parsippanyumc.com/blog

A sermon preached on May 13, 2012 – Mother’s Day – based upon John 15:9 – 17.  

I heard a story about a family of sharecroppers living in Georgia during the 1950s.  The family was very poor and there just wasn’t money for extras.  One year the family had a bumper crop and with the money they had left over they decided to buy something for their home.  After looking through the mail order catalogue they decided to order a mirror.  When it arrived they all took turns looking at their reflection.  The youngest son who had been badly burned in a fire when he was a baby looked into the mirror and then looked over at his mother.

“Ma,” he said, “you knew I was this ugly and yet you still loved me all these years.” 

The child may have been burned, but he was still beautiful in the mother’s eyes.

In honor of mother’s day, let me go out on a limb for some people and say that the main reason that Christians most commonly refer to God as “Father” rather than as “Mother” is simply because the language of our faith was developed in a culture where women weren’t valued.  It was a society where a daily prayer recited by men included thanking God for not making them women.

Women were viewed as inferior.  They were weak and untrustworthy – for this reason women weren’t permitted to testify in court.

So in that culture, if you want to use the image of a parent to talk about the personal kind of love that God has for God’s creatures – God’s children – well, the only option was to speak of God as Father.

You could argue that God was pictured as a father because it was the “masculine” aspects of love that were to be emphasized in the concept of God.   You know:  strength, discipline, accountability – that sort of thing.

But here’s the deal:   these days it’s easier to recognize that both fathers and mothers possess what is traditionally thought of as masculine and feminine dimensions of love – discipline and accountability as well as tenderness and nurture.

Some people might think I’m being heretical – that I’m messing with the word of God.   For God’s sake, didn’t Jesus himself call God “Father?” He sure did, but my point is this: being incarnate in a particular culture in history, Jesus had to use the language of that culture in order to be heard, and that culture referred to God as “Father.”

But notice this:  when Jesus talked about God being a father, the father he portrays is one with what we think of as “feminine characteristics.”   He told us to call God “Abba” – a word of tenderness best translated “daddy.”

He said that when a child asks a father for bread — which, you’ll notice was something a child would more commonly be asking his mother for, so the dad in this instance is taking on the mom’s role — he emphasized that we sure would hope this father would do the nuturing thing and give the bread and not be a hard-ass who gives a stone instead.

And think also of the father of the prodigal son who cares only that the lost son has come home – he’s not concerned about handing out the appropriate punishment for the misdeeds of the son.

On one occasion Jesus referred to himself as being a mother hen who longed to shelter her chicks beneath her wings.

So I hereby give you permission — as though you have any such need for me to exercise such authority — permission to refer to God as “mother”, or “mom”, or even “mommy”, if you feel so inclined.  I’m not suggesting replacing giving up “Father” as a name for God.  I simply pointing out that there are what we think of masculine and feminine qualities to God’s  love, and addressing God as Mother may open us up to more of the width and depth and height of God’s great love for us.

So, to take the first line of gospel reading Bob read for us:

“Jesus said, “As the mother has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.”

Abide in the mommy’s love.  Abide in mom’s love that sees the beauty inside us that oftentimes the world cannot see.

Abiding in mom’s love is an appealing idea to me at the moment, given the fact that my own mother passed from this world just a little over two weeks ago.

For me, part of what I have cherished most about my mother’s love for me is that she was the person I could count on to understand me.  My mother “got me.”   When I shared my thoughts and perceptions with her, it wasn’t difficult for her to follow what I was trying to express.

You could say this had to do with the fact that at approximately 50% of my DNA came from my mother.   In regard to the way my mind works, I’m pretty sure I got a good deal more than 50% of my mother’s DNA.

My mom pretty consistently affirmed me; she seemed to delight in hearing me share my thoughts and perceptions.

Now being understood is a big deal for me, because I am aware of myself as being a bit of a strange bird – I mean, my peculiar vocation sets me apart from others to some degree, and within this vocation itself, I am something of a strange bird as well.  If you have been with me in one of our small groups, you have probably heard me talk for a while and then suddenly stop and ask, “Am I making any sense?”  I often wonder whether my perceptions make sense to others.  And there have been times in my life that my strange bird quality has led me to feel pretty alone, and that there was something wrong with the unique way my mind worked.

But my mother “got me,” and took delight in hearing what I was thinking.  And that was always deeply reassuring.  And I believe that on some level I continue to abide in my mother’s love even as she has departed from this world.

And so it’s helpful for me to think of God as an ever-present mother who understands me even better than my earthly mother, because it was God who formed me in my mother’s womb, knitting together the absolutely unique combination of DNA that shapes me.  And I do believe that this God takes delight in me – as God does with all God’s children — particularly when we’re using our minds in the unique ways each us were created to think.

There is further cause for thinking of God as a mother when we hear these words on Jesus’ lips:

“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Giving birth itself is an act of laying one’s life down in love.   The pregnancy can include nausea and back aches and swollen ankles and God knows what else that come from carrying a child around for nine months.  And beyond that, from what I’ve seen giving birth requires that a woman undergo a degree of pain beyond anything she’s ever known before – indeed, to put her very life at risk (which was especially true in ancient times when there were no guarantees at all that a mother would come out of child birth alive.)

It is possible for a man to have a hand in creating a child – you know how it’s done – and never, ever sacrifice anything on behalf of his child – to go off and leave the child high and dry.

Not so a woman.  She may put the child up for adoption because she’s not ready to make the further sacrifices necessary to raise that child, but there’s no getting around the sacrifice she must make in order to birth the child. And so mothers, by virtue of the sacrifice they are compelled to make on behalf of their kids, mirror Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.

And in some ways this is even more true of mothers who adopt their children in their willingness to sacrifice themselves in more ways than could ever be numbered for the sake of their kids who aren’t flesh of their flesh.

With all this talk of self-sacrifice, it can be easy to miss the fact that the love we are focusing on goes hand in hand with joy.   Jesus said as much in this morning’s Gospel lesson:

¹¹I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete…

He goes on to say…

¹⁵I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends…

I wasn’t sure how to end this sermon.   On a whim this morning,  I opened up a book on my shelf and happened upon a charming devotional poem that conjures up the image of God’s womb from whence we all came,  and offers this common womb as the reason why you and I, whoever we are, should be friends, and be so joyfully.   It comes from a Sufi poet named Hafiz who lived in the 14^th century.  I found it enchanting, and so I end this morning with the last few lines of this poem, which is entitled “Your Mother and My Mother”:

I should not make any promises right now,

but I know if you

pray

somewhere in this world—

something good will happen.

God wants to see

more love and playfulness in your eyes.

For that is your greatest witness to Him.

Your soul and my soul

once sat together in the Beloved’s womb

playing footsie. 

Your heart and my heart

are very, very old

friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A sermon preached by Pastor Jeff on May 6, 2012 based upon 1John 4:7 – 21 and John 15:1-8, following his mother’s death.  

A week ago Tuesday evening my 89 year old mother had a stroke.   The next morning I drove the two hour drive to the assisted living community outside Philadelphia where she lived, and when I saw her, I knew immediately that she was dying.  My sister Alison soon joined me, having rented a car to drive from New York.  I called my wife Sarah and asked her to come, along with Kate and Bobby.   I called my brother Mark in North Carolina and told him that the nurses were saying that if he wanted to see Mom before she died, he’d better come by the next day.

My mother would open her eyes occasionally, but beyond that there was very little indication that she knew we were there, though we trusted she did.  Her breathing was labored.  The nurses assured us that she wasn’t in pain, but it was nonetheless hard to watch.   Kate and Bobby drove back home that evening, while Alison, Sarah and I stayed to keep a vigil at my mother’s bedside, taking turns napping on a cot the staff had brought for us.

On Thursday little had changed in our mother’s condition.  David Turner arrived late morning bringing bagels and fruit with which to nourish us.   My brother arrived mid-afternoon.   I hadn’t been sure Mark would come.  There was a period of about twenty years when it was as if we weren’t a family at all.   A wall had come up between my brother and me as a result of the sorts of misunderstandings that are unfortunately common to families, and he was aloof from my mother and sister as well.  During those years my mother, my sister and I never say my brother.  And then about seven years ago the wall started to come down some.   I brought Bobby, a nine year old goalkeeper at the time, to watch Mark’s nineteen year old son, Brian, a more seasoned goalkeeper, play in a semi-professional soccer game.  From then on Brian was Bobby’s hero.

Two years later Mark invited us all down to North Carolina to share in celebrating his daughter’s wedding.   At first my aging mother wasn’t sure she could make the trip; at that point she walked with a cane and her eyesight and hearing had already begun to fade.   But in the end Mom, Alison, Sarah, Bobby and myself all piled into a rented van to make the trip.   My brother welcomed us warmly, and we were very pleased to share in the joy of the occasion.

In the subsequent five years I’d only seen Mark three times — once a couple of years back at my father’s house, and then twice in the past year when Mark had flown up to visit our mother.  So as I said, I hadn’t been sure Mark would come.    It wasn’t clear that Mom was conscious.   Just five months earlier, knowing that our mother was fading Mark had made a special trip up to visit Mom; perhaps that trip would suffice for the saying of goodbye.

But he did come, and when he walked into the room he gave us each heart-felt hugs, and then took his place beside Mom to let her know how much he loved her.  He cried when I handed him some pictures I’d found of our Mom with Mark’s children when they were young.   We were, once more, a loving, united family.

The vigil continued into the next day.  At one point, watching our mother labor so for breath, my sister said to me with tears in her eyes, “I don’t understand why she should have to struggle so.  What is the lesson to be learned that requires this?”

In the morning, a doctor came in and told us that it might be another 24 to 48 hours before our mother finally passed.   It seemed as if she had settled into a relatively calm rhythm in her breathing.   Two nurses came in and said they needed thirty minutes with our Mom to bathe her and such, so all three of us stepped out of the room and stretched our legs.

It was an exquisite lovely day outside, and Sarah and I began to go on a walk on the beautiful grounds of the facility.   We were maybe a ten minute walk away when my sister called me on my cell phone urgently telling me to “Come back now!”

Apparently while the nurses had been working with my mother, she suddenly gave a great gasp.  They recognized the sign that the end was at hand, and called my sister and brother into the room, who sat with her for the remaining few breaths of her life.

I hurried back to the room, but by the time I arrived she had already taken her last breath.   My brother and sister were kneeling beside each other, weeping, clasping our mother’s hands. I joined them on the other side of the bed and we clasped hands together around her.   Soon Sarah joined us, and we said the 23^rd psalm and sang a weepy version of “Amazing Grace.”  I imagined my mother’s resurrection body rising up above us as she began her ascent to heaven, looking down with pleasure at the sight of her children connected so deeply in love.  In heaven there are no walls separating people, and in that moment our family was a reflection of heaven.

I hadwanted to be present at the precise moment when my mother let go and departed this world.  But in the end, it didn’t seem to matter.  It was the only time all three of us had been out of the room in the past 48 hours, and perhaps my mother needed this to be the case to let go.

We spent another three hours together in our mom’s room.  Midway through the undertaker came, and we followed him as he rolled our mother’s body to the hearse.  We returned to the room and divided what little worldly possessions our mother had between us – mostly photos and a few small odds and ends.  By the end of her life our mother had let go of most of what she had, materially speaking.

The four of us went out to a nearby diner for an early supper, sharing memories and a few laughs.  It was as if we had always been a close family.  It was lovely.  Afterwards we hugged each other goodbye and each went on our way, returning to our homes.

In our epistle lesson this morning, this simple but powerful declaration occurs twice:  “God is love.”   Despite the impression some will convey, God’s nature is absolutely loving.   Whenever love is experienced in this world, it is a sign of God’s presence.

We were made out of love.  Our essence is love.  In our Gospel lesson, Jesus says, “I am the true vine, and you are the branches.”   We arise organically out of the love that gave birth to the universe.  We are connected to this love, like a branch is connected to a vine.

