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A sermon preached on January 27th, 2008 based upon 1Corinthians 1:10 – 18 and Matthew 4:12 – 23, entitled “The Most Important Thing.”

Life requires a certain balance that can be really hard to maintain.

On the one side of the balance, you’ve got to be practical, sensible, productive, realistic. You’ve got to face the daily drudgery that life in this world inevitably involves, which in our story this morning is represented by the fishermen rising early each day to go out in their fishing boats, tend to their nets, and do all the other stuff that is required to feed themselves and their families.

In our more sophisticated and complicated society, we are unlikely to go hungry this week if we don’t face the daily grind. Nonetheless, there is this constant looming chaos that demands our attention lest it overwhelm us; things like washing the dishes, taking out the garbage, going to work, paying the bills, getting the car inspected, on and on and on. If we don’t deal with this stuff, the chaos threatens to engulf us as our problems multiply. People who don’t deal with their practical stuff often become burdens to others. And people who are good at these kinds of practical things are admired and valued by the rest of us for their competency that helps keep the chaos at bay.

And yet, as important as this stuff is, and as important as the ability to effectively deal with it is, it isn’t “the most important thing.” And there’s the rub. You can be very good at dealing with the practical stuff of life, and yet not be very good at living itself, because you don’t ever come in touch with the most important thing.

And so the other side of the balance involves being able to make contact somehow, regularly with “the most important thing.”

Well, what is the most important thing? And in asking this question we realize immediately that we can’t really name it, at least not directly, precisely. The Jews have always appreciated this fact. They have this great story (as do we, since it is in our scriptures as well) of how Moses first encountered directly “the most important thing.” He was going about his own version of attending to the fishing boats and fishing nets; as a shepherd, he was herding his sheep in the wilderness. One day he sees in the distance a strange sight: a bush that is burning, and yet is not consumed. He turns aside, leaving for the moment his work responsibilities in order to approach the great mystery, at which point the mystery addresses him directly. “Moses, Moses, take off your shoes, for the ground you’re standing on is holy ground.” At one point Moses asks what the name is of the One who stands before him, and the mystery answers with more of a riddle than an actual name: “I am who I am,” or, “I will be what I will be.” The name is unspeakable. It has no vowels, only consonants, generally translated, “YAHWEH.”

And from that day on the Jews have had this great reluctance to speak the name of God. To do so would be to presume some control over the great mystery, and the Jews realized athat this was idolatrous. And so at the top of the ten commandments comes this one: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

We’re accustomed to say that “God is the most important thing,” but to say this in no way guarantees that we are in fact addressing the great, holy mystery that is at the very depths of life, out of which all life comes. It could mean instead that we’re trying to run away from this great mystery by having a word by which to address it.

Interestingly, Matthew’s Gospel is the most Jewish of the four Gospels. Where Mark and Luke use the expression, “Kingdom of God,” Matthew demurs, speaking rather of “the kingdom of heaven”, showing the traditional Jewish respect for the holy of holies.

And so Jesus comes, Matthew tells us, declaring “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

“The kingdom of heaven” is an expression that is intended to point in the direction of “the most important thing”, but obviously, it doesn’t explain much. In truth, the kingdom of heaven is more of an experience than it is a concrete concept.

So Jesus arrives on the scene announcing that “the most important thing” is at hand, and by calling us all to repent implying that to some degree we’ve all been missing “the most important thing,” and that an absolute change of direction of our attention is necessary.

Our reading from Matthew this morning describes Jesus walking by the Sea of Galilee, seeing these four fishermen, calling them to follow him, and them immediately up and leaving their nets, their boats, their father, and following him.

We wonder, how could they do such a thing? How could they just walk away from their responsibilities and up and follow this total stranger, who has the audacity to say to them, “Come and follow me, and I will make you fishers of people”?

It makes a bit more sense to me if I posit that there is in these four fishermen as there is, I think, in all of us a deep hunger of the soul to experience “the most important thing” beyond all the “stuff “of life — a desire that in the routine grind of life in this world can easily be pushed aside. And that there is something about this stranger who speaks to them — this Jesus before whom they stand with their dripping nets — that places them in an undeniable contact with the mystery of “the most important thing,” as Moses long before had experienced standing before the burning bush.

At that moment do they understand who he is or what they are experiencing? I expect they had no clue. But their souls so starved for such contact that they felt no choice but to up and follow him.

Now although we may find it hard to imagine ourselves doing what the fishermen did that day, I think that all of us have had a taste of this experience.

Think about what happens when we receive word that someone close to us has suddenly died. No matter what you had on the agenda for your day — much of which may have seemed extremely pressing and important at the time — suddenly it all takes a backseat to what has opened up before you. It is all revealed to be not nearly as important as it had seemed to be.

And here, too, words are inadequate to express what it is we are opened up to in such moments: You could say are compelled to contemplate the depths of life, the mystery of what it means to be alive and how at any given moment that mystery as we know it in this world can come to an end, and how it all suddenly seems so much more poignant and meaningful than we recognized when we were in our normal mode of being in this world.

I had a touch of this experience this past week. An old friend called to tell me that another old friend, someone I’ve known for 31 years since we worked together at Camp Aldersgate, had suddenly died of a massive heart attack. I hadn’t seen Mark in years, but nonetheless, I was caught short. I descended into my memories of times spent with him, of who he was, and what he had meant to me. The next day I set aside the afternoon to drive over to the town where his parents still live, to drop in and share an hour of shared remembrances of Mark.

