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Here are some more quotes from Leonard Sweet in his book, “The Gospel of Starbucks”, which our Bishop wants us to read.  What do you think? 

Most people today don’t fret over whether Christianity can get them to heaven.  They want to know:  “Will it make me a better person?”  Jesus did not call disciples so they could become Christlike.  He called them so they could become “little Christs,” or what I like to call spittin’ images.  Some linguists argue that the phrase spittin’ image derives from the Southern dialect where spirit and image were contracted into one.  To say that you are the spittin’ image of your father is to say that you bear both his spirit and image.  You bring together the visible and invisible, the tangible and the intangible, of your parent.  Jesus enables us to be his spittin’ image to both  body and character…

The passion of Christian faith is the ability to say, “Yes, Christianity can make you a better person.  That better person is Jesus.”  Christianity promises a provenance that can be certifiably Jesus.  Authenticity is not about being more relevant but about being more Jesus.  Do you speak with a Jesus voice?  Do you see with Jesus’ eyes?  Do you listen with Jesus’ ears?  Do you touch with a Jesus touch?  pp. 48 – 49

The world is not impressed that people attend church on Sunday morning.  If anything, such a gambit is viewed as a quaint waste of time.  But imagine if every Christian in the world were living as a little Christ?…

Early Christian mystics believed that God is born anew in every child. “Here comes God again,” they would say, “in deep disguise.”  God wants to work the miracle of the Virgin Birth in every one of us.  God wants to bring Jesus to life in every person and community.  Just as the apple seed becomes the apple tree, and lemon seeds become lemons, so too, the seed of Christ in Jesus can live his resurrection life in us.  We were created for the communion of union with God… p. 50  We are invited to become living expressions of God.  p. 51

Life’s second greatest passion is to grow a soul that is a beautiful work of art, a soul with such sensitivities that it can pick up signals of transcendence in the most unlikely of places, a soul with such stretch that it can experience the subtleties of life that separate the good from the bad, and the good from the great.  P. 53

Christian faith is designed to be lived experiences of beauty… p. 55

Consider how much time your church expends in creating beauty.  P. 56  Beauty is not pretty… is not useful… is not skin deep; it is soul deep… beauty magnifies message.  pp. 57 – 58

“Would that you were hot or cold,” God says, “but because you’re lukewarm (or more precisely, play-it-safe, middle-of-the-road, mediocre), I’m going to spit (or spew, or in the best translation of the Greek, vomit) you out of my mouth.”  (Revelation 3:16) You didn’t know there was a God-vomit verse in the Bible, did you?  Above this verse I have written in the margins this paraphrase:  “You make me sick, pew potato church.”  That’s why my bookmark is a Continental Airlines barf bag.  Whenever I want to join the crowd, or start to become faithful in my mediocrity; whenever I settle for growing a garden-variety soul, I get out my barf bag and remember that God loves variety that is vigorous and audacious.  pp. 59 – 60

Exactly thirty years ago, in the summer of 1977 I had just graduated from college and was working at Camp Aldersgate in Swartswood. One of the other counselors had been to the deserted railroad tracks in Chester to see the lights of the so-called “Hooker Man,” and intrigued, seven of us set off on a Saturday night between camp sessions to check out what there was to see. We borrowed the director’s station wagon, and piled in for the forty-five minute drive. As the oldest and a future seminarian, driving was entrusted to me. We arrived at the isolated tracks where a couple of other cars were parked — it was apparently the place to be on a Saturday night. I parked and we headed out on the tracks, joining the handful of other sight seers on hand, and sure enough, we began to see the lights: a bright white light, and a swinging red light, that would appear intermittently for a second or two, re-appearing every thirty seconds or so, perhaps one hundred yards down the track. Stories were shared by those on hand about odd things purportedly happening to people there — the one I vaguely recall was one about a sudden, unstoppable nose bleed striking a young woman who had come to view the hooker man’s lights.

Feeling adventurous and undaunted by the spooky stories, my friend Ed and I walked ahead of the others, perhaps a half mile or so down the tracks, hoping to get closer to the lights. The lights, however, seemed intent on keeping their distance from us, although at one point I remember the lights appeared to streak towards us, which lead me to feel momentarily afraid. It was clear to us that what we were seeing was not merely car lights in the distance, and the red light with its swinging motion made it easy to understand how the story of a railroad man swinging his lantern would come to be associated with the strange phenomenon.

