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A sermon preached on January 31, 2010 based upon Luke 4:16 – 30 and 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

If you ever find yourself on Jeopardy, and the category on the board is “close calls”, which you pick for say, $500, and Alex Trebek reads the following: 

“They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff…”

having just listened to Bob read this morning’s Gospel lesson, you would know the question was, “What happened when Jesus went home to Nazareth?”

They almost killed him. 

I don’t think that a lot of people know about this Bible story.  

I don’t know about you, but this story disturbs me, in large part because I find the whole subject of anger frightening, both the anger of others, as well as my own anger.  And there’s a whole lot of anger present in this story.  Maybe what’s particularly scary about this story is that the anger is present among people who are essentially what we call “family.”  In those days a small town was more or less one big extended family.  These are the people Jesus grew up with, indeed were raised by.  We’re talking uncles and aunts and cousins and such.   This story is describing a “family reunion.”

What compounds the scariness of this story is that at one moment things seem to be going just swimmingly; the hometown folks are proud as punch of their boy returned home with all the reports of how he has done great things out in the world.  And the next moment they are trying to kill Jesus. 

Where did all this anger come from?  Anger like that doesn’t just appear out of thin air; apparently it’s been buried somewhere, quietly hiding underground, waiting for something to trigger it.  It’s scary to think about all the anger that gets carried around in people, hidden from view inside ourselves and the people with whom we live. 

In this case, Jesus himself “triggers” the anger.   He seems to have a fair amount of anger himself, which in and of itself is kind of disturbing to the image we tend to have of Jesus.  When I ask children to give me words that describe Jesus, one of the first words that come up is “nice.”  Jesus doesn’t seem particularly nice in this story. 

In seminary counseling classes I learned about what is called “family systems theory,” which has as its starting point the observation that no individual person can be understood in isolation; that individuals exist as a part of larger groups, the most notable being the family.   Seen in a certain light, a family is a single organism, with all the members interconnected, affecting one another in ways of which they aren’t fully aware.

Family system theory points out that within families there tends to be a force that strives to maintain the status quo, a certain familiar balance, even when the balance of the status quo can be unhealthy.  It is out of this way of viewing families that the now-overly-familiar word “dysfunctional” originated. Symptoms in individuals are seen as a part of a larger dysfunction of the family.  To effectively “treat” an individual it is often helpful to “treat” the family as a whole, leading to the rise of “family therapy.”

Part of what family systems theory calls attention to is the “dark side” of families.   For instance, when one member of the family has a drinking problem, there can be ways in which, as painful as the drinking can be to the family, the other family members can unconsciously conspire together to keep the drinking going.   Hence, the rise of the term “enabling.”  Enabling can involve a conspiracy to avoid talking about the problem, or it can involve the “secondary gains”  that the spouse of the drinker receives from feeling so needed, or simply so “good” in contrast to the “bad” drinker. 

The same sort of thing can occur with a youth who is “acting out” or manifesting depression.   Often on closer examination, the youth is found to be expressing a symptom of a larger sickness.  It has fallen to the youth to unconsciously express the “dysfunction” of the family. 

With this way of seeing things in mind, let’s return to our Gospel story.  Jesus has come home to his original family system.   On the Sabbath he goes as always to the synagogue.   He reads from a passage from Isaiah that speaks of a great healing breaking out, a new justice arising, where various forms of oppression are being overturned.  He claims that in the present moment he himself, anointed by the Spirit, is the agent of this healing and liberation.

At first the family seems to bask in the glow of what “their kid” has accomplished.  If he is doing such great things out in the world, than surely that must mean that as the people who raised him up, they must be pretty great themselves.

And that’s where things quickly turn ugly. 

Jesus begins to lambast the hometown folks for their pride and arrogance, their sense of entitlement.   He says that they have no special claim to God’s grace, reminding them of a couple of Old Testament Bible stories in which God’s prophets passed over Jews like themselves delivering instead blessing and healing to a couple of foreign Gentiles.  It’s at this point that the family’s anger explodes to the point of violence. 

I find it helpful to have different scripture lessons talk to one another.  Along with this story, the lectionary for this morning includes one of my favorite scriptures, Paul’s famous love chapter in first Corinthians 13. If we don’t have love, Paul says, we’re nothing.  He says love is patient and kind and all these other good things.   It’s not rude. 

At first glance, Jesus doesn’t seem particularly “loving” in this story.  You could easily see him as playing the part of a rude guest. 

Paul says love is “slow to anger”; another translation says love isn’t “irritable.” There’s some subtlety here.  Paul doesn’t say love can’t be angry;  it’s just not quick to anger.   Sometimes love can be expressed as anger.  There is also a significant distinction between “irritability” and “anger.”  Irritability is, in a certain sense, a lie.   It’s anger that is coming out indirectly, often towards objects that don’t have anything to do with what we’re really angry about.  Irritability is anger that isn’t owned; anger that is “leaking out.”

Paul says that love rejoices in the truth.   Evidently Jesus’ words to his hometown folk — harsh though they are – speak a truth they need to hear, and as such are fiercely loving.  In the lingo of family systems theory, Jesus is naming the dysfunction, but unfortunately the family has a lot of energy invested in refusing to own up to their dysfunction. 

The thing about 1^st Corinthians 13 is that you can’t really hear what Paul is saying without feeling humbled.   If you are not feeling humbled, then you’re not getting what he’s saying.  He is saying you can have all kinds of things that the world honors and covets, but if you don’t have love, in the end, your life amounts to absolutely nothing.   Paul is talking about love in its purest form – divine love – the Greek word agape.

