Originally preached on November 30, 2008, the first Sunday of Advent, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio UCC.
Isaiah 64:1-9 Mark 13:24-37
Dedicated to Betsy on the weekend of our anniversary; and always to the glory of God.
Today I’m going to preach about the second coming of Christ. This may not be a subject you have spent much time thinking about, or that you expected to hear about this morning. Or, it may be something you have thought about a great deal. My fear is that it is a part of our Christian faith that has been confused by those who talk about it with wild predictions and fearful words, but we’ll get to that.
Let us pray: God of light in the darkness, illuminate the eyes of our hearts, that we may receive your word of hope, of faith, and of love. Amen.
This is the first Sunday in the season of Advent, which is a word that means “arrival” or “coming.” In this season, we prepare to celebrate the arrival of Jesus Christ, born to Mary in Bethlehem so many years ago. It is a story from the past that shapes us in the present: the first coming of Christ.
Isaiah gave voice to those who waited for a messiah, waited for God to tear open the heavens and come down. We know that it happened. God did tear open the heavens and came to us, only not exactly how Isaiah had thought that God would come, with power and might on display. Instead God came as a baby, who would live and grow as one of us, sharing our common lot; knowing what our lives are like, so that he may show us what our lives could be. Isaiah’s hope has come to pass.
Advent is also about the future arrival of Christ, who will return to complete the work that he began: to heal what is broken, to bring goodwill to humankind and on earth, peace. This is also the hope of Advent.
In Mark’s Gospel Jesus tells his disciples about the time to come when he will come in clouds with great power and glory. He tells them to wait with a watchful eye, like a doorkeeper watching in the night for the master of the house to return. In worship, when we proclaim that “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again,” we become those who are watching for God in the night.
Advent is a time when we look backwards and forward. Looking back, we proclaim that Jesus Christ has already come to reconcile the world to God. All is forgiven; grace has been granted; and evil is conquered. And yet…still, all is not yet right in the world. Christ has not yet made a new heaven and a new earth, has not wiped away every tear, has not brought peace to all the world. We live between the words “already” and “not yet.” We live in the middle of the story, but even in the middle, we know how it ends, and what a difference that makes. Imagine earlier times in your own lives that you would have lived much differently if you had known how uncertainty would be resolved. Imagine the confidence you would have brought to a time of fear or anxiety. For us, knowing the end of the story is what it means to have faith in the second coming of Christ.
It means that when we read the news reports from Mumbai, India of the innocent lives lost, or the reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, where soldiers and civilians are injured and killed, we trust that bombs and bullets will not have the last word. It means that when we hear the stories of neighbors having to choose between paying the heat bill and buying groceries, we trust that want and hunger will not have the last word. It means that tomorrow, on World AIDS day, when we remember the devastation caused by this disease in every corner of the world, we trust that illness will not have the last word. The second coming means that God will have the last word. We light candles and trust that the advent of Christ will set all things right in the end. And just as the birth of Christ in the past can shape our lives in the present, so the future coming of Christ also shapes our lives here and now.
To understand this frame of mind, it’s helpful to turn to our storytellers. One modern story of hope is told in the movie The Shawshank Redemption, set in Shawshank Prison. It is the story of men who have done terrible things which cannot be denied, but it is also the story of how the cruelty and despair of prison life slowly diminishes their souls. In one scene, a prisoner finds himself alone in an administrative office, reviewing books and records that have come for the prison library. He picks up a recording of one of Mozart’s operas and places it on the turntable. Then he realizes that the microphone for the prison’s speakers sits on the desk next to him. He locks the door and for several minutes broadcasts the music, a duet, to the entire prison. Every man stands still, in the prison yard of dirt and rocks, in the woodshop and laundry rooms where they labor, every man stares silently at the loudspeakers. One prisoner says later: “I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about…. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.” That’s what it means to know that the present moment is not the last word. We get glimpses of it, and it changes the shape of our lives.
But first there are some warnings we need to pay attention to, like the warnings you might read in the directions of some power tool. These are things that can do great work, but using their power carelessly, or in the wrong way, can do great harm.
The first warning is that the second coming is not for us to speculate about or make predictions. I think that one of the reasons why we in the mainline Protestant and Catholic churches don’t talk very often about the second coming of Christ is that there’s not much to tell in terms of specifics. There have been lots of people who think they know just how it will happen and event the date, but in century after century they have always been wrong, and the more they speculate, the more ridiculous the whole thing seems. Jesus said “about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the son, but only the father.” Speculation and the prediction are dead ends. It’s got to be more than that.
The second warning is this: we can never assume that our own politics or agenda will be served by the second coming. This is not the time when all our enemies get what’s coming to them. This is the other problem with the predictors: it just happens that their enemies turn out to be the enemies of Christ. For years it was Russia who would be defeated by a triumphant returning Christ. Then it was Baghdad, the site of ancient Babylon and our newest enemy, and now it may be Iran. For those who didn’t like the United Nations, they predicted an anti-Christ there, and even in this country, political rivals are named the enemy of Christ in anonymous writings. All of this makes the mistake of thinking that when Christ comes back he will be different than he was before – as if he will make the world right by destroying his enemies. This kind of vengeance is totally at odds with the character of God, revealed to us in Jesus, who offered healing not only to the poor and powerless of Israel, but to Roman soldiers who occupied their land. He offered forgiveness not only to repentant sinners, but to the ones who crucified him. When Jesus comes to make all things new, he won’t do it by destroying evil but by transforming it, and reconciling all of creation to God. Any vision of the second coming which imagines that God would cause violence and suffering to increase goes against the life of Jesus Christ.
A third warning: Do not wait for God to do everything for us. When we read the New Testament, remember that these people expected Jesus to return within their lifetimes. And so Paul is writing to some of them who have decided that it doesn’t make much sense to plant crops, tend animals, or do maintenance on their homes. It’s not going to last anyway. Paul tells them to get back to the sacred work of caring for one another. Christ came and showed us how to live, told us to love other as he loves us. Showed us that peace can stand up to violence, love can conquer fear, and grace can transform hatred. It isn’t complete yet, but it has been started. Jesus said the kingdom of God is among you, so instead of waiting for God to make everything new in the end, we can work in our corner of the world to make it new right now.
Advent calls us to do just that. In our national news we’ve been following this strange time between the election and the inauguration of our new president, a time every four or eight years when the President-Elect has to wait until inauguration, but in the waiting there is much great work to be done. There’s always a transition team bringing great skill and creativity to their work. This is our image for Advent. We know what’s going to happen but it hasn’t happened yet, and we are God’s transition team. We can’t solve every problem or cure every ill. But we can solve this problem. We can cure this ill. We can give a bit more of ourselves, of our resources, our time, our love and attention to someone else. And how freeing it is to know it finally doesn’t depend on us alone, because God’s going to have the last word. We trust in the second coming not with specific predictions but with our faith put into action.
In this season of Advent, I invite you to do more than preparing for the celebration of Christmas with presents and treats and decorations. Those things are wonderful expressions of our joy, and they make this a magical time of year, but I invite you to let them be just the beginning of our preparation. Let us prepare for the coming of Christ by finding ways to create the kind of world that God will bring to completion.
You might suggest to certain people that instead of exchanging gifts, you might make donations in each other’s names, like a check to the Akron-Canton Foodbank or to the United Church of Christ Neighbors in Need fund.
You might send a card or even a dinner invitation to that person you are finally ready to forgive, because not forgiving is causing you too much hurt.
You might simply create a time of quiet this week at dinner to light one candle for hope, and two candles the next week, then three and four. Light candles and pray for God to heal this world. Light candles as a way to keep watch in the night.
Jesus tells his disciples to “keep awake,” and that is the word for the season of Advent. We wait in a night that often seems dark and cold, and we watch for God to come into the world and into our lives with a new movement of God’s soul healing grace and world changing love. It will be so, it will be so. Amen
Let us pray:
O God, you came to us a baby lying in a manger, and you dwell among us still. By faith, we trust that you will come again to make all things new. So call us to live in the holy present, help us to respond in these sacred moments to those small broken places where we can share your healing grace. Amen
Monday, December 1, 2008
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Sermon - Mixed Blessings
First preached on November 2, 2008, All Saints' Day, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio UCC.
Matthew 5:1-12
Dedicated to my Uncle Michael; and always to the glory of God.
Jesus begins his sermon on the mount by telling us the surprising news of the people who really have it great. They are blessed, he says – which translates better as “happy!” They are blessed and happy. The latin prase is Beatitude, and so that’s what we’ve come to name this magnificent section of the gospel: the beatitudes.
A minister I know once went to the bedside of an elderly woman, who was dying – they both knew it. He asked if there was anything he could do for her, and she said, “why don’t you take that Bible there and read the Beatitudes. My mother used to read those to us all the time. I didn’t understand them as a child, still wrestle with them today.”