As we all have experienced in a whole host of ways, there is a power at work in this world that is in conflict with love, and traditionally this power has been called “sin.”  Even at our best, every one of our expressions of love in this world is tainted.  There is love present for sure, but there are other things mixed in as well that are not of love.   When Jesus says that there are branches that need pruning, he is referring to the process by which we let go of those things in our hearts that taint our love.

There can be parts of our lives that are altogether devoid of love.  These are the branches that don’t need simply to be pruned; these are the branches, as Jesus said, that need to be simply thrown away.

It is possible over time for people to reach a point where love altogether disappears from their lives.  These are those who have truly lost their souls.  I don’t know what happens to such people in death.  I put my hope in what Jesus said about the Good Shepherd who seeks the lost sheep in the wilderness until he finds it.  The implication here is that God keeps seeking every lost soul throughout eternity.

My mother was a very loving person; I knew that love first hand.   I can’t recall her acting unkindly towards anyone, ever, though I’m sure she must have.  I know that like all of us, she had unkind thoughts, because she told me so.

There are other ways, however, for the power of sin to be manifest in a person’s life besides acting unkindly.  For my mother, the power of sin was experienced as a certain self-consciousness that she was rarely able to shed; a self-consciousness that held her back from fully engaging life.  My mother was a gifted author who wrote many poems, and this theme is one that shows up in many of her poems.  She told me once that she heard a voice say softly to her one morning, “Are you going out with your paper hand cuffs on today?”  She took it to be the Holy Spirit.   The words called attention to the way she often lived life as though she were incapacitated by hand cuffs, rendering her powerless, when, in fact, the hand cuffs were merely made of paper.  It was possible for her to break free.

I was delighted when I heard the bell choir play “This Little Light of Mine” at the start of our worship, because I had planned to reference the words of Jesus upon which the song is based.  Jesus said to us, “You are the light of the world!”  God’s love shines through us, because we are branches arising out of the one true vine – the source of all love.  Jesus went on to say, “Don’t hide your light under a bushel!”   My mother often felt the need to hide her light under a bushel, as I think most of us do.   And her light was mighty bright.

For most of us, it is in dying that the final pruning takes place that makes us ready to enter heaven.

My sister had asked, Why does dying have to be such a struggle?   Perhaps it is because the pruning of branches is never painless.  It hurts when the knife cuts the fruitless branches to make more room for the fruit bearing parts.  For most of us, it is in dying that the final pruning takes place that makes us ready for Heaven.  Heaven is the place where there is nothing but love, and in order to enter heaven, we have to leave behind everything that has been a part of us that isn’t of love, and that includes a lot of stuff we’ve grown to be quite attached to over the years.  We can’t imagine existing without some of this stuff.  It seems like a part of who we are, but its not, really.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite hymns, “How firm a foundation.”  The fourth verse goes like this:

“When through fiery trials thy pathways shall lie,

 my grace, all sufficient, shall be thy supply;

the flame shall not hurt thee; I only design 

thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine.”

The gold is the love; the dross is all the other stuff.  A fire must be passed through — it’s another way of saying that a pruning is necessary.

“Abide in me as I abide in you,” Jesus said.  In her own way, my mother had tried to abide in the light of Christ as best she could. As she had shed herself of her worldly possessions, so she had tried as best she could in her life to shed herself of the other kinds of heart-possessions that block love.  In the end, her dying could have been a lot worse.  I’d like to think that because she had spent her lifetime trying to learn the lessons the Holy Spirit was trying to teach her through the twists and turns of her life, it allowed her final pruning to be relatively gentle.

 

A sermon preached on April 22, 2012, based on John 20:19 – 31.

Late in Thomas Jefferson’s life, after he finished with politics and doing his part to help set up the government of the newly formed nation, he turned his attention to matters of philosophy, morals and religion.   Jefferson was quite impressed with the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, believing that they were at the spark out of which the best of western civilization arose.  But to his mind the rest of the stuff you find in the Gospels was essentially fluff – the stuff of fairy tale.

If you go to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, you can find what is referred to as Jefferson’s Bible.   What Jefferson did was take a copy of the Bible and with a razor in hand, he carefully cut out all the parts he valued from all four Gospels and pasted them into chronological order, leaving out, among other things, all the supernatural stuff.   So Jefferson’s Bible begins with Jesus’ birth without any angels, moving on to his teachings without any miracles.  There’s no divinity and no resurrection.   Taking verses from John’s Gospel, this is how Jefferson ended his Bible:

“Now, in the place where He was crucified, there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid. There laid they Jesus. And rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.”

Jesus — a great man, a great teacher, perhaps the greatest teacher — but he stayed dead the way you expect a person to stay dead.

I was raised in the Methodist Church; from early on in my life my family attended church most Sundays; and I attended Sunday School, where I was taught to believe in Christ.

Early on in high school, however I stopped going to church.  By the time I went off to college, if you had pressed me on what I believed about Christianity, if I had known about Jefferson’s Bible, I would have probably said I pretty much agreed with Jefferson’s take on Christianity.  Jesus was a great teacher with extraordinary moral vision.   But the rest was all pretty suspect.

I had come to this place I think because of two reasons.

First, it is the nature of adolescents to question the authority that has previously gone unquestioned.  Rebelling is a part of growing up, in some sense necessary, and I grew up in a particularly rebellious time in our country’s history.

The second reason I found myself in this place was that the particular church I attended didn’t do much for me.  The worship services bored me, Sunday School seemed at best a time to fool around, and in my brief experience at the Youth Group I got picked on by the older kids.   But beyond all of that, my family and I were in a good deal of pain in those years.  My parents were divorced when I was going into seventh grade, and the people of the church didn’t really seem to respond to that pain in any recognizable way.  I just felt like an odd ball with divorced parents.

And so since the professed beliefs of these people didn’t seem to make them especially more loving that other people, I figured their beliefs didn’t hold water.

It is human nature to try to interpret life in black and white categories — two avoid shades of gray – but rarely is life so simple.  Often this is how people see faith and belief. Either you are a believer or you are not.

But what I think is actually the case is that there is this continuum extending absolute belief to absolute doubt.  At one end you have an atheist who is absolutely convinced there is no God – that the material world is the only reality.  At the other end you have somebody who is absolutely convinced of the reality of God and the risen Christ.

Most of us spend our lives somewhere towards the middle of this continuum, moving in one direction or another at various seasons of our lives.  I’ve come to believe that there are relatively few people who live their lives consistently at either end of the spectrum.

Most self-professed atheists are really agnostics.  You can declare that nothing in your experience has given you reason to believe that there is this other dimension of reality where God reigns, but since this other dimension is by definition one that isn’t perceptible with our ordinary five senses, the fact that you haven’t experienced this other dimension doesn’t prove it doesn’t exist.  (Even Richard Dawkins has recently retreated from his stance of absolute atheism.)

Most of us live in the middle somewhere.   We find our lives expressed in the words of the distraught father in the Gospel of Mark who comes to Jesus in terror because his beloved son is very sick and very well may not recover.   He says to Jesus, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.”  Faith and doubt wrestle within him. We may feel pretty confident in our faith in God, but then, as in the case of the father whose son was very sick, things happen that shake our very foundations, and we find doubts we didn’t know existed arising within us.

When I got to college, I took courses in theology in which I recognized that there were people associated with Christianity who were dealing with the big questions of life – the sort that don’t often get addressed, like, what is life all about, anyway? and I recognized a yearning to address these kinds of questions.  I met people of faith who seemed to me to have integrity.  Part of what made them credible to me was that they didn’t pretend that they didn’t have any doubts.   They were honest about the way their faith and their doubt struggled together.  And their doubts seemed to have value:  they pushed them to a deeper faith – one that didn’t settle for pat answers to hard questions.

I arrived at college closer to the unbeliever end of the continuum, but as I began to consciously ask these questions with the people of faith I admired, I found myself gradually moving towards the belief end of the continuum – a process I’ve been consciously engaged in ever since.

I had a close friend though who arrived at college with me as a fundamentalist Christian.   Now it is the nature of fundamentalism that either you believe or you don’t, and that you’re not allowed to doubt or seriously question anything.  The Bible is to be taken as the inerrant word of God, and if you question anything within it you are, in essence, questioning everything within it.

But college is a place where critical thinking is encouraged, and so pretty soon my friend was entertaining doubts, and once the cracks started to show up in his beliefs, it wasn’t long before the whole thing came tumbling down.  Having accepted the fundamentalist terms for viewing Christianity, he ended up rejecting the whole thing, ending up closer to the unbeliever end of the continuum.

Which is one of the reasons I think fundamentalism is a dangerous thing.

In general, I think that what Thomas Jefferson was up to is legitimate.  We aren’t obliged to accept everything that is written in the Bible.   The Bible is full of contradictions as well as the stuff of mere human culture getting passed off as God’s will.   If we aren’t going to stick our brains in the sand like an ostrich, we will find ourselves in an ongoing quest to sort out what is part of the essence of Christianity, and which stuff we can reject because it isn’t of the essence.

Where I came to part ways with Thomas Jefferson was his rejection of everything supernatural.   Strange things do occur that don’t make sense in a strictly “natural” understanding of reality, and such things often happened in the course of Jesus’ ministry.

And, the resurrection is a part of the essence of Christianity.  Exactly what took place at the resurrection, and how it was that Jesus could appear to his disciples after his resurrection – well, there is plenty of room for discussion and disagreement.  But Christianity declares that something very real happened there – something that overcomes the fear of death — the usual way human beings see death as final.

All of this is by way of setting up the story Bob read for us from John’s Gospel.

So we have this disciple named Thomas, who is often referred to as “doubting Thomas”, with some degree of disdain.  But his doubts are real, and the guy really loved Jesus.  He has been traumatized by his beloved master’s torture and death.

And what is often overlooked is the fact that the other ten disciples also wrestled with big load of doubt even after Mary Magdalene told them that she had seen Jesus alive again. We find them huddled in fear behind locked doors in that upper room.  They weren’t really any different from Thomas.

And in relationship to Thomas, Jesus doesn’t take the attitude of, “Well, hey, you won’t believe what the others told you about my resurrection?  Then I’ll punish you by not appearing to you.”  No, there is integrity to Thomas’ doubts, and Jesus respects that.  In the end, Jesus provides what Thomas needs in order to believe.

The first thing I want to briefly take note of us in this story is that the ten disciples who did believe Jesus had been raised didn’t reject Thomas because he wouldn’t believe the way they did.   They loved him.  They carried him in his doubts.  You don’t see the kind of rigidity that sometimes characterizes churches wherein if you question the dogma, you’re shown the door.  It’s something I take pride regarding our congregation in that we view the circle of Jesus’ love as big enough that it can include people who are very up front about their doubts and questions.  Faith is nurtured in the company of those who have worked through some of their doubts, as I found to be the case in college.

But to understand why the Gospel writer John gives so much attention to this story about Thomas, you need to pay attention to the words Jesus says after Thomas finally professes his faith, “My Lord and my God.”

“Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

There is this distinction being made between those who believe because they have seen, as opposed to those who never got a chance to see, but nonetheless found their way to some kind of belief.

John wrote his Gospel near the end of the first century, which means that for the vast majority of those for whom he wrote, they never had a chance to see Jesus in the flesh.  Most of them were born after he died, so the stories they heard came second or third-hand.  A child who was six years old on that first Easter Morning would have been close to seventy by the time John wrote his gospel, and in those days most people didn’t live that long..

Here’s how Barbara Brown Taylor puts it:

“John’s problem, which is a continuing problem for the church, was how to encourage people in the faith when Jesus was no longer around to be seen or touched.  The story of Thomas gave him a way to do that.  By detailing that reluctant disciple’s doubt, John took the words right out of our mouths and put them in Thomas’ instead, so that each of us has the opportunity to think about how we do (or do not) come to believe.”

I said before that there is a continuum extending between complete belief at one end to complete doubt on the other, and that most of us live our lives out at various places along the middle of the continuum.