After perhaps an hour and a half of being out there on the tracks we returned to the car in order to go back to our camp, and this is where one of the two weird things happened connected with the overall weirdness of seeing the lights themselves. I took out the borrowed car keys, inserted a key into the ignition, and immediately it locked — it was the wrong key! To my great embarrassment, there was absolutely no removing it. We ended up calling the camp director, who, none to pleased, drove out to Chester to pick us all up. We didn’t return to camp until something like 3:30 a.m., with a new set of campers arriving within a few hours. The station wagon had to be towed, and my recollection is that it took weeks for it to get fixed.   In retrospect, the Camp Director was extraordinarily gracious about the whole fiasco. 

The second weird thing, to my way of thinking was that about ten years ago I was with a gathering of old friends that included Ed. The subject of that night on the railroad tracks came up, and Ed remembered everything except seeing the lights themselves. Now I like to think of myself as a fairly grounded person, lacking tendencies towards hallucination. My memory of the lights was quite clear — we had seen them numerous times over the course of the hour and a half. But Ed, who I would also take to be pretty grounded, was as adamant that there had been no lights as I was that there had indeed been lights.

Thirty years later, I still don’t know what to make of the experience. It does, however, make for an interesting story.

Our bishop, of whom I generally have a positive impression, has been pushing certain books for the clergy and laity New Jersey Methodism to read.  One of the two books this year is “The Gospel According to Starbucks: Living with a Grande Passion”, by Leonard Sweet, a seminary professor at Drew. 

I’ve been reading the book. For the most part, Sweet’s style irritates me significantly.  He makes a great deal of the success of the Starbucks corporation, calling to the attention to the fact that they peddle an experience rather than just a cup of coffee.  Sweet seems intent on being clever and showing off his dexterity with popular culture.  (Perhaps why this annoys me is that my writing and preaching at its worst tries to do the same.) 

Anyway, there is no way I would try to get people in my congregation to read this book from cover to cover, but there are places where Sweet makes provacative points, so I think I will quote some of these passages, skipping over the Starbucks/popular culture riffs.   Let’s see what you what you think.  Try this one out:   

 (Sweet laments) The death of spontaneity.  Typical Christians are more at home in the plan than in the moment, more at ease following someone else’s formula than making it up as we go along.  But spizzerinctum involves the habit of saying yes to the moment.  Jesus received each moment as a gift, less going after what he wanted than wanting what came to him. 

His speech reflected the same approach to life.  In a content analysis of the one hundered twenty-five incidents of Jesus’encounters with people, Ralph L. Lewis has found that “roughly 54 per cent of those encounters are initiated by His hearers.  Instead of standing up and proclaiming the message He wanted the people to hear, He responded to His audience’s questions, objects, doubts.  He allowed and welcomed their involvement.”…
Pariticpation turns the spontaneity up.  Part of our problem is we have an image of God as The Grand Master of Chess Moves, moving players around on the board of life, able to checkmate at any moment and end the game.  It is easier for us to think of Jesus as Monologue than as Conversation Partner.   But Jesus was not premeditated in his approach to life.  In fact, he was the most spontaneous person who ever lived.  As a boy when he was learning in the temple, he decided on the spot to stay longer than expected and threw a monkey wrench in his parents’ plans.  His spizzerinctum shocked even his parents.  Similarly, Jesus did not draw up careful job descriptions for the Twelve.  Rather, while wandering the country side (even in his lifetime travel radius of thirty-five miles Jesus took unpredictable arcs), he decided one day it was time to put together a team.  Seeing some fishermen on the shore, he stopped and said with holy boldness, “You’ll do.  Follow me.“ 

Any reading of the gospels reveals a Jesus not needing to be in control.  Instead, we see a Jesus who is open to being surprised by life and responding spontaneously to the circumstances around him.  Jesus was free-flowing music, not formulaic math.  He didn’t pencil people into his crowded schedule.  Rather, he lived in the immediacy of the moment and fell in love with whomever he met, whether it was a rich younger ruler who had everything or a little man in a tree.  Pp. 87 – 88

I am in no way qualified as an expert in science, but nonetheless I find myself fascinated by the bits and pieces I hear of from the dialogue that occurs between science and religion. From the little bit I understand, the most compelling suggestion for the hand of God arising in science comes not from biology, where the theory of evolution suggests a random process of trial and error, but from the field of physics and cosmology, where something called the “anthropic pinciple” has been uncovered. As best I understand it, this principle focuses on the extraordinary fact that in the moment of the proverbial “big bang” all the conditions were in place in our universe in terms of the vast array of laws of physics that were necessary for the eventual evolution of not only life, but of what we refer to as “intelligent life.”