And so he read those words, just as we heard them read this morning. Afterward there was silence, and then she said to him “I don’t know. Kind of sounds like a mixed blessing.” She was right.[1]
The problem is that the ones Jesus calls blessed do not look much like the people we would generally consider blessed – assuming, that is, that being blessed has something to do with being well off, comfortable, entertained, and healthy. That’s what we usually mean by the words blessed and happy. So what do we do with what Jesus says, that you are blessed if you are poor in spirit, mournful, meek, and persecuted? Even the nice sounding ones are a good bit of work: to be merciful, peacemakers, pure of heart, or to hunger for righteousness.
It’s not the kind of list we are used to, but then isn’t that why we are here – shift our perspective, to change our paradigm, to realign our direction. After Jesus is baptized, the first words out of his mouth are “repent, the kingdom of God is near.” Repent – it means turn around, go in a new direction. And the reason we turn around, the reason we trade in our old list of blessings for a new one is because the kingdom of God is near, and we can enter it right now. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Listen to how Eugene Peterson translates that teaching:
“You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God.” Sometimes it takes the failure of our old blessing system before we are ready to live in the kingdom of God.
Dick Howser was a baseball player in the major leagues and went on to manage the Royals and the Yankees. His wife Nancy used to say “it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” I remember learning that myself as a child, don’t you? And Dick would say to her, “that’s very nice, but in the real world, you’ve got to win.”
Then he got two brain tumors, and had to resign from baseball, and life wasn’t so certain anymore. Looking back, he saw that the real world had taught him “blessed are those who believe in themselves for theirs is the kingdom of success.” But two tumors taught him that “the gospel of self-sufficiency needs to move over and give room to divine dependence.”[2]
What would be our wake-up call to tell us that the blessing system designed for the kingdom of success isn’t working and isn’t worth it? What is the wake-up call? That might come in different ways for each of us, but on this day, I want to suggest that it will come from listening to our ancestors, the saints who have gone before us.
The finality of death and the memory of our ancestors has a way of re-ordering our priorities in a wonderful way, and that is partly the reason why we take this day to remember our saints, and this is partly their gift to us.
One of the great privileges in my ministry is to be with families when someone has died. We gather in a room and we make arrangements for the memorial service, and then I get to hear the family stories. I want to tell you that the most treasured memories, the gifts that mean the most, are not their successes and achievements, awards or titles, proud as we may be of those honors. The most important stories have to do with the blessings in the Beatitudes. We tell stories of challenges faced and faith deepened, of mourning in sadness and finding comfort and strength, of making peace in the face of conflict and strife, and of being pure of heart when surrounded by corruption, by jealousy, by greed. In the last accounting of a life, those are the stories we tell, the lessons we take, the gifts that we receive.
So why then, do we get stuck in this thinking that what life is really about is keeping everything smooth, secure, and fun? We want to make ourselves invulnerable to heartache, sadness, and pain, and the longer we can walk that tightrope, the more we consider ourselves blessed. We make the pain-free, struggle-free life our goal. Even worse, we make it our responsibility, so much so that when something does inevitably go wrong, we actually blame ourselves.
And yet, when we remember our saints, when we think about their lives, we realize that we often saw their best when they faced challenges: when they were poor in spirit, mourning, even persecuted – when they had said and done things for which they needed mercy. It was in those times that they found the blessings of God: when they received comfort, when they received mercy, when they found the kingdom of God that cannot be taken away by our pain, our mistakes, our failures, or our grief.
The beatitudes remind us that God does not promise to take away sadness or pain or even death, not in this life. In this life, hardship comes to everyone. The kingdom of God does not mean a short cut to easy street. What it means is that even when we face the tough times that are a part of every life, our suffering does not define who we are. We will not be remembered by the number of nights we went to bed with full stomachs, the worth of our home or the size of our bank accounts. We will be remembered, rather, by the number of nights we went to bed with a peaceful soul, the worth of our mercy, and the size of our love.
Funny how often we lose sight of all that. Funny how quickly we fall back into thinking that being blessed and happy is about being well off, comfortable, entertained and healthy. And I’m not saying that there’s something wrong with any of that. We should take care of our bodies and our homes; we’d be irresponsible not to. But if we get really good at taking care of ourselves, then we need a word of warning that we are in danger of thinking that we are not dependent on God but only ourselves.
On All Saints’ Day, let their lives be that warning, that reminder, that wake-up call to us, that we might seek a different set of blessings. The path to the beatitudes begins when we join with the poor in spirit to remember that even we who like to declare our independence really need to make a declaration of dependence on God. “You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God.” More of God is no mixed blessing. It is what we’ve been longing for all along.
[1] Dr. Richard Wing, from his sermon titled “The Fifty-first State”
[2] Quoted by Dr. Richard Wing, in his sermon titled “The Fifty-first State”
Matthew 5:1-12
Dedicated to my Uncle Michael; and always to the glory of God.
Jesus begins his sermon on the mount by telling us the surprising news of the people who really have it great. They are blessed, he says – which translates better as “happy!” They are blessed and happy. The latin prase is Beatitude, and so that’s what we’ve come to name this magnificent section of the gospel: the beatitudes.
A minister I know once went to the bedside of an elderly woman, who was dying – they both knew it. He asked if there was anything he could do for her, and she said, “why don’t you take that Bible there and read the Beatitudes. My mother used to read those to us all the time. I didn’t understand them as a child, still wrestle with them today.”
And so he read those words, just as we heard them read this morning. Afterward there was silence, and then she said to him “I don’t know. Kind of sounds like a mixed blessing.” She was right.[1]
The problem is that the ones Jesus calls blessed do not look much like the people we would generally consider blessed – assuming, that is, that being blessed has something to do with being well off, comfortable, entertained, and healthy. That’s what we usually mean by the words blessed and happy. So what do we do with what Jesus says, that you are blessed if you are poor in spirit, mournful, meek, and persecuted? Even the nice sounding ones are a good bit of work: to be merciful, peacemakers, pure of heart, or to hunger for righteousness.
It’s not the kind of list we are used to, but then isn’t that why we are here – shift our perspective, to change our paradigm, to realign our direction. After Jesus is baptized, the first words out of his mouth are “repent, the kingdom of God is near.” Repent – it means turn around, go in a new direction. And the reason we turn around, the reason we trade in our old list of blessings for a new one is because the kingdom of God is near, and we can enter it right now. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Listen to how Eugene Peterson translates that teaching:
“You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God.” Sometimes it takes the failure of our old blessing system before we are ready to live in the kingdom of God.
Dick Howser was a baseball player in the major leagues and went on to manage the Royals and the Yankees. His wife Nancy used to say “it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” I remember learning that myself as a child, don’t you? And Dick would say to her, “that’s very nice, but in the real world, you’ve got to win.”
Then he got two brain tumors, and had to resign from baseball, and life wasn’t so certain anymore. Looking back, he saw that the real world had taught him “blessed are those who believe in themselves for theirs is the kingdom of success.” But two tumors taught him that “the gospel of self-sufficiency needs to move over and give room to divine dependence.”[2]
What would be our wake-up call to tell us that the blessing system designed for the kingdom of success isn’t working and isn’t worth it? What is the wake-up call? That might come in different ways for each of us, but on this day, I want to suggest that it will come from listening to our ancestors, the saints who have gone before us.
The finality of death and the memory of our ancestors has a way of re-ordering our priorities in a wonderful way, and that is partly the reason why we take this day to remember our saints, and this is partly their gift to us.
One of the great privileges in my ministry is to be with families when someone has died. We gather in a room and we make arrangements for the memorial service, and then I get to hear the family stories. I want to tell you that the most treasured memories, the gifts that mean the most, are not their successes and achievements, awards or titles, proud as we may be of those honors. The most important stories have to do with the blessings in the Beatitudes. We tell stories of challenges faced and faith deepened, of mourning in sadness and finding comfort and strength, of making peace in the face of conflict and strife, and of being pure of heart when surrounded by corruption, by jealousy, by greed. In the last accounting of a life, those are the stories we tell, the lessons we take, the gifts that we receive.
So why then, do we get stuck in this thinking that what life is really about is keeping everything smooth, secure, and fun? We want to make ourselves invulnerable to heartache, sadness, and pain, and the longer we can walk that tightrope, the more we consider ourselves blessed. We make the pain-free, struggle-free life our goal. Even worse, we make it our responsibility, so much so that when something does inevitably go wrong, we actually blame ourselves.
And yet, when we remember our saints, when we think about their lives, we realize that we often saw their best when they faced challenges: when they were poor in spirit, mourning, even persecuted – when they had said and done things for which they needed mercy. It was in those times that they found the blessings of God: when they received comfort, when they received mercy, when they found the kingdom of God that cannot be taken away by our pain, our mistakes, our failures, or our grief.
