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A sermon preached on February 24, 2008 based upon Exodus 17:1 – 7, and John 4: 5 – 26, entitled, “Whom Shall We Blame?”

Out there in the wilderness, the Israelites found themselves with a major problem. Not the problem of where would they find water; the problem I have in mind was the fact that they now had no one to blame.

For years and years they had a very easy answer to the question: who can we blame? Pharaoh, of course, was to blame for our misery; he who has oppressed us, kept us slaves, worked us to the bone, kept us from being free. And there was plenty of truth in that statement. He was one very cruel overlord, that’s for sure.

And then a funny thing happened. This guy Moses shows up. He is one of them, but not quite one of them. Moses seems to see their plight differently from the way they see things, and he goes toe to toe with Pharaoh. Standing behind Moses is this strange and powerful God, and before they know it, Moses and his God have worked out this deal with Pharaoh whereby they are free to leave Egypt.

So the Israelites up and proceed to leave, and when Pharaoh tries to renege on their deal, the mighty hand of God parts the red sea so they can pass through. Pharaoh’s armies get drowned. They find themselves liberated from their bondage to Pharaoh, without having to hardly lift a finger, Moses and God having done all the heavy lifting.

Now they’re out in the wilderness, which isn’t the easiest place to live. And who do they blame now, especially when food is in short supply, or worse, they can’t find any water to drink?

Well the answer comes quick enough to them: Moses, and his God, that’s who we’ll blame! This new answer requires a sudden re-writing of their history, one in which Pharaoh wasn’t such a bad guy, and Egypt was the lost land of the three square meals a day. Now Moses and his God are no longer the “liberators”; rather, they are the sadists with the perverse desire to watch the Israelites suffer, having brought them out here into the wilderness to starve and thirst to death.

****

We are the Israelites. There is a whiner in us all.

I often mention the “serenity prayer” with its simple wisdom about life: Lord,
Grant me the serenity to accept that which I cannot change, the courage to change that which I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
When the whiner takes over, we’re not interested in serenity, nor in courage; all we’re interested in is whining about that which we cannot change.

Jeannette Nickelson used to say, “Give yourself 15 minutes for your pity party, and then put it up on the shelf.” Well, it is possible to get so attached to the perverse pleasures of the pity party, that we simply refuse to leave.

Why did the Israelites wander for 40 whole years in the wilderness? They didn’t have to; the promised land wasn’t that far away. Unfortunately, it took them that long to leave the pity party. It took them that long to learn the lessons of the wilderness: that blaming does no good, and that somewhere along the way you have to grow up and stop the whining and take responsibility for your life.

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One of the primary stories we are invited to contemplate during the season Lent is that of the 40 days Jesus spent out in the wilderness. A running theme in the temptations that Jesus turned down were that they were all means by which Jesus could have simply taken away all our freedom and responsibility.

Are there hungry people about who need to be fed? No need to share, Jesus will turn stones into bread. Are we having a hard time believing in Jesus, putting our trust in him, and following in his way? No problem, Jesus will jump off the pinnacle of the temple and we can all marvel at the sight of the angels catching him; who could possibly have a problem believing in him after having seen such a thing? Are there people who are misbehaving? Don‘t worry, Jesus will simply take over all the kingdoms and armies and police forces of the world and MAKE everybody behave they way they should.

****
The great Russian writer Dostoevsky, in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov, includes a short story written by one of his characters entitled “The Grand Inquisitor.” Set in the Middle Ages during the time of the Inquisition in which non-believers were burned at the stake, Jesus suddenly returns, walking humbly through a village where a funeral procession is taking place. Laying his hand upon the corpse, he brings a mother’s son back to life, amazing the crowd. The ruling cleric, a Cardinal referred to as the Grand Inquisitor, witnesses the scene, and immediately has his soldiers arrest Jesus.

The following day the Grand Inquisitor visits his prisoner in his jail cell. Jesus never speaks. The Grand Inquisitor does all the talking. He tells Jesus how he made a grave mistake when he didn’t accept the offers made to him by the devil in the wilderness. “The one things human beings can’t bear,” he declares, “is freedom.”

He goes on to say, “We, the Church, have corrected your great error. We have taken away the people’s freedom, which they have been all too happy to hand over to us.”
So the question that is thrown back on us each of us: who was right, the Grand Inquisitor, or Jesus?

****
One of the insights that have come out of AA and support group at its side called Alanon for the family members of alcoholics, is that oftentimes the family members need the alcoholic to drink.

As much misery as the family member’s drinking causes to the family, it nonetheless provides a convenient answer to the question the Israelites dealt with out in the wilderness: Whom shall I blame?

Oh, how wonderful my life would be if it weren’t for his drinking, her drinking.

If however, they were to actually stop drinking, then I would be forced to take responsibility for building that wonderful life, and I’d have to ontend with my own inner garbage that would thwart my wonderful life. Better to have them continue to drink so I can enjoy my fantasy without the responsibility.

And so it is not uncommon to find family members conspiring to sabotage the recovery of the alcoholic — and the most common way to do this is to not actually hold the alcoholic responsible for their actions — in order that the family members can maintain their posture of whining.

****
Victor Frankl was Jewish psychiatrist who ended up in a Nazi prison camp.
With every worldly possession and privilege taken from him, he realized that the one thing that the Nazis could not take from him was his freedom to choose his own attitude to the horrific set of circumstances in which he found himself. Frankl was determined not to abandon this most basic of freedoms. Embracing the responsibility of this freedom, he triumphed spiritually over his oppression.

The same responsibility is ours, as we find ourselves in, generally speaking, far less oppressive situations.