If you start from the assumption that the laws of the universe could, in theory be established in an infinite variety of possible ways, the vast majority of which would never permit the development of intelligent life, you are left with the question of why is this so? Even the slightest variation from the laws as they are established would have made the ultimate appearance of you and me quite impossible.

There are basically two ways to account for this extraordinary set of affairs. One is to credit it to mere chance.  The other is to theorize that there is a great designer with an intention, in other words, God.

In order to make the “chance” explanation more palatable, some cosmologists have theorized the notion of an infinity of parallel universes, each with a separate set of physical laws, in which our life-friendly universe is only one. In such a context, the fact that the known universe is so life-friendly loses its impressive distinction.

Many have suggested that the design explanation is far more plausible than the chance one, and that the parallel universe theory arises from a bias on the part of the theorists to avoid at all costs resorting to God to account for the way things are.

If, as I do, you find the notion of design more plausible than chance, then it leads to an extraordinary sense of awe and wonder (if you let yourself go there.) On this earth alone, something like eight billion years have passed in anticipation of the appearance of we so-called intelligent beings. (The number gets many, many times greater if you figure in the “years” prior to the creation of the earth, leading back to the original “big bang” of the universe.)  The anthropic principle can make you wonder whether the whole blessed thing was designed with an end in mind that is tied into our appearance,  and that Genesis 1 is on to something when it describes us as being created in the image and likeness of the creator on the final day of creation.  All those billions and billions of years of anticipation is quite a drum roll, if you know what I mean? 

On the other hand, if after such a long drum roll all the Creator has to show for it is Paris Hilton and masses of human beings obsessed with the details of her life, well, you can’t help but feel a cosmic sense of let down.   

Reading never came easily for me.  I was in the slow reading class in elementary school, took supplemental reading classes in junior high, and did poorly on my Verbal SATs in high school.  They didn’t talk about “learning disabilities” in those days, and though I don’t think I’m truly dyslexic, there is something about my brain that keeps me from racing forward over the words on a page.   My wife can read literally four or five times faster than I can read.  When I read silently I stumble a lot, forcing me to back up and re-read passages through which I tried to go too fast.  Fast readers tell me that you aren’t supposed to be saying the words in your head as you read.  When I try to read without hearing the sounds of the language, I crash and burn like a race car trying to take a turn too fast. 

Over the years this “disability” has been frustrating, and in certain ways it has held me back from greater success.  But I’ve come to recognize that there are a couple of significant benefits to the way my brain works when it comes to the process of reading.  For instance, I excel at reading aloud; I rarely ever stumble.  Reading aloud forces me to read in the manner that my brain requires, sounding out every word.  In addition, since I can’t read fast, I am forced to ponder more deeply the meaning of the words I have read — to pursue their depth, so to speak.  Also, reading this way has helped me to learn the craft of writing.  For me, writing is all about hearing the words in my head.  Does a given sentence sound “right”?  My ear won’t allow sentences that don’t sound right to me.  
 
So my “disability” also contains abilities, which leads me to wonder in what ways other things we label as “disabilities” might also come hand in hand with certain abilities that aren’t so easily recognized.  Gerald May in his book I recently finished suggested that kids with the diagnosis of ADD might actually me more naturally “contemplative” than so-called “normal” kids.  I want to quote from his book: 
“I think all babies, animal and human alike, are naturally contemplative.  We are born open, present, unfocused, here-and-now.  In civilized human society, we teach children to focus their attention, to fend off distractions, to concentrate on the particular task in front of them.  This may be necessary for learning in the ways our schools are conducted, but we should know that we are training our children out of their natural contemplative presence, teaching them to devalue it, ever perhaps to fear it.  Children with attention deficit disorders tend to be more naturally contemplative, but they can have tremendous difficulty in our focused civilization.  We treat them with drugs.” (p. 63, “The Wisdom of Wilderness”)

