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Sarah’s Uncle John died last week at the age of 91.  These are words of remembrance I spoke at his funeral on November 18, 2009.

I came into the family about eighteen years ago, which makes me a relative newcomer.   From the beginning, and throughout the years, John always made me feel so welcome.  “How’s Jeff?” he would say, with his double-handed hearty hand shake, and that warm smile, and those tender eyes.

The John I knew was always glad to be alive, happy to be in the company of others, never in a hurry to be anywhere else than in the present moment.   I marveled at his remarkable story-telling ability – how he always had a tale to tell if you asked for remembrances of years past.    You weren’t always sure which part of the stories were fact and which were creative embellishment arising from the charm of his imagination, but the stories always succeeded in holding one’s attention.  He liked simple things:  a good meal, a good laugh, a good story, a good dog.  He had stories to tell of all the good dogs he had known, including the powerful one named Queenie he had as a child that would pull him and his brother Bob around on a sled in the winter; the one named Cindy he had in the navy that the general coveted, so faithful standing guard at the door of the mess hall, waiting for a command from John; and of course, his late in life friend – little, sweet Suzie.

He gave the impression of having extraordinary equanimity – always even keeled.  I never heard him complain about anything.  He seemed to take life in stride. 

But of course, every life has its share of struggles, and John’s life was no exception.   It is out of the forge of sufferings mixed with faith that character is shaped.    For the back story of John’s life I am reliant upon my wife Sarah and to Kathy.

John had a happy childhood, but at age 19 he suffered heart-wrenching grief along with the rest of the family when his kid sister Katherine suddenly died from an infection at the tender age of 17. 

He went off to fight for his country in the Navy during World War II, nearly losing his life from injuries suffered in the explosion of his ship.

John married Ruth early on in his adult years, and though it was a happy marriage, they weren’t able to have children, and John had always wanted children of his own.   And so John found other places to express the love he had hoped to shower upon his own children:  On his nephews and nieces, on good dogs, in his church work, and in a making a home with Ruth where guests would always be welcomed.  

He also loved his work, where he enjoyed the challenge of figuring out how to make something work.  He devoted himself to his work, perhaps at times more than he should have.  One time his finger got caught in some machinery resulting in the loss of that finger.   In his telling of the story, John mostly remembered being annoyed with the fact that he hadn’t been able to finish the particular job he was working on.  

John bought a camper, and looked forward to the day when he would retire, and he and Ruth could leisurely travel.   But when that time finally came to leave the work behind, Ruth had become very sick.  Leisurely travel wasn’t possible.    John would always regret he hadn’t taken the time when he had it; a lesson I suspect we all learn too late in life.  Surely this lesson had a hand in shaping the serenity he expressed so strongly in his latter years. 

The death of his beloved Ruth rocked John, and to family members it seemed as though the light in him had nearly been extinguished.  It looked as though John was ready to pack it in. 

But he decided to make one more trip down to Durham, North Carolina to see the part of the family located there.  And there was Helen, widowed from his youngest uncle, sharing the family history that he treasured so, and love bloomed, life began again, and the joy returned.   With Helen at his side, the camper did get put to use after all.  Helen, full of courage, said goodbye to her home in North Carolina, returning with John to make a home together in Ohio, and share with one another the adventures of the latter years of their lives.  John loved Helen’s children, Joan and Dick, as his own.  Indeed, they shared the same McGranahan blood. 

John and Helen happily spent two decades together, never missing an opportunity to get together with family.  

 On a visit to Durham in 1999, John was driving with Helen when somebody in too much of a hurry came up from behind and side-swiped their car.  Their car flipped; Helen was injured, but fortunately not severely; John’s body, however was broken nearly to the point of death.  It was an injury that would have taken many a younger man, and John wasn’t expected to live, but with his dogged determination and fierce love of life, he began to  recover, amazing us all.  Kathy and Sarah remember sneaking Suzie into the intensive care unit so John could get a nuzzle of encouragement from the good dog. 

Before long, John was back on his feet, but he realized he needed to be closer to family. So five and a half years ago Helen and John said good bye to so much that was familiar, and like Abraham and Sarah long before them, set off once more trusting in the graciousness of God.  They moved to Mount Holly, New Jersey to be close to his beloved brother Bob and his family.  In his last years John became a fixture in Kathy and Thad’s home, who loved him well.