The people who lived way back when Jesus lived and died and actually got to see and touch him in some manner in his resurrection – well, I imagine them as having been on the extreme “belief” end of the continuum.   They had a first hand experience to draw upon that pretty much blew all doubt out of the water.  (Though interestingly, Matthew 28:17 tells us that even in seeing the resurrected Jesus, some of the disciples still doubted.)

So John is writing to encourage those of us who haven’t had such an experience, and therefore continue to struggle with our doubts.

Throughout the centuries there have always been a relatively small group of people who, I think, have been blessed by experiences given to them that similarly pretty much took away all the doubts.  The Apostle Paul, for instance, as far as we know never met Jesus when he was going about his ministry.  But two years after his death and resurrection he was astonished as he was making his way to a town called Damascus by a vision of the glorified Christ that transported him up to what he called the seventh heaven.  He had all kinds of struggles afterwards, but doubting the reality of the risen Christ wasn’t one of them.

In 1902, the great psychologist William James wrote a book entitled “The Varieties of Religious Experience” in which he recorded dozens and dozens of first hand accounts of intense religious experience.  At our men’s group this past Friday we listened to a Ted Talk in which the speaker quoted the words of one of those accounts, from a young man named Stephen Bradley who wrote these words: “I thought I saw the savior in human shape for about one second in the room with arms extended appearing to say to me, ‘Come.’  The next day I rejoiced with trembling.  My happiness was so great that I said I wanted to die – this world had no place in my affections.  Previous to this time I was very selfish and self-righteous but now I desired the welfare of all mankind, and could with a feeling heart forgive my worst enemies.”

Some of you may have read the book, “Ninety Minutes in Heaven,” written by the guy who described going to heaven when his heart stopped after what appeared to be a fatal auto accident.  Or maybe you read the bestseller, “Heaven is For Real”, that describes what a four year old child reported having seen when he nearly died on an operating table.  I’ve been drawn to the accounts of countless other people who have had what are termed “Near Death Experiences”.   I just read the autobiography of Dr. Raymond Moody who first popularized the NDE when he began collecting hundreds of such accounts, publishing them in the book, “Life After Life.”   Having heard so many stories, Moody was pretty convinced of the reality of heaven.   But it wasn’t until years later that he had a NDE experience himself that he felt he knew for sure.

People are often shy about talking about these kinds of experiences because they are so different from any other kind of experience they’ve ever had, and they find words inadequate to express them. They often fear people will think them crazy if they speak to them about what they saw. (If any of you have anything like this sort of experience, I’d love to hear from you.)

People who had such experiences generally speaking feel as though the reality they encountered was so undeniably real that from that point on they never again doubted the love of God or the reality of heaven, or, for that matter, that life on earth has a God-given purpose.

Since I have never had such an experience myself, I live in that realm between belief and unbelief.    I envy people who have had these kinds of experiences, though I don’t envy what they often had to go through to receive such visions.   But their testimonies encourage me, just the way John’s stories were meant to encourage his readers, so that we can make our way further down the continuum towards deeper faith and trust.

I still have my moments of doubt, but the bigger part of me trusts that when I breathe my last breath here on earth, I will see that which so many have caught glimpses of, and, that like Thomas, I will cry out a whole-hearted “My Lord and My God!”   

In the meantime I draw encouragement in my faith journey from the faith and love expressed by you, my fellow pilgrims, which is what a church at its best should provide.

I am encouraged to keep my eyes and ears and especially my heart open to witness God instances – those strange coincidences that occur in life that you probably wouldn’t notice if you weren’t looking for, but which are there for those who I are ready to notice.  These God-instances aren’t of the magnitude of the direct visions I’ve been describing, but they nonetheless provide impetus to move further down the spectrum towards faith and trust.

I told David Turner I was writing a sermon on Thomas, and that I hadn’t made much progress.  He told me had kept an essay he had read about the subject that had encouraged him, and he shared it with me – which is an example of the kind of encouragement that fellow pilgrims can provide for one another.  I want to finish with a quote from that essay by Margaret Bullitt-Jonas on her blog, HolyHunger.org:

“Someone once remarked that two sorts of people please God: those who serve God with all their heart because they know God, and those who seek God with all their heart because they do not know God. Christians of all sorts–whether parishioners or priests. religious or laypersons–are both finders and seekers of God. We are finders of God, any of us who have been drawn, however briefly, into a sense of wonder and awe before the living Mystery in whom we live and move and have our being. And we are all seekers of God, too: people who, time and again, need to confess our foibles and failures, people who hunger for a deeper intimacy with the Holy One, people who wrestle with all kinds of questions and doubts.”

 

A sermon preached by Bob Keller on April 15, 2012 based on Acts 4: 32 – 35.

I’m certainly a layman, but I have this overwhelming desire to lend a hand when Pastor Jeff asks for some well-deserved time off.  So, before I realize what I’m getting into, again, I say “yes,” thinking that, since today is April 15^th, the lectionary would be that passage about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

I had a look at the lectionary for today and found one of the passages was from John – the familiar story about Thomas and his doubts about the risen Lord.  “Nah,” I said.  I’ve done that a couple times before, although it was very tempting to do again.  Thomas really suits us.  He has an appeal to modern man.  His skepticism and “show me before I believe” attitude of 2,000 years ago is very much like we are today.  We’ve been fooled far too many times to buy in to another fantastic story.

So I read the passage from Acts that David just read and thought I could do something with that.  I later checked the commentaries.  There’s four lines, FOUR LINES!, written about that passage.  So you’ll be treated to a short message today!  Hey, I come for free so you get what you pay for.

If you paid attention to the children’s message this morning, you already heard the main point of today’s sermon.  Sharing is good because it’s God-inspired.

I read a story about a pastor in a rural church.

This pastor had a farmer friend in his congregation and they were talking over the fence one day. The pastor asked the farmer, “Abe, if you had one hundred horses, would you give me fifty?”

Abe said, “Certainly.”

The pastor asked, “If you had one hundred cows, would you give me fifty?”

Abe said, “Of course, I would.” Then the pastor asked, “If you had two pigs, would you give me one?”

Abe said, “Now cut that out, pastor; you know I have two pigs!”

Generosity sounds good in the abstract; many Christians picture themselves giving away half their lottery winnings. Far fewer, it seems, can part with one pig.

When I read today’s scripture, the first word that popped into my head was ‘socialism.’  That’s a dirty word today.  I’m sure Joe the Plumber would get ticked off at today’s scripture.  But what was Luke, the likely author of the Book of Acts really talking about?

For an answer to that let’s look to Lucien.  Lucian lived between 120 and 200 AD. He was a Greek satirist and opponent of anything religious.  He grouped all religions together as superstitions. Yet when he saw the generosity of the Christian church he wrote: “It is incredible to see the fervor with which the people of that religion help each other in their wants. They spare nothing. Their first legislator (Jesus) has put it in their heads that they are brothers.

The cause of the difference which Lucian observed among the Christians was the presence of the Holy Spirit producing power in their witness. Our God is generous; and when we devote ourselves to him, and he works among us, he makes us generous like himself. Then others can see the works of the Lord and they, too, want to know the Savior.

A 12-year old boy went to his first orthodontist visit.  He was filling out the required forms and, in an effort to impress the doctor, under “Hobbies,” he wrote ‘skateboarding and flossing.’  The doctor had a good laugh and was shown that we’re all prone to a little hypocrisy.

However, spiritual hypocrisy isn’t funny. The hypocrisy of professing Christians has served as an excuse for many to disregard the claims of Christ, saying, “The church is full of hypocrites.”
Half of the misery in the world comes from trying to look, instead of trying to be, what one is not.

Hypocrisy is deliberate deception, trying to make people think we are more spiritual than we really are.
It is said that, “A hypocrite is a person who is not himself on Sunday.” Hypocrisy is the hiding of the things you do, not because you were not supposed to do them, but because you would be ashamed to have them known by people who know you.

Do we act like the early Christians by taking care of our brothers, or are we hypocrites?  Please don’t misunderstand!  I’m NOT trying to lay a stewardship “guilt trip” on you.  Guilt-induced offerings deny the gospel of grace and really interfere with generous giving from the heart. Instead, let’s look for the causes of the amazing generosity we saw in today’s reading.

First, God’s grace produces unity in the Church.  Note the first line of today’s scripture: “All the believers were one in heart and mind.”

The Bible includes this sentence to help our unbelief.  Would we really think it possible that thousands of Christians could agree on something?  These were men and women of different ages, backgrounds and personalities, people who were opponents of one another a few months earlier.  They came from a wide variety of sects and religions.But that was now all forgotten, and they are unanimous in their love for Jesus. And because they were united to the Lord, they were joined to one another in holy love. Recall the dying command of Christ to his disciples: “Love one another,” and one of his final prayers to the Father: “That they may be one, even as we are one.”

They loved one another, and that love enabled them to count others of greater value than themselves; love caused them to overlook any number of faults.

How many in here are parents?  And how many have, or had, parents.  That’s everybody!  That means that all of you know the extent of personal sacrifice a parent would endure to make sure his or her children do not suffer hunger and want. I dare say that many (maybe all of you) would sell your house, car, land and property, if it were necessary to provide for your children. You love them. They are yours and you are theirs. Problems and disagreements do not prevent outrageous acts of generosity, for they are your beloved family.

Second, God’s grace makes our giving generous.

John Stott, a noted Anglican cleric who passed last year, wrote in his book, “The Spirit, The Church and the World,” that “Luke…is concerned to show that the fullness of the Spirit is manifest in deed as well as word, service as well as witness, love for the family [of believers] as well as testimony to the world” Elevating the word without acts of extravagant mercy is frankly unbiblical. But take note of both characteristics of these believers.

1)      First, sense their radical attitude. This is not communism, for no one took from them what was theirs. It was “common-ism,” so deep was the love that they felt every possession (must be made) available to help their brothers and sisters in the Lord.

2)      Second, see their sacrificial action. They refused to speak of a love that is not visible through generosity. Faith without works is dead; love without generosity is empty.

Listen to this quote:   “Surely we ought to observe the same order, first loving one another with a sincere heart, and thereafter our love showing itself in its application to others. For even external beneficence, if it comes not from the heart, is of no value in the sight of God. We boast in vain of proper affections, unless the evidence of them is seen in outward performance…. In those days the believers gave abundantly of what was their own; we in our day are content jealously to retain what we possess…. They set forth their own possessions with simplicity and faithfulness; we devise a thousand cunning devices whereby we may acquire everything for ourselves by hook or by crook. They laid down at the apostles’ feet; we do not fear, with sacrilegious boldness, to convert to our own use what was offered to God.

They sold their own possessions in those days; in our day it is the lust to purchase that reigns supreme. At that time love made each man’s own possessions common property for those in need; in our day such is the inhumanity of many, that they begrudge to the poor a common dwelling on earth, the common use of water, air and sky. These things then are written for our shame and reproach.”

Do you know who said that?  John Calvin in the 1500’s!  Things haven’t changed much, have they?

Third, God’s grace makes our witness more powerful.  Bible scholars disagree over whether the “grace [that] was upon them” refers to God’s grace or the people’s favor. The word “God” is not in this verse, and the Greek word for grace can refer either to a blessing from God or the acceptance of people.
Whichever meaning is intended, both are clearly true. God’s favor was on the early church.  They witnessed with power, they preached with boldness, they prayed with visible demonstrations of the presence of the Spirit, and they cared passionately for their fellow believers.

Earlier in Acts 4 you’ll read about the boldness of Peter and John as they appeared on charges before the high priests and basically told them to ‘buzz off!”  As a result, they enjoyed the favor of many, and, as we read in Acts 5, “more than ever, believers were added to the Lord, multitudes of men and women.”

We don’t have to validate the cross.  The cross is empty.  The tomb is empty.  The life, death and resurrection of Jesus validates itself.  Our love demonstrates it!

I would like to leave you with a Native American proverb:

The creator gathered all of creation and said,
“I want to hide something from the humans until they are ready for it. It is the realization that they create their own reality”.