In a broader, spiritual sense, recognizing and learning to live with what we call “disability” also leads us into the humility that is essential for compassion and connectedness with other human beings.  I have my disabilities and you have yours; let us be gentle with one another.  The most damning disabilities of all, of course, are disabilities of the heart, wherein a person lacks the ability to feel compassion for others.  People with this kind of disability are often hard pressed to identify any of the more commonly recognizable disabilities in themselves — they seem to be good at everything.  Except compassion. 

A sermon preached on June 24, 2007 based upon Galatians 3:23 – 29 and Luke 8:26 – 39, on the occasion of the baptism of Andrew Paul Schnetzer.  

I had lunch with Bart Routhier this past week, the twenty year old sailor from our church family who was home on leave.  For a year now Bart’s been in the Navy, learning construction, having spent several months in Afghanistan and in Guam, putting his skill into practice.   He has four more years to serve. 

The thing that I have been marveling at is the difference between Bart in the present and the Bart we knew back in high school.  Bart’s always been a good kid, but back in high school he wasn’t exactly what you would call self-disciplined.  By his own recounting, he didn’t apply himself in his studies, just coasting along doing as little work as possible to get by.  At home he was something of a couch potato — his favorite pastime being watching TV and eating junk food.  He’d always been a big kid, but in high school his weight ballooned to over 300 pounds. 

In this regard there wasn’t anything particularly unusual to Bart.  High Schools across America are filled with kids floundering with no apparent direction, which, in itself, makes this state all the easier to fall into; it is, to some degree, the norm.  

But somewhere along the way, Bart got hold of this dream: he wanted to follow the path set by his mother and other members of his extended family and join the Navy after graduation.  The dream meant service to his country, adventure, a way to acquire skills for work and life, and who knows what else, and it took hold of him. 

There were a lot of skeptics regarding his dream:  teachers, for instance, who had found Bart a likeable enough kid but doubted he’d ever amount to much.  The biggest obstacle to his dream coming true was his weight:  Bart would need to lose a hundred pounds before the Navy would accept him.

Millions of us Americans are trying to lose weight, and the success rate is pretty meager.  The forces of inertia are always pretty strong:  daily habits of sedentary lifestyles; food addictions with which we comfort ourselves — these things can be pretty tough to overcome. 

We can say, “I know I should lose weight — I will lose weight.”  But knowing this and saying this doesn’t mean we will follow through.  As I said, the forces of inertia are pretty tough to overcome. 

Bart, however, started out walking everyday, then jogging around Lake Parsippany.  He changed his eating habits, staying away from the junk food.  It took a long time — slow and steady wins the race — but he did it; he took off over a hundred pounds, and now he is trim and fit and self-disciplined in a way he never was before.  And there’s other changes, too:  having taken on the risks involved in leaving the safety, comfort and familiarity of home, Bart has an appreciation for his life and his family that he probably would never have had stuck in his old life. 

I thought about Bart’s transformation in light of our scriptures this morning.  First off, Paul talks about the difference between “living under the law” and the possibility that has arisen through the appearance of Christ of “living by faith.”

Now laws and rules have their place.  We need them to help provide some order in the face of the chaos into which we human beings are capable of descending.  But living by the Law has some definite shortcomings.  Apart from the desire to avoid punishment, laws don’t provide any real motivation — any real focus and direction to a life. 

You can follow all the rules and inwardly be as dead as a doornail.  (Which is a good way of describing the Pharisees in Jesus’ day; no joy, no passion.) 

And when an addiction and a law come into conflict, well, the addiction will win out every time. 

Now when I speak of laws, I am talking about laws broadly speaking:  the laws that our governments legislate, as well as the internal laws and rules we carry around inside ourselves, things like:

“I really should lose weight.”  “I really should get more disciplined.”  “I really should study more, or be more honest, or be more helpful, or spend less money,” or whatever.

In Bart’s case, I’m sure these kinds of rules lived inside of his head, and he had teachers and parents reminding him of the rules, but the rules didn’t really provide him with any power to change. 