The beatitudes remind us that God does not promise to take away sadness or pain or even death, not in this life. In this life, hardship comes to everyone. The kingdom of God does not mean a short cut to easy street. What it means is that even when we face the tough times that are a part of every life, our suffering does not define who we are. We will not be remembered by the number of nights we went to bed with full stomachs, the worth of our home or the size of our bank accounts. We will be remembered, rather, by the number of nights we went to bed with a peaceful soul, the worth of our mercy, and the size of our love.
Funny how often we lose sight of all that. Funny how quickly we fall back into thinking that being blessed and happy is about being well off, comfortable, entertained and healthy. And I’m not saying that there’s something wrong with any of that. We should take care of our bodies and our homes; we’d be irresponsible not to. But if we get really good at taking care of ourselves, then we need a word of warning that we are in danger of thinking that we are not dependent on God but only ourselves.
On All Saints’ Day, let their lives be that warning, that reminder, that wake-up call to us, that we might seek a different set of blessings. The path to the beatitudes begins when we join with the poor in spirit to remember that even we who like to declare our independence really need to make a declaration of dependence on God. “You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God.” More of God is no mixed blessing. It is what we’ve been longing for all along.
[1] Dr. Richard Wing, from his sermon titled “The Fifty-first State”
[2] Quoted by Dr. Richard Wing, in his sermon titled “The Fifty-first State”
Monday, October 20, 2008
Sermon - Good News Travels
Preached on October 19, 2008 at The First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Dedicated to my wife, Betsy Wooster, who inspires me and shows me God’s love in the world; and always to the glory of God.
When we study the history of the church, one of the perplexing questions is how the church grew from the small number of people who had met and known Jesus in Galilee and Jerusalem and the surrounding country, to within three centuries reaching all the way through Asia Minor and Greece, to Rome, the capital of the Empire, and reaching south into Egypt, Ethiopia, and further into Africa. The strange thing about this great growth of the church is that under the Roman Empire in the first three centuries, Christians could be persecuted for their beliefs, arrested because they refused to call Ceasar their Lord, instead claiming only Jesus as Lord. And so, Christianity didn’t grow because they had wonderful worship services, or because there was great preaching. Worship services had to be held in secret, and only those who were already Christian could attend. In a time of persecution, you couldn’t announce a worship service and invite visitors.
So how did the church grow?
The historian Justo Gonzalez tells us that people did not find out about Christianity “in church services, but rather…in kitchens, shops, and markets.” It was in ordinary, everyday relationships that people came to know an invitation to a different kind of life in Jesus Christ. Jesus had told his followers to love one another, and by that love others would know that they were followers of Christ.[1]
Henry Chadwick, in his history of the early church, concluded that “the practical application of charity was probably the most potent single cause of Christian success.” Chadwick describes how “Christian charity” in the early church was expressed in “care for the poor, for widows and orphans, in visits to brethren in prison…and in social action in time of calamity like famine, earthquake, pestilence, or war.”[2]
This morning we heard the beginning of Paul’s letter to the church in Thessalonica, in what is today eastern Greece near the Aegean sea. After his conversion, Paul traveled to many cities to proclaim the message of Jesus Christ and to help local people to begin a Christian community before he moved on to somewhere else. Much of our New Testament is comprised of letters Paul wrote back to these communities after he had left. In this case, Paul has moved northwest to the regions of Macedonia and Achaia, and he writes back to the Thessalonians to tell them what he hears there:
“You became imitators of us and of the Lord; in spite of severe suffering, you welcomed the message with the joy given by the Holy Spirit. And so you became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. The Lord's message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia--your faith in God has become known everywhere. Therefore we do not need to say anything about it”
Good news travels.
When we hear about people doing great things, it inspires us. We want to try it. When we hear about a creative family gathering that got the kids excited, we plan one with our family. When we hear about a great date idea, we want to try it ourselves. When we hear visit someone and admire their goldfish pond or the decorative candles in the dining room, we get an idea that we want to do at our home. And so it is in the life of faith. When we see the kind of love that exists among the faithful, and the depth of meaning in their lives, we want to join them: to surrender ourselves more fully to worship, to service, to spiritual growth.
Faith is not supposed to be a solo act. We need to hear the good news of each other’s lives. So let me share some good news with you.
I want to tell you about Anil and Teresa Henry. Ten years ago, Anil was a surgeon at a hospital in a large U.S. city; Teresa was an anesthesiologist, and they had three children. In the midst of this comfortable life, they felt the call to service that had been nurtured throughout their lives. They contacted Global Minitries of the United Church of Christ to offer their service, and were soon placed as a missionaries to India. They were commissioned at the Avon Lake United Church of Christ, not far from here in Tallmadge. In 2003, Anil and his wife took over Mungeli Hospital in Central India. At the time it had three working light bulbs, no screens, no linens, no beds, and very little equipment. Piece by piece they have made it a working hospital, never asking patients if they have money, but treating everyone as best they can.
Earlier this year, Anil drove 1200 miles to a port to pick up a shipping container full of supplies that had been donated from the U.S. Some of the boxes were marked with the words “packed with love,” sent by people very much like this congregation. One particular piece of equipment was put into use the day it was unloaded: an infant warmer for twins who had been born prematurely. The twins remained in acute care for one month at Mungeli Hospital. Here is what Anil wrote afterward: “The family and the community was amazed as to how we were able to save these small little babies with what little we had. It surely was the beginning of showing the community that with a little hard work and faith, there is so much that we can do.”
Good news travels. The early church thrived on practical applications of charity, and that has not changed. That’s still how the church grows. The same thing happens here and now, in this congregation. For starters, you help to support the Henry’s in India and the many other missionaries and disaster response efforts that we undertake in the United Church of Christ. It is our goal to increase our contribution to the wider mission of our church next year as a part of our stewardship.
It also happens here in very local ways: when you take food to Miller Ave, when you help to host homeless families with Interfaith Hospitality Network, when you buy malaria nets, when you go on mission tours, when you visit people in hospitals and homes, when you listen to veterans and their families, when you support people in illness, or as caregivers, and when you celebrate with them for weddings and babies who are born. Remember all the ministries featured at the ministry fair last Sunday. Or, perhaps, remember this next week when you look at the “ministry story booklet” that you will receive in worship: it tells the stories of this church. Good news travels, and the more good news travels, the more God is at work within us to do even more.
I want to invite you to share our good news. Here’s a quiz for you to see if you are ready to invite others in on what’s going on here, and you can just take this on your own right where you’re sitting.[3]
Let’s say a new family moves into your neighborhood and as you are meeting them, they say “This is exhausting. There’s so much to do. I have to find a new dry cleaner, a new grocery store. Why, we’ll even have to find a new church.”
Would you say…
A: Yeah, moving stinks.
B: I can recommend an outstanding dry cleaner.
C: Yes, I know how hard that is. I’d be glad to steer you toward a few places. And we attend a wonderful church where we feel at home. I’d be glad to tell you about it.
If they say “really, what’s your church like?”
Would you say…
A: Well, we’re like any other, we have our share of problems.
B: To be honest, I don’t get their all that often, so it’s hard to say.C. It’s very welcoming, full of all kinds of great people. I leave worship ready and inspired for the week.
Finally, if they say “Well, I think I’d like to visit your church sometime.”
Would you say…
A: You’re kidding?!
B: Good for you, I was thinking of sleeping in this week.
C: Great, why don’t you come with us. We’ll show you around and afterward we’ll take you all out for brunch.
Telling our good news is easier than you think, and it’s a wrong assumption to think that people are not interested. There is good news here and we have good news to tell about God’s great love for us shown in Jesus Christ, so may we continue the tradition that goes all the way back to those Thessalonians Christians, who became imitators of Jesus with joy, and the love they showed was so great that their good news traveled, and the story continued, and the story continues still…
In the name of the one who gives us life, redeems our lives, and sustains us along the journey. Amen
[1] Gonalez, The Story of Christianity, Volume 1. Page 99
[2] Chadwick, Henrey. The Early Church. Page
[3] Adapted from “Are You Ready to Talk About Your Church?” UCC pamphlet by Rev. Lillian Daniel.
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Dedicated to my wife, Betsy Wooster, who inspires me and shows me God’s love in the world; and always to the glory of God.
When we study the history of the church, one of the perplexing questions is how the church grew from the small number of people who had met and known Jesus in Galilee and Jerusalem and the surrounding country, to within three centuries reaching all the way through Asia Minor and Greece, to Rome, the capital of the Empire, and reaching south into Egypt, Ethiopia, and further into Africa. The strange thing about this great growth of the church is that under the Roman Empire in the first three centuries, Christians could be persecuted for their beliefs, arrested because they refused to call Ceasar their Lord, instead claiming only Jesus as Lord. And so, Christianity didn’t grow because they had wonderful worship services, or because there was great preaching. Worship services had to be held in secret, and only those who were already Christian could attend. In a time of persecution, you couldn’t announce a worship service and invite visitors.