In our epistle lesson this morning, Paul is dealing with the church politics in Corinth. People are dividing up into political factions. This sort of thing is inevitable when we lose touch with “the most important thing.” The Church, of course, is an institution founded on a mission of calling people to attend to “the most important thing,” but institutions, no matter what their purpose, require that plenty of practical, routine work get done to keep it operating, and much of it isn’t particularly gratifying. If you are dealing with such drudgery without regular opportunities to connect up again with the “most important thing,” well, the practical stuff invariably descends into pettiness, power politics, where the goal is merely to win, to defeat the opponent. Even in church.

So Paul’s job here is to try and redirect the folks attention back to “the most important thing.” Again, “the most important thing” can’t be confined to words, but words is often all we have, so he offers up a few in the hope that it will point the irritable folks in Corinth in the right direction. He refers to “the message about the cross.” For Paul, it all comes back to Jesus hanging there on the cross expressing an awe-inspiring love. Funny, one again it involves reminds us of the reality of death. Remember what you experienced, Paul seems to be saying, when you pondered Jesus giving his life on the cross. The world thought it represented defeat, failure, but remember how when you first contemplated his death, there was this stranger power present to call you back to “the most important thing.” Don’t forget it. Life is too precious — to short for all this pettiness.

Jesus continues to walk among us, calling us back to pay attention to the depths of life, so we don’t get lost in the shallows.

My twelve year old son has entered that phase of life wherein his relationship to his parents is often a challenge. As I’ve mentioned before, I find comfort in the story of the twelve year old Jesus — he was a challenge to his parents as well. This phase of life is a somewhat unavoidable stressor in life.

Paul referred elsewhere to an ongoing “thorn in the flesh” that he struggled with that kept him humble, and those of us with children of a certain age know that the expression “thorn in the flesh” can often aptly describe our relationships with our children at this phase of our lives.

God interrupted our lives with a dream this past week. I had gotten up before Bobby and was downstairs getting ready for the day, when I heard my son cry out from his bedroom upstairs. “Where are you, Dad?!”

I’m down here, I let him know.

He hurried downstairs in nothing but his boxers, and when he reached me, he hugged me tightly, telling me he had had a dream in which I had died.

“I love you, Bobby,” I said as I hugged him back. “I love you, too, Dad,” he said.

Reassured, he began to relax, and not too long afterwards, he was back to being my thorn in the flesh. And I was back to putting together my agenda of “important things to get done.”

But the dream remains to call us to remember.

A sermon preached on January 20, 2008 based upon 1Corinthians 1:1 – 9 and John 1:35 – 42, entitled, “Who we will be.”

There is this anecdote from the life of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Apparently one day he was poring over a plant in a public garden for a very long time. A police officer, his suspicions aroused, approached him and demanded: “Who are you?” Schopenhauer looked the officer in the eye, scratched his chin, and chose his words carefully, “Sir, if you could only answer that question for me, I’d be eternally grateful.”

Who am I? To reflect deeply upon this question leads us into the spiritual journey.

Part of the difficulty we have with answering this question comes from the confusion we encounter before the mystery that is “time.” In this life, we are compelled to live in chronological time, characterized by the ticks of a clock. We separate time into the past, which seems behind us, and the present, what we like to say is all we really have, and finally the future, which lies before us.

But physicists and theologians alike suggest that this perception of time contains some degree of illusion, that on the deepest level of reality past, present and future are, in fact one, though it is almost impossible for our minds to get around this concept.

The answer we give to the question of “who am I?” is shaped differently depending upon whether our focus is on the past, the present, or the future. In other words, there is: who I was, who I am now, and who I will be.

Who I was matters greatly. Where did I come from? What were the influences that shaped me? What is the story out of which I emerged? These questions demand our consideration. A person who is cut off from his or her roots — from the story in which they have been the primary character — is, in some sense cut off from a part of his or her soul.

But who I was isn’t the only thing, nor is it even the most important thing. We do in fact change. We cease to be the little, helpless kid, the awkward, dorky teenager who got absolutely tongue tied.

And so there is also who I am now, which is impacted by the roles I find myself filling, the relationships that are central to my life in the present, the problems I face, the addictions with which I struggle.

All of this is important, but it is not always as important as we tend to make it out to be.
Much of who I seem to be now — the concerns that loom so large in the present — will pass away in short order like dust in the wind.

In 1955 Martin Luther King, Jr. was a young, privileged Black preacher fresh out of Boston University Seminary, having just begun pastoring his first church in Montgomery, Alabama. Looking at him, I don’t know that there would have been much to suggest greatness that was his destiny. Within a year, however, he was thrust into the role of the spokesperson of a great liberation movement, choosing to risk his life for the cause of justice.

In 1988 Ronald Reagan was the most powerful man on the face of the planet earth. Five years later he was pretty much helpless, living with Alzheimer’s, no longer going out in public.

The third dimension of who I am is the person I will be. Christianity highlights this dimension, declaring that who I am becoming is ultimately more important than who I was or who I am now.

If, on some level of our being, we have heard the call to enter the spiritual journey, then what we are becoming are “saints.” One day, as the Apostle Paul tells us, we will be sanctified. All the garbage that gets in the way of God’s wondrous love and light shining through our lives will be left behind.

In a certain sense if we’ve begun this journey we already are saints, in so far as the seeds have been planted within us. We are gifted with moments in which we are allowed to experience a bit of what it is to be truly loving and transparent to the light — to lose ourselves in something much larger and more wonderful than our own little egos.

And yet, we also know that even as we are already saints, we are also in the present very much “sinners” as well, habitually getting stuck in ourselves, plagued by our fears and resentments, our greed and our jealousy.

I said that we are on our way to becoming saints — fully sanctified saints — but it is, of course, possible for a person to persistently turn a totally deaf ear to the divine call and claim on their lives — to enter a process of “losing one’s soul”, as Jesus termed it. In doing so, a person would be, by default, traveling a path leading to a place where the inner garbage snuffs out the light; to a deep and dark bitterness.