The power to change came about only when his dream grabbed hold of him.  There was something Bart wanted passionately, a vision of his future that was compelling, and this dream provided the motivation he otherwise lacked to overcome the inertia of his bad habits. 

Now I do not mean to equate joining the Navy with faith in Christ.  But what I am trying to do is to get at what is involved when we talk about motivation and what’s required for real change to talk place in our lives.  And if we think about it, real change of ourselves is a tough thing to bring about. 

Whenever we have a baptism, we are reminded that life involves a struggle between good and evil.  We don’t tend to look at it this way, but at the heart of life, that is what we have.  The deepest question in life is, are we moving towards the light of God’s love, or are we moving towards the darkness that is opposed to love?  Will we be a part of the problem, or a part of the solution?  Will we be creative, or destructive?  Will we align ourselves with love and hope or with hate and despair?  The battle is being waged in countless little and big choices we make in the course of each day.

And so at the outset of our baptism, Andrew’s parents, Ted and Bekki were asked where they came down in this struggle, and whether they were determined to help Andrew as he grows and confronts the struggle between good and evil for himself?

Well, how do we do this?

The first thing that comes to mind for most of us is to make sure Andrew knows the rules.  Teach him the ten commandments, the golden rule, stuff like that.  And that certainly will be a good thing to do. 

But something more is required.  We need to help him move, as Paul says,  beyond living under the law to living by faith in Christ. 

The strange story from the Gospel reading describes the incredible transformation of a man who lived in a place called Geresene.  He is suffering horribly — described as demon possessed.  He has no internal freedom, being subject to destructive forces within himself over which he has no control.  He is an addict, with multiple addictions, the nature of which is unclear from the brief story.  His life is absolute chaos:  impulsively he lashes out at others and at himself,  forcing him to live in utter isolation, attempting again and again to kill himself. 

The Law has been tried with this man.  The townspeople have told him to behave himself, to control his impulses, and then punished him when he didn’t.  They even put chains on him, but he simply broke the chains.  Nothing seemed to work. 

And then Jesus shows up — his boat landing on shore.  There is strange stuff here:  on the one hand, the man comes running to Jesus.  There is something powerfully attractive about Jesus, drawing the sick man to himself like a magnet.  And yet at the same time, the demonic powers inside the man are crying out in terror to Jesus, begging him to leave them alone. 

Jesus is irresistible to this man — that is, to the healthy part of this man, even as there are parts of himself that realize that to move towards Jesus will mean their death.  (It’s a little like Bart realizing that if he wanted to go towards his dream, it meant killing off the part himself that wanted nothing more than to eat French fries in front of the TV.)

Long ago sitting in a rather tedious, long winded lecture in seminary, a fellow student taught me this little hand signal from the lexicon of charades.  First, you tug on your ear — the gesture that means, “sounds like”– and then you pantomime pouring water from a pitcher.  Who can tell me what this means?  “Boring.”  Sounds like, “pouring”.   

I am tempted to give you permission to flash me this gesture when I am descending into the land of boredom, because I think that one of the great sins of the church is being boring.  Somehow we’ve managed to turn being good into “boring”.  We learned this from the Pharisees, for whom goodness meant nothing more than following all the rules.  It involved no passion, no adventure, no risk taking, no joy. 

Think about the way the meaning of the words “good” and “bad” got switched a few years back in youth culture, so that “bad” came to mean “good”.  To say, “Oh, he’s bad!” meant someone who was doing something very well, indeed.  The reason for this switch was that in the common usage of the words,  “being good” had come to seem boring.

But Jesus wasn’t boring.  Just ask the man in our story.  He’d never met anybody like Jesus.  Jesus was the real deal.  He was absolutely free, and full of life and passion and creativity as well as real joy and real sorrow.  It was absolutely impossible to be bored in his presence.  Some people got angry enough to kill him in his presence, but nobody got bored.  And many people fell into love with Jesus — they caught hold of his dream called the kingdom of God, and in the power of this dream they were transformed.

So back to little Andrew.  How do we lead him into goodness?  Obviously, it will involve more than teaching him the rules.  We want to introduce him to Jesus.  Well, what’s that mean?  Does it mean teaching him to say things like:  “Jesus is my Lord and Savior.”  “Jesus died for my sins.” ?  If that is all it means, I can pretty much guarantee you that Andrew will be out of here when he reaches adolescence.  Teenagers, if you haven’t noticed, have a low tolerance for boredom. 