When I examine my own actions, my innermost thoughts, I know that there is plenty that is not love running through every part of me.   I am impatient, envious, boastful and arrogant; I want my own way, I hold on to resentments.  If I don’t admit this stuff, I am not telling the truth.   This is another way of saying that I am, indeed, a sinner. 

I do believe, however that there is also within me “love”.  It is not “pure” love, or maybe it is “pure love”, but it’s mixed in with  lots of other stuff, so it is awful hard  to locate it in its pure form.

So families are peculiar organisms.  “Love” is a word we often associate with families, as well we should.   But part of what the scriptures this morning say to me is that the love that exists in families is inevitably mixed up with other things as well:   fear, guilt, pride.  Even hatred.  How else to you account for the presence at times of such explosive anger?

In other words, within families (and churches as well) love exists side by side with hate.   There are ways in which we oppress, we wound, we hurt the very people we love the most.  

This isn’t stuff we like to admit.  Our mind goes to great lengths to avoid seeing the ways we do this.   And when we are pushed to acknowledge it, our first reaction can be violent anger, which, if we stop to think about it, proves the very point we are denying. 

If the people of Nazareth were as good as they wanted to think they were, they wouldn’t have tried to kill Jesus when he called them on their arrogance.

But admitting these things is the only way we move toward the wholeness that God intends for us; the wholeness that Jesus announced when he stood up to speak in the synagogue in Nazareth. 

The alcoholic can’t begin to recover till he or she admits they have a problem over which on their own they are powerless to solve.   The “enabler” can’t stop enabling till he or she confesses that they have been doing so, and begins the hard process of giving up the self-righteousness that drives them.  And we sinners can’t begin to come to terms with our sin until we fess up to our sin – all that  is within us that blocks the fullest expressions of love. 

In the end, the people of Nazareth felt compelled to throw Jesus out of the community; to essentially break off their relationship with him.   Seeing themselves as good people was that important to them.   It was, of course, their very great loss.

Those of us who have lived a long time within the family of the church can easily find ourselves in the same position as the folks of Nazareth.  We’ve also “grown up” with Jesus.  The story confronts our arrogance and entitlement as well.  It challenges us to look at the anger that lies beneath the surface in our lives. 

I grew up in a family where my parents never fought, and then one day when I was going into seventh grade they quietly announced to me that they were getting divorced.  I was stunned.   Looking back, perhaps if they had learned how to fight – to deal directly with that underlying anger – they wouldn’t have felt the need to end the relationship.  Who knows?  Perhaps they could have come to a deeper love.  Instead the marriage died. 

Ideally, being a part of a church family should give us an opportunity to learn how to move to the deeper love, and part of why it gives us this opportunity is that one of our starting assumptions is that we are — every one of us — simultaneously sinners and saints.    Of course we are sinners; of course there is a darkness that looms large within us, of course we often treat the people we profess to love the most with a subtle cruelty.  We don’t have to pretend it isn’t so.  We can own our stuff, and deal with it.

But thanks be to God for the forgiveness that is the heart and soul of the family of Christ.  It is this forgiveness that time and again allows us stay in relationship with one another and to persevere together to the greater wholeness, embodying a love that does not end.

A sermon preached on January 24, 2010 based upon 1Corinthians 12:12-27 and Luke 4:14-21.

The guy who thirty years ago shot Pope John Paul was released from prison this past week. If you are old enough, you may remember how when the pope was still recovering from his wounds he went to visit his would-be-assassin in prison, forgiving him for the violence he had committed.

The man had some odd things to say upon his release from prison. “I am Christ eternal,” he declared. He indicated that the New Testament was flawed and he would soon be coming forth with a revised version.

He was, obviously, something of a nutcake. But he did get me thinking about the language we use in the church. Every Sunday morning I greet everybody saying, “We believe that newcomers are Jesus come in disguise to bless us.”

Why do I say that? Well, because Jesus himself said essentially the same thing when he said, “Whenever you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it unto me.” One of the most readily available opportunities we have to come in touch with Jesus is through an encounter with someone who is vulnerable.

The significance of the stranger in our midst is that he or she is almost unavoidably vulnerable. We who have been here a good while and feel pretty comfortable may overlook this fact, but to walk into a church where you don’t know anybody is invariably to feel ill-at-ease, fragile, wondering whether perhaps you should make a dash for the door at the first chance you get.

The people of Haiti are intensely fragile; probably the demented man newly released from prison is as well. As such, they are people through whom we can encounter Christ.

But the demented man is not, in and of himself, “Christ eternal.” Nor is the newcomer in our midst. Individually, none of us is the body of Christ.

There has only been one man who was in-and-of himself the Christ, and our Gospel lesson from Luke this morning tells the story of how he began his ministry. Having spent forty days alone fasting in the wilderness, he had faced his own deepest vulnerabilities, and now he comes forth in the power of the Spirit. He goes about Galilee with charisma, creating a safe space for others who are grappling with their own fragility and vulnerability, inviting them into a new wholeness and freedom. He arrives at his hometown, gathering with the people in the synagogue on the Sabbath. He is handed the scroll of the Scriptures, where he opens up the prophet Isaiah, and reads, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, release to the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And then he declared, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

He is the one and only Christ, and the most compelling evidence to the truth of this statement came forth afterwards when the community that arose once he had finished his work on earth began to embody all that he had said in that opening mission statement. The church of those first decades following the resurrection of Jesus embodied “good news for the poor” and “liberation for the oppressed.” It was a community unlike any others the world had seen up to that point – astonishingly inclusive — where slaves and Roman citizens lived together as kin, Jews and Gentiles forgot their differences, and men and women freely shared authority, and in general, people experienced the liberating power of the Spirit to transform their lives in life-giving ways.