Our reading from the Gospel of John this morning describes the first meeting of Jesus and Simon. Jesus has the capacity to see in people that which others miss; in particular, he sees what a person is becoming when the rest of us tend to get stuck on what a person was or is now.

Jesus sees Simon, and right there on the spot he gives him a new name. “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas”, which translates Peter, which you may know means Rock.

The implication is that Simon Peter is strong, reliable, unmovable. In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus goes on to says that upon this rock he will build his church. So evidently if we ask, “Who is Simon Peter?” according to Jesus we could say he is someone who is strong, reliable, unmovable.

But Jesus is here speaking more of who Peter will be, rather than what he is now, in the present.

There aren’t many stories that occur in all four Gospels, but one story we do find in all four is the story of Peter’s betrayal of Jesus on the night of his arrest, when, for a brief period of time, the spotlight is squarely on Peter, and what he displayed in that moment is anything but strong, reliable, unmovable. Simon Peter moved pretty quick indeed when he felt himself to be in danger.

In time, however, Peter does in fact become stronger, as he goes through the whole experience of Jesus’ death and resurrection, as well as the sufferings he undergoes later on Jesus’ behalf. Curiously, his strength arises from his own humble acknowledgement of his frailty and weakness.

Sometimes we need to be reminded of who we are becoming. We started the service with a reading from the beginning of Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth. It’s funny — if this is all we read, we might think the church at Corinth was a place where nothing but love could be found. As the letters go on, however, we discover that the congregation was plagued by the same sort of thing that has plagued congregations throughout the ages: pettiness, divisiveness, power plays.

Paul’s opening to his letter intentionally reminds his readers who they are called to be, who they are in some sense already, in order to inspire them to move away from the pettiness they have fallen into in the present.

Past, present and future are all linked, and sometimes we do need to be reminded where we have come from. Paul also got a name change: He was once Saul, the man full of violent rage who persecuted Christians, and he became the primary apostle to the Gentiles, but every so often he needs to be humbled by remembering where he started, and how the transformation of his life wasn’t his doing — it was all God’s grace.

The Civil Rights movement that Martin Luther King led was driven by a vision of who we will be: Don’t be deceived into thinking that the way things are now is how they always will be; those who are oppressed now are indeed proud children of God who one day soon will rightfully claim their full dignity and place within this society; those who are the oppressors now will one day find the joy of being a part of God’s color blind society. I have a dream, Martin Luther King declared, that one day soon, we will be who God in fact called us to be.

I wrote a play a while back called “No Preacher Man” that dealt with this whole theme.
The story involves a black teenager named Benny who is going door to door in a white suburban neighborhood, trying his hand at selling magazines. His past has known a lot of hardship and sorrow. His present is uncertain; he seems to be floating about aimlessly.

Benny comes to a house where a handicapped man and his elderly mother live. They are grief stricken, for the father and husband of the household has died just days before.

Somehow God’s grace is at work in this unlikely encounter of these people from what seems like altogether worlds. Without even recognizing it, Benny discovers himself to be on a spiritual quest.

The seeds of this quest were planted in his past. Benny recalls going to church as a child with his mother. In large part he was bored there, but one thing he remembers clearly, the words with which the preacher, who he refers to as a big sweaty man, would end every service — words at the time he couldn’t really comprehend, but which nonetheless, stayed with him through the years.

In the course of the play, Benny discovers himself called to be a servant to this odd grieving mother and son. He fakes his way through an improvised funeral service during which surprising grace is discovered.

In the end, Benny abruptly leaves the house, frightened by the road he glimpses ahead of him. But in the very last scene, the handicapped son, gifted with a remarkable memory, quotes the words of the preacher that Benny had earlier relayed to him.

“Sometimes you may feel like you’re abandoned — orphaned in this world. But let me tell you, and don’t you forget it: You ain’t orphans! You’ve been adopted by the Heavenly Father through the ministrations of the Holy Ghost, through whom all things are possible! Why, you’re the beloved sons and daughters of the great and glorious King — that’s who you are!”

A sermon preached on Sunday, January 13th, based upon Matthew 3:13 -17, entitled “Hierarchies and the Baptism of Jesus”

I’ve been thinking a lot about hierarchies this past week.

Take wolves, for instance. There was a wonderful presentation here at the Church Wednesday night by a group called “Defenders of the Wildlife” who brought along a beautiful, live wolf. Within every wolf pack there will be a hierarchy that establishes whose up and whose down. And wolves as a species exist in the animal world atop the most basic of hierarchies, also known as the “food chain.“

Though we humans often experience hierarchy as sinister, it is not in and of itself evil. Following a children’s sermon I once gave in which I invited the children to imagine the fulfillment of the Biblical image of “the wolf lying down with the lamb,” my engineer friend Lincoln reminded me that the actual demolition of the animal hierarchy would be a disaster for the animal kingdom. The bigger guys eat the littler guys, or more precisely, some of the littler guys — that’s how the system works. Do away with the hierarchy of the food chain and chaos and starvation would quickly follow.

Animals seem to intuitively recognize the need for hierarchy: put a bunch of dogs together for the first time, and they will immediately set about establishing whose up and whose down in the pecking order. Following a few initial growls and maybe a couple of bites, all the dogs can relax and interact easily with one another, since each dog now knows his or her place in the order of the pack.

Because wolves sit at the very top of the animal food chain, human beings have often unfairly demonized them, perhaps projecting our own darker impulses onto these predators. Consider, for instance, the portrayal of the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood“, with which every kid grows up. But wolves do not recklessly kill as humans are known to sometimes do. And when human beings have taken it upon ourselves to play God with the animal kingdom, believing it would be better off without those mean wolves at the top of the hierarchy, we soon discovered there were unfortunate consequences. Hunting wolves down to near extinction meant the elk and other natural prey of the wolf quickly became too numerous for their environments to bear, resulting in a barrenness in the land from which the rest of the animal kingdom suffered.