*****
So Jesus had to cross through Samaria. Now there was an ancient history of blaming that took place between the Jews and the Samaritans. Six hundred years earlier, Israel was conquered by the Babylonians, and many of the people were taken to live as exiles in Babylon.

It was a humiliating defeat for the people, and as time passed, they sought someone to blame for this humiliation.

When the exile was over, the blame was placed upon those Jews who had married “foreigners”. It was those backsliding Jews with their evil relationships with foreigners that caused our nation’s humiliation and misery.

The Samaritans were the descendents of those marriages between Jews and foreigners.

Jesus, a Jew, sits beside an ancient well in the noon day heat. A Samaritan woman comes to draw water. She is there at noonday when the other women of the village would have come early in the day when the heat was not so oppressive.

Evidently there is another level of hostility between this woman and her own people that leads her to come to the well alone. Amazingly, Jesus breaks through all these barriers of blame and shame, and relates directly to the woman as a human being.

She is taken aback, suspicious, as past experience teachers her she has good reason to be. Jesus is intent on blessing this woman, but there is a lot of resistance he has to get through to offer this blessing.

The woman clings to her whiner posture. She complains about various things, including the fact that she has to come to his damn well every day to fetch water.

Eventually Jesus confronts her with the facts of her broken life, not by way of condemning her, or humiliating her, but by way of getting her to take some responsibility for the misery of her life.

She tries to distract Jesus with a discussion regarding the different religious traditions of the Jews and the Samaritans. “Religion is so confusing, isn‘t it? You Jews say you’ve got to go all the way to the temple to worship God. We Samaritans say you’ve got to go up on the holy mountain to worship.”

“Listen, woman, you don’t have to go anywhere to experience God’s love for you. God is here, right now, waiting in the depths of your thirsty soul, a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

Something happened to that woman in her encounter with that mysterious stranger beside the well.

She dropped her bucket, and feeling powerful in a way she hadn’t felt in a long, long time, she ran back to the center of her village to the very people with whom she’d been caught up in an endless blame game.

“I met a man who showed me what it means to be truly free. Could he be the messiah?”

A sermon preached on February 17, 2008, based upon Genesis 12:1 – 4a and John 3:1 – 17, entitled, “The Two Journeys.“

Reading the two scripture lessons, I was struck by the fact that neither Abraham or Nicodemus were spring chickens. When these stories took place, they’d both been around a few years. Abraham is 75. Genesis describes folks in those days living a lot longer than they do these days; as such, it would be safe to call Abraham “middle aged.”

Nicodemus was up there in years as well, because we know that he has established his place as a leader in his community, and we can assume it took some time to establish such stature. He also speaks this poignant line to Jesus:

“How can anyone be born after they are old?”

Nicodemus expresses a kind of despair, and a longing, as if to say,

“I am old. My life is passing me by. I don’t have the same vitality I once had. When I was younger, I’d jump out of bed in the morning full of vim and vigor, ready to make my mark on the world; these days I just don’t have the same enthusiasm. When I was younger, I longed to attain the place in which I now stand now, with the respect and admiration of my community. Now I mostly have what I once coveted, and I find it isn’t everything it was cracked up to be. I need to be reborn, sure, but that’s impossible. Isn’t it? I’m over the hill.”

Both Abraham and Nicodemus find themselves at this relatively late stage of life on the threshold of an entirely new kind of journey — one where the old maps don’t work. Abraham is called by God to leave behind all that is familiar: his home, his community, his family — and journey to an altogether new place.

Nicodemus comes to see Jesus because there is something about Jesus that is calling to him, but he senses that this something will require his giving up all his old understandings as well as his established place in his community, which terrifies him, so he comes by cover of night, unwilling at this point to publicly associate himself with this man.

You could say there are these two journeys we have to make in life. The first is there from the beginning, but is embarked upon seriously when we cross into adolescence. It involves creating a sense of identity and place in this world. It invariably involves some degree of competition, because we establish our sense of identity and place over against the identities and places being established by the others around us.

This journey is necessary, indeed unavoidable. As we grow up, we need to be able to come up with some kind of worldly answers to the questions, “Who am I? Where is my place in this world? What are my unique sources of drawing pride in myself?”
We worry about kids who don’t seem to be making any headway on this journey, who don’t have any endeavors for which they get charged up about — who don’t have anything they feel like they are good at — better than others.

In this journey, our egos are smack in the middle. We are on this journey trying to accumulate ego strength. Money, appearance, positions, attention and praise all tend to be major concerns in this journey as indicators of having succeeded in making our place in the world.

This first journey, although necessary, eventually reveals itself to be ultimately unsatisfying. In spite of attaining some measure of success, an emptiness remains, and the first response to this emptiness is to assume that our problem is simply that we’re not succeeding enough, and to reach all the more desperately for new signs of success.

And so an aging professional baseball player can begin secretly shooting his body
up with steroids, even as he is telling kids, “Don’t use steroids,” because he realizes that without the competitive edge the steroids that give him, he will soon be washed up, a “has been.”

The awareness of emptiness is, in fact, the sign that it is time to embark upon the second journey of life in earnestness — to attend to what Jesus was referring to when he said,

“What does it profit a person if you gain the whole world, but forfeit your soul?”

It involves the realization that our egos are not the same thing as our souls; that our little egos are simply inadequate to hold the center around which our life revolves.

Before I try and talk about the nature of this second journey, it is important to note that the timing of these journeys vary from culture to culture. In our culture, everything tends to get delayed. When, for instance does a person feel like they truly have reached adulthood? It is not uncommon for people these days to still feel as though adulthood has not yet fully arrived for them even as they pass the age of 30.