It was indeed the new kind of community that God had always intended for the world. But human nature being what it is, sustaining this new way of being proved problematic. The early churches found themselves descending into the old divisions, factions, and squabbles that characterize the world.

And so in our epistle lesson the apostle Paul reminds the congregation of Corinth of the truths that had originally given birth to their church: You were all baptized by the one Spirit which overcame those age-old barriers of Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. “You are the body of Christ, and individually members of it.”

This image of the church as the body of Christ expresses two things at the same time, both of which need to be held onto.

First off, there is a celebration of our individuality. We don’t have to be clones of one another; that’s not what God had in mind. “God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.” You are, in your essence, the person God wanted you to be, (though you may well be failing to live out your essence.) The particular combination of gifts and limitations that distinguish you is precisely what God intended. Don’t rebel against who you are, and embrace the particular gifts you were given to share with the body. Make a point of finding out what these gifts are; the help of others will be essential in this process. Also, accept the fact that you weren’t intended to be good at everything. Accept your limitations, which are part of what it means to embrace the fact that you are designed to be vulnerable. It is through your vulnerabilities that Christ’s light shines.

The second thing that goes hand in hand with our individuality is the fact that there is a bond between us that is far deeper than we are prone to acknowledge. Says Paul, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’, nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.”

It is precisely people who are quite different from ourselves, who contribute something altogether different to the Body from what we can contribute, to whom we are tempted to say, “I don’t need you!”

But we do. We need the diversity of gifts, of vulnerabilities, of perspectives to be the Body of Christ. There are things God speaks to us through the very people who are most unlike ourselves that we may not otherwise hear. To break off relationships with such people amounts to shutting God out.

If the people in a congregation pretty much all look the same–if they all dress the same and talk the same and think the same — well, it’s not a good sign. If Christ is present among a group of people – if those people collectively are allowing Christ to act through them – then there will be an ability to love people where they are, rather than where we need them to be in our own self-centered view of the world. If people in a congregation have no capacity for loving those who are different from them selves, then what you have is a club where membership depends upon everybody being clones of one another. You don’t have the Church; you don’t have the body of Christ.

A sermon preached on January 17^th, 2010, based on John 2:1 – 11, on the Sunday following the earthquake in Haiti.

 The great religious question that has loomed large over the past week was the one demanded by the horrors being suffered in Haiti:  Where is God in all this?

The massive earthquake follows a long history of suffering in Haiti.  Haiti began as a French slave colony, founded by people who had been brutally kidnapped from their homeland.  Remarkably, these African-born slaves managed to throw off their slave masters and their cruelty.  A long difficult history followed of poverty, failed government and corruption and political violence, as well as exploitation by rich business people come from the outside to make a profit, stripping the country of its resources, and leaving the land ecologically destitute – the majority of its trees cut down. 

Haiti is a country that has suffered disproportionately to other countries  from the AIDS epidemic.  In recent years it has been ravaged by hurricanes.  It is a land of orphans. 

And now this horrible earthquake, leaving so many dead, maimed, homeless, grief-stricken. 

Where, indeed is God in all this?

The question was helped along by the buffoon, Rev. Pat Robertson of the 700 Club, already famous for making wacky and cruel comments.  He said something to the effect that all this suffering in Haita could be traced back to a supposed pact signed by the original slaves with the devil through which they sought the help of the devil in getting free from the French.   The implication of Robertson’s statement was that the Haitians brought all this suffering upon themselves – that what we are witnessing is punishment for sin. 

My first reaction to Robertson’s words was to ignore them as the commentary of a buffoon few can take seriously at this point.  But to the extent that there are non-Christians who might hear his words as expressing the “Christian point of view,” I pause to offer some well-expressed responses from a couple of Christians leaders whose writings I admire: 

Jim Wallis of Sojourners declared:

My God does not cause evil.  God is not a vengeful and retributive being, waiting to srike us down; instead, God is in the very midst of this tragedy, suffering with those who are suffering.  When evil strikes, it’s easy to ask, where is God?  The answer is simple:  God is suffering with those who are suffering. 

Tony Campolo, who along with his son Bart have done a great deal of compassionate ministry in Haiti, wrote: 

Haiti’s former dictator, Jean-Claude Duvalier, was a voodoo witchdoctor, and when he was driven from power it was widely rumored that he offered an infant boy as a blood sacrifice to Satan, and cursed the country with an evil spell to bring disasters and suffering upon the Haitian people.  You may not believe in that sort of thing, but many Haitians do.  Now we must show them that God’s love, expressed through sacrificial people, is greater than the forces of darkness.

Just after the earthquake, as huge billows of dust caused by collapsing buildings hung over Port-au-Prince, witnesses heard not only the moans of suffering people, but also the eerie sounds of hymns being sung by Haitian Christians.  These are the songs of an undaunted people who are determined to defy Duvalier’s curse with their faith in God.

Help them to hope!  Help their prayers to be answered! I don’t believe God called this disaster down on Haiti, but I do believe God’s grace and love, flowing through those of us who are surrendered to God’s will, can bring healing and redemption to our Haitian brothers and sisters.  Please, please, please … do what you can.

At this point there isn’t much we can do other than give our money and pray. 

In my helplessness, I surf the web.  I came across a clip of the comedienne John Stewart, who happens to be Jewish, responding to Robertson.  Holding up a large Bible, he noted what a big book Robertson had available to him as a Christian to draw upon as he attempted to respond to the great suffering of the Haitian people.  Reading aloud a portion of psalm as an example, Stewart pointed out how many moving scriptures of comfort from which Robertson could have quoted.  Instead, Stewart marveled at how Robertson managed to pass over all these potential scriptural selections to refer in stead to what amounts to an “urban legend.”

