at the table'? Would you not rather say to him, `Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink'? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, `We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!'”

What does Jesus mean by that?

The clue is in the master/slave relationship illustrated in the parable.

When the slave does what needs to be done, the master doesn’t say, “Okay, now I’ll do what you want me to, since you did what I wanted!” The master does not say, “Well, what do you think you should do first, since you might have a better idea of what to do than I?” No. The master tells the slave what to do, because the master knows what needs to be done. The slave has faith that the master knows what should be done and does not expect anything extra for doing it.

When we think about the power and wisdom of God, about how He made the universe and all that is in it, the idea that we can know better than He does what is best for our lives is ludicrous, at best. We are certainly worthless in comparison to God. God is the Master and his will is to be central in our lives.

And so we see that Jesus’ new faith equation is:

Me + God’s will = Faith

When we center ourselves in the will of God, faith comes naturally. When we struggle to surrender our will daily to God, giving up our insistence that our knowledge is better than His, then we realize that whatever God chooses to do in our lives is what we really want.

And realizing that, when we pray, we stop asking for things from God as if we know what the best answer is to our problems. We start asking Him to take over, to do what is best. Instead of telling God what will bless us, we ask Him to bless us in whatever way He chooses. And sometimes what God chooses is the exact opposite of what we want. But what I have found is that it always turns out to be what is best for me and for the ones I love, though it doesn’t always seem like it at the time.

The most powerful prayer, the prayer that Jan Karon, in her series of novels about Father Tim Kavanaugh, says is the prayer that never fails, is “Thy will be done.” Because when we pray that prayer, we have that super-concentrated faith, the new and improved formula, the faith that moves mountains.

Proper 20 Year C - September 23, 2007

2007-09-23T15:05:00.000-07:00

Sermon – Proper 20, Year C – September 23, 2007

Charles Haddon Spurgeon was a 19^th century British Reformed Baptist preacher who remains highly influential amongst Christians of different denominations, among whom he is still known in various circles as the "Prince of Preachers."

At the height of his fame, he preached to thousands in London every Sunday, but he started out passing out tracts and teaching Sunday School as a teenager. He said, “I am perfectly sure,” he said, “that, if I had not been willing to preach to those small gatherings of people in obscure country places, I should never have had the privilege of preaching to thousands of men and women in large buildings all over the land. Remember our Lord’s rule, “whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”

Charles Spurgeon is the perfect illustration for today’s gospel lesson, in which Jesus says, “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much.”

People like Charles Spurgeon inspire many people, but they also discourage many people who ask themselves, “How can I, with my small gifts, do as much for God as someone like this, to whom God has given much greater gifts?”

There was a popular song in the 1950’s recorded by Kitty Kallen called Little Things Mean A Lot. The lyrics start out with:

Blow me a kiss across the room

Say I look nice when I'm not

Touch my hair as you pass my chair

Little things mean a lot

Give me your arm as we cross the street

Call me at six on the dot

A line a day when you're far away

Little things mean a lot

The song celebrates how love is expressed, not in big romantic ways, but in the small everyday words and gestures that mean much more in the long run. In ministry, little things mean a lot too. We are all in ministry, whether we realize it or not, the ministry of the baptized towards each other and towards the world. Any gift we have to give is the Lord’s gift to the world, not our own. We need to realize that small acts of ministry are often the most effective.

I recently read this story online: An elderly widow, restricted in her activities, was eager to serve Christ. After praying about this, she realized that she could bring blessing to others by playing the piano. The next day she placed this small ad in the Oakland Tribune: "Pianist will play hymns by phone daily for those who are sick and despondent; the service is free.” The notice included the number to dial. When people called, she would ask, "What hymn would you like to hear?'

Within a few months her playing had brought cheer to several hundred people. Many of them freely poured out their hearts to her, and she was able to help and encourage them.

Clearly this widow understood that small acts of ministry can have big results. She didn’t say, “I can’t serve God because I am too old” or “I can’t do as much as I used to, so I’m going to sit back and let others do what I can’t” or “I don’t have anything to give that will make a difference in people’s lives.” She asked God to tell her what she COULD do. And by using the gift that he had given her, she was able to be effective in her ministry.