The Eagle said, “Give it to me, I will take it to the moon”.
The creator said, “No, one day they will go there and find it”.
The salmon said, “I will bury it at the bottom of the ocean”.
The creator said, “No they will go there too”.
The buffalo said, “I will bury it on the great plains”.
The creator said, “No, they will cut the skin of the Earth and find it even there”.

Grandmother mole, who lives in the breast of Mother Earth, and who has no physical eyes but sees with spiritual eyes said, “Put it inside of them”.

And the creator said, “It is done!”

It has been said that the most difficult journey is the one we make into ourselves.

Do we make that journey?  Do we talk the talk, but fake the walk?  Do we love one another, and therefore give to one another, as Jesus wanted us to do?  Do we witness with power and boldness?

Do we justify the sacrifice made on the cross?  God’s love says, “Yes!”, but it’s up to us to accept it and to live the life that Jesus wants us to.

A sermon preached on Easter Sunday, April 8, 2012 based upon Matthew 28:1 – 20.

You may be aware that the four Gospels vary a good deal in the details they tell regarding what happened on that first Easter morning.

There is one detail, however, that is consistent in the stories told by all four Gospels, and it is this: that it was women, not men, who first came to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body, where they found the stone rolled away and Jesus’ body missing, and that these women came away from that tomb convinced that Jesus was alive again.

Now this is a curious detail for them all to agree upon, and one that if you understand what it means points to something very real and very powerful happening back there – that the story wasn’t merely a fairy tale conjured up by the followers of Jesus in order to keep his movement going.

You see, in those days, women were distinctly second-class citizens – slaves really.  They were nobodies; invisible people in the eyes of the justice system.   Women in those days weren’t permitted to be witnesses in a court of law, because, being “only” women, their witness was considered unreliable.

Consequently, if the story of the resurrection of Jesus were simply a fairy tale manufactured to promote the movement, then those doing the fabricating would surely have had men be the ones who discovered the tomb to be empty, in order to properly impress a rigidly sexist world.

So the fact that the testimony remains consistent in all of the four Gospels – that it was indeed women who were the first witnesses to the resurrection – this fact argues compellingly that the story was based upon a real experience that the women had that morning when they went to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body.

The invisible women refuse to stay invisible or be silenced; they know the truth of what they have experienced, a truth that has called them from death and despair to life and hope.

Now when you go beyond what the four Gospels have in common, you soon discover a good deal of variety in the details told by the Gospel writers as to what took place on the first Easter.

In some cases, these variations of the story may not be historically accurate, but in all instances, the Gospel writers are trying to make a point in regards to the meaning of Christ’s resurrection, an event they were absolutely convinced had happened.

When, for instance, as we heard in our Gospel story this morning, Matthew alone tells us how the stone got rolled back – that there was a mighty earthquake and that a powerful angel who shown like lightning descended and rolled back the stone, and that in seeing this, the guards who had been stationed their by anxious authorities shook with fear, becoming like dead men, and that then a conspiracy immediately was undertaken to cover up Jesus’ resurrection – well, this may very well be a flight of imagination on Matthew’s part, but it is a flight intended to make a very important point.

That point being this:  that the resurrection of Jesus threatened the powers of this world that oppress and dehumanize people.

In the kingdoms of this world certain people are always viewed as being expendable.

The Roman Empire was actually more humane than a lot of empires that have ruled in human history – but the Romans knew well how to exercise violence in order to hold on to their power.  The cross, their common method of execution, was specifically designed to humiliate and to extinguish life in a very gruesome and public way, so that the rest of those subject to its power would be properly intimidated.  The message was unmistakable:  “Don’t mess with Rome’s authority, or we will make you disappear as well, never to be seen or heard from again.”

But if the life of one of those whom the Romans had made disappear were to suddenly  re-appear — and not just any life, but one that had stood up to those very threats – not in the name of some other kingdom of this world  — but rather by a higher authority – God’s very kingdom in which all the supposed expendable people are cherished – well, then, the empire with blood on their hands would have reason to tremble and quake.

The man who, it was testified, came back from the dead had sent disciples out into the world proclaiming God’s kingdom, telling them, “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.”

In other words, it is not possible for you to ever truly become invisible, no matter what the powers of this world try to do to you.

In the words of Rowan Williams, “Here and now, God holds on to the lives of all the departed – including the lives that have been wasted, violently cut short, damaged by oppression. All have worth in his sight.”

So the news of Jesus’ resurrection was truly disturbing to the powers of this world.  Jesus was said to be the “first born to be raised” – meaning, all the others who had been made to disappear would also be re-appearing in God’s good time.  All the more reason for the empire to tremble and quake.

There are plenty of places in this world where people can still be routinely made to disappear by violence, when the kingdoms of this world judge this necessary for them to hold onto their power.

But wherever the Gospel of the Resurrection is proclaimed, the powers of this world are called to account.

A generation ago in El Salvador – Norma’s homeland – thousands of people simply disappeared when the death squads aligned with the government would come by night to carry them away, never to be seen again – their bodies never found.

In response to these atrocities, the faithful established a tradition in the midst of the celebration of the mass.   When the priest came to the place in the liturgy where he says, “And so, with your people on earth and all the company of heaven…” he would pause in order to read aloud the names of those who the regime had made disappear.   Following each name, somebody in the congregation would stand up and shout out “Presente!”  “Here!”  And by so doing the power of the oppressors was defied, and the reality of God’s kingdom asserted.

We are fortunate to live in a society that isn’t in the habit of executing those who challenge the government, thank God.

Though such overt brutality doesn’t take place in this country, America is not the kingdom of God – which means there are more subtle, covert forms of brutality that dehumanize people.

In our society there are countless people who are essentially viewed as expendable, and rendered invisible.

We have an economic system that tolerates 8% unemployment, with so many more underemployed.  We have an economic system that works to the benefit of the richest members of our society who steadily get richer and richer, while millions others are laid off, losing their homes, disappearing in the ranks of expendable people.  The county we live in, — Morris County – is so geared towards affluence that many full time jobs simply don’t pay enough for people to either buy or rent a home.

Most of us have seen or read the powerful play, “Death of a Salesman”, which was written back in 1949 but is now back on Broadway.  It describes what this disappearance is like for a man named Willie Loman, who aspired to succeed in the competitive post-war business world, buying into the lie that his value depended upon his success, only to fall into the great abyss in middle age as he loses his job and his self-respect.   There’s this classic speech his wife makes to her sons as they witness the demise of their father:

“I don’t say he’s a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”

Yes, attention must be paid.

And the resurrection of Jesus declares that attention is paid, that God pays attention to all those who would be forgotten, and that we are called to do likewise.

We live in a society in which people are readily seduced into possessing many things as a substitute for loving contact with other human beings.  Increasingly people live more and more isolated from one another.  At the same time the advances in health care and medicine make it possible for people to live longer than ever.  This is not always a good thing.  As people age, their isolation often increases, and they become those who are forgotten  – invisible – long before they die.

Tony Campolo tells a story about receiving a phone call from his mother telling him that Mrs. Smith, the sweet old lady who lived across the street, had passed.   Could he please attend the funeral to show his respects for Mrs. Smith?  He said, “Sure, Mom.”

The day of the funeral Tony was running late, arriving at the funeral home just as the service was starting.   He hurried into the room, and immediately sensed that something wasn’t quite right.   The place was empty except for one old lady sitting up front and the minister taking his place at the podium.  More disconcerting yet was the fact that the old man in the casket didn’t look a thing like Mrs. Smith.    He was about to make a quiet retreat, when the old woman turned to look back at him, saying, “You were my husband’s friend?”

He felt he had no choice. “Yeah,” he said, “He was my friend.  He was a nice guy;” sitting down in the seat next to the old woman.

When the service was over, the old lady turned to him with tears in her eyes and said, “You’ll go with me to the cemetery?”

“Of course,” said Tony.  What else was there to say?  So he road in the limousine  beside the old lady for what turned out to be a 45 minute ride to the cemetery.

When it was all over, and they were finally back at the funeral home, Tony felt obliged to tell the old lady the truth.

“I’m sorry, Maam, but I gotta be honest with you.   I didn’t really know your husband.”

“I know,” she said softly, looking into his eyes. “I know.  But you’ll never know what it meant for me to have you with me today.”

Attention must be paid.

The resurrection of Jesus is a testimony to God’s determination that no one should disappear; no one forgotten.

I want you to listen to something for a moment.

(Play beginning of the recording, “Jesus’ Blood,” by Gavin Bryars – an old man’s voice singing, “Jesus’ blood hasn’t failed me yet, hasn’t failed me yet, hasn’t failed me yet.  There’s one thing I know, that he loves me so.” Reduce volume, but continue playing the loop of the man singing.)

A British Composer by the name of Gavin Bryars was involved in project back in the 1970s in which people went out into a particularly rough neighborhood in London to interview and record people living on the streets.  Sometimes they would sing bits of song they knew, as did the old man who sang the chorus of his favorite hymn.

In the eyes of the world, people like this old man are the nobodies, invisible and forgotten.   Shortly after the recording was made, the man died.  (Abruptly stop the recording.)   If there was a funeral for this old man, it is not likely that there were many in attendance.

Bryars was moved by the sound of the old man singing the old hymn, finding it enchanting and haunting, and over the years he held on to the recording.

Over time an idea began to take hold in Bryars to record man’s voice singing as a loop, just as you heard, and to gradually add the sound of a beautiful symphony playing behind the voice.  And so he did, with the full piece lasting 114 minutes.

Listen to a bit of what it sounds like.

(Play Track #2, volume up.  After one verse…)

Now let’s add our voices to the man’s voice.  Let’s sing along.

(Congregation sings along for a verse.)

The one who was raised from the dead was the one who also said, whenever one of the forgotten ones are found, then all the angels in heaven throw a big, boisterous party to celebrate, and I’m sure the there’s plenty of music and lots of singing.

No matter what the powers of this world may try to do to you to make you disappear, know that the angels in heaven are singing along with you, and in the sight of God, you cannot disappear.

And you are called to sing with the angels for every one of the little ones of Jesus.

A sermon preached on Palm Sunday, 2012 based upon Mark 11:1 – 11.  

Jesus had lived the better part of thirty years on this earth before he undertook his ministry.    Something had been slowly taking shape in the course of those years – something that finally crystallized the day Jesus went down to the Jordan River with so many ordinary, struggling people longing for a new life, and entered with them into the dark water of John’s baptism.

Those waters symbolized nothing less than death itself, and as he came up out of those waters, it was as if he had already passed through death and come out the far side.   The sting of death – the fear of death – was overcome as heaven itself opened up to him.  It was that moment when he heard the words he realized God longed to whisper in the ear of every human being:  “You are my beloved child!”  It was as if he himself no longer mattered.  The very Spirit of God was now in charge and calling the shots, and what mattered now was the mission to which he felt himself called.

A vision was given to him that day, a vision that was fleshed out in the forty days he spent out in the wilderness, where the evil One who rules over this world tried his best to distort the vision – tried to tempt Jesus to water down the vision with something other than pure, holy love of God.

So Jesus came forth from the wilderness with his vision clear and strong; the vision had a name:  “the kingdom of God,” he called it, though sometimes it was also called the “kingdom of heaven” – they were one in the same.  You could say the vision was of what life could be like, but that’s not really strong enough, because, in fact, the vision was about how life already is at the deepest level of reality – that is, beyond time in heaven.

And catching people up in this vision was what his ministry was all about.  His message was simple and direct:  “Repent,” he said, “for the kingdom of God is at hand.  Now is the time to let go of everything that is within you that blocks the full expression of God’s kingdom.”

The time had come, Jesus realized for all the dividing walls that stood in the way of the kingdom taking hold on earth to come falling down – the walls of hostility that separated people one from another, and separated people from their truest, most authentic selves, and beneath everything, separated people from the God who created them and longed to hold them.