In other cultures there are certain rites of passage that clearly mark the arrival of adulthood, and these often take place in the early teens. The teenage girl is given in wedlock and quickly finds herself a mother. The boy is given a job with important responsibilities, with perhaps a wife and child to care for. They both know that now they are adults.

Likewise, when does the onset of “middle age” occur? It is interesting to note that Jesus did not begin his ministry until he was in his early 30s. In our culture, this is an age when a person can still be clinging to childhood, but in Jesus’ day, a man of such an age would have already been an adult for over fifteen years and would have been considered to be well into middle age. With the shorter life span, a 32 year old in those days could safely assume that he had already lived the majority of his allotted years on earth.

The great psychiatrist Carl Jung treated patients throughout his career who came to him seeking help with some sort of emotional distress. He alluded to this second journey of life when he said that in his experience, all of his patients in what he called “the second half of life,” which he defined as past the age of 35, were all ultimately in search of a vision of life of the sort offered by the great religions of the world.

These days, the terms “middle aged” and “elderly” keep getting put off to mean something that comes upon a person at a later and later age. Most 35 year olds are reluctant to label themselves “middle aged”, and most 70 year olds resist the term “elderly.”

The significance of this for our present discussion is that it makes a difference as to what stage a person understands themselves to be in life in regard to their readiness to enter into the second journey, which, I would suggest is the one with which the “the Christian life” is primarily concerned.

When Jesus said,

“If any want to become my followers,
let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
For those who want to save their life ill lose it,
and those who lose their life for my sake will find it,”

he was talking about something that is near impossible to do if you haven’t made some measure of progress on that first journey; some degree of success in defining yourself, and coming to a sense of who you are and where your place in this world.

You can’t give up something that you don’t yet have.

You can’t sacrifice yourself if you haven’t yet come into possession of a self.

I think this is important to keep in mind when we think about what we are trying to achieve when we provide our children with “Christian Education.”

Children aren’t yet ready to be born from above, because they are still in the process of being born of the flesh. At this stage, we hope to plant seeds that will be more fully harvested later on in their lives, but to push them hard in regard to making a Christian commitment would be a mistake.

I understand that the Amish have a ritual that appreciates this fact. In their later teen years, the Amish youth are encouraged to leave the community and go and live for a year in the world — to sow their oats, so to speak.

It is as if their community says to them: “Go taste the pleasures that the flesh have to offer; get your ego gratification, and see what it brings. Then you can choose, for, or against, living in our community.”
Typically, the Amish young people experience that emptiness of which I spoke,
and after a year away freely choose to return to the community, giving themselves over to the pursuit of the higher, spiritual values upon which their community is founded.

Like the prodigal son, they are now in a position to truly appreciate life in the father’s house. The elder brother in that same parable is an example of someone who early on in life tries to skip over the first journey in order to prematurely enter into the second journey, and in doing so the second journey becomes something of a charade.

The truth of the matter, though, is that in reality the two journeys tend to overlap one another. We can, indeed, hear the higher calling when we are but a youth, but our response at this point will necessarily be limited. There are children who we sometimes refer to as “old souls” because they seem to intuitively sense at an early age the call of the second journey; they sense truths that don’t usually become evident to people until much later in their lives. Perhaps they have dealt at an early age with the reality of death, leading them to seek the eternal rather than the merely temporal. But although these children should be affirmed in their spiritual insight, they should still be encouraged to be a kid.

And as we age, we are not immune to the pull of that first journey — to engage in competition for our place in this world — and we are better off acknowledging it than pretending we have left it all behind.

There is, of course, a lot of ambiguity here, and the potential for a great deal of deception and pretense. Religions arise from a sincere desire to pursue this second journey, but religions cannot avoid becoming institutionalized, which means having to deal with money and statistics and the hierarchies of power and status that are so much a part of the first journey. And in doing so, it’s easy to lose touch with the second journey. This is where Nicodemus, a leader in the synagogue, finds himself.

Now you may have noticed that in this strange sermon I have neglected to talking specifically about what is involved in what I have referred to as “the second journey”. The reason for this is that it is hard to do so, as the conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus clearly indicates. Nicodemus becomes frustrated precisely because he just doesn’t get what Jesus is talking about when he speaks of “being born from above,” and who can blame him? How do we, as Jesus says, speak of “heavenly things?” How do we make sense of the Spirit, which, like the wind, is invisible and utterly out of our control?

Success in the first journey, “the earthly things”, seems easy enough to measure. But how do you measure success on this second journey?

You can’t — not really, because the second journey is about love, which, as the apostle Paul says, is the only thing that never ends, and the only thing, in the end that truly matters. And love can’t be measured — not really. How to you measure an act of kindness offered from one person to another? Only God knows for sure what it means.

But here is one thing that is for sure. Unless we enter into this journey of being “born from above” — of replacing our ego-centered life with a life that is centered upon the Spirit — we are certain to become more and more bitter and despairing as we age.

Scott Peck, the psychiatrist and Christian writer, tells a story of working with four remarkably similar women in their late sixties and early seventies who came to him with the same chief complaint: depression at growing old. Each had a lot of money, had beautiful children. It was as if their lives had gone according to a script.

But now, in various ways, their bodies had begun to deteriorate, and they were angry and depressed. This certainly wasn’t how they would have written the script.

Peck saw no way to help them apart from offering them a vision of old age as something more than a meaningless time of watching themselves simply rot away. In various ways he said to them, “Look, you’re not the scriptwriter; this just isn’t your show.”
Three of the four women weren’t interested in changing the way they saw their life. They were accustomed to being in control, and they weren’t interested in letting go of the illusion of control.