So what gifts are you hiding under your bushel? Ministry can be as big as leading people to Christ like Billy Graham and as small as sending cards to shut-ins. As big as writing books that inspire millions of people like Philip Yancy, or as small as giving rides to church to those who can no longer drive themselves. Little things mean a lot in ministry. So why is it so often we end our ministry before we even have begun?

We are not faithful in little because we are little in our faith. We are our own worst enemies, talking ourselves out of doing what we can by minimizing the effect we can have. We make the mistake of believing that only large ministries can have an impact in the world, when small ministries may actually help people in many ways that large ministries fail. We want recognition, a 100% success rate, and enough time, energy and motivation to keep ourselves going forever. We tell ourselves that if no one notices what we do, that if we fail sometimes at what we attempt, and if we get tired and discouraged, that we are not succeeding.

David McCasland, noted biographer of Oswald Chambers, wrote:

When we long for success, God says, "I will reward you."

When we ache for recognition, God says, "I see you."

When we are ready to quit, God says, "I will help you."

Whether our service is public or private, our responsibility is the same—to be faithful.

Paul, in his letter to the Colossians, wrote:

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.

Whatever you do. Not “in all the big things you do” or even “in all the things you do in church”. There are ministry opportunitites everywhere if you only look for them; holding a door open for someone, telling the waitress at the local diner what a great job she’s doing, or giving your place in line at the grocery store to someone with just a few items. Little things mean a lot.

There’s an old hymn by Kittie Suffield that goes:

1. In the harvest field now ripened,
There's a work for all to do.
Hark, the voice of God is calling,
To the harvest calling you.

2. Does the place you're called to labor
Seem so small and little known?
It is great if God is in it,
And He'll not forget His own.

3. When the conflict here is ended
And our race on earth is run,
He will say, if we are faithful,
"Welcome home, my child, well done."

CHORUS:
Little is much when God is in it.
Labor not for wealth or fame.
There's a crown and you can win it,
If you go in Jesus' name.

Proper 18 Year C - September 9, 2007

2007-09-23T15:02:00.000-07:00

Sermon – Proper 18, Year C – September 9, 2007
I was watching “The Quiet Man” the other day on television. This is a movie that I’ve seen many times, due to the fact that my husband is a big John Wayne fan. Of all the movies John Wayne made, this is his favorite one. We always watch it when it’s on television and, believe me: it’s on television quite often.

If you’ve never seen it, in the movie, set in Ireland, Mary Kate Danniher, a fiery redhead played by Maureen O’Hara, marries Sean Thornton, played by John Wayne. After the marriage, Mary Kate’s brother refuses to hand over her dowry and the things that had been passed down to her from her mother and grandmother. Their wedding night turns out miserably because Sean can’t understand why those things are so important to Mary Kate. He says, “It seems like a lot of fuss and bother over a little bit of furniture.” She says, “There’s three hundred years of happy dreaming in those things and I want them!”

Sean is an American and doesn’t understand the Irish culture which made Mary Kate so insistent on having her “things about her”. To him it seems mercenary and cold, while to Mary Kate, her things represent something much deeper: her self-identity and position in the community.

In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus tells the disciples that they must give up all their possessions.

Maybe to us, understanding the true impact of what Jesus was asking his disciples to do is just as hard as it was for Sean Thornton. We live in a very affluent country; in comparison to the way that the Jewish people lived back then, we are fabulously wealthy. Our access to increasingly cheaper goods has turned us into the world’s largest consumer culture. We don’t get as attached to most of our possessions, probably because we have more than we really need and if something gets broken it’s easily replaced. I’ve seen this in my own children; if they break a toy, it isn’t a big deal to them. I contrast my own remembrances of toys that were prized possessions and that I mourned over when they broke. It was harder to get a new toy in our family. You had to wait until your birthday or Christmas because toys were comparatively expensive then, dollar for dollar.

These days most of us are just not as invested in our possessions as someone who had to work very hard just to acquire a nice table or a chair. Those things were much more representative of the hard work done to acquire them and were passed down in the family. Sean doesn’t understand Mary Kate’s need for her “things about her”, at least not at first.