The vision was fully formed in Jesus’ own soul, and so, as he began his ministry up there in Galilee – the northern country of Israel – the people he encountered in the small towns and villages there were simply astonished by the spiritual authority he exercised.   At his command the walls came tumbling down.  The sick were healed, the lame stood strong and whole on their own two feet, the blind restored to sight, and in general, so many people who had felt outcaste and unworthy and left out of the circle of God’s love, were amazed to find themselves included in God’s great party; embraced, included, loved and empowered to live whole lives.

The vision involved a new kind of community, one that encompassed all people, where sharing and caring and forgiveness and love were the norm, not the exception — where the little ones were loved every bit as much if not more that the high and mighty ones valued by this world — where people were loved and money used, not money loved, and people used.

His ministry provided glimpses into this kingdom.  A particularly powerful glimpse was provided the day that thousands of simple folk travelled out in to the wilderness to be with Jesus and absorb his presence.  When the sun began to set, and the empty bellies began to grumble, the old fears of the disciples that they had learned in the kingdom of this world began to take hold.   Jesus responded to their fear by modeling what it was to trust God in everything.  Jesus took the little bit of food that he and the disciples had brought with them and shared it with all of the people, and sure enough, in doing so God had provided for all their needs.  A barnstorm of sharing took place, and the old fear and the selfishness that arises from that fear was left behind, and everybody got fed that day, and people experienced what it was like to care as much if not more about their neighbors as they did for themselves.  They felt what it was to be a part of a community where every last one of them was treasured, and there was always room in the circle.

It was a miracle for sure — one they would never forget.

From the very beginning of his ministry, it was clear that there were demonic forces that were dead set on resisting the Kingdom of God with every fiber of their being.   In those early days of Jesus’ ministry, however, these dark powers seemed no match to the power of God’s love embodied in Jesus.  In his presence, the unclean spirits were sent packing in a way people had never seen before – those dark powers that for so long had kept people in that kind of bondage that manifests itself in paralyzing fear, or in a black hole of shame and unworthiness — those dark powers intent on deceiving people into forgetting altogether their birthright as God’s beloved children.

In Jesus’ presence, it seemed quite possible that the will of God could be done on earth, as it was already done in heaven – that heaven could be here on earth.

Or so it seemed.

Though the dark powers had taken a beating it seemed up there in Galilee, they were rallying themselves for the fight ahead, and it was down in the big city of Jerusalem where their dominion was most deeply entrenched.

The thing about evil is that it doesn’t simply take up residence in individual people.  No, it takes hold in the systems that organize human life.  The religious, political and economic systems that control our thoughts in ways we don’t even realize, determining what we think is possible or impossible.

It is these demonic systems — referred to in the New Testament as “the principalities and powers” – that can take an otherwise good person and lead them to do evil things.

Up in Galilee, for the most part the opposition to Jesus was located primarily in the Scribes and Pharisees.   For the most part, these were not what we think of as “evil men.”  But they were prisoners themselves to demonic systems that went unquestioned.   The scribes and Pharisees took their marching orders from the power structures that were headquartered in Jerusalem, where the Roman soldiers held sway, and the rich and powerful maintained their power through a perverted system of that presumed to dole out the favor of a God presumed to be reluctant to render blessings.

Very early on in his ministry, Jesus saw that eventually he would have to go to the place where the dark powers were their strongest – go to the very center of the darkness, so to speak.  He had to go to Jerusalem to confront the powers of darkness with God’s holy light.  That’s where the center of the problem was.  To stay in Galilee would be simply piddling around the edges of the problem.

He knew it wouldn’t be easy.  In fact, he recognized early on that this confrontation would more than likely end up in his death.   That’s how strong the dark powers were.  But he also realized that ultimately his life didn’t matter.   What mattered was for the kingdom of God to clearly confront the kingdom of this world.   What mattered was for the light to expose the darkness.

He didn’t want to die, but having already confronted his own death in John’s dark waters, and in the wilderness experience that followed, Jesus was willing, if necessary, to do so if that is what witnessing to God’s kingdom required.

There would be plenty of voices, including those of his own disciples,  that would seek to persuade Jesus that the powers of darkness could be fought with more darkness.  But if the kingdom of God is all about love, well then, there was no way when he got to Jerusalem that he could take up arms against his adversaries.

And so on that day we call Palm Sunday, Jesus arrived at the city where evil’s death grip had its strongest hold.   He took pains to make it clear the manner in which he was coming, though many were not ready to recognize his intentions.  He arranged to ride into town on a humble, young donkey rather than on any sort of war horse.   He came in the eyes of the world in weakness and vulnerability.  But for those who look through the eyes of faith, we recognize in his coming a power that is far greater than the powers of this world.

There is extraordinary courage in his choice to enter this city on that donkey.  He will not back down.  He intends to confront the powers of darkness, whatever it takes.

Mark tells us that when the parade was over, Jesus went to the Temple, took a look around, presumably seeing what he expected to see.  The Temple wasn’t about God; it had become a place where the dark powers of fear and shame had taken up residence with their love of money.

The day was getting late, so Jesus retreats to a village nearby to spend the night.  The next day he will return and drive out the money changers and those selling the pigeons.  No one is killed, or wounded.  No real violence is committed.  It is a symbolic act he takes; the next day the merchants will be back doing business as usual.    And yet his intentions are clear, and in this act of cleansing the Temple, he seals his fate.  The dark powers begin immediately to conspire to have him killed.

They will succeed, and yet in doing so, they will expose the fraudulence of their authority to all who have eyes to see for ages to come.

 

So here we are 2000 years later, remembering the courage of Jesus.   What are we to make of this?  They same struggle continues to take place between light and darkness — between the power of love and the power of brutality and fear.

There is that story I’ve told so many times; you may be tired of hearing me tell it.  A man was down on his hands and knees at night searching for something under a street light.  Another man comes by, and asks him what he is looking for.  “I lost my house key.”  Wanting to be helpful, the man gets down on his hands and knees as well and begins to search for the lost key.  After several minutes of fruitless searching, he asks the man, “Where exactly did you lose your key?”  “Oh, I lost it halfway down the street, but the light is better here.”

Jesus knew the missing key wouldn’t be found up there in Galilee, even though the light seemed brighter there.   He had to go to Jerusalem.

It occurs to me that there are ways in the lives of all of us that we piddle around the edges of our lives instead of confronting head on the problems that the powers of darkness have wrought in our lives.

For each of us this means different things, and each of us will have to discern how this might be so in our lives.

We may be expending enormous amounts of energy around the edges of our lives, impressing ourselves with how hard we’re working, but all the while attending to things that are relatively easy to address, and through it all avoiding confronting the real problems.

We do so, perhaps, because we are afraid.  We do so because we’ve become attached to the status quo, even though the status quo is dysfunctional, ridden with fear and hostility rather than with an open-hearted, truth-telling love.

Perhaps there is a conversation you have avoided having with someone significant in your life  –  dealing with a truth that has been steadfastly avoided being spoken – because when you imagine the conversation taking place it scares you.  You imagine that the outcome of the conversation could make things far worse, and so you are afraid, and you cling to the way things have been, even though the way things have been is miserable, underwritten with fear and resentment as well as a sense of tedium and meaninglessness.

Perhaps this conversation needs to happen with someone near and dear – or maybe someone you work with.  Only you and God know where that conversation needs to take place.

What dysfunctional, fear ridden system that impacts your life needs to be confronted with love and light, even though in doing so you risk paying a severe price?

Jesus is with us as one who gives us courage to do what needs to be done.  In a little while you will be coming forward to receive the bread and the cup that symbolizes the body and blood of Jesus that he was willing to sacrifice in order to confront the deep darkness.

I invite you to think of the cup this morning as a cup of courage, to empower you to confront the fearful dark places of your life.  Trust God, and walk in the light that shines in the darkness.

 

 

A sermon preached on March 25, 2012 — the fifth Sunday in Lent — based upon Psalm 51. 

A major theme during the season of Lent is a call to acknowledge our own personal guilt.  The psalm we just hear read is all about confessing guilt, and it’s always read on Ash Wednesday at the beginning of Lent, and then it pops back up again in the lectionary as we near the end.  

A lot of people figure they can do without Lent and the downer that all this naming of guilt would seem to be, and who can blame them?   The language of the psalm can get pretty heavy handed:

“Behold, I was born into iniquity, and I have been sinful since my mother conceived me.”

Not exactly a sentiment that would be helpful in building a healthy sense of self-esteem in a child.

Through the centuries the church has often gone out of its way to load people down with guilt  — frequently about things that, in retrospect don’t seem like legitimate reasons to feel guilty at all.   For instance, labeling dancing sin, or simply acknowledging that we are sexual beings.  We have the expression, “Laying a guilt trip”, because we recognize that often times guilt is used as a way to control and manipulate people – get them to do what we what we want them to do.   (If the church could simultaneously be the source of people’s guilt as well as the place where that guilt could be reduced – well, the church had a hold on people, to say the least.) 

So it is easy to understand the urge to get away from guilt altogether.  

But guilt – and here I referring to real, legitimate guilt as opposed to guilt for the sake of manipulation – is really a very wonderful thing.  Yes, that’s what I said:  a wonderful thing. 

It is a sign of spiritual health if from time to time our conscience bothers us.  If I do something cruel or dishonest, and I don’t feel any guilt about it, something has gone terribly awry inside me.   It indicates I’ve lost contact with that God-given conscience that keeps me on the right, life-giving path.   If I can hurt people and not be troubled by this fact, then I’m on my way to losing my soul.  A marriage or a friendship is in big time trouble when we can wound one another and not feel any remorse.

And guilt is not intended to be a permanent condition.  We are not condemned to wallow in guilt.   The nature of God, the psalmist reminds us, is steadfast love and mercy – a fact that becomes all the more clear in the New Testament with Jesus. 

Where there is real guilt, once we face up to it, own it, and where possible make amends for it, we are to trust the mercy of God and move on with life. 

Here is what I want to talk about today:  the reason we often have a hard time appreciating the blessing that true guilt is, or to own up to our legitimate guilt, is that we’ve gotten guilt and shame mixed up with each other. 

Guilt is not the same thing as shame, though we often use the words interchangeably.  Quite simply, guilt means, “I have done something bad.”  Shame, in contrast means, “I, myself am bad, worthless, unlovable.”

When the psalmist cries out to God “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!” he’s talking about guilt, not shame. 

If I can be washed clean of something, then what I’m afflicted with is not something at the core of who I am.  My guilt is external to my essence. 

But shame isn’t a judgment about something I’ve done wrong – it is a judgment that I myself am wrong.   The filth is who I am.  No bath will ever help clean me if I am the filth.

Now, shame and guilt is a part of the experience of all of us.  If we go back to the story of Adam and Eve we find both guilt and shame present in the story.  The story isn’t literally, historically true, but it sure does express what it feels like to be a human being.

We are told that Adam and Eve were made good – that they are made in the image and likeness of God.  When God first looked at these first human beings, God declared them to be not just “good”, but “very good.”

But good creatures can do bad things.   Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the one tree that the Lord explicitly told them not to eat from.  They do something wrong.  They are guilty. 

They are still good creatures – good creatures who have done something wrong.   There is guilt, and the guilt needs to be dealt with.But as the story proceeds, that’s precisely what they can’t seem to do.  And why not?    All we can say is that they can’t deal with their guilt because they immediately descended into shame.  

This is expressed in the story by the fact that for the first time, Adam and Eve notice that they are naked. Never noticed this before.  Been parading around in their birthday suits, and thought nothing of it.    Their bodies seemed just fine — nothing to be ashamed of.   

But now, as they look at their bodies, the sight suddenly disgusts them.  They feel the urge to cover up their bodies so they won’t be so grossed out by the sight that they are now convinced is disgusting. 

There bodies aren’t actually disgusting.  Remember that God looked at the same bodies and said they were very good.   But their vision is now warped, and disgusting is what they see.  

The sight of themselves fills them with shame, and whatever is takes to avoid feeling that shame they’ll do, so clothes are now the order of the day.  They find some fig leaves and make the first clothes to cover up the sight of their flesh. 