And so I pause here to quote from the opening of Psalm 46, which starts off referring to what sounds very much like an earthquake: 

God is our refuge and strength,
   a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change,
   though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
though its waters roar and foam,
   though the mountains tremble with its tumult.

If you read through the Bible you will find a persistent theme that suggests that God has a preference in fact for poor people – people like these destitute folk in Haiti.  The central Old Testament story tells of God hearing the cries of poor, oppressed slaves in Egypt, leading them to deliverance in the Exodus from the rich and powerful Pharaoh.  The Old Testament prophets consistently voice God’s concern for the overlooked poor and oppressed, and God’s judgment on those who would oppress them. 

In the New Testament, Jesus is born into a poor, homeless people, with poor shepherds as his first companions.  In his ministry, Jesus spoke of having not place to lay his head, and declared that it was very hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.  He told a parable about a poor starving man named Lazarus who sleeps at the doorstep of a rich man, and how when the lives of both poor Lazarus and the rich man come to an the end, poor Lazarus goes directly into the embrace of God, while the rich man is held accountable for this refusal to take notice of the plight of his neighbor. 

The lectionary reading that happened to fall to this Sunday was this peculiar story about the first miracle of Jesus recorded in the Gospel of John, in which he turned water into wine at a wedding in Cana.  Hearing the news of the earthquake, my first reaction to this Gospel story was that it wouldn’t have been one of the ones I would have turned to in this context.  The story can almost come across as trivial –water turned to wine so a wedding can go on.  

In Matthew, Mark and Luke the miracles that Jesus performs most commonly arise in response to human suffering:  Jesus multiplies the loaves to feed the hungry masses; Jesus heals the sick and the lame.   In John’s Gospel, it’s different.  The miracles occur as “signs” intent on revealing – to those who have eyes to see – the glory of God. 

Maybe at such a time as this, it is precisely the glory of God of which we need to be reminded. 

The passage starts off with, “After three days…”  It’s easy to jump over this little detail, but John is intent on reminding us of something.  “After three days…”  Where have we heard that before?  Oh, yes.  On Easter, at the resurrection.  The women went to the tomb, and there they discovered that the violence, suffering and death they had witness as Jesus was nailed to the cross was not the final word. 

They discovered that Jesus was alive again. 

John tells us that the first miracle Jesus performed was a part of a wedding feast, a grand celebration, an occasion of joy.   He made ordinary water into delicious taking wine.  It was a time for laughter and dancing. 

Something profound is being said here. 

If we were to ask, What is the fundamental problem we human beings deal with in life?  I suspect we would answer by pointing to the presence of suffering.  This is so much terrible suffering.   And that is true. 

On a practical level this answer leads us to focus our attention on minimizing pain and suffering and maximizing pleasure, comfort and earthly security.  

What if, however the fundamental problem in life isn’t so much the presence of suffering, but rather the fact that we so often miss the joy.  We miss the glory.  

Remember that joy is not the same as mere pleasure, or even “happiness.”  Joy is something deeper that has a way of showing up in strange places, like a stable in Bethlehem.  Said the angel to the shepherds, “I bring you good news of a great joy…”  

What if worst than having to endure suffering is to go through life and miss the joy?

As Christians, we live out of the resurrection:  out of a love and life that is greater than the death that ravages this world.  Joy is intended to be our hallmark.

As I surfed the web this week, I found a lot of discussion about what’s wrong with Haiti – not so much from a religious point of view, as from a secular point of view:  why haven’t the people of Haiti been able to get it together politically and economically, the failure of which has left them so vulnerable to the earthquake?   These are legitimate questions that will need to be addressed in the years to come as Haiti is rebuilt. 

But I have a suspicion, to which I rely on the testimony of Tim Tyler and others who have experienced life in Haiti up close, and that is that even as there is more suffering in Haiti than there tends to be in the United States, there may also be more joy as well.   Even as there is so much “wrong” with Haiti, I suspect that people there know better than we do how to be in the spirit of the wedding of Cana.  

At the moment, the people of Haiti find themselves in a time that calls for weep rather than rejoicing.   But in time joy will return, and I expect that Haitians know better than we how to rejoice.   They are better at beholding the glory than we are.  

There may well be a lot of things that people can hear God saying in the midst of this tragedy, but to us up here in the United States, perhaps God is saying, “Wake up!”  We who so anxiously seek to fortify ourselves against suffering – we’re missing what life if all about.  Life is a precious gift, and even though this gift is often very painful, it is also full of joy and laughter.  It is not about hoarding and obsessing about security; it is, in fact about dancing.   And perhaps the dancing begins by letting go our tight, fearful grip on our money so as to help those who are in great need.

Recently I was asked to write a short paragraph by way of a biographical introduction of myself for a theater group that is doing a public reading of one of my plays.   I wanted to say something concisely to this secular group about the church of which I am the pastor; since my identity is so tied up with this community.   This is what came up to me to write in my bio:  “I have been the pastor of the Parsippany United Methodist Church for twenty-one years, where the mission statement begins, “In a hostile, hurting world, we reach out to share kindness and laughter.”

You don’t find the word “laughter” in too many mission statements.  I think we’re onto something including this word in our description of what we’re all about.   It truly is a “hostile, hurting world,” but deep down there is a great laughter underneath everything – God’s laughter – and we are invited to laugh along with God. 

I met with our youth this past Friday night as they had their sleepover in the church.  We prayed together in the darkness of the sanctuary by candlelight.  The people of Haiti were in our hearts and minds.  I wanted to read something from this big book to finish with.  I chose these words that come from the very end of the Bible:

 “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 

(Did you catch that?  In the ultimate healing to which all of creation is headed, it will be like a wedding celebration.)