For Mary Kate, her things were the more important to her than her marriage was. She put her possessions first. And that caused many problems.

There’s an old saying, “Well begun is half done.” In the example that Jesus uses, a builder makes sure he has enough money to begin the construction of his tower BEFORE he begins. And so he is able to finish the tower and avoids the ridicule that waits for people who do not finish what they begin. Jesus asked his disciples to prepare themselves for discipleship by giving away their possessions. This showed their commitment to him, a commitment that many failed to make.

But these days, are we required to do the same? This is a frequent question that comes up in Christian circles and a deterrent for many who believe that Jesus meant it literally. After all, someone has to work to make money to give to missions, to provide children sponsored by World Vision, Compassion International, and similar organizations. What are we to do with all of this “stuff” that makes our lives easier and enables us to continue earning to provide for our families as well as to give to the poor? Are we really supposed to give it all away?

When looking over the many passages where Jesus speaks to this issue, it seems clear: if we can’t freely give away what we have, we do not have God first in our lives. If we would have a hard time closing the doors on our houses and walking away if God called us, we are not putting God first in our lives. God does not want us not to have possessions; he wants possessions not to have us. When our things become more important to us than him, there are many problems.

So when Jesus told his disciples to give up their possessions, Jesus was really asking his disciples to put God first in their hearts. After all, this is the first commandment: You shall have no other gods before me. God wants to be first.

Even the passage preceding the stricture about possessions was not strictly about hating “father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself.” It is about putting God first. The word “hate”, when used in the Bible, does not carry the same sort of meaning it does for us. It means “loving less”. So when God says in Malachi 1:2 “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated” he doesn’t actually hate Esau. He just loves Jacob more. When Jesus says we must hate our families, he means we must love them less than we love God. God wants us to love him more than any other.

Like many of Jesus’ teachings, putting God first is more about heart change, rather than physical change. God must be first in our hearts. We must love him more than our families, our possessions and our lives.

Like any true Hollywood classic, “The Quiet Man” has a happy ending. Mary Kate gets her possessions and Sean understands, finally, why they are important to her. Their marriage is saved and they live happily ever after.

As we leave today, may we also have a happy ending. By putting God first in our lives, our possessions will not own us. We will stop worrying about what we will eat or wear. When confronted with the opportunity to give, we will not hesitate. We will begin to lay up our treasures in heaven, not on earth. After all, the earth is the Lord’s, for he made it. Won’t he provide even better for us than we can for ourselves?

Marjorie Holmes, the author of “Two from Galilee” wrote the following prayer which I think sums up our struggles today. May it inspire you as it inspired me:

Help me not to put too much stock in possessions, Lord. I want things, sure. But life seems to be a continual round of wanting things—from the first toys we fight over as children to our thrilled unwrapping of wedding presents to those we buy in our old age. Our concern is not primarily love and friends and pride in what we can do, but things.

Sometimes I’m ashamed of how much I want mere possessions—things for my husband and the house and the children. Yes, and things for myself, too. And this hunger is enhanced every time I turn on the television or walk through a shopping mall.

My senses are tormented by the dazzling world of things.

Lord, cool these fires of wanting. Help me to realize how futile is this passion for possessions. Because—and this is what strips my values to the bone—one of my best friends died today in the very midst of her possessions. She was in the beautiful home she and her husband worked so hard to achieve, the home that was finally furnished the way she wanted it with the best of everything. She was surrounded by the Oriental rugs she was so proud of, the formal French sofas, the painting, the china and glass, the handsome silver service…She had been snatched away while silently, almost cruelly, THEY remain. Lord, I grieve for my friend. My heart hurts that she had so little time to enjoy the things that she had earned and that meant so much to her. But let me learn something from this loss; that possessions are meant to enhance life, not to become the main focus of living. Help me remember that we come into the world with nothing and we leave with nothing.

Don’t let me put too much stock in mere possessions.

Amen

Welcome to my Sermon Blog

2007-09-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

I recently completed the preaching course offered to Total Ministry participants in the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan and was commissioned to preach in my church, St. Elizabeth's Episcopal in Redford, Michigan. I hope you enjoy the sermons!