So how did the church grow?
The historian Justo Gonzalez tells us that people did not find out about Christianity “in church services, but rather…in kitchens, shops, and markets.” It was in ordinary, everyday relationships that people came to know an invitation to a different kind of life in Jesus Christ. Jesus had told his followers to love one another, and by that love others would know that they were followers of Christ.[1]
Henry Chadwick, in his history of the early church, concluded that “the practical application of charity was probably the most potent single cause of Christian success.” Chadwick describes how “Christian charity” in the early church was expressed in “care for the poor, for widows and orphans, in visits to brethren in prison…and in social action in time of calamity like famine, earthquake, pestilence, or war.”[2]
This morning we heard the beginning of Paul’s letter to the church in Thessalonica, in what is today eastern Greece near the Aegean sea. After his conversion, Paul traveled to many cities to proclaim the message of Jesus Christ and to help local people to begin a Christian community before he moved on to somewhere else. Much of our New Testament is comprised of letters Paul wrote back to these communities after he had left. In this case, Paul has moved northwest to the regions of Macedonia and Achaia, and he writes back to the Thessalonians to tell them what he hears there:
“You became imitators of us and of the Lord; in spite of severe suffering, you welcomed the message with the joy given by the Holy Spirit. And so you became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. The Lord's message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia--your faith in God has become known everywhere. Therefore we do not need to say anything about it”
Good news travels.
When we hear about people doing great things, it inspires us. We want to try it. When we hear about a creative family gathering that got the kids excited, we plan one with our family. When we hear about a great date idea, we want to try it ourselves. When we hear visit someone and admire their goldfish pond or the decorative candles in the dining room, we get an idea that we want to do at our home. And so it is in the life of faith. When we see the kind of love that exists among the faithful, and the depth of meaning in their lives, we want to join them: to surrender ourselves more fully to worship, to service, to spiritual growth.
Faith is not supposed to be a solo act. We need to hear the good news of each other’s lives. So let me share some good news with you.
I want to tell you about Anil and Teresa Henry. Ten years ago, Anil was a surgeon at a hospital in a large U.S. city; Teresa was an anesthesiologist, and they had three children. In the midst of this comfortable life, they felt the call to service that had been nurtured throughout their lives. They contacted Global Minitries of the United Church of Christ to offer their service, and were soon placed as a missionaries to India. They were commissioned at the Avon Lake United Church of Christ, not far from here in Tallmadge. In 2003, Anil and his wife took over Mungeli Hospital in Central India. At the time it had three working light bulbs, no screens, no linens, no beds, and very little equipment. Piece by piece they have made it a working hospital, never asking patients if they have money, but treating everyone as best they can.
Earlier this year, Anil drove 1200 miles to a port to pick up a shipping container full of supplies that had been donated from the U.S. Some of the boxes were marked with the words “packed with love,” sent by people very much like this congregation. One particular piece of equipment was put into use the day it was unloaded: an infant warmer for twins who had been born prematurely. The twins remained in acute care for one month at Mungeli Hospital. Here is what Anil wrote afterward: “The family and the community was amazed as to how we were able to save these small little babies with what little we had. It surely was the beginning of showing the community that with a little hard work and faith, there is so much that we can do.”
Good news travels. The early church thrived on practical applications of charity, and that has not changed. That’s still how the church grows. The same thing happens here and now, in this congregation. For starters, you help to support the Henry’s in India and the many other missionaries and disaster response efforts that we undertake in the United Church of Christ. It is our goal to increase our contribution to the wider mission of our church next year as a part of our stewardship.
It also happens here in very local ways: when you take food to Miller Ave, when you help to host homeless families with Interfaith Hospitality Network, when you buy malaria nets, when you go on mission tours, when you visit people in hospitals and homes, when you listen to veterans and their families, when you support people in illness, or as caregivers, and when you celebrate with them for weddings and babies who are born. Remember all the ministries featured at the ministry fair last Sunday. Or, perhaps, remember this next week when you look at the “ministry story booklet” that you will receive in worship: it tells the stories of this church. Good news travels, and the more good news travels, the more God is at work within us to do even more.
I want to invite you to share our good news. Here’s a quiz for you to see if you are ready to invite others in on what’s going on here, and you can just take this on your own right where you’re sitting.[3]
Let’s say a new family moves into your neighborhood and as you are meeting them, they say “This is exhausting. There’s so much to do. I have to find a new dry cleaner, a new grocery store. Why, we’ll even have to find a new church.”
Would you say…
A: Yeah, moving stinks.
B: I can recommend an outstanding dry cleaner.
C: Yes, I know how hard that is. I’d be glad to steer you toward a few places. And we attend a wonderful church where we feel at home. I’d be glad to tell you about it.
If they say “really, what’s your church like?”
Would you say…
A: Well, we’re like any other, we have our share of problems.
B: To be honest, I don’t get their all that often, so it’s hard to say.C. It’s very welcoming, full of all kinds of great people. I leave worship ready and inspired for the week.
Finally, if they say “Well, I think I’d like to visit your church sometime.”
Would you say…
A: You’re kidding?!
B: Good for you, I was thinking of sleeping in this week.
C: Great, why don’t you come with us. We’ll show you around and afterward we’ll take you all out for brunch.
Telling our good news is easier than you think, and it’s a wrong assumption to think that people are not interested. There is good news here and we have good news to tell about God’s great love for us shown in Jesus Christ, so may we continue the tradition that goes all the way back to those Thessalonians Christians, who became imitators of Jesus with joy, and the love they showed was so great that their good news traveled, and the story continued, and the story continues still…
In the name of the one who gives us life, redeems our lives, and sustains us along the journey. Amen
[1] Gonalez, The Story of Christianity, Volume 1. Page 99
[2] Chadwick, Henrey. The Early Church. Page
[3] Adapted from “Are You Ready to Talk About Your Church?” UCC pamphlet by Rev. Lillian Daniel.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Economic Crisis
In the midst this economic crisis, and the central crisis of the housing market collapse, I’m reminded of the widows who lost their houses in a long-ago time.
In a part of the gospels of Mark and Luke seldom noticed, Jesus speaks to the corruption of the religious leadership in Jerusalem : the scribes who were charged with applying the laws of the scripture to their society. They were supposed to be true to God’s word of justice and good news to the poor. Instead, the religious leaders were padding their own wallets while the ones in greatest need lost out. Jesus was always very forgiving of people who had sinned, but when he conf ron ts sin perpetrated in the name of religion, he lets them have it:
“Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows' houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.” (Mark 12:38-40).
The Biblical scholar Douglas Hare tells us how the scribes used their position of legal power to defraud a widow of their late husband’s estate. This was at a time when women were not allowed to speak in a courtroom. Unless the vulnerable widow had a son or brother who could present her case, she was easy prey to those in power. The precarious fate of widows in that era explains why scripture so often commands generosity and special concern for widows (and orphans). God’s will, revealed in scripture, was the moral conscience for a society where too many were left out.
I don’t know how to fix the economic crisis. I’m trying to understand it, and I’ve learned a lot about the stock, housing, and credit markets and the complex mechanisms that guide them, but I’m not in a position to advocate any particular solution. What I can do, and what I believe the church must do, is to be a moral conscience for our society. We should proclaim that those without power should not be left out of our public policy. We should demand a society in which the ones with power do not promote their own success by devouring the houses of the vulnerable, but instead work for the good of everyone, no exceptions.
In a part of the gospels of Mark and Luke seldom noticed, Jesus speaks to the corruption of the religious leadership in Jerusalem : the scribes who were charged with applying the laws of the scripture to their society. They were supposed to be true to God’s word of justice and good news to the poor. Instead, the religious leaders were padding their own wallets while the ones in greatest need lost out. Jesus was always very forgiving of people who had sinned, but when he conf ron ts sin perpetrated in the name of religion, he lets them have it:
“Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows' houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.” (Mark 12:38-40).
The Biblical scholar Douglas Hare tells us how the scribes used their position of legal power to defraud a widow of their late husband’s estate. This was at a time when women were not allowed to speak in a courtroom. Unless the vulnerable widow had a son or brother who could present her case, she was easy prey to those in power. The precarious fate of widows in that era explains why scripture so often commands generosity and special concern for widows (and orphans). God’s will, revealed in scripture, was the moral conscience for a society where too many were left out.