In the animal kingdom, animals instinctively fulfill their place in the balance created by this hierarchy. Generally speaking, animals don’t maliciously hunt one another. They hunt specifically to eat, and in doing so a delicate balance is maintained.

It goes without saying that there is plenty of hierarchy in the human world. My daughter Kate described some of the customs she witnessed in Tanzania that reflect the hierarchies in place there. Among the most primitive tribe that Kate stayed with — the Maasai, older people are honored for the experience they have gained over the years of their life. When a younger person encounters an older person, the younger person bows his or her head in respect, and the older person responds by gently touching the top of the person’s head in a kind of blessing, in a mutual acknowledgement of the implicit authority the elder has over the younger person. Kate thought this was a nice custom, and I do too. Because of the shorter life span in Tanzania, at 52 I would be considered downright ancient there, receiving great honor and many bowed heads for my many years. I thought it might be a nice custom to introduce here as well.

The same custom, however, was also in place in other relationships within the Maasai people in ways Kate didn’t care for so much. There is a class of men ranging in age from 17 to mid-thirties who fulfill the function within the tribe of so-called “warriors”, theoretically defending the tribe from its enemies, but Kate’s impression was that for the most part all they really did was swagger about drinking beer. Because they were understood to be at the top of the hierarchy, when other members of the tribe would encounter a warrior, they were supposed to bow their heads in submission so that the warrior could pat them on the head. As you might expect, Kate wasn’t about to bow her head to any testosterone-driven, beer-swigging teenager, which in turn quickly identified her as something of a rebel to the system.

There is, of course, a great deal of established hierarchy in our culture as well, as reflected in the relationships of parent/child, employer/employee,doctor/ patient, teacher/student/ bishop/ds/pastor/layperson, to name but a few. These hierarchies provide a structure that we rely on for order. Although hierarchies often need reforming, and some hierarchies can be done away with altogether, without any hierarchies human interactions would be inclined to descend into a destructive chaos.

But unlike animals who are driven by instinct, gravitating automatically to their proper place and function in the hierarchy, we human beings have some measure of freedom, which means, among other things, that we make choices to either fulfill our place, or to abuse the power given to us in the hierarchy.

With human beings, there are two kinds of authority. There is the external authority given to a person by the hierarchical system — the authority bestowed simply by virtue of the fact that he or she has been given the title of “pastor“, or “teacher“, or “policeman“, or whatever. And then there is internal authority, a kind of spiritual reality that arises from who a person truly is (or have become) in their personhood. Ideally, the person who has been given external authority carries within him or her the internal authority that corresponds to their place in the hierarchy. (Obviously, Kate didn’t perceive within the young Maasai warriors the internal authority to match their external authority.)

We find ourselves in the midst of a presidential campaign. When we assess the candidates, beyond their position on policy we are asking, in large part, whether they possess the internal authority to match the external authority they are seeking in being elected president.

It’s a pretty crucial question, because obviously it is quite possible for someone to run for president who is driven by nothing more than blind ambition — a desire to possess more political power than any other person on the face of the planet; to be, essentially, the chief wolf sitting at the top of the human food chain, so to speak. Presidents driven by blind ambition end up doing a tremendous amount of harm.

Accurately or inaccurately, Hillary Clinton got a bounce in the polls last week when she became teary eyed and spoke convincingly of how she was running not merely because she wanted power, but because she truly believed she had something to offer that would serve the country well in these difficult times. The perception of her as a woman with the internal authority required to be president became believable to many people.

It is helpful to consider the story David read us this morning in the Gospel lesson in terms of external and internal authority. Sometimes a person can possess great internal authority but have no formal role in society. This is the first public appearance of Jesus in the Gospels. He is, in a certain sense, a nobody, holding no external authority. Unlike the priests, scribes and Pharisees who all had been given a certain external authority in the society, both Jesus and John the Baptist carried no title. Their internal authority, however, was unmistakable. When they spoke, people listened, because their integrity and innate wisdom was simply compelling.

Immediately upon Jesus’ arrival at the River Jordan, John raises a question regarding hierarchy. Jesus, he perceives, is, in truth, above in him, carrying a greater internal authority than his own. But Jesus has come to submit to John’s baptism as though John were above him. John is discomforted by the fact that they seem to be undermining the hierarchy of authority. Jesus reassures him that this is okay.

And then Jesus does a remarkable thing. Though he is, in a very real sense, above every body else, he humbly takes his place in the waters of the Jordan, placing himself alongside every other human being who ever lived.

To be a parent, rightfully understood, is to serve one’s child — not in the sense of being their maid, but in terms of exercising authority over them specifically for the purpose of enhancing the child’s life. The same can be said of pastors, teachers, presidents, or any position of authority.

Once, as Jesus was making his way to Jerusalem where he would confront those who had abused their authority, he was approached by two of his disciples, James and John.

“Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.”
And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?”
And they said to him,
“Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”
Jesus is asking, in essence, whether they have the internal authority necessary to take on the authority they are seeking. When Jesus was baptized by John, he was indicating his willingness to suffer with, and indeed to die for, those who he would have authority over. Jesus took the occasion of his disciples’ question as an opportunity to speak regarding the nature of true leadership and authority.“You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and there great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave to all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.” (Mark 10:35 -44)
For those of us who would seek to follow Jesus, our call to serve knows no limits.
A woman wrote about an important lesson she learned in college: During my second month of nursing school, our professor gave us a pop quiz. I was a conscientious student and had breezed through the questions, until I read the last one: “What is the first name of the woman who cleans the school?” Surely this was some kind of joke. I had seen the cleaning woman
several times. She was tall, dark-haired and in her 50s, but how would I know her name? I handed in my paper, leaving the last question blank. Before class ended, one student asked if the last question would count toward our quiz grade.“Absolutely,” said the professor. “In your careers you will meet many people. All are significant. They deserve your attention and care, even if all you do is smile and say hello.”I’ve never forgotten that lesson. I also learned her name was Dorothy.