To some degree, shame lurks inside all of us.  When it breaks out in full force, the feeling is simply horrible – quite literally the worst feeling.  The words that are associated with it are… “I’m no good, I’m ugly, I’m a loser, I shouldn’t be alive. Nobody could ever really love me.” If we were to experience shame directly and continually without relief, we would eventually want to kill themselves.  That’s what Judas did.

So when we feel threatened by shame, we will do whatever it takes to try and keep it at bay.  And what we do is — we hide.  That’s what Adam and Eve do – they go into hiding.  

To be seen is to evoke the sense of shame – so got to stay hidden.

We all know what its like to hide, though.  We keep people at a safe distance so they won’t have a chance to get a good look inside us because we’re certain they would be horrified by what they see, reject us, and evoke in us that awful shame.

Now in the old story, usually whenever God stopped by the garden, Adam and Eve would be right there, happy to see God.  But this time when God stops by, they are nowhere to be seen.  God has to go looking for them.

But you can’t really hide from God.  So God finds them and asks about what it is they have done.  But Adam and Eve can’t seem to own up to it.   They can’t take responsibility for the fact that they did what they shouldn’t have done – they ate the forbidden fruit.  “It wasn’t me,” says Adam.  “It was that woman you gave me.”  “It wasn’t me,” says Eve.  “It was that serpent you allowed to be in the garden.” They pass the buck.  They blame somebody else. 

Take it as a given.  When you find yourself consumed with a need to blame others for the reasons things are so messed up, you’re trying to get away from your own sense of shame. 

Adam and Eve can’t distinguish between guilt and shame.   In their minds, to acknowledge guilt would cast them down into shame.   So the guilt isn’t faced up to. 

There are plenty of ways to avoid confronting our sense of shame.  At their core, addictions are driven by the need to flee from shame.  They are the habits we develop to flee from the awfulness of feeling ashamed.  So we flee into drink, or our work, or shopping, or eating or TV and the internet.  

But the problem with our addictions, of course, is that although they provide temporary relief, afterwards we feel all the more ashamed of ourselves. 

When we understand the difference between guilt and shame, we can better understand the story of Jesus and his redeeming love.

Take, for instance, the story of the paralyzed man who early on in the Gospels is brought to Jesus on a stretcher by four friends, who can’t get in the door of the house where Jesus teaching because there’s such a great crowd of people.   So they hoist him up on the roof, tear a hole, and lower him down to Jesus.  

And what does Jesus say to the paralyzed man?  “My son, your sins are forgiven.”

Wow. 

You see here how clearly the nature of God is to forgive sin.  Jesus doesn’t hesitate – doesn’t even wait around for the man to ask for forgiveness.  He declares the man’s forgiveness straight out. 

And it’s curious, because the man hasn’t been brought to Jesus to have his sins forgiven, at least, that’s not what his friends figured he needed.  They brought him there so Jesus could heal him – enable him to walk again.  

But Jesus recognizes that at the core, the man’s problem is one of shame.    He doesn’t feel worthy of life.  Perhaps there were things he did, or imagined he did, that contributed to this final judgment he rendered upon his life.   On an unconscious level, he’s sentenced himself to a slow death.   That’s what his paralysis is about. 

And so Jesus senses what this man most needs to hear is, “My son, your sins are forgiven.”  

At this point in the story we hear about some scribes and Pharisees who were present who start to grumble about the fact that Jesus has claimed for himself the authority to forgive sins.   That is only God’s prerogative!  This Jesus is committing blasphemy!  

What we see here is that the problem of shame and guilt doesn’t happen in a vacuum. 

Communities can be built around inducing guilt and shame, as we said before, to control people.   It’s the worst when churches do it, because we’re supposed to have our marching orders from Jesus — the one who has come to set the captives free. 

Why are the scribes and Pharisees so intent at pointing the finger of condemnation at Jesus, and by implication at the paralyzed man?   Well, you guessed it.  They are driven by their own sense of shame.  They keep one step ahead of their own sense of shame by pointing the condemning finger outwards at others.

So let’s go back to guilt. 

The world isn’t the way God wants it to be.   It’s full of hostility and violence, isolation and suspicion, not to mention all kinds of injustice.  Who bears responsibility for the brokenness and suffering of this world?  It’s pretty easy for us to point to others – there is no shortage of easy targets to blame, and there are certainly times where prophetic words need to be spoken.

But we all have a hand in tearing down the destruction of life and the fabric of community, and each of us is responsible, first off, with our own culpability.  

So in the next two weeks, as we hear once again the story of the final week of Jesus’ life, the invitation is for us to ask ourselves in what ways can identify with the characters in the story?

To the fickle crowd, at one moment welcoming Jesus with loud Hosannas, and five days later, calling for his death, because he wasn’t the kind of savior they wanted him to be.

To the money-changers and the sellers of animals in God’s temple – who have put the love of money ahead the love of God and people?

To the High priests conspiring, incensed that Jesus could challenge their power, their sense of entitlement, and their image of themselves as the “good people” over against the wretched sinners?

To Judas, who, I believe really thought he loved Jesus, but couldn’t parcel out his need to control Jesus from what it would have meant for him to truly love Jesus. 

To those who come by cover of night to arrest Jesus, because they figure if nobody sees what they’re doing, they won’t have to take responsibility for their actions.  

To Peter, unwilling to acknowledge how frail and vulnerable he was, and intent on seeing himself as braver and stronger than the others. 

To the Romans, willing to do whatever it takes to “keep the peace” and hold onto their power.

To the crowd mocking Jesus in his agony, perhaps because everybody else is, and in their passivity, figuring that whatever the crowd says is right is good enough for them?

We see something of these characters inside ourselves, and we confess our guilt.  We don’t suddenly enter into a life that knows no sin, but maybe we inch a little bit closer to living a life of compassion, kindness and justice. 

And here’s something wonderful we discover along the way.  We can own up to our guilt without descending into shame, because we know the God revealed in Jesus is one who delights in bringing home the lost. 

We sang thing that Oh so familiar hymn:

Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

I was visiting somebody in the hospital recently and I was looking over the devotional literature the chaplain’s office had given out.  They had the words to Amazing Grace, but they had changed the word “wretch,” to something more pleasant.  It’s understandable why they would do that.   Words like wretch are associated with shame, and we certainly don’t want hospital patients wallowing in shame. 

But the hymn, like so many psalms, is emotionally honest.  When shame takes hold, “wretch” is a good word for describing ourselves, because that’s how we feel. 

The Gospel, however is good news about God’s intention to heal us of our shame. 

This is jumping ahead, but after Jesus’ crucifixion, the disciples descended into a pretty toxic dose of shame.   They let abandoned Jesus, denied knowing him, let him down.  Now they feel absolutely unworthy of love. 

At the resurrection Jesus comes looking for them, like God came looking for Adam and Eve.  And Jesus comes not to condemn them, but to call them out of their personal tombs of shame. 

When we really begin to catch hold to the meaning of the Gospel, the communal life of the church has an altogether different quality from the shame-based interactions commonly found out in the world.  We are let others get close enough to get a pretty good look inside us, trusting that they will not condemn what they find there.   When we do something that hurts somebody else in the church, we can acknowledge our failing, ask for forgiveness, trusting that we will in fact be forgiven, because the one in whose name we live together has come to forgive us all.  We can make the clear distinction: we were created good by a loving God, and our inherent value doesn’t disappear because we sometimes, maybe even oftentimes – forget who we are and do bad things.

A sermon preached on March 18^th, 2012 based upon John 3:14 – 21. 

I have this running joke I share with Fred Coleman, our office minister, who comes in three days a week to answer the phone and be a hospitable, gracious presence.  There are days when he comes to work dressed far better than I – me being a dressed- down-kind of guy.   On such days Fred looks a lot more like what most people think a pastor is supposed to look like than I do.

So I call Fred my “Pastor decoy.”  I conjure up this fantasy of a deranged man bursting into the church office one day with a loaded gun, which he aims alternately at Fred and me.  For some reason – maybe the man’s angry with God, I don’t know – the deranged man is intent on taking out a pastor — (I know, it’s a really weird fantasy.)

“Which one of you is the pastor?” the man demands.  And I point at Fred dressed in his suit, and Fred gets filled with lead.

I find the pastor-decoy fantasy funny for a couple of reasons.  One, it expresses the gap I know there to be between the goodness people often project on me as “the pastor,” and the broken, sinful creature that I know myself in fact to be.   In the fantasy, I am quick to give Fred up when the madman points his gun.

But I also laugh because the fantasy expresses something else – the fact that I really do feel loved by Fred, and I suspect that if a deranged pastor-killer ever were to come crashing into the church office, if necessary, Fred actually would take a bullet for me.

It was Saint Francis who said to his friars, “Go out into the world and preach the Gospel.  Use words if you have to.”    The idea being — actions speak louder than words.

For instance, the reason St. Patrick could single-handedly bring the people of Ireland to Christ had less to do with the words he spoke, and more to do with the power of his actions – specifically that he, born an Englishman – would return to the people who had made him a slave, not out of revenge, but out of the great love that possessed his heart.

It was St. Francis who was willing to risk his life by crossing into so-called enemy lines during the travesty of the Crusades, in order to go directly to the Sultan to tell him of the love of Jesus.  His words were worth listening to because his actions had already spoken the Gospel.

John 3:16.   It has been called a sound-bite for God – the verse Tim Tebow writes on his face – a succinct summary of the Gospel:   

“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.” 

I can stand up here and tell you of the great love God has for the world, and by extension, for each one of you, and that I want nothing more than for you to know this love for yourselves, and maybe by the grace of God my words register within you, but then again, words, as they say, are cheap.

If I were to come down from the pulpit and bathe each of your feet, perhaps such a demonstration of love in action would move you more, though it might rather just make us all uncomfortable.

But if somehow the moment actually came where I was called on to take a bullet in order that you may live, and I did so, well then, I suspect you would be pretty stirred by such a testimony to a very deep love.  And the fact that I was able to live out such love in my actions would make my testimony to God’s love all the more persuasive.

In Bob’s reading, just before the oh-so-familiar 3:16 we heard a reference made to an obscure Bible story that it would be safe to say most of us probably don’t know.

It hearkens back to a time when the Israelites, having been delivered from their captivity to Pharaoh by God are now wandering in the wilderness, and they begin to act like bratty little children, wining and complaining against God and Moses, saying – and this is a direct quote – “we detest this miserable food.”

God’s response is rather other the top, but the feeling behind the response is probably understandable to any parents who have been trapped in a car with winey children.

God sends poisonous snakes to attack the Israelites.  Many are bitten, and some have already died.

The people repent of their ingratitude and impatience and come to Moses to ask him to pray to God for relief, which Moses does.  In response, God tells Moses to make a snake out of bronze and put it up on a stick and then hold it up high, so that when the people gaze upon it, the sight of the snake will provide a healing from their snake bites.

It’s a strange story for sure, presenting an image of God that – from the perspective of what we know of God in Jesus – many of us would have a lot of trouble with.

But the Gospel writer John creatively conjures up this image of the poisonous snake lifted high and the healing brought about by the sight of it as a way to grasp the meaning of Jesus’ being raised up on the cross.

“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.”

There is nothing quite so healing to hardened hearts as the sight of Jesus hanging on the cross.

A French Bishop once told the story of three young university students in Paris who were walking through the streets on Good Friday when they came upon a church.   The most outspoken of the three began to talk with great bravado about how the church was a dying institution and Christianity was nothing more than superstition.

On a whim, one of the other young men puts a challenge to the one who spoke with such conviction.  “What you say is true, but I bet you won’t go inside this church and tell the priest himself what you just told us.” And the third young man chimes in,  “Yeah, I bet you won’t either.”

The young man is momentarily taken aback by the dare, but not wanting to appear the coward by his mates says, “Well, I should, shouldn’t I?  It’s the truth isn’t it?  The priest might as well face up to the truth!”

So he heads inside where he finds the old parish priest.  He asks the old man if he could have a word with him.  “Certainly, my son,” says the priest, sitting down with the young man in the pews.