I don’t know how to fix the economic crisis. I’m trying to understand it, and I’ve learned a lot about the stock, housing, and credit markets and the complex mechanisms that guide them, but I’m not in a position to advocate any particular solution. What I can do, and what I believe the church must do, is to be a moral conscience for our society. We should proclaim that those without power should not be left out of our public policy. We should demand a society in which the ones with power do not promote their own success by devouring the houses of the vulnerable, but instead work for the good of everyone, no exceptions.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Let's Climb a Tree
Zacchaeus was a tax collector for the Roman Empire in his little town in Israel. Rome had taken power in Israel , as they had most everywhere else, and they levied large taxes on the conquered people, not for infrastructure or social services, but for the wealth and power of Rome . To collect the taxes, they found a local who was willing to work for them and supplied him with armed soldiers to get the money. That was Zacchaeus. He knocked on his neighbors doors on behalf of the empire, and he made his own salary by collecting more than Rome had demanded and pocketing the difference. He was sort of like the mafia collecting “protection money.”
What he was doing was w ron g, but it was working for him. I wonder if his old friends and neighbors ever tried to talk him out of it? Did they argue with him, pointing out his faults? And, if so, did Zacchaeus get defensive and argue back, adopting the Roman talking points about “Pax Romana,” the peace of the empire?
But argument is a poor way to change someone’s mind. It was Paul Tournier who said “I remember changing my mind during a heated argument only once in a long life.”
When Jesus finally met Zacchaeus and changed his life, he did it without argument. Jesus didn’t even mention the tax business or Zacchaeus’ corrupt wealth. All Jesus did was to look up in the tree that Zacchaeus had climbed in order to get a look (the townspeople, out of spite, had blocked him out at the roadside). Jesus looked up and told Zacchaeus that he wanted to share a meal with him.
I agree with Tournier. I don’t become a better person because someone argues with me. I become a better person by the power of God’s grace, shown to me in people who say to me by their actions, “I value you. You are a person of great worth.”
When life is going well for us we don’t look for changes. When we are comfortable, we don’t look for anything to upset our comfort. We don’t ask hard questions. Zacchaeus was living comfortably. He was wealthy, and he had power in his position. Why did he climb the tree? What was it in him that wanted to see Jesus? What was it that wanted to climb a tree and look at a different way of life? I wonder what trees we might need to climb?
And I wonder about us not just as individuals, but together as a people. We live in the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth, and that’s what Zacchaeus was in his town. I wonder what a conversion for our nation would look like. Can we, together, climb a tree, hoping to see this son of God who can show us a better way?
What he was doing was w ron g, but it was working for him. I wonder if his old friends and neighbors ever tried to talk him out of it? Did they argue with him, pointing out his faults? And, if so, did Zacchaeus get defensive and argue back, adopting the Roman talking points about “Pax Romana,” the peace of the empire?
But argument is a poor way to change someone’s mind. It was Paul Tournier who said “I remember changing my mind during a heated argument only once in a long life.”
When Jesus finally met Zacchaeus and changed his life, he did it without argument. Jesus didn’t even mention the tax business or Zacchaeus’ corrupt wealth. All Jesus did was to look up in the tree that Zacchaeus had climbed in order to get a look (the townspeople, out of spite, had blocked him out at the roadside). Jesus looked up and told Zacchaeus that he wanted to share a meal with him.
I agree with Tournier. I don’t become a better person because someone argues with me. I become a better person by the power of God’s grace, shown to me in people who say to me by their actions, “I value you. You are a person of great worth.”
When life is going well for us we don’t look for changes. When we are comfortable, we don’t look for anything to upset our comfort. We don’t ask hard questions. Zacchaeus was living comfortably. He was wealthy, and he had power in his position. Why did he climb the tree? What was it in him that wanted to see Jesus? What was it that wanted to climb a tree and look at a different way of life? I wonder what trees we might need to climb?
And I wonder about us not just as individuals, but together as a people. We live in the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth, and that’s what Zacchaeus was in his town. I wonder what a conversion for our nation would look like. Can we, together, climb a tree, hoping to see this son of God who can show us a better way?
Sermon - No Way to Run a Business
Preached on September 21, 2008 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.
Matthew 20:1-15
If you run a business, this parable will drive you nuts. It’s a parable about a vineyard owner and the workers he hires, but as a model for owning a business or labor relations, it’s a mess from top to bottom.
It’s a twelve hour day in the vineyard, and he hires some workers at the beginning, and then others for nine hours, six hours, three hours, and finally a few more for one last hour in the workday. Some are full-time and some are part-time. No problem. But when the foreman starts to hand out the pay and he begins with the one-hour workers, things go awry. The one-hour workers each get a denarius. Now we remember from the beginning of the parable that a denarius is the wage that the first workers agreed to when they were hired at 6 AM. The owner went out first thing and found workers who agreed on one denarius for one day. In the original greek phrasing, it’s understood that agreed wage means the negotiated wage. So one denarius seemed like enough for the workers, and the owner thought it was not too much: it must be a fair wage. Later in the day, when the owner hired the other workers, he simply said “I’ll pay you what is fair” without negotiation. They were probably happy just to get work.
But now, at the end of the day, the one-hour workers get the full denarius, so the other workers know that this is about to get ridiculous in one way or the other. For a brief moment, they think it might get ridiculous in their favor. “Hey this guy doesn’t pay a denarius per day, he pays one per hour! Now each set of workers is mentally adding up their pay according to the number of hours they worked: three, six, nine, twelve denari. That’s what they might earn in two weeks! What a great job!
Alas, the fantasy is short-lived. As the foreman distributes the pay, it’s one denarius apiece for everyone. So it got ridiculous the other way. How can this be? They demand. How can it be fair to pay the same to those of us who worked in the heat of the day as the guys who barely had time to put their gloves on?
Now, you don’t need to be in business to guess the result. When tomorrow’s workday begins at the vineyard, do you think that a single worker will show up before 5 o’clock? Why work all day when the pay’s the same? And that’s if the full-timers come back at all, having been taken advantage of and humiliated. The owner says it’s his right to be generous, but it is also unfair. It does not inspire hard work or loyalty. It’s no way to run a business.
But of course, this parable is not about business. Now that we’re worked up about the unfairness and incompetence of this as a business story, we remember that Jesus introduced the story by saying “the kingdom of heaven is like….” This parable is about the kingdom of God, and things work differently there. There are a lot of places where we need fairness. We need fair evaluation of test scores and fair legal judgments. We need objective standards instead of insider deals. We need transparency and honesty in financial books and boardrooms. And we need equal pay for equal work. That’s all true. But that’s not what Jesus is talking about.
The grace of God is not about fairness, and for that we may be eternally thankful. The grace of God has nothing to do with what we have earned, or what we deserve. In this case, merit is the last standard we want to have applied. The only standard for God’s grace is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the wideness of his mercy, the power of his love.
The vineyard in this parable is not a business model, and Jesus is not giving a management seminar. The vineyard stands for the kingdom of God, and this would not have been a strange image to the people of the first century. In the prophet Isaiah, the people of Israel were portrayed as God’s vineyard which has gone bad because the people have ignored God’s will. When Jesus told his disciples “I am the vine, and you are the branches,” that was a vineyard metaphor. The vineyard in our parable today is not a business; it is the community of God, working to bear Godly fruit, and to this vineyard everyone is invited by the generous grace of God.
Everyone is invited. Just like another parable in which God is the shepherd who searches for his lost sheep, so God is now the vineyard owner who goes out to the marketplace again and again and again to invite people into the vineyard. And so we as the church continue to extend God’s welcome: an invitation to join in this great and compelling life of faith. This act of welcome is so central to our identity that we are in the midst of a construction project that is designed as a tool that allows us to be as welcoming as we can be. It is designed to remind us that this welcome goes beyond these walls. Our spirit of welcome goes out again and again, at the sixth hour, the ninth hour, the eleventh hour.
I am struck by the conversation the owner has with the workers at the eleventh hour. He asks them “why are you still standing here idle?” And they tell him the difficult truth: “because no one has hired us.”
The biblical scholar J. Ellsworth Kalas[1] tells the story of coming home from school one day to the surprising sight of his father at home at mid-afternoon. He asks what has happened, and in the silence of his father’s response, his mother says “your father lost his job.” This was a revelation for Kalas, because before that day he hadn’t known that good people could lose their jobs. He had grown up thinking that the unemployed were lazy, uncommitted, bad workers. He didn’t know that a person who wanted to work would have any trouble finding it. Think about those last people whom the vineyard owner found at 5 o’clock: “no one has hired us.”
This parable reminds us of the terrible burden of unemployment. What becomes of us when our work is not valued, when we are unwanted? And since the vineyard represents the kingdom of God, we should also ask who is left standing around because no one has told them that they are welcome, that they are valued? No one has told them that there is a great calling for their lives, to give them to something meaningful, to a cause that is worth our work and even our sacrifice. Why are they standing around? Because no one has shown them that they are loved beyond measure.