A sermon preached by Bob Keller on December 30, 2007 based on Matthew 2: 13 – 23.

I’d like to start this morning by relating this imaginary correspondence between Martha Stewart and the late Erma Bombeck:

Hi Erma,
This perfectly delightful note is being sent on paper I made myself to tell you what I have been up to. Since it snowed last night, I got up early and made a sled with old barn wood and a glue gun. I hand painted it in gold leaf, got out my loom, and made a blanket in peaches and mauves. Now it’s time to start making the place mats and napkins for my 20 breakfast guests. I’m serving the old standard Stewart 12-course breakfast, but I didn’t have time to make the tables and chairs this morning, so I used the ones I already had. I did take time to make the dishes to use for breakfast from Hungarian clay, which you can get at almost any Hungarian craft store.

Well, I must run. I need to finish the buttonholes on the dress I’m wearing for breakfast. I’ll get out the sled and drive this note to the post office as soon as the glue dries on the envelope I’ll be making.
Love,
Martha Stewart

Response from Erma Bombeck:

Dear Martha,
I’m writing this on the back of an old shopping list, pay no attention to the coffee and jelly stains. I’m 20 minutes late getting my daughter up for school, packing a lunch with one hand, on the phone with the dog pound, seems old Ruff needs bailing out, again. Burnt my arm on the curling iron when I was trying to make those cute curly fries. Still can’t find the scissors to cut out some snowflakes, tried using an old disposable razor…trashed the tablecloth. Tried that cranberry thing, but the frozen cranberries mushed up after I defrosted them in the microwave. Oh, and don’t use Fruity Pebbles as a substitute in that Rice Krispie snowball recipe, unless you happen to like a disgusting shade of green! The smoke alarm is going off, talk to ya later.
Love, Erma

Now wouldn’t we all like to have the time and energy, not to mention the talent, for the Martha Stewart Christmas!

But all of the waiting and anticipation, not to mention all of the “noise” of the holiday somehow gets in the way and Christmas sneaks up on us and it’s gone before we realize it was even here!

I’ll bet if you check the ads in today’s paper, you’ll see that Target and Kmart and Walmart and Sears all have ads for storage boxes. Those ads are subtly telling us that it’s over. It’s time to put it all away. They’re telling us that it’s time to once again “get organized.” To tidy up our lives and get back to “normal.”

In a way, they’re telling us that Christmas is over. If you missed it, too bad, but we’ll help you be organized for next year. And what happens then? Same thing as this year!
Christmas is filled with joy, and in this 21st century, it’s filled with hassles and the need to be organized.

But what of that first Christmas? How organized was it? Were there any hassles? Certainly this was the fulfillment of the prophecies, but was that fulfillment even noticed as the events unfolded? Probably not, but the hassles could hardly go unnoticed.

When Pastor Jeff asks me to fill in for him, he usually gives me a few weeks notice and provides the scripture lessons for that day. I use that time to read the scriptures and then I check every commentary I can find to help me understand what I’ve read. The common thread in all of the commentaries on the passage that David read for us this morning is that this is really part of the Christmas story.

Probably, many of you are like me and associate the Christmas story with the passage from Luke’s gospel- the story where the angel choirs sing and the shepherds are amazed and fall down to worship the newborn king amid peace on earth. Now we come to Matthew’s account and we find hassles. Not only hassles, but downright barbarism in the Slaying of the Innocents.

Let’s take a look at Joseph, a guy who does an admirable job at being the stepfather of God’s son. Did Joseph have hassles?

First, he’s got a new wife and she’s pregnant already. But Joseph is an obedient man and he listens to God when he’s told in a dream to not be afraid to take Mary as his wife because the child she carries is of the Holy Spirit. God goes on to tell Joseph that he should name the baby Jesus because he will save His people from their sin.

Did God get Joseph out of his hassle? Did God allow Joseph a “do over?” No, but He was with Joseph and told him why this was happening. So Joseph kept Mary as his wife and they went to Bethlehem because of this tax thing – now here’s another hassle, where do I get the money to pay this unexpected tax? I’ve got a new wife and a baby on the way. Not only do I have to pay a new tax, I’ve got to travel to Bethlehem for the privilege of paying it! But the baby was born. From there the familiar story from Luke’s gospel traditionally takes over until we need the story of the visit of the wise men to fill some time in our documentary.

So we come to Matthew’s account of Christ’s birth. We know from Luke’s account that the shepherds arrived fairly soon after Jesus was born. But we don’t know how long it took the magi to get to Bethlehem. Their journey from the East could have taken several days or as long as nearly two years.

When the magi got to Jerusalem, their first stop was to see Herod, the king. Surely he would know where this new king was to be found. Well, the birth of this new king was news to Herod and it’s safe to assume that Herod was none too pleased to hear of any competition. After all, there can only be one king.

So here’s a hassle for the magi. They’re in a strange land. They’re under orders from the king to find this baby and report his whereabouts to Herod. They find the child, recognize him as the one they were told about. They present their gifts and they make a decision to not go back to Herod, but to leave the area by another way. Now think about that for a moment. They literally took their lives in their hands. Three magi traveling together was probably a sight out of the ordinary. If Herod had found the baby and saw the gifts he would have known that the gifts likely came from people like the visiting magi. Surely these three men risked their lives in fleeing to protect the baby.