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
‘See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;  
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.’

And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’

(Revelations 21:1 – 6a)

A sermon preached on January 10th, 2010, based upon Luke 3:15 – 17; 21 – 22.

Consider this flight of fantasy:  What would it be like if through some magic or futuristic science it were possible for you or me to spend some time literally inside the life of another person.  Imagine fully experiencing what it would feel like to be them, encountering the world through their perceptions as they go about the moment by moment choices they face, and then afterwards, return to ponder what we had experienced?

I suspect that to be inside somebody else’s unique experience of the world would quite literally blow our minds.  We would be humbled, to say the least.   Though we may know better, we tend to assume in our human interactions that life is coming at everybody else pretty much the same way it is coming at us.  We judge others as “idiots” when they don’t make the choices we’ve made in what appears to us to be similar situations.   The fact is, however, that each of us has an absolutely unique perception of reality arising from a totally distinct genetic code interacting with an unrepeatable environment creating a personal history that is all our own. 

To experience pretty much any other person’s life from the inside would probably do the trick, but imagine if sobriety comes easily to you what it would be like to experience the addictions of another, and how hard it is for that person to make the choice to turn down the drink.   What would it be like to be inside someone suffering from the burden of mental illness?  If you’re an extrovert, to experience what it is like for the introvert who finds a crowd of people anxiety provoking?  Or if you are an introvert, to experience how easy it is for the extrovert to put his or her foot in their mouth because they aren’t weighed down by the same thought police that stand guard at the doorway of your mind?   If you are a man, to experience for a few moments what it is to be a woman, or vice versa. If you are straight, to experience what it is to be gay.

Imagine finding yourself in a situation that in your old life would have seemed pretty routine, but here in this other person’s life, you find yourself stepping on emotional land mines, exploding with waves of anger and sadness.  

Think of the possibilities if every person with strong political or religious convictions were to experience what it was like to be inside someone with a very different point of view.

Initially we would be struck by how different we are from one another.  But I suspect that if we were able to undergo the experience for an extended period of time, we would begin to come around to seeing an underlying similarity to all human experience as well.   We all have a different combination of strengths and weaknesses, talents and shortcomings, but everybody still has to deal the reality pointed to in the serenity prayer:

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

Over time, the significance of the external contexts of our lives would probably lessen. On a given day one person wins the jackpot lottery, and another suffers an auto accident that leaves him a paraplegic, and on that day their experience seems as different as night and day.   But follow those two people a year or two or three down the road, and the interpretations of “fortunate” vs. “misfortunate” I suspect would begin to blur.   (Researchers indicate that the paraplegic is slightly more likely to describe himself as “happy” than the one who has so much money she no longer needs to work.) 

Over time, the external context of our lives may come to appear more like simply “window dressings”;  interesting, but not the most important thing.   Certain basic questions arise to be addressed in every life, in every context:  How do I come to terms with the fact that one day I will die?  How to I give and receive love?  Where do I find meaning?

One person moves into her “dream house”, and another is arrested for a felony, sentenced to several years in prison.   In time the one in the dream house discovers that the house itself didn’t make her as happy as she had imagined, and that there are these ongoing tedious responsibilities to deal with of paying the mortgage and making the repairs that occupy so much of her time and energy.   The inmate discovers that even in the prison there are people to love and be loved by, and a life that has meaning, and that strangely, prison life removes some of the tedious burdens of daily living that can distract people who aren’t incarcerated.

Underneath everything else, there is this question that everyone of us must face:  What will I do with the life God has given me?   Our life is distinct, no one else gets to live it.  Will we?

In the Gospel story, the thirty year old Jesus appears for the first time.  What has he been doing with the life that God has given him?  We don’t know for sure, but in terms of outwardly impacting the world, apparently very little.   Presumably, he has been discovering his unique giftedness — the ways he is unlike any other man.  

As Jesus shows up at the River Jordan he has a choice to make.   What will he do with this extraordinary giftedness he has discovered within himself?   He can, in theory, use it for his own personal glory.  He can hoard it, so to speak.   Or, he can live for the glory of God.  He can dedicate his gifts to God’s purposes in this world. 

Choosing to enter the water of John’s baptism expresses a couple of powerful themes.  On the one hand, Jesus is choosing to be with all the rest of us poor slobs.   This is what the incarnation is all about:  God choosing to be with us in the muck of life; to experience our lives from the inside.   

The creeds of the Church speak of Jesus being simultaneously human and divine, which is a tough idea to get our heads around.  He is human – he is just like everybody else.  But he is something vastly more as well.  

One way to conceive of the God-nature of Jesus is to consider the fact that God is the only one who is capable of fully carrying out the exercise I have fantasized about.  God, having made each one of us, knows what it is like to be every single, distinct human being.   Jesus, in turn, surely had a capacity far beyond ours to intuit what it felt like to be all other human beings, and to empathize with our plights, which we get a hint of in so many of the things he said, for instance, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

The choice to enter the waters involves solidarity with all us poor slobs, and it also expresses the willingness to risk all in faith.   It involves letting go — trusting God to be with us, come what may, and trusting God to work things out as God sees fit as time moves on.   As such, it’s a little like going into the deep water without a flotation device to support us to get dunked.

Today is Stewardship Sunday in our church.    Our time, our talents, our gifts and our money are all part of what God has given to us in our absolutely unique life.   These things vary enormously.   But the underlying issue is the same.  What will we do with what we have been given?