In this place we worship one who tells us that we have been created for great things. Here we remember that life is not just about taking care of ourselves. Here we are called to look out for one another, to join in a community that cares for the vulnerable, that seeks peace, and lives justly. Here we allow God’s love to make us new, that we may love others not according to their merit, not according to how deserving or lovable they are, but simply because God has first loved us. This life is worth inviting everyone in on, and it doesn’t matter if you start early or late, just join in; we want everyone.
And now we know why the 12-hour workers complained. They were the ones who made a deal: one days’ work for one denarius. They had negotiated a deal, so when the owner is generous, that doesn’t work for them. I wonder, how many of us think that we have negotiated a deal with God? I’ll do this for God, and God will do this for me. If I’m good, then God will keep me safe. If I give enough, then God will cure my ills and solve my problems. If I don’t mess up, then God will love me. Consciously or unconsciously, we have our deal worked out, and so we try to keep up our end. And that’s why we get upset when God’s love is given just the same to those who haven’t lived up to our deal. It’s not fair for them to be treated the same as us!
To which God says “fair? You want fair? You’ve never gotten fair and you wouldn’t want it.”
When we are generally good and when life is good to us, and when that goes on for a long enough time, we gradually forget that we are totally dependent on the grace of God. We think that we’re just working out our little deal. We forget that all our work in the vineyard of God’s kingdom is not to earn us greater rewards – it is its own reward. It is its own reward because when we are in the vineyard, we are not standing around waiting for something to give our lives meaning. When we are in the vineyard, we get to be the ones who hold open the doors and throw the welcome party. This is what we get to do every day, wherever we go: sharing God’s love, sharing God’s generosity, sharing the fruit of God’s vineyard. That’s what we get to do, and it’s such a great gig, we get together every week to do it together right here in this sanctuary, with praise and thanksgiving.
[1] Kalas, J. Ellsworth, Parables from the Back Side.
Matthew 20:1-15
If you run a business, this parable will drive you nuts. It’s a parable about a vineyard owner and the workers he hires, but as a model for owning a business or labor relations, it’s a mess from top to bottom.
It’s a twelve hour day in the vineyard, and he hires some workers at the beginning, and then others for nine hours, six hours, three hours, and finally a few more for one last hour in the workday. Some are full-time and some are part-time. No problem. But when the foreman starts to hand out the pay and he begins with the one-hour workers, things go awry. The one-hour workers each get a denarius. Now we remember from the beginning of the parable that a denarius is the wage that the first workers agreed to when they were hired at 6 AM. The owner went out first thing and found workers who agreed on one denarius for one day. In the original greek phrasing, it’s understood that agreed wage means the negotiated wage. So one denarius seemed like enough for the workers, and the owner thought it was not too much: it must be a fair wage. Later in the day, when the owner hired the other workers, he simply said “I’ll pay you what is fair” without negotiation. They were probably happy just to get work.
But now, at the end of the day, the one-hour workers get the full denarius, so the other workers know that this is about to get ridiculous in one way or the other. For a brief moment, they think it might get ridiculous in their favor. “Hey this guy doesn’t pay a denarius per day, he pays one per hour! Now each set of workers is mentally adding up their pay according to the number of hours they worked: three, six, nine, twelve denari. That’s what they might earn in two weeks! What a great job!
Alas, the fantasy is short-lived. As the foreman distributes the pay, it’s one denarius apiece for everyone. So it got ridiculous the other way. How can this be? They demand. How can it be fair to pay the same to those of us who worked in the heat of the day as the guys who barely had time to put their gloves on?
Now, you don’t need to be in business to guess the result. When tomorrow’s workday begins at the vineyard, do you think that a single worker will show up before 5 o’clock? Why work all day when the pay’s the same? And that’s if the full-timers come back at all, having been taken advantage of and humiliated. The owner says it’s his right to be generous, but it is also unfair. It does not inspire hard work or loyalty. It’s no way to run a business.
But of course, this parable is not about business. Now that we’re worked up about the unfairness and incompetence of this as a business story, we remember that Jesus introduced the story by saying “the kingdom of heaven is like….” This parable is about the kingdom of God, and things work differently there. There are a lot of places where we need fairness. We need fair evaluation of test scores and fair legal judgments. We need objective standards instead of insider deals. We need transparency and honesty in financial books and boardrooms. And we need equal pay for equal work. That’s all true. But that’s not what Jesus is talking about.
The grace of God is not about fairness, and for that we may be eternally thankful. The grace of God has nothing to do with what we have earned, or what we deserve. In this case, merit is the last standard we want to have applied. The only standard for God’s grace is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the wideness of his mercy, the power of his love.
The vineyard in this parable is not a business model, and Jesus is not giving a management seminar. The vineyard stands for the kingdom of God, and this would not have been a strange image to the people of the first century. In the prophet Isaiah, the people of Israel were portrayed as God’s vineyard which has gone bad because the people have ignored God’s will. When Jesus told his disciples “I am the vine, and you are the branches,” that was a vineyard metaphor. The vineyard in our parable today is not a business; it is the community of God, working to bear Godly fruit, and to this vineyard everyone is invited by the generous grace of God.
Everyone is invited. Just like another parable in which God is the shepherd who searches for his lost sheep, so God is now the vineyard owner who goes out to the marketplace again and again and again to invite people into the vineyard. And so we as the church continue to extend God’s welcome: an invitation to join in this great and compelling life of faith. This act of welcome is so central to our identity that we are in the midst of a construction project that is designed as a tool that allows us to be as welcoming as we can be. It is designed to remind us that this welcome goes beyond these walls. Our spirit of welcome goes out again and again, at the sixth hour, the ninth hour, the eleventh hour.
I am struck by the conversation the owner has with the workers at the eleventh hour. He asks them “why are you still standing here idle?” And they tell him the difficult truth: “because no one has hired us.”
The biblical scholar J. Ellsworth Kalas[1] tells the story of coming home from school one day to the surprising sight of his father at home at mid-afternoon. He asks what has happened, and in the silence of his father’s response, his mother says “your father lost his job.” This was a revelation for Kalas, because before that day he hadn’t known that good people could lose their jobs. He had grown up thinking that the unemployed were lazy, uncommitted, bad workers. He didn’t know that a person who wanted to work would have any trouble finding it. Think about those last people whom the vineyard owner found at 5 o’clock: “no one has hired us.”
This parable reminds us of the terrible burden of unemployment. What becomes of us when our work is not valued, when we are unwanted? And since the vineyard represents the kingdom of God, we should also ask who is left standing around because no one has told them that they are welcome, that they are valued? No one has told them that there is a great calling for their lives, to give them to something meaningful, to a cause that is worth our work and even our sacrifice. Why are they standing around? Because no one has shown them that they are loved beyond measure.
In this place we worship one who tells us that we have been created for great things. Here we remember that life is not just about taking care of ourselves. Here we are called to look out for one another, to join in a community that cares for the vulnerable, that seeks peace, and lives justly. Here we allow God’s love to make us new, that we may love others not according to their merit, not according to how deserving or lovable they are, but simply because God has first loved us. This life is worth inviting everyone in on, and it doesn’t matter if you start early or late, just join in; we want everyone.
And now we know why the 12-hour workers complained. They were the ones who made a deal: one days’ work for one denarius. They had negotiated a deal, so when the owner is generous, that doesn’t work for them. I wonder, how many of us think that we have negotiated a deal with God? I’ll do this for God, and God will do this for me. If I’m good, then God will keep me safe. If I give enough, then God will cure my ills and solve my problems. If I don’t mess up, then God will love me. Consciously or unconsciously, we have our deal worked out, and so we try to keep up our end. And that’s why we get upset when God’s love is given just the same to those who haven’t lived up to our deal. It’s not fair for them to be treated the same as us!
To which God says “fair? You want fair? You’ve never gotten fair and you wouldn’t want it.”
When we are generally good and when life is good to us, and when that goes on for a long enough time, we gradually forget that we are totally dependent on the grace of God. We think that we’re just working out our little deal. We forget that all our work in the vineyard of God’s kingdom is not to earn us greater rewards – it is its own reward. It is its own reward because when we are in the vineyard, we are not standing around waiting for something to give our lives meaning. When we are in the vineyard, we get to be the ones who hold open the doors and throw the welcome party. This is what we get to do every day, wherever we go: sharing God’s love, sharing God’s generosity, sharing the fruit of God’s vineyard. That’s what we get to do, and it’s such a great gig, we get together every week to do it together right here in this sanctuary, with praise and thanksgiving.
[1] Kalas, J. Ellsworth, Parables from the Back Side.