Joseph, Matthew tells us, had another dream. This time he’s told to get up and take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Here’s another hassle for Joseph. Now remember, Joseph probably wasn’t the youngest player on the team. All this traveling was no fun for an older man. I checked to find out how far away Egypt is from Bethlehem – it’s 300 miles! Mary wasn’t a “soccer mom” so they didn’t get in the Dodge Caravan to make the journey and neither Greyhound buses nor Amtrak were available. They walked, and 300 miles is like walking from here to Pittsburgh! But again, the angel of the Lord explained why – because Herod was going to seek out the child to kill him. Joseph didn’t ask how he was to get there. He didn’t ask where he would live once he got there. Remember, the new family had the gifts from the magi that they likely used to finance their journey. Joseph simply said, “Well, OK then. I’ve got the Son of God here – I can’t let Herod kill him.”

When the magi didn’t come back to Herod, he realized that he had been “punk’d.” Herod believed the prophecies of a king being born in Bethlehem, but he had no idea where he was. So he ordered all of the male babies under two years of age, in and around Bethlehem, be killed. Now, talk about your hassles! Imagine being a parent in those days. Now imagine the soldiers marching up your street and coming into your house and searching until they find your baby boy. Now imagine those soldiers taking the boy and running a spear through him. This is part of the Christmas story? It fulfills the prophecy found in Jeremiah

Often, people will ask if Jesus was a real person. Well, he’s referenced alongside Herod who most certainly was real. Evidence of Herod’s reign abounds in ancient, non-biblical, writings as well as in archeological finds. Quite frankly, there’s no dispute that Herod lived, was quite an architect, and was an SOB.

Let’s take a little closer look at Herod. Caesar Augustus was quoted as saying that it would be better to be King Herod’s pig than to be his son. Pigs were protected by law … Herod’s family members were not. King Herod had already killed two of his own sons … he had them strangled. He also killed one of his 10 wives … his favorite wife … because he thought that she had been unfaithful to him (she wasn’t!). He also killed her grandfather, and her 80-year-old uncle, who had once saved Herod’s life. He also killed his own uncle and his mother-in-law. He killed his 18-year-old brother-in-law, because the Jews liked him better than they liked Herod. What are a few babies in Bethlehem to King Herod!

But the new family was safe in Egypt.

When Herod dies, Joseph has another dream. This time he’s told to take the boy and his mother and to go back to Israel. We don’t know the exact timeline here, but Joseph is likely 10 years older than when he went to Egypt. Is this another hassle for Joseph? It is – but it’s another fulfillment of prophevy – Israel’s savior will come out of Egypt and it reminds us that God’s people, Israel, had safely come out of Egypt so many years before.
Let me ask you – how many times have you moved in your lifetime? Whether one time or many, it’s a hassle. Connie and I have moved four times. And we always get so well organized! In fact we are so well organized that we still have “stuff” in boxes that we packed for our first move some 33 years ago. But we tend to define ourselves by our “stuff”, don’t we?

It’s said that ‘only in America do we fill our garages with stuff and park a $30,000 car in the driveway!’ No such luxury for Joseph and Mary. How much stuff can you carry when you’re walking 300 miles and maybe have only a donkey to share your load.

Herod’s son, Archelaus, was in charge now. From historical accounts, Archelaus made his father look like Little Bo Peep. To make his power known, after he took over from his father, Archelaus had 3,000 Jews killed in the temple on Passover.

Joseph, in another dream, is warned of this new tyrant and bypasses Judea and takes his wife and son to Nazareth. Nazareth is not the kindest place for Jews in that day. It’s a crossroads city and the northern garrison for the Romans. It’s mostly inhabited by gentiles and the few Jews that lived there were often said to be in cahoots with the enemy, the Romans. But another prophecy is fulfilled – HE (Jesus) shall be called a Nazarene. The Son of God was to grow up among the Gentiles.

In these few short verses, Matthew completes the Christmas story. He balances fulfillment of prophecy with the political treachery and barbarism of the day. Matthew reveals the hassles of the birth of the Son of God. Since we, in our sin, are in no shape to go to be with God, He sent his Son to live among us. He shares our hassles and our pain as well as our triumphs and joy.

This birth was no easy feat. In fact, how many more hassles could have been thrown into the plot here? The possibility of an unwed mother, the taxes, the long journeys, the threat of death, the treachery of a despot, the even greater treachery of the despot’s son – even the murder of untold numbers of innocent children.
But we also have the fulfillment of prophecy. Amid the hassles and the horrific slaughter, is a tale that tells us that God was, and still is, in charge.

God makes a promise to all of us: He promises His presence.

In Psalm 34 we are told that: The LORD is near to those who have a broken heart, and saves such as have a contrite spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD delivers him out of them all.

Many prophecies of the Old Testament were fulfilled with Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. Even more with the slaughter of the Innocents, the flight to – and return from – Egypt as well as the move to Nazareth.

The story could have ended there, but Jesus didn’t die in Bethlehem. The baby in the manger grew up to be the man on the Cross. And that cross, that EMPTY cross, is what the Christmas story is all about. It’s about the hassles and it’s about hope. The hope that was born in Bethlehem. The light in the world that no darkness can overcome. The Savior that came to be with us, to share in our lives, not just at Christmas and Easter, or at weddings and baptisms, but ALL of the time. It’s about the Savior that takes our sins and allows us that “do-over” that we so desperately need. It’s about hope for today, tomorrow and for all eternity.