“Father, I have come to tell you that the Church is a dying institution, and that Christianity is nothing more than superstition.”  The young man says this and more, and the old priest listens intently, without speaking.

When the young man finishes speaking, the priest speaks softy.  “It must have taken you quite a bit of courage to come in here and tell me what you just had to say.  I admire that.  I have one thing to ask you to do before you leave, and I wonder if your courage will allow you to do this.”

“Any thing, Father.  Within reason.”

“I want you to go up to the altar and gaze upon the crucifix.  And then I want you say again the essence of what you just told me.  I want you to say, “Jesus died for me and I don’t give a damn.”

Once more the young man is taken aback, but having come this far he isn’t about to back down now.

“Very well,” he says, and proceeds to the figure of Jesus hanging on the cross.  “Jesus died for me and I don’t give a damn.”  He hurries back to the priest.   “I did as you asked.  Farewell, Father.”

“You are truly a man of your word, and I admire that,” says the priest. “If you don’t mind, do it once more to indulge the request of an old man.”

“If you insist,” says the young man.   This time he stays a bit longer before saying these words: “Jesus, you may have died for me, but I don’t give a damn.”  Once more the young man retreats to the priest, anxious to be on his way.

“That is quite remarkable that you could do what you just did,”  the old priest says to the young man.  “I admire you greatly.   Please, just do it one more time.  I promise, I won’t ask you again.   Afterwards you are free to be on your way.”

Reluctantly the young man once more approaches the altar, and gazes up at the figure of Jesus dying there on the cross.  He stays there longer this time.  Finally, he returns to the priest, walking slowly.

“Father,” says the young man, “I’m read to make my confession.”

The Bishop telling the story then said this:  “I was that young man who stood before the crucifix; it was I who made his confession that day.”

What I find so striking about this story is that it wasn’t any intellectual argument – any doctrines or ideas, nor any words at all – that convinced the intellectual young man of his need to repent and turn back to God’s great love.  No, it was the image of Jesus acting out the Father’s great love hat bypassed the barrier of the young man’s intellect to speak directly to his heart.

Elsewhere in John’s Gospel, Jesus says that when he is lifted up – lifted up that is on the cross – he will draw all people to himself.  The love demonstrated there intends to draw all people – not just some.

And yet there is often a lot of confusion about the cross of Jesus, and it is words spoken about the cross that get in the way. The is a common notion about what Jesus did on the cross that runs something like this:  People were so bad and so mean and God was so angry with them that He would not forgive them unless somebody big enough – that’s Jesus – could take the rap for the whole of them.  It’s the idea of a God who is so pissed that it’s easy imagine Him sending poisonous snakes to bite us.

But as Richard Foster puts it, “Nothing could be further from the truth.  Love, not anger, brought Jesus to the cross.  Golgotha came as a result of God’s great desire to forgive, not His reluctance.” 

As John expresses it this morning’s reading, Jesus did not come to condemn the world.

It is true that gazing upon the cross – if we really let ourselves contemplate what is revealed there – will reveal our own brokenness and sin to ourselves – that we all had a hand in a certain sense in putting him up there.

Here’s how Adam Hamilton put it:  “Jesus suffering and death is meant to be a mirror held up to our souls; a reminder of the jealousy,  pettiness, self-centeredness, spiritual blindness and darkness that lurks in all our souls.” 

We recognize that there is a problem inside ourselves that we can’t fix; we need to reach out to the grace and mercy of God.

Thankfully, I am not likely to ever have to take a bullet for you, nor you for me. So we are left to resort to less dramatic ways of acting out the Gospel.

In our church we talk a lot about kindness.  “Reaching out with acts of kindness,” we say.  The thing about kindness is that it’s so down to earth.   Nothing fancy.

But true kindness, if we’re paying attention, is hard to miss, and hard to ignore.

Warmly greeting strangers… Holding the door for somebody… Getting a cold class of water for somebody who is thirsty… Sitting with somebody who is scared, or sad, or lonely.

Nothing fancy.  Nothing terribly dramatic.

The Gospel of John talks a lot about light and darkness.  Light is one of his ways of talking about God’s love and grace.  A true act of kindness reveals the light.

And whenever a true act of kindness is offered – that is, with no thought for what the person will get in return – it is as if the recipient of the kindness stands at a crossroads.

Will he or she embrace the light or not?

Kindness isn’t fancy or dramatic, but in every simple act of true kindness, something very important is at stake.  Will we choose the light, or flee to the darkness?  Which will it be?

In the course of our lifetimes, it the choices we make in this regard that ultimately matters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A sermon preached on March 11, 2012 based upon Exodus 20:1 – 17 and John 2:13 – 22.

 The Ten Commandments, given to Moses by God over 3000 years, are often thought of as external laws imposed on human beings to keep in check our inherently immoral natures. 

But I’ve read a lot of stuff over the years that suggest that the morality we associate with the ten commandments is actually hard-wired to the biology of our body and brains.  This wiring is part of what we can point to in understanding what it means when the Bible declares early on to that we are created in the image and likeness of God.  – that we are created good. We may have fallen from our true natures as the story of the Garden of Eden suggests, but that doesn’t mean we are inherently evil.  Quite the contrary; we were created with an inherent goodness. 

Take, for example the commandment that says, “You shall not steal.”  A Yale psychology professor named Paul Bloom has recently been studying infants 6 to 10 months of age, in which the babies were shown a little puppet show.  First they watched, a puppet being helped by another puppet, which we’ll call the “good” puppet.   Next the babies watched the same puppet being harmed by another puppet, which we’ll call the “bad” puppet.  The harming included stealing the first puppet’s stuff.

After the puppet show, the babies were offered both the “good” and the “bad” puppets on a tray.  Overwhelmingly the babies reached for the “good” puppet instead of the thief.

The results surprised professor Bloom, who had previously believed that babies were blank slates upon which any kind of morality or lack there of was shaped solely by their upbringing.  From the results of his experiment, Bloom concluded instead that “Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred to the bone.”  (For more on Paul Bloom’s research, read the recent New York Times article ”The Moral Life of Babies” at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html )

Consider also the commandment, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” – or in other words, always tell the truth – don’t tell lies.  With the exception of sociopaths, human beings can’t tell a lie, even a little one, without setting off a kind of smoke alarm in our nervous system — the sudden discharge of nerve impulses and certain hormones.  This is why lie detector tests work:  they measure responses of our physiology that we can’t control that happen every time we tell a lie, causing a kind of strain on the system.  As Lewis Thomas, a medical doctor put it:  

“Lying, in a pure physiological sense, is an unnatural act… Now I regard this as a piece of extraordinary good news, meaning… we are biologically designed to tell the truth to each other.”   

Lying damages our spirits and bodies on levels we aren’t even aware of. 

Even the commandment “to keep the Sabbath Day”– to set aside one day a week during which we refrain from all work and simply rest – is, in a certain sense, wired into our nervous system. 

My lay person’s understanding of this is as follows:  Our nervous system is divided into two parts.   One, called the “sympathetic nervous system,” takes over whenever some kind of threat arises in our environment.  A fight or a flight response is instantaneously mobilized, and on a totally unconscious level a whole host of internal bodily functions — the most obvious being our rapid heart beat – are set in motion in order to channel maximum energy towards carrying out either the fight or the flight. 

In contrast, the “parasympathetic nervous system” is the part that takes over when the threat is gone and we are able to rest.   In this mode the body digests food, stores up energy, strengthens the immune system, heals wounds and fights off disease.

In more primitive times, it was pretty clear when each nervous system would do its job.  A lion appeared in a person’s environment, causing stress, and immediately the sympathetic nervous system would kick into gear to deal with the threat to the person’s life.  Once the lion was gone, the body could shift back into its restorative mode. 

But in our complicated, modern society, the threats we experience are vaguer than the threat caused by a lion.  We may feel threatened by the possibility that we’ll lose our jobs, that our kids might get hooked on drugs, or simply that we won’t be able to get our taxes done in times.  These kinds of threats tend to just hang around in the background of our consciousness, causing our nervous system to get stuck in a perpetual state of danger alert.  There’s always something more I might do to keep the threats at bay.

And so when, in our modern sophistication, we figure we don’t need to pay attention to the ancient commandment to keep the Sabbath holy, what this means is that we never fully enter into the rest mode, and a profound toll is paid by our bodies and spirits.   Life loses its vitality and joy; it’s inherent sense of blessing and God-given goodness. 

We are wired with a need for Sabbath rest. 

“You shall not commit adultery.”  In this instance I turn not to science but to history.  Many historians see a correlation between the collapse of theRoman Empireand the loss of fidelity in marriage and the resulting breakdown of the family.  The result was a broad social instability and a sense of meaninglessness.  When orgies become acceptable and a notion of “if it feels good do it” trumps marriage vows, society pays enormous costs.  

One of the reasons that Christianity prospered as theRoman Empirefaltered was that people recognized in the faith the moral bearings they desperately needed in a culture that no longer provided such bearings. 

And so we seem to be hardwired to thrive when there is fidelity in marriage. 

“You shall not kill.”

“You shall honor your father and your mother.”

Underlying these two commandments is the capacity for empathy.  You can not take another person’s life if you can empathize with what it feels like to be that person.   And you can’t help but honor your father and mother in their old age if you have the empathy to recognize that you, too, will one day be old and frail, and in need of compassion and respect. *  

There is a growing body of scientific evidence that we are, in fact, hard-wired to experience empathy towards others.  

For instance, one recent study showed that when people simply imagined giving money away to a charity that benefits others in need, scans of their brain activity showed that the same primitive parts of the brain normally associated with food and sex were activated. 

The study suggested that the desire to help others is “hard-wired and pleasurable”, in the words of those who conducted the study.  (Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA in October, 2006.)

Thirty years ago some Harvard psychologists found that samples of the saliva of people who viewed a film about Mother Teresa and her work with the poorest of the poor showed elevated levels of a certain secretion that is the first line of defense against colds and other viral diseases.  When they were shown other kinds of films, no such reaction took place.  Feeling compassion apparently strengthens our immune systems.   (Harvard psychologists David McClelland and Carol Kirshnit)

A couple of years back a working class black man made headlines in New York City by jumping onto subway tracks with a train bearing down to rescue a young white college student who had fallen unconscious onto the tracks.   He risked his life to save the stranger’s life, managing to hold him down just underneath the train as it passed inches above them.

It was a remarkable story that got people talking.   Everybody viewed this man as quite extraordinary to do this.

But what I’m suggesting here is that he did what came naturally to him, and perhaps, to the human species itself, as those who were made in the image and likeness of God. 

I think it’s significant that he didn’t have any time to think about what he was going to do.   He responded without his thoughts getting in the way – the fact, for instance, that the man lying in the tracks was of another race and social-economic status.  His instinct to care about another suffering human being just took over. 

 

So… if we are, in fact hard-wired for such things as empathy and honesty – if in fact the ten commandments are in a certain sense written into our brain chemistry – why, then do we witness so much immorality – so much selfishness and cruelty and hardness of heart in human relationships? 

Both science and our Biblical wisdom can shed light on this question. 

I read an article that summarized seven different experiments that point to the clear conclusion that when a person’s wealth and status rise, so also does their tendency to act in unethical ways. (The findings were announced Feb. 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)

The experiments varied.  Here’s one to give you an example.  

A four-way intersection inSan Franciscowas monitored, taking note of the makes and models of automobiles passing through, with the value of the cars taken to be a reliable indicator of a person’s socio-economic status. 

They also tracked rude behavior:  whether drivers cut off other vehicles and pedestrians.   Their finding?  “Rude behavior rose with status, and high socio-economic status drivers were roughly twice as inconsiderate as low-socio-economic drivers.”

Other studies showed that the higher a person’s socio-economic status – the more money they possessed — the more likely they were to cheat on tests to get advantage over others. In trying to account for this fact, one of the researchers wrote: 

“Occupying privileged positions in society has this natural psychological effect of insulating you from others.  You’re less likely to perceive the impact your behavior has on others. As a result, at least in this paper, you’re more likely to break the rules.” (Psychologist Paul Piff of theUniversityofCalifornia,Berkeley.)