Monday, September 1, 2008
Do the right thing - it works
It’s always interesting to me when we discover that doing the right thing is also doing the thing that works. In so many cases, it turns out that the idealistic path is also the practical one. For instance, Jesus told us that life was about loving our neighbor, even our enemies, and that only those who lose their lives for his sake and for the gospel will truly save them. The ideal he gave us is to love others selflessly.
In recent years, psychologists have applied rigorous study to the experience of human happiness and have found that happiness does not come from riches or entertainment - although a basic level of food, shelter, and comfort is still a must. Instead, happiness comes from human connections and from service in a greater cause. Loving service is not just the right thing to do, it is also the only pragmatic way to live with the deep happiness we long for. The ideal is what works.
Loving your enemy is often disregarded as naïve and unrealistic. The conventional wisdom these days is that we must wipe out our enemies, especially in a world in which terrorism is such a horrific threat. But Jesus preached a different way. He and his disciples practiced nonviolence, and later the church fathers created a “just war theory” in order to define the very narrow criteria under which the careful use of force could be justified as a necessary evil by preventing a greater violence. Two of the criteria are that the use of force may not cause more suffering than it is certain to prevent, and that force may never affect innocent civilian populations. You can tell right away that this theory comes from a century in which battles took place on battlefields far from civilian homes. The strict criteria for just war are meant to remind us that violence is tragic, even when we use it toward good. Many would argue that modern weaponry and warfare is, by definition, never justified, because it always involves civilians and collateral damage. It could never meet the criteria for a just war.
But all of that is just a nice ideal, right? It doesn’t work in the real world. Well, it turns out that it does. The RAND Corporation is a non-profit institution committed to researching public policy. It began during World War II, and is commissioned by government branches, including the Pentagon. RAND recently finished a study of terrorist groups since 1968, and found that most terrorist groups end because 1) they become incorporated into the local political process or 2) they are brought down by local police who arrest or kill key leaders. RAND further recommended that the concept of “war on terror” was not effective.
So it turns out that building political relationships or using force in a small-scale, specific way is not just the ideal recognized by Christian tradition. It’s also what works.
In recent years, psychologists have applied rigorous study to the experience of human happiness and have found that happiness does not come from riches or entertainment - although a basic level of food, shelter, and comfort is still a must. Instead, happiness comes from human connections and from service in a greater cause. Loving service is not just the right thing to do, it is also the only pragmatic way to live with the deep happiness we long for. The ideal is what works.
Loving your enemy is often disregarded as naïve and unrealistic. The conventional wisdom these days is that we must wipe out our enemies, especially in a world in which terrorism is such a horrific threat. But Jesus preached a different way. He and his disciples practiced nonviolence, and later the church fathers created a “just war theory” in order to define the very narrow criteria under which the careful use of force could be justified as a necessary evil by preventing a greater violence. Two of the criteria are that the use of force may not cause more suffering than it is certain to prevent, and that force may never affect innocent civilian populations. You can tell right away that this theory comes from a century in which battles took place on battlefields far from civilian homes. The strict criteria for just war are meant to remind us that violence is tragic, even when we use it toward good. Many would argue that modern weaponry and warfare is, by definition, never justified, because it always involves civilians and collateral damage. It could never meet the criteria for a just war.
But all of that is just a nice ideal, right? It doesn’t work in the real world. Well, it turns out that it does. The RAND Corporation is a non-profit institution committed to researching public policy. It began during World War II, and is commissioned by government branches, including the Pentagon. RAND recently finished a study of terrorist groups since 1968, and found that most terrorist groups end because 1) they become incorporated into the local political process or 2) they are brought down by local police who arrest or kill key leaders. RAND further recommended that the concept of “war on terror” was not effective.
So it turns out that building political relationships or using force in a small-scale, specific way is not just the ideal recognized by Christian tradition. It’s also what works.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Sermon - Discerning the Will of God
Preached on August 24, 2008 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.
Exodus 1:8-20; Romans 12:1-8
The title of this sermon comes from our reading from Romans. We’re talking about the will of God. But let’s be clear from the start: doing the will of God is never, ever what it takes to earn God’s favor, love, and mercy. That’s not the message of Jesus. We don’t exist as a church in order to crack down on the world and force it to follow the will of God – or else! That’s a rule-based, bookkeeping religion: keeping track of our good and bad deeds to see if we measure up. That kind of religion has never been effective, and it has not made God happy.
We are here because God gives us life and loves us more than we can ever know. God loves us just as we are, whether we know even the first thing about what God’s will is. So I have to say all of that before we come in here today and think about this passage from the 12th chapter of Paul’s letter to Rome, which is, after all, over halfway through the letter, and only comes after a lot of stuff about how much God loves us, through Jesus Christ, just as we are.
So we’ve got to start with God’s grace, and maybe we should just preach about that every Sunday from now until the end of our lives because that simple message of God’s unconditional love has been so badly damaged in the history of the church. And even so, God still continues to get through to love us, and when we come to know the love of God, when we feel ourselves surrounded and made anew by the grace of God, then we find ourselves overflowing with this holy gratitude, with love that seeks to give back, that wants to live in God because no other kind of living seems nearly as compelling or as fulfilling. So then we become interested in discerning the will of God so that we might live more fully.
This is exactly the place where Paul is at the start of chapter 12 in his letter to the church in Rome. (Actually, chapter 12 is just what we call it; to Paul it was just a letter: no chapters or verses). The entire beginning of the letter is about the good news of God’s love for us, shown in Jesus Christ. That’s my summary. Paul tends to be a bit more complex, but that’s what he’s saying. Here’s a good excerpt from what we call chapter 8 (verses 38-39):
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
That’s the first word about God and the most important word for the church. It is only after that word that Paul arrives at discerning the will of God. Listen again to his words we heard before.
“I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, in view of the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice…. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God.”
When Paul writes “therefore, in view of the mercies of God” he’s telling us that following the will of God is not a test of our worth or the payment we must make to appease God, but is actually what we naturally seek after we experience God’s love and realize that a Godly life is the fullest and most compelling way to live.
I sometimes use Paul’s language when I lead the prayer for our offering during worship. I say “with eyes wide open to your mercies for us, to all that you have given us, we offer these gifts.” We don’t make an offering to earn God’s love but because God has already shown great love for us.
Paul tells the church in Rome to offer their bodies as living sacrifices in view of the mercies of God, which is a way of saying that what God wants more than any empty ritual is for us to live the way that way that Jesus lived, to live by the will of God. But what is the will of God? How do we answer that question about our own lives, about our major decisions or our priorities?
I won’t try to define point by point what the will of God is for us. I don’t think we can define it so much as we can point to what it looks like, as we do week by week here in worship. This morning we have clues in our scripture readings. Paul gives us an important clue when he writes “do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God.”
Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed. The writer Flannery O’Connor put it another way by paraphrasing the words of Jesus: “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you odd.” That seems to be the way of Jesus, because when we enter the kingdom of God, it is different than the other kingdoms and it makes us different. Two quick examples: First, the followers of Jesus were not the only ones who were critical of the brutal occupation of the Roman Empire, but they were the odd ones who did not take up swords against it. Secondly, the followers of Jesus were odd because they welcomed gentiles and Jews and treated slaves as equals.
The will of God is life affirming and outward reaching, and this often does not conform to the world’s motives of power and fear. We see what this looks like in the passage we heard this morning from the book of Exodus.
A little background: Last week we heard about how the families Jacob’s twelve sons flourished in Egypt, thanks to their brother Joseph’s preparation for the great famine, which saved the Egypt from hunger. At the beginning of the story in Exodus, we move many generations into the future, and the families have grown to become a great people, a growing ethnic group in a foreign land, and a new king rises in Egypt who does not remember Joseph’s relationship to the old king, and Joseph’s great work on the Egypt’s behalf. This sets the stage for a timeless story, one that is tragically and horrifically made new in every century. One nation, two rival ethnic groups. It is the story of the Jews in Egypt, repeated in for the Jews under the German Third Reich and Hitler’s final solution. It is the story of Tutsis in Rwanda at the hand of the Hutus. It is the story of the Darfur region, where scarcity of water and fertile land has led to genocidal abuse and murder of one ethnic group by the other. In our own country, the sad history of the Native Americans and the Africans sold here in chains is a legacy to remind us of that the evil abuses of power are not exclusive to other people.
It’s important to read these old stories because they keep us from thinking: well it was all well and fine to do the will of God, love your enemies and all that back in Bible times. But we live in a different world where evil has to be attacked and defeated. That thinking doesn’t hold up when you realize that Bible times had their own genocide. In the time of Jesus, Rome was hanging its enemies on crosses by the thousands. The world of the Bible is our world. Pharaoh said “kill the Hebrew’s baby boys,” and the story is repeated over, and over, and over again.