A sermon preached on November 15th, 2009 based upon Psalm 42.

As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.

2My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?

3My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?’

4These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival.

5Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help 6and my God. My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember you from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.

7Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts; all your waves and your billows have gone over me. 8By day the LORD commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life. 9I say to God, my rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me? Why must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?’ 10As with a deadly wound in my body, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?’ 11

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.

Reality comes to us perpetually revolving between various sets of poles — a rhythm that swings back and forth. There is an unavoidable “polarity” to our lives, like unto the polarity of north and south.

Despite the fact that I have begun my sermon this morning with what might well be an overly intellectual tone, you do in fact know what I’m talking about, and I will demonstrate this as follows:  I will name a word, and I will ask you to give me back the word that is the polar opposite. This should be pretty easy.

Sickness. (Health.) Wining. (Losing.) Success. (Failure.) Love. (Hate.) Life. (Death.) Valley. (Mountain.) Darkness. (Light.) Hope. (Despair.) Good. (Evil.) Work. (Rest.) Engergized. (Fatigue.) Sad. (Happy.) Rrich. (Poor.) Light. (Darkness.) Empty. (Full.) Control. (Chaos.) Sin. (Grace.)

We instinctively know the meaning of one side of the polarity in reference to the other; the words can not help but go together. In all of those pairs of opposites that I gave you, we also tend to think of one as positive and the other as negative.

If we were to take an iron magnetized rod, with a “positive” end and a “negative” end, we could saw it in halves in an attempt to get a half that was nothing but positive. But you know what would happen: once more both pieces would possess both a positive and a negative end. The polarity can’t be removed.

In that great mythic story of the Garden of Eden, one way to understand what happens there is to see the man and woman as falling prey to the notion that it is within their power to do away with polarity; that they can create a better reality than the one God gave us. But it can’t be done, and their attempt to do so just makes things worse.

In various ways, human beings continue to re-enact the story of Adam and Eve. Totalitarian movements are driven by a desire to create a utopian society where evil is eradicated, and end up creating truly sinister societies.

Oftentimes people go into marriage imagining that here is the place where they will find pure love, only to discover that the polarity of love and hate is at work within the relationship. This, in turn leads some to conclude prematurely that they have married the “wrong” person, rather than to realize that all marriages encompass both what we call “love” and “hate,” and to set about learning how to live together in such a way that the love rules the relationship more often than the hate. Wedding vows acknowledge polarity. The foundation of marriage is not in romantic feelings that come and go; it is found in a commitment that endures “for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.”

Religion is another place that people try to flee from polarity, becoming a part of a sect that exclusively possesses all truth and goodness. Cutting themselves off from the world, they imagine that they are leaving behind the negative pole to live only with the positive pole. Sooner or later, however they discover that the positive and negative, the light and the darkness, continues within their community as well, and that the negative has been wreaking havoc in ways that hadn’t been acknowledged. The polarity of sin and grace runs right through our hearts.

It is, of course, our God-given duty to strive to make a better world, to do what we can to strengthen the positive and hold in check the negative – to reduce hunger, disease, warfare, and all the other things that diminish life. But our success will always be at best relative and not absolute.

Perhaps the reason for this has to do with the fact that without what we call the “negative” pole, the “positive” pole can’t truly exist. There is a necessity to the two poles. If you have never known anything of poverty and going without, how do you appreciate abundance and prosperity? If you have never been sick, how do you appreciate the blessing of health? If you have never known conflict, how will you appreciate peace? And if you didn’t have the capacity for grief, how would you ever love?

With my son Bobby’s soccer involvement, I spend a fair amount of time in the world of sports, which revolves around the polarity of winning and losing. Neither of the two has any meaning except that the other has been experienced. The Parsippany High School football team went 0 and 10 this season, getting crushed in every game. It’s got to be tough on these boys to never taste winning. I think, however, that it would every bit as destructive to a kid to grow up playing sports and never taste defeat. Experiencing defeat is painful, but instructive.

In our spiritual lives, we can harbor this illusion that here, finally, we should be able to leave behind polarity. We figure that if we are living out our faith the way we should then we will experience a state of grace in which doubt, fear and the perception of God’s absence never afflict us. But this also is an illusion.