Now this may call to mind some familiar scriptures:

Jesus saying,

“It is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a camel than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Or Paul saying,

“The love of money is the root of all evil.”  

Or this, the last of the ten commandments:

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

Or maybe this story that Jesus told.

A man on the road to Jericho is robbed, beaten up, and left half dead at the side of the road.   A priest walking down that road passes on by and doesn’t stop.  The same with a Levite – someone employed in the Temple.   But when a Samaritan comes by, he has compassion on the suffering man, doing what he can to help him. 

You know the story.  

If we are wired for empathy and compassion, then the question isn’t why the Samaritan stopped – he did what should come naturally to human beings.  The question is why didn’t the Priest and the Levite stop?  What blocked their innate empathy?

The findings of those experiments suggest an answer.  

The Temple hierarchy, in which they had a place – was the primary determiner of economic and social status in their society.  The priest and the Levite were up there on the ladder of privilege, rewarded financially for the place they held in the system.  

The first commandment is God declaring,

“You shall have no other gods before me.”

But their status, power and wealth had become for them a kind of god, commanding their worship from them, and over-riding their natural, God-given empathy for the pain of others. 

And so now, finally, in this long winded sermon, I come to the story of our Gospel lesson. 

There aren’t many stories that show up in some form in all four of the Gospels.  The story of Jesus driving out the money changers and the people selling animals in theTempleis one of them.  It was the single most troubling thing Jesus did in the religious authorities, because he was in fact challenging their devotion to their false god.

The Temple was intended to point people to the One, living God who alone was worthy of their worship.  It was outrageous to Jesus that instead theTemplehad become a place where the love of money and status was now the thing.  “Stop making my Father’s House a marketplace!” he screamed. 

When the market place becomes god, then we lose our true humanity, the innate goodness with which God knit us together is blocked for the addictive attachment to money and status. 

It is helpful to remind ourselves that underneath this sickness is a health, is a grace, is a capacity for goodness that is the birthright of all us, waiting to be rediscovered.  And this is what Lent is about; it’s a time to strive to remove those things that get in the way of our God’s given nature as God’s beloved children. 

I just want to say to you that if you’re feeling discouraged about yourself, there truly is wonderful stuff inside you.  You have a profound capacity for love, compassion and creativity.  That is who you were made to be.  What’s getting in the way of that beauty and goodness?  Jesus came to set you free from such things.

 * “The nonprofit Edge Foundation recently asked some of the world’s most eminent scientists, ‘What Are You Optimistic About?  Why?’  In response, the prominent neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni, cites the proliferating experimental work into the neural mechanisms that reveal how humans are ‘wired for empathy.’”

“We know from neuroscientific empathy experiments that the same affective brain circuits are automatically mobilized upon feeling one’s own pain and the pain of others.” (Gary Olson,”Hard-Wired for Moral Politics”)

A sermon preached on March 4, 2012, based upon Mark 8:31 – 38, entitled “The Way of Jesus.”

A rather unremarkable comment made to me by another pastor nearly 30 years ago has stayed with me through the years.   The pastor was maybe fifteen years older than I was, and he had been kind to me, offering himself as something of a mentor to me, but I found his comment troubling.

Like I did, he served a two point charge – that is, he had two churches he served at the same time.   He was happy with the relationship he had with the larger church, the one at which he lived in town.  There were more professional people in his congregation, and he felt they treated him with the sort of respect he felt he deserved.

But the smaller church that was out in the country was more troublesome to him.  Apparently the little country church struggled to pay its bills, and to do so, they held a dinner each month, and he didn’t have much interest in those dinners.

The comment he made with obvious anger in his voice was this:   “They want me to stand around at these dinners and serve coffee.  I didn’t go to four years of college and three years of seminary just to stand around serving coffee.”

He saw their expectation as being demeaning to him, expressing a lack of appreciation and respect on the part of his parishioners for his status as a professional and the knowledge he had worked so hard to achieve.

From the perspective of the world, he certainly had a point.   I mean, you put in all that time in school precisely so you won’t have to do menial work to make a living, right?  Nobody asks lawyers or doctors to serve coffee, right?

The problem, of course, is this peculiar vocation he and I had chosen.  Yes we had spent all those years in higher education, but ultimately the purpose of all that education was to get a clearer handle on Jesus the Messiah.   His way was that of a servant — somebody who, if necessary, washes feet, and maybe serves coffee.

Now I have my own forms of arrogance and pride to grapple with – just ask my family — and usually it’s easier to see such things in others than in yourself.  Nonetheless, it seemed clear to me way back then that my colleague’s comment was suggesting a direction in ministry I shouldn’t try to follow.

It is in this spirit that I have always made it a point in worship when I’m not actually leading worship to sit in the pews along with the rest of the congregation — and especially not to sit in one of those thrown-like chairs.   In most churches, the pastor or priest sits on the altar on an elevated plane, suggesting that he or she is on some higher plane of existence.

But the truth is, we’re all in this together.

So accustomed to the way of the world, the disciples found it hard to grasp the way Jesus was leading them in.

In the passage immediately before this morning’s Gospel lesson, Peter has come up with the “right” answer when Jesus asked them, “who do you say that I am?”

He’d answered, “You’re the messiah.”  It was the right answer, but strangely, Jesus tells them to tell no one.  The world’s idea of the messiah was different from the kind of messiah that Jesus was called to be.   The disciples assumed along with every else that the messiah would come with power and glory to set everything straight, barking a lot of others, vanquishing his enemies.

But as the conversation continued, Jesus starts talking about how at the center of his mission as the messiah is the trip he must make to Jerusalem where he will suffer and die at the hands of the religious authorities.

Peter tries to set Jesus straight.  He takes Jesus aside and “rebukes” him, telling Jesus he doesn’t have to suffer and die.  And then Jesus explodes.  He rebukes Peter in the presence of the other disciples, calling him nothing less than Satan, the tempter.  He says Peter has his mind on people’s way, not God’s.

The way of people is to rise above other humans, to accumulate more status or money or power or recognition than the next guy.  It’s to try and rise above the human condition, to be special, not like others.

But the way of God involves descending into the depths.  We see this in Jesus over and over if we’re paying attention.   He is born at the bottom in terms of social status — into a homeless family in the midst of violence.  At John’s baptism, Jesus enters the waters as if he were just another slob on the bus trying to get home.  (Which, if you remember, is the precise moment that God says to him, “You are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.”  God gives the stamp of approval in regard to the direction Jesus is taking.)

Jesus went out into the wilderness to suffer hunger and temptation just like every other human being.

And now he tells the disciples that he will suffer being misunderstood and abandoned and even death itself, just like every other human being experiences in the course of their life.

But Peter wants his messiah to stay up on a pedestal.   “You’re above all this, Jesus.  Your God’s special child.”  You don’t serve coffee at church dinners.

“No,” says Jesus.   “You’re trying to pass off the human way as God’s way.”  But God’s way is to enter the muck with the rest of us.

Peter says what he says because he cares about Jesus.  But there’s more to it than that.  He wants to be exempted from all that painful stuff as well.   And it’s not hard to see that if the messiah he is following is headed to suffering and death, he’ll be headed there too.

And Jesus goes on to spell it out:  “If you want to follow me,” he says, “you have to pick up your cross and follow me.”

Get this:  The strongest rebuke that Jesus ever gave to an individual person – calling the person no less than “Satan” – is given to the man who is destined to become the first pope – the first clergy person.   Perhaps the point here is that the Church will always be tempted to head the wrong way.

In Mark’s Gospel there will be two more times when Jesus will tell his disciples that he must suffer and die.   On both occasions, the disciples clearly don’t get it, or don’t want to get it.  After the second time, Mark tells us that the disciples promptly engage in an argument regarding which of them was the greatest – which of them had ascended to higher status than the others.  Jesus tries to get them to understand what he is talking about by placing a little child in the middle of them.   In those days, children were at the absolute low end of the social ladder. Welcome a child like this, he said, and you’re welcoming me.

The third time Jesus talked about his suffering and death, James and John show how they just don’t get it by coming to Jesus and asking for special status in the kingdom they’re still expecting to be established when they get to Jerusalem.

But the way of Jesus isn’t the way of the world, and it can take a life time to get that.

In Mark’s day, taking up your cross and following Jesus could easily have meant literally getting nailed to a cross just like Jesus.  Emperor Nero was killing all the Christians he could find.  There’s a Christian in Iran who has been sentenced to death for his faith.  Thankfully, that’s not likely to happen to any of us.

What, then does a cross-life look like for us?

Well first of all, it means repeatedly reminding ourselves that we’re in this thing called life with every other single person on this planet.  .  It means trying to rid ourselves of the patronizing attitudes that so easily can creep into our language.   We are no better than anybody else.   When we see someone who has fallen, we resist the seduction of the pride that tells ourselves we didn’t similarly fall because we’re better than they are.   Instead, we remind ourselves, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

It means a willingness to open our hearts to compassion.   To share in, and feel the pain others experiences.

It means paying attention.  The most basic form love is paying attention.  If you love someone, you will make an effort to pay attention in such a way so as to gain some understanding of what life feels like for them.

That was part of the problem with the pastor’s comment.   We are called to be next to people wherever they find themselves, to be shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with them, and maybe that means serving coffee, or digging ditches – whatever it is they do in order to get a better feel for what their life feels like.

You may have heard this story:  The professor at a medical school surprised her students with the final question they found on their exam.  The question was this:  What is the name of the woman who cleans the bathrooms we use in this building?

At first the students thought this was a joke.  But the professor was quite serious.  All of them could not have helped but to noticed this woman who cleaned up their messes.  She was there everyday in their building.  Had they taken the time to, at the very least, learn her name?

This was a particularly powerful lesson for students making their way to the prestige that comes from being called doctor.  There is a special kind of arrogance that can come to doctors  — MDs, or “Medical Deities” as the letters sometimes are said to refer, who have risen high above the people they would condescend to help, never to be questioned or second guessed.

Recently a politician who is very public about his Christian faith questioned whether President Obama is truly a Christian, as he claims to be.   This, I think, is dangerous water for any Christian to be treading.  Only God can make these judgments, and to set ourselves up as the judge of what’s in the heart of  another  is to imagine ourselves to be lifted up high above others.

This same politician later criticized President Obama because he issued an apology to the Moslem world after some American soldiers had thoughtlessly destroyed some Korans.  The impression this very public Christian gave was that being Christian means you don’t need to apologize, especially to Moslems.

Walking the cross walk means walking humbly — apologizing when necessary, and recognizing our own sins before we condemn the sins of others.   It means caring enough about other people – all other people – to pay attention to what matters to them.  For instance, to recognize that if you burn their holy book you will be offending them deeply.

Many American soldiers have gone out of their way to truly be in Iraq and Afghanistan with a desire to pay attention to the people who live in these lands, and sensitively help build a lasting peace.  These soldiers have been servants following in Jesus’ way.

But the soldiers who burned the Korans hadn’t bothered to pay attention.  If they had, they would have known how precious the Koran is to Moslems, and following the golden rule, wouldn’t have so thoughtlessly burned the Korans.

In a few moments we will be celebrating Holy Communion.  In doing so, we remember the act of self-sacrificial love upon we are all called to aspire to in our lives.

In order to participate in Holy Communion, it is not necessary to have our beliefs all neat and tidy.  Hardly.   It is important, however, to share in the spirit of humility and solidarity that is at the heart of this sacrament.

Another distressing news item:  a priest in Maryland refused to serve communion to a grieving woman at her own mother’s funeral, because the woman had lived with another woman for 20 years in a committed Lesbian love relationship.

That priest just didn’t get it.  When we share the Lord’s Supper, we remember that we’re all in this thing called human life together.   That, at our core, we are all vulnerable and in need.   We become as beggars side by side to receive the life-giving bread we all need.