The fourth woman was losing her eyesight — she was 90% blind, and it depressed her terribly. Fortunately, however, she was in the habit of listening for God’s voice in her life. “I just hate it when they have to take hold of my arm to help me out of the pew or walk me down the steps at church,” she ranted, and, “I hate being stuck at home. Lots of people volunteer to take me places, but I can’t ask my friends to drive me around all the time.”
“It’s clear to me,” Peck told her, “that you’ve taken a lot of pride in your independence. You’ve been a very successful person, and I think you needed that pride for your many accomplishments. But you know, ife is a journey from here to heaven, and it’s a good rule of journeying to travel light. I’m not sure how successful you’re going to be in getting to heaven carrying around all this pride. You see your blindness as a curse, and I don’t blame you. Conceivably, however, you might look at it as a blessing designed to relieve you of the no longer necessary burden of your pride. Except for your eyes, you’re in pretty good health. Likely you’ve got at least a dozen more years to live. It’s up to you whether you’d rather live those years with a curse or a blessing.”

When she returned for her third session, her depression of four years’ duration had lifted.

A sermon preached on February 10, 2008 based upon Genesis 2:15 – 17, 3:1 – 7, and Matthew 4:1 -11, entitled, “It’s All Good.”Thinking about the two scripture readings this morning, a line from a movie popped into my head:  “It’s good to be king!” It took me a few minutes, but I traced it back to Mel Brooks and his comedy, “The History of the World: Part I”, in which Brooks plays King Louie, shortly before the French Revolution.  Every so often in the movie, when the privileges of his station in life permit King Louie to possess pretty much anything he desires, Brooks looks into the camera, raises his eye brows and addresses the audience, saying, “It’s good to be King!”
Ah, to have no limitations — none of the constraints that the mass of humanity is forced to live under –  to be so special, to be exempt.  It’s a funny line in the movie, and we can’t help but laugh. 

The line, however, begs some examination.  In a certain sense it reflects the point of view that drives our whole culture.  It is the appeal of this line that makes it possible for the credit card companies to seduce us, and the lottery to entice us.  A great deal of the advertising with which we are bombarded is based on the notion that if we will only buy their product, we will be as happy as old King Louie.

Our economy is designed on the principle that in order to have perpetual growth in the economy a perpetual discontent is required by you and me with our present lot in life, with the assumption that the longed for contentment would be ours if we could only have the consumer goods offered by the manufacturing sector. 

But I digress. 

The underlying assumption of the statement “It’s good to be King!” is that it isn’t good to be you and me, the peons who struggle under the constraints and limitations of being merely ordinary. 

The opening chapter of the Bible tells the story of creation, where God creates the cosmos in six days, resting on the seventh. Now as historical truth — as an explanation for exactly how the world and everything came to be — this story isn’t much use.  It does, however, contain spiritual truth, the core of which is found in the oft repeated line, “And God saw that it was good.” At the end, God contemplates everything God has made and declares all to be “very good.”
(Interestingly, Alex Hawkins has taught me that there is a popular phrase in the lexicon of young people these days:  “It’s all good.”)

Now, I would suggest to you that everything kind of hinges upon whether or not we buy into the notion that Genesis, rather than Mel Brook’s King Louie, has it right.

Is it good to be alive, and here I mean to possess simple, ordinary human life?  Is it good, or no?  Or is life only good if we can leave behind being ordinary — to be special, exempt, unlimited. 

This morning we heard the two most famous temptation stories.  At the heart of both of these stories is the temptation to buy  into some version of what Mel Brook’s King Louie would have us believe. 

Genesis chapters two and three tells us about Adam and Eve living in the Garden of Eden. They have everything they need.   It is all good. 

The talking serpent comes along, however, and quickly calls attention to the limitation God has placed into their lives.  “You mean you can’t eat of the fruit?” No, they say, we can eat all of the fruit, we just can’t eat that particular fruit.  “You know the real reason God doesn’t want you to eat that specific fruit is because God wants to keep you from the truly good stuff. The truth of the matter is that if you eat the fruit of this particular tree, you will become LIKE GOD.”
In other words, happy, at last, like the King.

Before we turn to the New Testament story, there is another Old Testament story worth considering, and that is the one where the middle-aged King David looks from his roof top and sees beautiful Bathsheba sunning herself, and he turns and looks into the camera and says, “It’s good to be king!” taking Bathsheba for himself. He does this even though she is already married to a man named Uriah, who happens to be off at the battlefront serving as a general in David’s army.

Like King Louie who ended up killed by the angry masses fed up with his privilege and debauchery, things don’t turn out so well for King David.  When David discovers that he has gotten Bathsheba pregnant, he calls Uriah home from the battlefront.  In an attempt to cover his tracks, King David tries to get Uriah to sleep with his wife. Curiously, Uriah refuses the special treatment offered by his king.  His soldiers who serve him are at the battle front aren’t able to sleep with their wives, so neither will he.  He reflects a kind of honor which, for the time being at least, David has lost.

King David ends up arranging to have Uriah murdered when he returns to the battlefront, which simply goes to show that once you start down the “I’m special and the rules that constrain other people don’t apply to me” path, well, there’s no telling what you’ll be capable of doing.

When we turn to the New Testament story, it is important to keep in mind what happened immediately before the story of the temptation of Jesus.  Jesus shows up at the River Jordan where John is baptizing masses of people in the River Jordan — ordinary people, like you and me. 