Listen to the words of Christina Rosetti
That night when shepherds heard the song of the angelic host caroling near,
A deaf man turns in slumber’s spell, and dreamed that he could hear.
That night when in the cattle stall slept mother and child in humble fold,
A cripple turned his twisted limbs and dreamed that he was whole.
That night when o’er the new born babe a tender mother rose to lean,
A loathsome leper smiled in sleep and dreamed that he was clean.
That night when to the mother’s breast the little King held secure,
A harlot slept a happy sleep and dreamed that she was pure.
That night when in the manger lay the Holy One Who came to save,
A man turned in the sleep of death, and dreamed their was no grave.
What shall be our gift to Him? What shall I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd I’d give Him a lamb,
If I were a wise man I’d do my part.
What shall I give Him? I know…I’ll give Him my heart.

You’ve heard the expression – Today is the first day of the rest of your life. I’d like to turn that just a bit and state “Today is the last day of your life, so far.” What will you do with it? Will you check out the ads for storage crates, boxes and bins? And will you put Christmas away all organized for another year? It’s OK if you do, but consider leaving out that thing called “the hope of Christmas.”

Will you take that message of Christmas with you and live it? Not just the message of peace on earth and angel choirs, but the message of real hope that Christmas brings to all those that will hear it. God gave us the hope of His Son living among us, will you give Him your heart?

Please pray with me:

Father, what can we say? You gave us that chance for a “do-over” when you sent your Son to live and dwell among us so that He could feel what we feel. Yet He wasn’t just a man, He was Immanuel – God with us.

Our prayer is that we would know his presence with us, each day of the year, that we would know the hope that your Son brought to us and that it would dwell forever in our hearts. Amen

December 29, 2007

It is striking that God (or whatever we who have gathered here this day call the mysterious power behind the universe) designed us human beings in such a way that we find ourselves inexorably attracted romantically not to people that simply mirror ourselves, but rather to our opposite, which, in itself speaks of our need to be completed from beyond ourselves; our need to be drawn out of ourselves towards a greater wholeness.

The particular couple that stands before us expresses well this attraction of opposites. I’ll let you figure out who fills each end of the polarities I now describe:
*One is fair skinned, with blond, straight hair; the other is darker, with jet black, wavy hair.
*One is a WASP, the other full blooded Italian.
*One is petite, the other is, well, not petite.
*One is a bit of an introvert; the other as extroverted as they come.
*One is laid back, inclined to go with the flow; the other most comfortable when every detail has been thoroughly considered.
You complement one another, balance one another; and as such God will grow you through one another. Of course, this quality of being opposites to one another — the very thing that attracted you to one another in the first place, will be not infrequently the source of bewilderment to one another — the cause of a painful friction — but know that over time this pain will simply polish your love.

But we who have gathered here this day to witness the vows you are about to make are confident you will persevere, that over time your love will not wilt upon the vine, but rather grow; that your marriage will be a blessing, not a curse. And part of why we have such confidence is that we know that even as you are in one sense such stark opposites to one another, that there is also in your relationship a deep harmony of your core commitments in life: You share strong devotion to family and to friends, to creativity, and to bringing laughter and beauty into this world. You are traveling in life down the same road.

It can be a terrible thing to discover oneself drawn to one’s opposite, only to have that other traveling in an altogether different direction. But it is not so for you. You have found each other’s soul mates.

It is no small thing to find a soul mate with whom to journey through life. You can describe this as “good luck“, but from the eyes of faith we have another word with which to describe this: “Grace.” (Carrie’s middle name!)
You have been given a gift from invisible, benevolent hands that want only good for you — the very hands of God — the same God who formed you so lovingly in Claire and Kathy’s wombs, giving you the extraordinary gifts that are so magnificently in evidence this weekend.

A question occurs: Why you and not others? Why not the lonely Joes and Janes of this world who have not, as of yet found their soul mates, and may never in this world? Why? I have no idea.

The truest thing to say is that you have been blessed, which is quite different from saying you have been rewarded. And, as the apostle Paul reminds us in the reading we heard, the only truly appropriate response to grace is simple awe and gratitude.

Over the course of this weekend you have recognized the debt you owe to your wonderful families and friends who have so lovingly supported you in countless ways to help you reach this moment, and it was right for you to do so. But these very same families and friends were blessed themselves by extraordinary grace as well, and they were simply passing on what they had received.

I think I speak for your parents and everybody else here today when I say that the best response to the grace you have been given is not to try and pay it back, but rather, in the words of that wonderful movie by the same name, “Pay It Forward.”

Pay it forward.

God loves you and has blessed you in more ways than you can ever name. But God is not an ego maniac; God desires not that you attempt to pay the debt back, but rather than you pay it forward.

God loves this troubled but beautiful world in which we been given life. God made you breathtakingly talented, and together as a couple, you are even more so as a result of the wonderful synchronicity of your gifts.

The world that God loves so needs you. There are many, many people in this world living lives in great depravation: deprived of love, of beauty, and other basic necessities we so easily take for granted. You were drawn together by grace so that together you could be a great blessing unto this world.

How exactly you will live out your calling to pay it forward, God only knows for sure. You have, at this point, only the slightest of clues. But it will be beautiful and wonderful, and with much laughter, though surely some tears.

And through it all, those unseen, loving hands will be there always, helping you along the way.

A sermon preached on January 6, 2007, based upon Matthew 2:1 – 12, entitled, “The Great Loneliness.”

As many of you know, my family of origin isn’t as close as many families in this world. My parents, having never been particularly connected to one another in the first place, divorced when I was 11, and over time we largely went our separate ways. Closeness with my mother has always come pretty easily for me; I am most like her, and we tend to understand one another instinctively. But easy connection has not come easily elsewhere in my family of origin. Over the years I have maintained some contact with my sister. My older brother married his high school girlfriend, getting caught up in her tightly knit family. Over the next ten years, I would see my brother and his wife occasionally, but as is all too common among families, misunderstandings caused a wall to harden between us, and for nearly twenty years, we had no contact whatsoever.