The Gospels portray Jesus himself living in the midst of polarities. At one point he’s alone in the wilderness in temptation; at another he’s at the wedding of Cana in Galilee surrounded by friends and family enjoying good food and wine. At times he is wonderfully tender; at others he is intensely angry. At the end, you see him suffering the feeling of being abandoned by God, crying out from the cross words from Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Psalms embrace the polarity of life. Psalm 42, especially. The psalmist cries out to God, “Why have you forgotten me?” His soul is cast down – disquieted within him. He has descended into the depths.

Well, if polarity is with us to stay, does that mean that our spiritual lives will always be something of a roller coaster ride? Yes and no. The psalm shows us something about getting perspective. In a time of deep darkness, the psalmist remembers a time when it wasn’t that way; when the praise of God came easily and God’s presence was undeniable. He reminds himself to “Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.”

When we can accept the down side of polarity, and surrender into the experience the present moment presents like the psalmist does in this psalm, we discover that what we are experiencing in the present moment isn’t everything. We have a perspective that allows us to be fully with the present, but not overwhelmed by it.

Typically, young people lack the perspective to realize that what consumes them in the present moment isn’t necessarily all it seems cracked up to be. The passion of a first crush isn’t necessarily the love of a lifetime. The sadness of a broken love will indeed pass. The anger that drives one to say “I hate you” to someone they are deeply connected to eclipses other more positive feelings underneath. They lack the perspective to see this.

Hopefully, with age the wisdom comes that recognizes even though I can’t at a given present feel God’s presence, it doesn’t mean that God’s love has in fact left me. “Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.”

A sermon preached on November 8th, 2009 based upon Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17 and Mark 12:38-44.  The sermon anticipates Veteran’s Day.

There was a disturbing irony to the story that came out of Fort Hood in Texas this past week, coming as it did, just a week before the day our country sets aside to honor those Americans who serve in the military.  An army major became unhinged — an army psychiatrist no less — apparently randomly opening fire.  Thirteen lives were lost; countless more were wounded.

There are a number of different story lines that the news media has followed up on in the aftermath of these terrible shootings, including speculation regarding what role the major’s religion may have played in the rampage.   All I would say in this regard is that I hope that, rather than leading to a greater intolerance, this terrible story challenges us to seek greater understanding of one another.

For me, the thing I would like to focus on is simply the incredible stress soldiers are often under, especially in a time of war. These  pressures are rarely fully appreciated.   The culture of the military emphasizes the admirable qualities of self-control and discipline.  Focusing on doing their duty, soldiers are slow to give voice to the pressures arising within them.  But the shootings in Fort Hood remind us just how much pressure they are in fact under, and to appreciate anew the sacrifices they make for our country. 

As a psychiatrist in the army, it was the job of the man accused of the shootings to listen daily to the traumas experienced by soldiers who had returned home from the wars, and in a certain sense absorb them.  Apparently the doctor had recently learned that he was to be sent to the war himself. 

And so apparently last week he snapped.   As is often the case in this kind of story, the violence that erupted from the army psychiatrist was described by those who knew him as distinctly uncharacteristic of him.  

Sadly, in our society at large, stories like this are rather common.  There was another story in the news this past week of a 40 year old man who, frustrated by being out of work for two years, took a gun to his former work place and opened fire.

Such violent acts fill us with horror, but part of the reason they do so is that on some level we recognize that sense of “there but for the grace of God go I.”   We all live under a fair amount of stress and pressure which we manage well enough to keep ourselves from erupting violently.  But we know that should the circumstances of our life conspire to intensify the pressure, piling stress upon stress, well, we don’t really know what we’re capable of. 

That’s why we pray each week, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” because we know we are not as strong as we pretend to be.

And yet, here’s something to think about:  How often do people come close to the breaking point, only to be brought back from the edge by unseen grace expressed by some anonymous act of simple kindness and courage?  How many “walking time bombs” are there in our midst that somehow manage to get diffused before they reach the headlines.  More, I suspect, than we can imagine.

The two scripture stories for this week lead me to think about this, because they both describe the sort of anonymous faithfulness of which I’m talking – simple faithfulness that, generally speaking, goes under the radar screen, so to speak.

The heroes in both of our stories are poor women, relative nobodies in male-dominated societies. In the temple, just days before he will die, Jesus pauses to notice what nobody else notices:  a poor woman giving her two copper coins to God – all she has.   This, he says, is worth far more than all of the offerings of the rich given so ostentatiously. 