We gotta make being good “cool.”  Which isn’t as hard as it sounds, because Jesus was way cool.  (Remember, nobody ever got bored in his presence.)  And in baptism we have put on Christ, the inherently cool dude. 

We want to love Andrew well, but part of what that love means is modeling for him the same kind of passion and joy and love and life that was in Jesus.  Andrew’s got two great parents:  Ted is a police officer, and Bekki a school teacher, both living out dreams that took hold of them like Bart’s dream of being in the Navy.  Let Andrew see your passion, the pleasure you get from making a difference in this world, putting your God given gifts to use helping people, giving back to our community. 

And Lord help us make the church a cool place to be, where people are full of life and joy and concerned with far more than following the rules, willing to take chances. 

The same way Bart is a walking advertisement for the Navy, we are walking advertisements for Jesus.  Let us not be accused of false advertising. 
 

These last couple of days — the first days of summer — have been exquisitely beautiful. A rainstorm washed away the humidity. There are lovely breezes inspiring the leaves on the trees to dance. There is much green and blue. These are days that demand we get outside and just take it all in. I am reminded of the line from The Color Purple, in which the character says it pisses God off when we pass a field of purple flowers and don’t stop to revel in it.

Strangely, these days of beauty and contentment remind me of the transience of life in this world. These days are rarities. There is the cold of winter and the oppressive heat that soon enough will be upon us — the dog days of summer. Intermixed throughout there are the countless days of gray where blue is no where to be seen and the green is distinctly uninspiring. Tomorrow the exquisite beauty may well be gone, so NOW is the time to savor it.

The rarity of such days enhances its beauty. If days like this were common (Southern California?) would they mean as much? Once again, the eternal rule of contrast: Beauty has its meaning over against ugly, love is defined in contrast to hate, life with death, etc., etc., etc.

So why am I sitting here staring at my computer screen?

This morning I made my monthly visit to the nursing home to lead worship. Afterwards I stopped to talk with a woman sitting in a wheel chair outside by the front door, enjoying the beautiful day. She told me a story that touched me. She said she had a brother who, in response to the sort of conflict that is not uncommon in families, had chosen to cut himself off from the rest of their rather large family about ten years earlier. This had caused the woman great sadness, and she had prayed to God, asking that she might get to talk with him before he died.

One day at lunch in the nursing home, she sat at the place identified by a card bearing her last name. Upon closer inspection, she was puzzled to discover that the first name was wrong — that it was in fact her brother’s first name. She inquired, and yes, her brother had recently been moved to the facility. She went to his room and found him there quite sick. He did not recognize her at first, but when she told him who she was, he was pleased to see her. He died a couple of days later. He had so isolated himself in his later years, that no one came to his funeral. She was grateful, however, for the granted prayer and the sense of reconciliation that the visit had provided before his departure from this world.

The Good Shepherd is seeking all those who have strayed. The Holy Spirit is working to bring reconciliation of all that has been broken apart. Whether in this life, or the life to come, the mending of what is broken continues. The art of living involves learning to cooperate with the healing intentions of the Spirit.

When I was a child, I thought like a child. When I was a young man I thought like a young man. Now, as an adult — this point is debatable — I try to think like an adult. These concepts are certainly not anything new and I suspect were pretty well established when Paul spoke about them in 1st Corinthians.

I like to describe these as intellectual stages of our lives. As children we were filled with wide-eyed wonder and eager to learn about everything in existence. It was pretty common to be bombarded with a thousand new thoughts and experiences every day and still we would bounce back for more.

As a young men and women, we took our accumulated knowledge and readily converted it into passion and dreams and hopes and aspirations for the future. We wanted to right the wrongs of the world, make our fortunes and dance the night away. Along the way though, something happened to interrupt our plans and that something was called ‘life’. Life quickly turned into reality and reality destroyed the innocence of our youth. When this happened, we became adults.