Now John intuitively recognizes that in a certain sense Jesus is indeed special.  He is taken aback by Jesus coming to be baptized WITH all these ordinary human beings, as if he were just, well, ordinary.  Jesus, however, doesn’t want special treatment; he wants to be baptized like everybody else.  When he rises up out of the water, the voice of God is heard: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I’m well pleased.”   Well, that certainly sounds like God is declaring Jesus special, and yet, his pleasure with Jesus at that moment seems to be related precisely to the fact that Jesus has chosen to take his place beside the rest of us ordinary slobs. 

The Spirit of God then drives Jesus out into the wilderness in order to be tempted by the devil.  All of the devil’s temptations involve the possibility of Jesus getting special treatment for himself.  As the son of God, you deserve being able to turn stones to bread whenever you’re hungry.  You should be able to ump off the top of the temple and make the angels catch you, dazzling the masses with just how special you are, not even bound by the laws of physics.  And finally, you deserve to take possession of even greatly worldly power than either David or Louie possessed. 

Through it all, Jesus turns down the special treatment option, choosing instead to walk the same walk that the rest of us all have to live, with all the same basic limitations.

Each of us is given this gift called life.  It’s a good gift, in spite of the fact that we all live under basic limitations.  To name just a few:  We can’t fly.  We can’t go without food and water.  We can’t live forever.  There are plenty of others, but you get the picture.

Our lives can vary greatly. Some are rich and some are poor.  Some have healthy bodies; while others deal with illness throughout.  Some are able to get an education, while others never get the chance. 

But here’s the thing:  Every single life consists of a combination of that which is possible (the opportunities), and that which is impossible (the limitations.)  Where exactly those possibilities and limitations are in each life vary widely from person to person, but in this we are all the same:  in every life there is opportunity and there is limitation. 

How we relate to our particular combination of opportunity and limitation is, on a practical level, what life is all about.  There is that wonderful prayer we’ve all heard that comes out of AA that spells it out nicely: 

God, grant me the serenity to accept that which I cannot change; the courage to change that which I can; and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen.

Accepting the limitations that are fixed and taking responsibility for what can be creatively improved — that’s what it’s all about. 

Part of what all this means is that every life will have some measure of suffering, and every life will have some measure of joy.  Don’t miss the joy be being preoccupied with the suffering.  Life is good in spite of the suffering. 

A lot depends on how we relate to our sufferings and the fact of our limitations.  We can feel sorry for ourselves, which certainly is an understandable response in the face of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” But a lifetime of feeling sorry for ourselves is a wasted life that has missed the truth that, nonetheless, “It’s all good.”

Jeannete Nichelson was a beloved member of our church who died a couple of years ago after a long life.  She had some good advice that several of us remember her sharing.  Jeanette would say, “Give yourself 15 minutes to feel sorry for yourself, and then put it on the shelf.”                                                                                                                                                                               
You can spend your days resenting the fact that you weren’t born to be king or queen, and part of the foolishness of this would be that the king and queen you imagined weren’t all that happy either. 

Life is good, even though life involves suffering.  There is this basic choice when we find ourselves in suffering.  We can either go searching for special treatment — a  special exemption.  Generally speaking, what this ends up meaning is that we bemoan the fact that we’re not getting special treatment.  We end up isolated, alone, bitter.

There is, however, another choice when we find ourselves in the midst of suffering, and it is the choice modeled by Jesus.  It is what I would call the path of “solidarity and compassion.” We recognize under the burden of our suffering that we’re in this thing called “life” with everybody else.  Our limitations and our suffering (as well as our joy) link us with everybody else. We’re not alone.  The suffering ends up creating bridges rather than isolation.  We find in our own suffering the essential capacity to feel compassion for others.

I love the fact that when at the end of the story of the temptation, when Jesus finds in himself the capacity to definitively say “no” to the tempter’s suggestion he seek special treatment, it is then that the angels show up.  I think we find in our own lives this to be experientially true.  When we come to the place of acceptance of, rather than rebellion against, the life God has given us to live, we discover blessings to which we previously hadn’t been open.  Doors open.  Connections are made.  There are bridges to cross.

Life is discovered, once more, to be good.

On Ash Wednesday I often find myself moved to preach from the back of the sanctuary.  The words of Jesus that we traditionally hear this day from the sermon on the mount inspire this retreat from sight.  He said,
“Whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others.”
The season of Lent leads us to move away from having ourselves “on display”; to go inward, to seek to strip away all deception within ourselves and before God; to try, as best we can, to leave behind all kinds of play acting. 

So I’m back here, and you’re either gazing at the altar, or your eyes are closed, and hopefully, without me up front to get in the way, my words can help you go inward.

Take a few moments to be still.  Psalm 46 reads, “Be still, and know that I am God.” God is in the stillness.

Pay attention to your breath; to the breath slowing going in, and breath slowly going out.   

At the beginning of the Bible we read these words:

“Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

With each inhale of your breath, God once more gives life.  The dust that is your body is filled with the breath of life, breathed into you by your creator.  

Your life is a gift. 

(Pause.)

In the early days of the church, ashes were not given to everyone, but only to the public penitents who were brought before the church.  Much like Hester Prynne bearing her scarlet letter, these open and notorious sinners were marked publicly with the sign of their disgrace. 

As time went on, others began to show their humility and their affection for the penitents by asking that they, too, be marked as sinners.  Like the classmates of the child who loses his hair because of chemotherapy, and in turn shave off their own hair in solidarity with the plight of their classmate, so these Christians would volunteer to bear the ashes of a sinner expressing their solidarity with the brothers and sisters who had publicly stumbled. 

Eventually, the number of penitents grew so large that the imposition of ashes was extended to the whole congregation in services similar to those that are observed in many Christian churches on Ash Wednesday. 