The Old Testament lesson tells the story of a young woman named Ruth, who suddenly finds herself widowed in a culture where women are pretty much lost without a man. She is poor, as is her likewise widowed mother-in-law, an old woman named Naomi.  Naomi, a Jew, had been forced by a famine to seek refuge with her sons in the land of the Moabs, where she crossed paths with Ruth.  Now that her sons have died, Naomi decides to return to her homeland.   She assumes her daughter-in-laws will not accompany her. 

Indeed, from the point of view of her own survival, it would be better for young Ruth to stay in Moab where there would be a good chance she could to find another husband.  But Ruth has grown to love her mother-in-law; their souls are connected.  In simple faithfulness to this old woman, Ruth chooses to go with her to a strange land she does not know.  In concern for Naomi, she chooses what appears to be the harder way to go, and in turn is blessed, becoming the vessel through which grace flows.  The descendents of Ruth will include first King David, followed by Jesus himself. 

In April of 1943, a young US army flight navigator named Harold Gantert found himself in a plane flying at 15,000 feet above Germany when suddenly it (Read on …)

A sermon preached on November 1, 2009 based upon Mark 12:28 – 34.

One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’ Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’ Then the scribe said to him, ‘You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that “he is one, and besides him there is no other”; and “to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength”, and “to love one’s neighbour as oneself”,—this is much more important than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.’ When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’ After that no one dared to ask him any question.

On one level, this passage seems to express an exquisite simplicity. We human beings have this compulsive tendency to make life overly complicated, which is one way to see the confrontation that took place between Jesus and the religious authorities.   The passage we read describes the final argument that took place between Jesus and the teachers of the law.   What is the most important commandment, Jesus was asked.  In reply he said that it was to live out a two- dimensional love:  love of God and love of neighbor.  We don’t need 614 laws and the complicated religious system human beings had concocted with the elaborate temple sacrifices. The truth in the end is simple.

It is a truth that I think we know in our hearts to be true. It is a truth that the teacher of the law who challenged Jesus that day couldn’t help but acknowledge, and one that all great religious traditions, at their best, lead us to: Love of the holy that is beyond everything, and love of the mortal, flesh and blood that is close at hand.

And yet, when I begin to ponder what it means to love God and love neighbor, my mind gets all tied up in knots. The love of neighbor part is hard enough. Who is my neighbor? What exactly must I do? How far do I need to go? When have I done enough? There are enough questions here for a whole lifetime of sermons.

But it’s actually the other dimension that leaves my brain most baffled: Love God with all you soul, and heart and mind and strength. What, pray tell, does that mean? God is invisible, wholly other. The ten commandments begins by prohibiting any “graven images” of God, because as soon as you try to conjure up an image of God, you end up reducing the mystery of God and creating an idol. God is not a “being” next to other “beings”; God is the ground of all being, the source.

Tell me to love my wife, my child, a member of the church or even a stranger I meet out in the world, and I have my senses to draw upon. I can see, hear, touch and smell them. I can carry the memories derived from my senses around with me and ponder the possibilities of how I can express love to them. Not so with God.

There’s a dilemma here, and one way we can try to solve this dilemma is to work it through in our heads this way: well, the way to show our love to God is to keep ourselves busy doing the work in this world that God wants done, which, of course, is to sing various renditions of the same old song “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And there is something to that.

But there is a problem with this solution, and it is the fact that this one-dimensional focus on the love of neighbor has an inevitable frustration built into it. What happens when we try to love people and our best efforts seem to bring about, as far as we can tell, nothing enduring, or in fact seems to make things worse? And what about the fact that human life exists in a state of perpetual decay, and so sooner or later every neighbor we seek to love is taken from us by death?

And then there’s the undeniable fact that sometimes the people we try to love can seem downright unlovable. Remember what Charlie Brown said? “I love humanity; it’s human beings I can’t stand.” And what about those times when we ourselves seem rather unlovable, which pretty well screws up the whole “love your neighbor as yourself” equation?

Pour ourselves out in loving our neighbors as ourselves, and it can seem we destine ourselves to become bitter and burn out. So the love of neighbor needs to be rooted deeper — in eternity, in that mystery for which we have the inadequate word “God.”