Luke’s Gospel is the one that tells us about a rich man who apparently lived a respectable life and a poor man named Lazarus who lived on his doorstep.   As different as their lives were on the outside, they both had to face the fact that one day they would die.    For Lazarus, this was probably something of a no-brainer; he lived very close to death every day.  The rich man, however, avoided the fact of his death, using his money as a buffer.  But one day they do in fact both die, and there is a reckoning and a reversal of fortunes.  To him whom much has been given, much is expected, and the rich man has not used what he has been gifted with for God’s glory.   Lazarus, at his doorstep, went without food.

It is also in Luke’s Gospel that find the story of Jesus in the Temple watching people making their offerings, taking note of the poor widow who gave her two copper coins – all that she had.   In terms of the spiritual meaning of her offering, Jesus said, her gift far outweighs the bags of gold placed by the rich people.   She has given all, letting go, trusting God with her life.  

What will you do with what God has given you?  Will you embrace the gift of your life, with all the limitations, but with all the possibilities as well?  If you don’t, who will?

A sermon preached on January 3, 2010 based upon Luke 2:41 – 52.

If I were to ask you, where you were, and what you were doing at a particular moment in time, say, this past December 12^th at precisely 7:48 in the evening, chances are, off the top of your head at least, you wouldn’t have a clue. 

But if I were to ask the same of you regarding another moment:  12 midnight on December 31^st (or January 1^st) chances are good that you would remember both where you were, and what you were doing, and who you were with, and not only this past December 31st, but probably quite a few other December thirty firsts in your life as well.  

The reason for this is, of course that we make a tradition of marking the passing of a calendar year.  Though we vary to some degree what we do from year to year, some things stay the same:  the count down, for instance, watching the ball drop in Time Square, perhaps.   Maybe Dick Clark. 

We practice traditions in order to provide ourselves with some order and stability in the midst of the passage of time; to keep things familiar in the face of all the unsettling change and loss we endure.

We may make fun of the expression, “We always did it this way.”  But there is a reason for traditions and the business of always doing it, at least to some extent, the same each year, and that is that it helps us feel as though the past isn’t altogether lost – that there is something constant that endures though time marches on.

When we sing “Silent Night” every Christmas Eve by candlelight, we suddenly feel very close to all those past Christmas Eves when we did the very same thing.   The earth may have rotated a full orbit around the sun since the last time we did it, and we may have passed through four full seasons, but nonetheless, here we are, back where we started, and we find this reassuring. 

So traditions stand as a bulwark against simply drifting away in the vast ocean of time.  Here we are again.

Yet even as traditions provide some stability in the face of all that changes with time, at the same time, they call attention to what has changed.

Every year we watch the perpetually young Dick Clark counting down the seconds in Time Square, and then last year he was gone, brought low by a stroke, disrupting the tradition.    And then last week, for the sake of tradition, he was back, doing it yet again, reassuring us somehow, except now there is no mistaking Dick Clark for a young man – the stroke he endured marks him clearly as elderly.  Even Dick Clark will one day die.

And once more we stand there holding our candle singing “Silent Night,” just like before, and yet as we sing, perhaps we experience the absence of a loved one all the more intensely. 

Our Gospel reading tells the story of an annual tradition:  “Every year (Jesus’) parents went to Jerusalem for the Feast of Passover.  When he was twelve years old, they went up to the Feast, according to the custom.”

Probably Jesus’ grandparents had done the same, and the great grandparents before that. And now each of the twelve years of Jesus’ young life, the family has done the same.  It has become so familiar that they don’t have to think about it much; everybody knows the routine, the family travels together with all the relatives and neighbors from Nazareth. 

But this year the tradition is disrupted; this year something happens that causes fear and anxiety, calling attention to the fact that things are indeed changing as time passes on. 

The twelve-year-old Jesus, claiming perhaps his identity as a man, acts independently in a way that the eleven-year-old Jesus would never have dared to act.  He stays behind in Jerusalem on his own to ponder the deep mysteries of God with the elders in the Temple.  The obedient child transitions into the young man who chooses his own way.  The little boy is gone, and how very distressing this must have been on some level to his mother and father. 

That great old hymn, “O God Our Help in Ages Past” has this rather harsh verse:

  “Time like an ever rolling stream    bears all who breath away;
   they fly forgotten, as a dream   dies at the opening day.” 

 But even as a part of us wants to do all we can to slow down the ever flowing stream, at the same time, another part of us knows that time must pass — that change is necessary — because we are on a journey — we are heading somewhere — not so much in time and space as in the soul realm of eternity. 

 We are called to transforming – to growing up – in the truest sense of the word, as the child Jesus had to grow up.  And even as the parents can’t be certain that their boy isn’t headed off on a misguided path, they also know that he will never find his path if he doesn’t set off on his own, and so reluctantly, they let him go.

Deep inside, we sense that there is this realm of eternity, and we practice our traditions in part as an echo to this truth; that all is not lost, that love never ends.

One of my favorite Christian writers is Frederick Buechner.  He describes in his memoir a conversation he had with his elderly mother, a woman of striking physical appearance and composure who had steadfastly avoided throughout her life discussing spiritual matters or anything, for that matter that was charged with emotion, particularly the subject of death.     

“But there was one day, I remember, when in the midst of some conversation we were having about nothing in particular she suddenly turned to me and said out of the blue, “Do you really believe anything happens after you die?” and all at once she was present to me in a way she rarely was.  She was no longer onstage.  She was no longer in character.  She had stepped off into the wings for a moment, and the words she had spoken were not in the script.  Her face was for the moment not the one she had skillfully assembled in front of the dressing-table mirror that morning with lipstick, powder, and eyebrow pencil, but her own true face.  She had come a long way from the little girl in frilly white with the upside-down flowers in her lap.  She was in her eighties with bad arthritis in her knees and was wearing whichever one of her many hearing aids she happened to have chosen that day, although none of them ever seemed to do her much good.   I always suspected that it was not so much because she was deaf that she couldn’t hear; but because there was so much she didn’t want to hear that she chose to be deaf.  To get anything through to her you had to say it at the top of your lungs, so in answer to her question, I said YES.  I said I believed SOMETHING HAPPENS.  But there are things that cannot be shouted, and as soon as I tried in my more or less normal voice to tell her a little more about what I believed and why I believed it, I could see that she was not only not hearing, but also not listening.  Just to have asked the question seemed for the time being to be as much as he could handle. 