This is as it should be. 

When Jesus showed up at the River Jordan when John was baptizing, he too, entered those waters, in a sense, taking upon himself the ashes of a sinner, identifying with all of us who stumble in the darkness. 

And when the Spirit then drove Jesus out into the wilderness for forty days of temptation by the devil, he wasn’t just going through the motions.  Jesus struggled out there with the dark voice that arose within him. 

It isn’t easy being human. 

We are fragile.  “Lead us not into temptation,” we pray, for we know we are weak.

It isn’t easy being human. Pondering that fact, we join hands with all people everywhere.

(Pause.)

When both John the Baptist and Jesus himself began to preach, their message was simple and to the point:  “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.”
It is striking that they make no distinction — not, “Some of you repent, you bad ones…” but rather, “everybody needs to repent.” Everybody has been missing the mark. 

To repent is to turn around.  It implies that we are going in one direction, away from God, and that we need to turn around, to walk with God. 

In our church’s Lenten devotional, the reading for today comes from the play Our Town.  A young woman has died and entered the spirit realm.  She begs to be allowed to return to relive a day of her life on earth.  The other spirits warn her against this, but she is determined to spend a day with those she has loved.  She is granted permission to return to the day of her 16th birthday. 

She finds the experience terribly painful.  From the perspective of death, she recognizes the poignant beauty of the gift of ordinary life — a beauty so readily missed by those of us who are actually living the gift.  She flees back to the other spirits.  A cynical old spirit, Simon Stimson says to her: 

“Yes, now you know. Now you know! That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.”
She had asked, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it–every, every minute?” The stage manager replies, “No. The saints and poets, maybe–they do some.”
And so we enter this season of Lent with a desire to awake from our slumber.  To truly live our lives before we die.

The ashes speak of sin, but they also speak of simple mortality.  The ashes invite us to remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. 

This could well be the last day of our lives on this earth.  Who knows? 

We are all approaching our deaths.  Aware of this fact, a clarity about life arises:  what is truly important, and what isn’t really important. 

The play acting isn’t important. Can we stop the pretenses? 

 In the same Gospel lesson we heard, Jesus reminds us that money — stuff — doesn’t have the importance we routinely attribute to it:

Said Jesus,

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where thieves do not break in and steal.”
What is treasure in heaven?  Love.  As the apostle Paul tells us, everything else passes away; love, alone, never ends. 

Love, itself, is something of a mystery.  It’s tough to define.   Is it of the heart or of the head?  Is it an attitude or an action?  Yes, yes, yes, and yes. 

It is like the famous remark made by the chief justice attempting to define pornography: “I can’t define it,” he said, “but I know it when I see it.”
So it is with love. 

When love is present in our life, whether if be the love of a child or a parent, of a spouse, or a friend or a stranger or a pet, or even the love of beauty, say music, art, drama, or of creation, when the real thing is there, you will know.  And all true love is of God.

This is the treasure of heaven.   

Part of the problem though, is that in this world we are so tempted to get into the perpetual hurry.  If we’re not in a hurry, the world says, there must be something wrong with us. 

This is the devil talking. 

It is only when we are not in a hurry that we can truly discern what is real — where true love — the treasure of heaven — exists in our lives.   It is hurry that leads us to chase after fool’s gold, the stuff that always eventually begins to decay and turn rotten. 

So, here at the beginning of the 40 days of Lent, it is good to try and make some room in our lives to get out of the hurry and rush; to carve out some time where we can listen for God’s voice and discover again what truly is important — to see where love would take us.  

Some people like to give things up for Lent, and that can certainly be helpful, particularly if what we are giving up is one of those things that are distracting us from focusing on what truly matters. 

If we decide to give something up, try and let the absence of the thing be a call to prayer.   Say you give up sweets, or t.v., or the internet, or gossip; well most likely you will feel this longing for what you are going without.  There will be this emptiness demanding to be filled in the familiar fashion. 

Be with the emptiness; pray through it with whatever words come to you.  Or simply be still.  Eventually the emptiness will change.  Mysteriously, it will become a good kind of emptiness.  It is the “waking up” that poets and the saints touch.  But it takes patience. 

They say it takes 21 days to create a new habit.

Again, be gentle on yourself.  It’s tough being a human being.  One of the problems with Lenten promises is that when we break them, we tend to despair and end up fleeing all the more from that attentiveness to what really matters of which true repentance is all about. 

So be gentle with yourself. 

Keep in mind the wisdom of the verse we read from Psalm 51. 

“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.”

In the end, the transformation we are seeking is from God.  It’s not something we can manufacture. 

All we can do is to admit the dirt that is within our heart, and the agitated state of the spirit that is in possession of our bodies at the present moment, and ask God to come and do that which we cannot do ourselves. 

We are trying to give God room to come and work. Even our stumbling can be the occasion for grace.

Despite the fact that I also grew up in Summit, I didn’t really get to know Mark until the summer after I graduated from college, when we worked together at Camp Aldersgate.

Getting to know Mark came as something of a revelation to me. Up until then, everybody I had been close to was pretty much two things: They were all on the liberal arts college track; idealistic types, not especially good at dealing with practical stuff, fixing broken cars, building furniture — that kind of thing.

This wasn’t Mark.

The other thing that defined all of my friends up until that point was that there were all, to various degrees, “people persons”, or more accurately “people pleasers.” When we met someone, with our great sensitivity we would tune into what that person needed from us to feel comfortable and reassured, and then we’d try as best we could to provide it, and if we found the person doing the same thing back towards us, well, then, maybe we would become friends.

But Mark wasn’t a people pleaser.