I believe that deep down within all of us, the love of God resides, waiting to find expression. It is there within us as children, but as we grow up, our words, our ideas, our minds get in the way, and the love gets blocked.

There is a story I read long ago that has stayed with me over the years. It involves a poor shepherd and an early “desert father.” In the centuries following Constantine’s embrace of the Church, there was a tradition of people retreating from the world to devote themselves to prayer and contemplation of God, known as the “desert fathers”, and in some instances, “desert mothers.” Often they were deep thinkers – theologians – from which much spiritual wisdom was passed on.

In the story I heard a desert father is in the company of a simple shepherd as a day comes to a close. The desert father notices that the shepherd takes a wooden bowl filled with goat’s milk, and carefully places it on the ground in a location that is raised up higher that the surroundings. He inquires of the poor shepherd why he has done this. “I am so grateful to God,” says the shepherd. “In my love for God I set out this bowl of the richest cream for God to enjoy.”

The desert father feels compelled to correct the shortcomings of the shepherd’s conceptions of God. “My friend,” he says, “don’t your realize that God is pure spirit, and as such, has no need for your bowl of cream?” The shepherd replies, “Well, I don’t know about the pure spirit business, but what I do know is that every night God comes down from heaven and drinks the milk, for in the morning the bowl is always empty.” The desert father answers smugly, “There will be moonlight tonight. We will watch together to discern the truth regarding what happens to your bowl of milk.”

They sit together where they can observe the bowl, and sure enough, shortly after nightfall, a little fox comes trotting along very intently, laps up the milk, and disappears into the wilderness. The shepherd is crestfallen. “How foolish I have been! You were right. God has no need for my little bowl of milk.”

That night, the desert father had a restless night sleep. God appeared to him in a dream – in a blaze of light, perhaps? “What you did to my child the poor shepherd was cruel,” said God. “I always appreciated his offering of a bowl of his goat’s milk. You are right. I am spirit, and since I had no need for the milk myself, I shared the milk each night with my little friend the fox.”

There is this deeper love within us – this sense of awe and wonder at the miracle of being alive — of simple, pure gratitude, and it needs to find expression. The shepherd’s nightly offering gave him a means by which to express that love. We must find such means as well, or else we will wither in our attempts at loving our neighbor.

I read an article recently about a woman who experiences the gift of tongues in her prayer life. I have never received such a gift, and like many “sophisticated” Christians, have tended to look askance at such strange practices. I was struck, however, by what the woman said. She has no idea how, without the gift of the tongues that pour out of her, how she would express the innate gratitude and love for God that is within her. Without it, she says, her mind perpetually gets in the way, worrying about having the right words, the right concepts. She’s right. Like the desert father, we can get trapped in our intellects, unable to access the depths of our hearts.

Vladimir Lenin, the father of 20th century communism, once said something to the effect that he had stopped listening to great music, or contemplating masterful works of visual art, because he found that doing so led to a distracting softness of his heart in which he wanted to go around and pat people on the head. Lenin’s ideology involved a militant atheism, but he had his own god in the doctrine of communism. In his mind any thing that distracted him from devotion to his inflexible ideals was to be avoided. Lenin would have done well to listen to the love hidden in his heart that arose within him when he came into contact with beauty.

Eight years ago our congregation broke ground to build a new sanctuary. In a way, our sanctuary is like the shepherd’s bowl of milk. God is everywhere, so on one level there is no need to put all this money and energy into building a beautiful sanctuary. You can worship God anywhere; in your living room, for instance, or out in the woods.

But the fact of the matter is that we are creatures who depend upon the gift of our five senses to open ourselves up to God. We rely on things like a well-designed worship space in which much consideration has been given to light and color and sound, and inspired, well-rehearsed music, and words hopefully well-crafted, and the taste of bread and wine. In the perception of our senses these things help transport us to that place where our hearts are opened up and the love that resides deep within, rooted in heaven rather than earth, may find expression.

Later in our service we will once more take bread and wine and evoke the memory of a time two thousand years ago when Jesus did the same with his friends in an upper room in Jerusalem. In the eyes of the world, the love he had come to share for all his neighbors would soon seem woefully unsuccessful. Rejected, he died like a common criminal upon the cross. We reenact this last supper with a desire to find with Jesus the love that is rooted not in time but in eternity – that love which alone can sustain us for the journey.