Many of you know the story of how it was that my daughter Tracy who got me to come back to church after a 20-year absence. But I don’t think I have told anyone why I left. I was raised in a Methodist Church not too far from here where my grandmother was the church organist for over 50 years. As a child, I attended Sunday school and got to know all the teachers and parents, the elders of the congregation and all the ‘who’s who’ and who did what and who was mean and who was nice and all the stuff a kid needs to know

to survive the three hour ordeal of church on Sunday mornings. My child-like intellect was in awe of certain individuals as any kid would be. One gentleman in particular impressed me as someone who must have been a ‘pillar of the church.’ He was a large man with a gregarious smile and warm handshake. He knew everyone’s name and always seemed to know the right thing to say. I would fantasize in my youthful exuberance that ‘someday I’ll be just like him.’

A few years later, I was overjoyed when having just gotten out of school, he asked me to join his agency. He sold real estate and insurance in town and I was to become his protege. While I was working to get my licenses, he took me around to meet all manner of ‘swells’ and ‘big wigs,’ to do lunch at the country club and be seen at all the right events and happenings. I was well on my way to fulfilling my greatest dreams. Often I would be called into his office and he would give me sales pointers and we would discuss strategies.

On one such occasion, he started talking about blockbusting. Now if you are not old enough to remember, blockbusting was a method of excluding individuals based on race or religion from acquiring homes where they were not wanted. I was totally shocked when instead of telling me how wrong this was he continued the conversation with ‘This is how we do it.’ He concluded our conversation by stating ‘If you ever show a home to any Blacks or Jews, you will be fired and black-balled from the multiple listing association and will never sell anything again!’

My whole view of the world suddenly came crashing down. This man who I had spent much of my life trying to emulate had just destroyed everything I had believed in. Reality had slapped me in the face. It was like my Sunday school stories and youth group experiences had all been no more than fairy tales. Spirituality and religion had no place in real life and I had just had my first lesson in adulthood.

Very shortly after, I left that job, left the world of real estate and insurance, left the world of sales and I finally left my church. Thus I began an absence that lasted for 20 years. During this time I developed the attitude that if God didn’t interfere with my business, I wouldn’t interfere with His. Had anyone asked me if I had seen God, I would have replied ‘No, but if YOU do, tell Him I’m waiting and have a few questions for Him.’

So I approached my reentry into church with a great deal of caution, slowly at first, attending only when asked and even then with a great deal of reluctance. As I’ve learned over the years, God works in mysterious ways and it wasn’t too long before I found myself on Sunday mornings tugging on Tracy’s bed sheets yelling ‘Come on, we’ll be late for church!’

The most amazing thing happened somewhere, somehow along the way and I have no idea how it happened. Within a very short time I realized that if anyone had come up to me and asked, ‘Have you seen God?’ I would have said, ‘YES! A thousand times, and thousand ways.’ It was a child who had converted me, the adult, back to God. I have never forgotten the words of Matthew 18:3, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Joanne and Bob, today we have baptized your beautiful third daughter, Elizabeth Devon, into Christ’s holy church. You have renounced the spiritual forces of wickedness, rejected the evil powers of this world and repented of your sins. Elizabeth, ‘Izzy,’ today we welcome you into the family of Christ. We have promised to surround you with a community of love and forgiveness. You have become our sister in Christ. This bond will last for the rest of your life.

At this point I have to pause for a moment and explain that last week when the Sunday school classes were fishing, I mentioned that our children had become ‘fisher’s of men.’ I was promptly and thoroughly chastised for using the term ‘men’ instead of ‘persons.’

Izzy, today is a special day indeed. Not only is today the day of your baptism, it’s also Father’s Day. I am reminded of Mark, Ch. 1 ‘Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the spirit descending like a dove on him, and a voice came from heaven saying ‘You are my Son, the beloved. With you I am well pleased.’ The kingdom of heaven lies before you and also the kingdom of earth. One is filled with glory and the other is filled with things of life.

Nowhere in life is a father better thought of than when he uses these two fingers. Try to think back to your own childhood when you would reach up and wrap your whole hand around these two perfect fingers. Their touch represented all that was needed in life. At no time was life more secure or happy or the feeling of utter contentment greater than at that moment.

As we grew our fathers became much more human and fallible and capable of making mistakes. And the world became less secure. I believe there is a correlation between the amounts of knowledge we gain and the amount our fathers lose. What I remember about my own father was that when I was 18, he was just about the dumbest thing this side of anywhere! But when I was 30 and attempting to raise a family, trying to pay the mortgage and all my bills on time, he was the smartest man I’d ever known. He had raised 6 kids nd never made much more than $100 a week!