Despite the pride I felt having just recently graduated from a demanding little liberal arts
College, my life was, nonetheless, extremely insular and I was, in fact, pretty clueless.

Basically, I divided the world into two kinds of people. There were the nice people like myself who played by the people person rules — the people I could be close to, who were,
more often than not, somewhat incompetent in regards to the ways of the world.

And then there were the assholes.

And then I met Mark.

It’s not that Mark lacked sensitivity. He was, in fact, one of the most perceptive people I ever knew. He could read people like a book.

But rather than instinctively reassuring the people he met, Mark would make a point of tormenting them with the sharp knife of his wit, calling attention right from the start to their arrogance and hypocrisies.

Now, there‘s some irony here, because I was at this point in time just beginning to make my way back into the church, having for all intents and purposes left it in my early teen years because of guess what: the hypocrisy and fakery I had perceived there with my adolescent hyper-sensitivity for such things.

In college I was a religion major, and had begun making my way back to Christianity, though not the church. A large part of what had been attracting me to Christianity was the discovery that within the tradition there was a great deal of wisdom about the nature of us human beings.

The words I had used to divide the human race: the assholes and the nice people, well, they had their corollaries in Christianity: the tradition referred to them as “sinners” and “saints.” But Christianity, rooted in that Jesus guy, had a much more profound understanding of how these categories related to one another.

Jesus, for instance, got along wonderfully with the people that were generally considered in his day to be “sinners,” (the assholes), whereas the people commonly regarded as “saints” — the nice guys — he was constantly in their faces calling them “hypocrites,” and it was these very same nice guys who managed to work out a secret deal wherein Jesus got his mouth shut by nailing him to a cross.

In our imaginations, we often make Jesus into another nice guy, but listen to a few of the words he served up to those who incurred his wrath, which I invite you to imagine rolling off the tongue of Mark Hoffman:

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For they clean the outside of their cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence…. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For they are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth… You snakes, you brood of vipers!”

And so, Christianity, at least Jesus’ brand of Christianity, understands that there is sinner and saint, asshole and nice guy, in all of us, and it declares we’d all be much better off if we’d quit the pretense and admit the whole, messy truth about ourselves.

And so here I was fresh from college at a Church Camp of all places, and here was Mark Hoffman. Mark’s approach was bit intimidating, but ultimately refreshing. Instead of presenting the saint part first, the nice guy, only later to deviously slip in the sinner part — the asshole — Mark’s strategy seemed to be to put the asshole right out front, first off, as if to say,

“Let’s get this clear, I’m an asshole, and I’m going to help you acknowledge that you, too, are an asshole, and once we’ve got that clearly established, both of us can get on with being saints as well,”
of which Mark had a lot of inside him too.

He was loyal, helpful, kind. He was smarter and more competent than those of us with our liberal arts degrees; a great person to have on your side. And when he cared about you, you pretty much knew it was real, because Mark simply wouldn’t tolerate that kind of fakery, which was ultimately much more reassuring than the nice guy strategy.

All of this was something of a revelation to me.

I had a lot of contact with Mark over the next ten years or so. He was a good friend.
A big theme in my life at this time was that I was lonely — pathetically lonely — longing for woman to love and be loved by, and seemingly helpless to find one.

At that point in time, Mark was also single, but okay with being single. I remember once saying to Mark something to the effect of “loneliness is the problem with life,” which, in my self-absorption, I figured that since it was my problem, it must be everybody’s problem.
Mark was quick to set me straight. “Loneliness is your problem, Jeff, not mine. For me, the problem in life is the bullshit you have to put up with.”
That too, was something of a revelation to me. Mark wasn’t especially lonely. He’d been raised by Sally and George, who had done a good job making him feel loved. And he had his large posse of good friends as well.

And then Mark went off on this great adventure for a year serving as the engineer on a tall ship on the high sea, and when he came back to land, he brought with him this really beautiful woman named Marcie, who was smart and funny and kind and pretty and well grounded — just about perfect. And he hadn’t even been actively looking for a mate, let alone playing the games of the dating world. (For Mark, dressing up to look good was putting on a clean tee shirt.)

And that too, was a revelation for me: that chicks dig men who are real, who know who they are, who have no pretense about them.

Marcie found the real deal.

So I ended up becoming a Methodist minister, which was pretty strange in itself. And I think Mark’s voice has always been there in the back of my head, in a certain sense saving my soul as a minister, because the biggest temptation we clergy undergo is that we somehow lose track of who we really are as we carry this strange mantel of being ordained, so that we end up becoming the kind of frauds that ticked Jesus off so.

And so throughout, Mark’s voice has been there, saying, “If you don’t really believe it, Jeff, don’t say it. Don’t be a fraud.”
And that’s been a pretty wonderful gift to carry along the way.

Thanks, Mark.

A sermon preached on February 3, 2008 based upon the transfiguration story, recorded in Matthew 17:1 – 9, entitled, “Afraid of Fear.”

Scott Peck tells a story in one of his books of a time he was flying in a plane, seated next to a young eighteen year old man — a boy really — who had never really been away from home before, much less flown on a plane. He was on his way to an army base where early the next morning he would begin basic training.

“Are you afraid?” Peck asked. The young man, afraid of his fears, refused to acknowledge them. “Not in the least.”

Peck said that shortly before the plane landed, the young man barely made it by him on his way to the bathroom where he proceeded to puke his guts out. Peck wished that he could have been able to tell the boy that if he had been willing to acknowledge his fears, he might not have needed to go through the whole puking business.