So later, when I got home, I tried to answer the question in a letter.  I wrote her I believe that what happens when you die is that, in ways I knew no more about that she did, you are given back your life again, and I said there were three reasons why I believed it.  First, I wrote her, I believed it because, if I were God and loved the people I created and wanted them to become at last the best they had it in them to be, I couldn’t imagine consigning them to oblivion when their time came with the job under the best of circumstances only a fraction done.  Second, I said, I believed it, apart from any religious considerations, because I had a hunch it was true.  I intuited it.  I said that if the victims and the victimizers, the wise and the foolish, the good-hearted and the heartless all end up alike in the grave and that is the end of it, then life would be a black comedy, and to me, even at its worst, life doesn’t feel like a black comedy.  It feels like a mystery.  It feels as though, at the innermost heart of it, there is Holiness, and that we experience all the horrors that go on both around us and within us as horrors rather than as just the way the cookie crumbles because, in our own innermost hearts, we belong to Holiness, which they are a tragic departure from.  And lastly, I wrote her, I believe that what happens to us after we die is that we aren’t dead forever because Jesus said so.  Jesus was another of the dead people I knew my mother wouldn’t want to talk about, and I had no idea how she would react to my involving his authority.  I said that, because in one way Jesus was a human being like the rest of us, I imagined he could be wrong about lots of things like the rest of us too and probably believed the world was flat just the way everybody else did in his day.  But when he said to the Good Thief on the cross next to his, “Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise,” I wrote here, I would bet my bottom dollar that he of all people knew what he was talking bout, because if in one way he was a human being, in another way he was immeasurably more.  

I could hardly conceive of a more unlikely person that my mother to have written such a letter to, but since trying to shout it all to her instead was unthinkable, I mailed it anyway, and when I asked about it some weeks later, her only answer was to say that it had made her cry.  I don’t think that it was anything I said that made her cry; in fact I doubt if she even read my letter all the way through.  I think that it was being reminded by the letter of her original question about death.  I think her tears had to do with what she saw as the pathos of simply having asked it when she knew without even talking about it that her own death couldn’t be all that far away.” 

(From “The Eyes of the Heart: a memoir of the lost and found”  by Frederick Buechner, pp.14 – 17)

Coming to church every Sunday is another tradition by which we hold onto our roots in the midst of so much change.   In a few minutes we will once more celebrate the Lord’s Supper, a tradition that enables us to hopscotch through the years and even centuries past, to every other moment of sharing the bread and the wine, to that original moment when Jesus himself sat around a table with his disciples the night before he died.   Eternity is touched in this ritual. 

Sally Fields won an Oscar for her performance thirty years ago in a movie called “Places in the Heart”, in which she portrayed a mother of two small children struggling to keep her farm out of foreclosure during the Great Depression.  In the opening scene of the movie, her husband is accidently killed by a drunken young black man.  In the second scene an angry mob of white men lynch the young black man.   The heart of the movie describes the struggle of the widow to survive working with an odd assortment of local outcastes.  In the final scene the woman is sitting in church with her children on Sunday morning as Holy Communion is served.  The camera pans down the aisle, and beside her we see her husband, likewise partaking.  It pans further, and we see sitting next to him the young man who accidently caused his death.   

In the midst of this ancient ritual which was instituted by Jesus himself, the underlying holiness at the heart of life is experienced, and for a moment the sinner/saints of earth and heaven are together as one in the Kingdom of God.

A sermon preached on November 22, 2009 based upon Luke 19:1-10, entitled, “Jesus and the Scapegoats.”

One thing you don’t want to be according to certain parts of the Bible is a goat.  Check out Leviticus 17, where you will find instructions for what the community was to do on the day of Atonement.  It involves taking two goats, bringing them before the temple.  A coin gets flipped, and one of the two goats is selected to be sacrificed unto the Lord in the Temple.  Hearing this, you might think that the other goat was the fortunate one.   Actually, no.   The other goat was cast out by the community to die a slow painful death in the wilderness.   This goat was to carry with it all the guilt of the people.  Hence the term “scapegoat.”

Evidently the ritual was a useful one, unloading a certain amount of toxic blame and negativity, allowing the community to move forward  into  a new year with a clean sheet, feeling unified and renewed.   Better, it would seem, to kill a goat than a human being, which is what people have been doing since the beginning of human history.  Adam and Eve’s son killed his brother Abel, making him the object of all his frustration and resentment in life.  

Over the last two thousand years, Jews have often played the role of scapegoat for Christians, with the most horrific example of this being the holocaust. 

With the defeat of the Nazis and Fascism, Americans found a new scapegoat in the Soviet Union.  Scapegoats can be useful in forming a sense of identity and unity.  For about forty years,  we felt confident of our moral superiority to the godless communists.   But then twenty years ago the Berlin Wall fell, and with it Soviet communism.   China began opening up as well.  This, of course, was a good thing, but it presented something of a problem in regard to losing our identity-shaping scapegoat.  

About this time conservative Christian pulpits began to identify a new scapegoat:  Gays.   Then in 2001 the terrorist attacks of September 11^th provided a more threatening scapegoat:  militant Moslems. 