Fathers are often given the responsibilities of the big decisions while mothers take care of the everyday tasks of life. Fathers set the tone for the way we live our lives and set the examples for us to follow. And they do it mostly by the seat of their pants! I feel that I am guilty of the sin of omission because I’ve never watched the Sopranos. As much as I know, the show recently aired its final episode. One reviewer described Tony Soprano as someone who showed no remorse at ordering the execution of another human being, yet was a kind and loving family man. I believe that there exists a little bit of Tony Soprano in all of us. We are all required to make hard decisions that may seem ruthless to others at the time. Fathers are willing to give up their souls for their loved ones and stand alone before God’s judgment trusting in God’s mercy and unconditional love. Fathers dispense discipline and command respect and try not to outwardly show the sentimental idea of “you are my child, my beloved. With you I am well pleased.”

Fathers are given the task of forgiveness. When Jesus was questioned about how often one was to be forgiven he replied “7 X 7 X 70″. In my own mind I have often thought that’s okay for now, but what about next week?

Finally, a father has to walk the tightrope between compassion and reality, between discipline and indulgence, between the covenants of our baptisms and the harsh realities of life. Fathers make mistakes. Fathers are imperfect. Could there be any greater satisfaction than to have a child say, “Father, I forgive you for you know not what you do. You are my father, my beloved, with you I am well pleased.”

AMEN

I just finished reading, “A Child of the King”, by Patricia Klinger Schrope, the mother of a new member of our church, Audrey Klinger. The short book beautifully tells the sad but ultimately inspiring story of the short life of Audrey’s two year older sister Tracy who died at the age of ten following a long and difficult struggle with cancer. The portrait presented of Tracy by her devoted mother describes a little girl who was so very full of life, love and courage, that despite the agony of her loss, reading the book one can not help but share in this mother’s extraordinary gratitude for the ten years she had Tracy with her on this earth.

The book concludes with on a note of triumphant conviction that Tracy indeed lives on in eternity, fully whole and every bit as alive as she once was when she inhabited this earth. Pat describes Tracy’s last moments: “You told me softly that you loved me.  After awhile a huge smile lit your face.  You said you felt you were in motion, rocking back. I misunderstood and thought you were describing a fainting sensation. ‘No, Mommy, it’s fun, like rocking on a ride back somewhere.’ There followed another unforgettable smile, then Doctor Couch said, “She’s gone, Pat. It’s all over.” (p. 81)

Pat describes what she first experienced as awful nightmares that came to her shortly after her daughter’s death, in which Tracy would return home, healthy and vivacious, playing with her little sister, doing cartwheels and laughing heartily. In the dreams Pat cannot accept what Tracy is telling her, and instead attempts to convince Tracy that she is dead.

Finally, a wise pastor challenged Pat to receive the message of the dream: “I got to know your Tracy pretty well in the hospital.  And if I am correct, she will come to you as often as she has to, until you believe that she is not dead.”

A few evenings later Pat received a phone call from an old friend, Tracy’s beautician who lived far away. Without having read an obituary, the friend knew that Tracy had died, and she relayed a dream she had received in which Tracy had come to her, “running joyously and free in a pastoral setting,” showing off her luscious hair. During the years of her treatment, the frequent bouts of chemotherapy had taken a toll on her hair to Tracy’s great embarrassment. Pat concludes: “Our kind friend had called to tell me that you were indeed alive, ecstatically happy and modeling a glowing head of hair. The lesson: I had to stop telling you and myself that you were dead. I had to be still and listen to my daughter bearing witness that she was most assuredly alive. No more nightmares, no more nightmares.” (pp. 84 – 85)

The book concludes with a simply drawing left behind by Tracy of a winsome balloon, floating upwards, which Dr. Bernie Siegel interpreted as “Tracy taking herself to a higher place and starting again.”

I cannot imagine the depths of pain involved in losing a child. It is indeed reassuring to read Pat’s personal testimony to her own experience of the fact that “Love never ends;” that death is not an end but a wondrous beginning in our eternal love affair with God and one another.