I thought of Peck’s story when I read the account Matthew handed down to us of the trip Jesus made up the mountain with Peter, James and John, where he was transfigured before them with a brilliant light. The story was first recorded by the Gospel writer Mark. Written twenty years later, Matthew’s version of the story has some interesting minor alterations from what he inherited from Mark.

First of all, it isn’t until the bright cloud overshadows the mountain, and God’s voice is heard, that the disciples are described as overcome with fear. In Matthew’s version it is the moment when the disciples are most unmistakably in the holy presence of God that they fall to their knees filled with fear. And then Matthew adds this lovely little line:

“But Jesus came and touched them, saying, ‘Get up and do not be afraid.’”

It’s a beautiful little line, worthy of our lingering with it for a while. It calls to mind the beloved song, Amazing Grace, particularly the second verse:

“Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.”

It is the same grace, the same loving kindness of God, that, on the one hand, pushes us to acknowledge and face the fears hidden within us, arising from the basic facts of our existence: that we are mortal, indeed weak and fragile, and one day we will die, and what then will we have to show for our lives?

Although we would try to avoid this confrontation; it is a reckoning that our souls require. Only then can we discover the extraordinary comfort of God who would relieve us from the torment of those very same fears.

When I noticed Matthew’s unique twist to the transfiguration story, I was led to look for other places within the Gospel where the theme of fear arises. Again, a couple of places are unique to Matthew’s Gospel. It is only here that the wise men come from the east when Jesus is born, their inquiry leading Herod to be frightened, and all of Jerusalem with him. Herod becomes an example of how not to deal with our fears: he lashes out with violence in an attempt to get away from his terror. Which leads me to wonder how much of the violence of this broken world is ultimately rooted in fear. How often do people afraid of their own fear end up committing violence?

Another story unique to Matthew’ Gospel is a parable that Jesus tells late in his ministry of a king who goes away for a time, leaving three servants with talents to care for. Upon his return, the servants who had been given ten and five talents both present to their master increased wealth from their creative investing. The one talent man, however, tells the master that he had buried his solitary talent, because of his fear of the master. He declares that he knew the king to be a harsh man, and in a strange case of self-fulfilling prophecy, the king throws the servant into jail.

Again I wonder, how often does our undressed fear of failure end up sabotaging our lives, leading to the very failure we so feared?

As in the other Gospels, the disciple Peter is presented as something of an example for us in our spiritual journeys. But Matthew adds the plot twist that when Jesus comes walking on the water when the disciples are out in a boat at night, Peter says to him, “Master, if it is you, bid me to come to you on the water.” Jesus says, “Come,” and to his credit, Peter steps out on the water, doing something altogether new in terms of his experience of life up to that moment. The wind picks up, however, and Peter’s fears take over. He takes his eyes off Jesus, and begins to sink into the deep water. He calls out to Jesus in his fear, and Jesus delivers him to the safety of the boat.

The story drives home again the importance of confronting our fears in the faith journey. At the Last Supper, when Jesus declares to his disciples that that very night their fear will overcome them all, Peter is adamant saying it isn’t so for himself. The others may be afraid, but not me, he says. Like the young man in Peck’s story, Peter insists he has no fear. In short order, however, the deep terror of Peter’s life washes over him, and three times he denies that he even knew Jesus, terrified that he, too, would be arrested, beaten and sentenced to die.

But in the journey of faith, the amazing grace of Jesus’ healing touch did, in fact, gradually deliver Peter from his fears.

Matthew’s Gospel ends strikingly. On Easter morning, the guards at the tomb who had seemed so fearless are shaken to their core with fear and become like dead men when an angel of the Lord, whose “appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow,” rolls back the stone of the tomb, declaring God’s victory over the death grip, and again, Jesus tells comes to his disciples, telling them not to be afraid.

Those of you who have heard me preach over time have heard me tell the story of how as a nine year old child I almost drowned. Afterwards, in the weeks and months to come, terror would often come upon me in my solitary times lying in bed at night as I considered the fact that I had almost died. The fear was pretty horrible, but lying in bed alone there was no way to avoid it. Finally, one night, I called out to Jesus for help, and mysteriously the fear simply evaporated, never to return in relation to the fact that I had almost drowned.

Now I do not wish to give the impression that I have lived a life free of fear. Hardly. In many ways I have often lived a life imprisoned by fears. The experience, however, did seem to free me from the fear of death per se, and gave me tangible evidence of the capacity of God’s grace to bring deliverance from the fears that plague us. That when God leads us into experiences that reveal to us the depth of fear that is yet within us, Jesus is there to come and touch us with his comfort and reassurance.

These days I often find myself living without consciousness of any great fear. When I think about this, however, I realize that this hardly means I’m fearless. I realize that there are countless things that could happen that would threaten my loved ones and my future that would quickly swamp me with fear, bringing me to my knees.

I am on a journey. One day I hope to sing for joy in heaven, and “when we’ve been there tend thousand years bright shining as the sun (bright shining as the face of Jesus on that mountaintop); we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we first begun.”
But I’m not there yet. An image came to me as I thought about all this. Our lives are like big, beautiful houses, with many wonderful rooms, but we confine ourselves to the kitchen, which happens to have a little bathroom off of it, so we manage okay in our confinement. In this one room we feel fearless, perhaps priding ourselves in how free of fear our lives seem, but we can’t admit to ourselves the choice we’ve made not to explore the other rooms. They seem dark, and who knows what we’ll find there? We’re afraid of our own fear. And so we live confined lives, often bored with the monotony of our one little room. We do not yet know the “glorious liberty” that is our birthright as God’s beloved children.

“Don’t be afraid,“ says Jesus. And he takes us by the hand, and together we begin to explore the great expanse that is our eternal home.