The thing about scapegoats is that generally speaking they do have certain negative qualities that lend themselves to becoming a scapegoat.   Goats, for instance, tend to be harder to keep than sheep, because, interestingly enough, they are smarter than sheep, and hence better at escaping. 

The problem with scapegoating though is that it blinds us to reality.   By focusing on the sins of the scapegoat, we overlook our own sins.    We reduce the world into a simple dichotomy of pure good and pure evil, with ourselves squarely among the good.   The positive qualities of the scapegoat can’t be recognized. 

I’ve focused on the big social-political examples of scapegoating, but what I’m describing is more pervasive than that.  We all engage in it.  If you’re sitting there thinking, “Gee, Jeff, I’m glad you’re giving this sermon, because so and so needs to hear this,” think again:  you are so and so.  I am too.

The democracy that we Americans tend to be so proud of is failing precisely because we have a hard time resisting the urge to scapegoat those who disagree with us.  Who is responsible for all of our problems?  The people on the other side of the political spectrum from us, whoever they may be.

Those of us who pride ourselves in our tolerance can be downright intolerant of people whose views don’t match those of ourselves. 

The health of every marriage and every other intimate relationship is directly connected to the ability of the partners to resist the urge to scapegoat other person; to locate all the guilt for what goes wrong in the relationship in the other person. 

In his ministry, Jesus had this persistent affinity with scapegoats.   He tended to hang out with outcastes, much to the distress of those who had cast them out.   At the dinner part of a Pharisee, he welcomed the embrace of “woman of the night”, perhaps a prostitute, angering the Pharisees.  (The thing about prostitutes is that they would have no business if not for the customers willing to employ them for the expression of their lust.)   He reached out to the Gerasene Demoniac, cast out from his community as the embodiment of darkness, and when the man was delivered from his bondage, the good people of the community are strangely displeased.  (Losing a scapegoat can mess with your head.)   The woman who was caught in adultery and brought to Jesus and the way to be stoned, ( it take two to commit adultery, a fact overlooked in this story)  finds a friend in Jesus, who says, “Let he who is without sin throw the first stone.”  

And in this morning’s Gospel lesson we hear about Zacchaeus , another classic scapegoat.   As a  rich taxcollector who has been conspiring with the Romans to profit from his own people in their oppression, he provides an easy depository for all the sin and guilt of the community.   To the community’s great dismay, rather than add on to the pile-on of accusation focused on this taxcollector, Jesus invites himself over to Zacchaeus’ house for dinner.    In challenging the peoples’ scape-goating, Jesus himself becomes their scapegoat.   

It is just a matter of days before he will be nailed upon a cross, becoming, in a sense, the scapegoat for all of humanity, with the idea being, Jesus has hereby put an end to all scape-goating, once and for all.  Unfortunately, we Christians more often than not haven’t gotten this, so we keep on looking for another scapegoat to put all the blame on. 

I heard a hopeful story on the program I often listed to named Radio Lab.  In a small town in Oregon, with all the qualities you associate with small town life, a man named Stu grew up.   Everybody in town had always known Stu, as it the way things are in small towns.  As an adult Stu was owned the only movie theater in town, located in the very center of town, which gave Stu something of a central role in the town’s life.   Caring deeply about his town, Stu was involved in the Chamber of Commerce and local government.  

Now it just so happened that from fairly early on in his life, Stu was aware of a way in which he was different;  specifically, he didn’t really recognize himself as male, and felt a desire to wear women’s clothes.   As he described it, when he looked in the mirror, he just liked himself better when he wore women’s clothing.  

At some point Stu began to experiment in fairly subtle ways with the way he presented himself.  He began by occasionally painting his nails.  As a promotional gimmick for the movie of the week, Stu would dress up as one of the characters, always choosing a female character:  Princess Leah, for instance, in Star Wars.  It struck people as a bit odd, a curiosity, and they would drive by the movie theater to see what character Stu had taken on this week. 

Slowly, over the years, Stu went further, undergoing in part a sex change.  Eventually there was no mistaking what Stu was doing; he wore women’s clothes all the time now.

Now if Stu had come from the outside as one who behaved this way, perhaps the town would have rejected him.   But since they had known and loved their whole lives, they tolerated what they saw as Stu’s eccentricities.  Folks might have said the cross dressing wasn’t something they exactly “approved” of, nonetheless he was “their Stu,” and they knew him to have a good heart. 

In fact, in 2008 Stu was elected in a close race as mayor of their town, a fact that made national news.    There is a distressing church in Kansas that sees it as their mission to travel around the country holding signs that say things like “God hates Fags”, and announcing that Hell is America’s destination for tolerating gay people.   When these folks heard about Stu getting elected, well they quickly sent a half dozen or so of their members on a road trip to Oregon, where they set up an ongoing demonstration in the center of town.  

As you might imagine, Stu was pretty distressed, and he encouraged his people to just ignore the demonstrators.   But the townsfolk felt offended by the demonstrators, so it only seemed right to them to set up a counter-demonstration.   Somebody got the idea that their point could be made a bit stronger if the men in the counter-demonstration dressed up in women’s clothes, and the idea caught on.  In short order, there were a couple of hundred cross-dressing counter-demonstrators, many of whom would have described their selves as being by nature pretty conservative.  They weren’t about to let “their Stu” be scape–goated.   Before long, the folks from Kansas left town. 

If truth be told, we are all pretty weird.  Scratch the surface of the appearance we work hard to manage, and you will find an odd ball with quirks that might make cross-dressing seem pretty tame.    Jesus comes to stand with the odd balls — the scape-goats —  and here and there, grace prevails, and the kingdom of God is discovered.   And as Jesus said of Zaccheaus, “Salvation has come to this house, today.”