In recent years, we have begun again to have occasional contact, opened up by the grace of God using the fact that both my brother and I have sons who play soccer goalie, which in turn lead to an invitation being extended to me two years ago to attend the wedding of my brother’s daughter.

This year, several weeks before Christmas, my father conveyed the message to my sister, my brother and I that it was very important to him that we all gather together at his home in North Carolina some time over the Christmas holidays.

With the craziness that is Christmas, combined with the fact that I was scheduled to officiate at the wedding of my wife’s niece four days after Christmas, I must admit, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the request. Clearly, however, it was important to my father, who, although in good health, finds himself at 86 pondering the unfinished business of his life as he approaches the end of his life. So I booked a flight for Christmas afternoon, with plans to return the next evening in order to be back in time for the wedding rehearsal.

Frankly, I resented having to leave my wife and children, as well as my mother who came to our house Christmas Eve, in order to travel down there on Christmas day in the midst of a sea of strangers.

As night fell, I found myself on my transfer flight from Charlotte to Greenville, SC where my father and my sister, who had driven down the day before, would meet me. I had a window seat, and as I looked to the earth below, my attention was captured by the little points of light — the people driving their cars on the roads, keeping their distance from one another, passing, as the saying goes, like ships in the night. The sight seemed to express to me the great loneliness that is the human condition. The little points of lights struck me as souls — people, stripped down to their essence.

I saw clearly what I think we all know in our heart of hearts — that our only hope is found in losing ourselves in a greater light — the light of God, the light that shines in and through every human being, if only we have the eyes to see it.

I felt a profound tenderness for all of us human beings, and for my very imperfect family in particular: I thought of my father in his old age contemplating his death. I thought also of my brother who, five years older, had always come across as macho and somewhat invincible.

A memory from almost thirty years ago came to me. Before the misunderstanding had grown that cut us off from one another, my mother and I were visiting my brother in his home one evening. My sister-in-law showed us a letter my brother had written her from China, where he had gone on a business trip, with the new market there having only recently opened up to Americans. In the letter my brother expressed how deeply he missed his wife; how alone he felt in the alien culture of China, where he could not speak the language nor understand the customs.

I imagined my brother also sitting in a plane looking down at the points of light, longing to be home.

I thought also of that star the wise men followed that led them into a culture alien unto themselves, and of the point of view that one might have looking down from that star, seeing the points of light — the lonely souls — longing so desperately for connection, but more often than not, passing one another like ships in the night.

I thought of the baby those wise men found at the end of their journey — the baby who was God, but who also, in some sense, represented everyone of us — so vulnerable, so alone, crying to be held, to be connected.

And I thought of the joy that the wise men felt when they held that baby in their arms.

Sitting alone in that plane in the dark night sky, I felt a sadness, recognizing that same deep loneliness in myself, and yet, paradoxically, I felt a peculiar connection to all human beings sharing together this same fundamental loneliness, evoking a great tenderness within me. I saw that even the King Herods of this world are acting out of their own frightened loneliness, feeling compelled to murder the baby whom they perceive as threatening their hold on the power they mistakenly assume makes them worthy of love. That in the end, our hope is in forgiveness, in tenderness, and our capacity to recognize in ourselves and in others that same helpless baby, so desperately in need of being held.

My sister has no children of her own; in place of children, she has cats, upon whom she showers love and affection. On her trip down to my father’s house one of her two cats, 13 year old Madeline, finally succumbed to an illness with which she had struggled for months. My sister often projects an image of emotional toughness, but from time to time throughout our visit she would openly weep like a little child, mourning her beloved cat, who was like a child to her, someone with whom she felt a redeeming connection in the midst of the loneliness of this world.

My brother and his wife came the next day. I’m glad we all got together. I wish I can say that all that separates us was overcome, but life in this world isn’t that simple. It is not easy for us to be with one another. Mostly we talked soccer, unable to find any other common ground on which to converse. But I knew I had seen something — experienced something — looking down from that plane at night at the points of light, that was true; something I needed to remember.

***

There is a lovely radio program that comes on NPR once a week called “Speaking of Faith.” On Christmas day the program featured an interview with Jean Vanier, the 79 year old man who founded what is called the L’arche movement, a series of Christian communities throughout the world that are made up of mentally handicapped people living alongside so-called “normal” people. They entitled the interview “The Wisdom of Tenderness”. I was struck by these words that Jean Vanier spoke:

“The big thing for me is to love reality: not love in the imagination, as in what could have been, or what should have been, or what can be, but to love reality, and then to discover that God is present.”

Last night twenty people came to our house to hear our daughter Kate show her slides and describe her experience of living among the people of Tanzania for the past four months. The strongest impression she left us with was of an innate joyfulness she encountered among the folks living there that seemed uncommon here in America. I thought of Jean Vanier’s words. Here in America we tend to be preoccupied with improving our lot in life rather than with simply loving life as it is, now, in the reality of the present moment. The Tanzanians tended to be far more capable of finding the joy that is already at hand.

Take having babies, for instance. Here we tend to be preoccupied with waiting until our lives are in order, particularly in regard to having our financial houses in order, before we have children. It seems, of course the only responsible thing to do. Not so, in Tanzania. Children are seen there as a great and absolute blessing, and they don’t worry about how the children will be provided for; they trust that the community will see to it that the baby will be looked after.

When we come into this world our essential vulnerability and loneliness is so evident: we are the baby that needs to be held. When we prepare to leave this world, that same vulnerability and loneliness once more arises to the surface of our lives, and with it the possibility of a great, redemptive tenderness. In a few minutes we will share again in holy communion, in which we remember Jesus in his great vulnerability as he approached his own death, sharing a last supper with his friends. In sharing this meal with Jesus, we are invited to lose ourselves in his great light.