The order was given to the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, since they were the ones present at the birth of children. The text does not tell us, but we can imagine the threat of dire consequences for those who disobeyed Pharaoh’s word. And yet they did disobey him, allowing the babies to live and cleverly claiming that the mothers gave birth too quickly for them to arrive one the scene.
These midwives are heroes, bold examples of living by the will of God, refusing to participate in violence, and working instead to give life. Most of us will never be asked to make such an obvious choice. Orders to kill are given in many parts of the world, but thank God, not in our neighborhoods. But we must ask ourselves another question: do we participate in systems of sin? Do we participate in injustice by our own fear, or in our silence, by which we condone realities like the imprisonment of vast numbers of men and women with mental illness and addiction, or a foreign policy that chooses investment in weapons over investment in diplomacy and human intelligence? Unlike the Hebrew midwives, no one will order us to take a life. Instead, they ask us quietly not to notice.
But what can we do about problems of such great scale? Our own lives are trials enough, aren’t they? What can we do that will make a difference? Shiphrah and Puah did it one birth at a time. One small act at a time – but what difference would that make? Well, what if each person, once a day, dropped one piece of paper on the ground? It’s only one piece. What difference would that make?
The will of God is done by those who follow an alternative way of living, one act at a time. It starts with speaking up in conversation when people are being put down. It starts with your one voice in the political system. It starts with your small act of generosity. It starts with your kindness to someone who is of a different race, class, or religion to counteract a history of fear and suspicion.
This is a great life, a compelling life. Living by the will of God releases us from fear and insecurity, although we will confront those feelings again and again. Living the will of God is something we seek because God’s love redeems us and frees us to love others because the love we received is overflowing. In view of God’s mercies, let us be transformed, that we may discern the will of God.
Exodus 1:8-20; Romans 12:1-8
The title of this sermon comes from our reading from Romans. We’re talking about the will of God. But let’s be clear from the start: doing the will of God is never, ever what it takes to earn God’s favor, love, and mercy. That’s not the message of Jesus. We don’t exist as a church in order to crack down on the world and force it to follow the will of God – or else! That’s a rule-based, bookkeeping religion: keeping track of our good and bad deeds to see if we measure up. That kind of religion has never been effective, and it has not made God happy.
We are here because God gives us life and loves us more than we can ever know. God loves us just as we are, whether we know even the first thing about what God’s will is. So I have to say all of that before we come in here today and think about this passage from the 12th chapter of Paul’s letter to Rome, which is, after all, over halfway through the letter, and only comes after a lot of stuff about how much God loves us, through Jesus Christ, just as we are.
So we’ve got to start with God’s grace, and maybe we should just preach about that every Sunday from now until the end of our lives because that simple message of God’s unconditional love has been so badly damaged in the history of the church. And even so, God still continues to get through to love us, and when we come to know the love of God, when we feel ourselves surrounded and made anew by the grace of God, then we find ourselves overflowing with this holy gratitude, with love that seeks to give back, that wants to live in God because no other kind of living seems nearly as compelling or as fulfilling. So then we become interested in discerning the will of God so that we might live more fully.
This is exactly the place where Paul is at the start of chapter 12 in his letter to the church in Rome. (Actually, chapter 12 is just what we call it; to Paul it was just a letter: no chapters or verses). The entire beginning of the letter is about the good news of God’s love for us, shown in Jesus Christ. That’s my summary. Paul tends to be a bit more complex, but that’s what he’s saying. Here’s a good excerpt from what we call chapter 8 (verses 38-39):
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
That’s the first word about God and the most important word for the church. It is only after that word that Paul arrives at discerning the will of God. Listen again to his words we heard before.
“I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, in view of the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice…. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God.”
When Paul writes “therefore, in view of the mercies of God” he’s telling us that following the will of God is not a test of our worth or the payment we must make to appease God, but is actually what we naturally seek after we experience God’s love and realize that a Godly life is the fullest and most compelling way to live.
I sometimes use Paul’s language when I lead the prayer for our offering during worship. I say “with eyes wide open to your mercies for us, to all that you have given us, we offer these gifts.” We don’t make an offering to earn God’s love but because God has already shown great love for us.
Paul tells the church in Rome to offer their bodies as living sacrifices in view of the mercies of God, which is a way of saying that what God wants more than any empty ritual is for us to live the way that way that Jesus lived, to live by the will of God. But what is the will of God? How do we answer that question about our own lives, about our major decisions or our priorities?
I won’t try to define point by point what the will of God is for us. I don’t think we can define it so much as we can point to what it looks like, as we do week by week here in worship. This morning we have clues in our scripture readings. Paul gives us an important clue when he writes “do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God.”
Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed. The writer Flannery O’Connor put it another way by paraphrasing the words of Jesus: “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you odd.” That seems to be the way of Jesus, because when we enter the kingdom of God, it is different than the other kingdoms and it makes us different. Two quick examples: First, the followers of Jesus were not the only ones who were critical of the brutal occupation of the Roman Empire, but they were the odd ones who did not take up swords against it. Secondly, the followers of Jesus were odd because they welcomed gentiles and Jews and treated slaves as equals.
The will of God is life affirming and outward reaching, and this often does not conform to the world’s motives of power and fear. We see what this looks like in the passage we heard this morning from the book of Exodus.
A little background: Last week we heard about how the families Jacob’s twelve sons flourished in Egypt, thanks to their brother Joseph’s preparation for the great famine, which saved the Egypt from hunger. At the beginning of the story in Exodus, we move many generations into the future, and the families have grown to become a great people, a growing ethnic group in a foreign land, and a new king rises in Egypt who does not remember Joseph’s relationship to the old king, and Joseph’s great work on the Egypt’s behalf. This sets the stage for a timeless story, one that is tragically and horrifically made new in every century. One nation, two rival ethnic groups. It is the story of the Jews in Egypt, repeated in for the Jews under the German Third Reich and Hitler’s final solution. It is the story of Tutsis in Rwanda at the hand of the Hutus. It is the story of the Darfur region, where scarcity of water and fertile land has led to genocidal abuse and murder of one ethnic group by the other. In our own country, the sad history of the Native Americans and the Africans sold here in chains is a legacy to remind us of that the evil abuses of power are not exclusive to other people.
It’s important to read these old stories because they keep us from thinking: well it was all well and fine to do the will of God, love your enemies and all that back in Bible times. But we live in a different world where evil has to be attacked and defeated. That thinking doesn’t hold up when you realize that Bible times had their own genocide. In the time of Jesus, Rome was hanging its enemies on crosses by the thousands. The world of the Bible is our world. Pharaoh said “kill the Hebrew’s baby boys,” and the story is repeated over, and over, and over again.
The order was given to the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, since they were the ones present at the birth of children. The text does not tell us, but we can imagine the threat of dire consequences for those who disobeyed Pharaoh’s word. And yet they did disobey him, allowing the babies to live and cleverly claiming that the mothers gave birth too quickly for them to arrive one the scene.
These midwives are heroes, bold examples of living by the will of God, refusing to participate in violence, and working instead to give life. Most of us will never be asked to make such an obvious choice. Orders to kill are given in many parts of the world, but thank God, not in our neighborhoods. But we must ask ourselves another question: do we participate in systems of sin? Do we participate in injustice by our own fear, or in our silence, by which we condone realities like the imprisonment of vast numbers of men and women with mental illness and addiction, or a foreign policy that chooses investment in weapons over investment in diplomacy and human intelligence? Unlike the Hebrew midwives, no one will order us to take a life. Instead, they ask us quietly not to notice.
But what can we do about problems of such great scale? Our own lives are trials enough, aren’t they? What can we do that will make a difference? Shiphrah and Puah did it one birth at a time. One small act at a time – but what difference would that make? Well, what if each person, once a day, dropped one piece of paper on the ground? It’s only one piece. What difference would that make?
The will of God is done by those who follow an alternative way of living, one act at a time. It starts with speaking up in conversation when people are being put down. It starts with your one voice in the political system. It starts with your small act of generosity. It starts with your kindness to someone who is of a different race, class, or religion to counteract a history of fear and suspicion.
This is a great life, a compelling life. Living by the will of God releases us from fear and insecurity, although we will confront those feelings again and again. Living the will of God is something we seek because God’s love redeems us and frees us to love others because the love we received is overflowing. In view of God’s mercies, let us be transformed, that we may discern the will of God.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Sermon - The Mystery of the Incarnation
Preached on July 27, 2008 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC, a day when we celebrated "Christmas in July”
John 1:1-14 Luke 2:8-20
Dedicated to this congregation; and always to the glory of God.
While John Shea was writing a book about the meaning of Christmas, and all of the cultural stories and legends that have grown up around it, he went one day to the library to look for the classic Dr. Seuss book about Christmas. It was July, and here is how he describes his experience:
The stacks in the children’s section have two shelves and are only three feet high. I am six feet, three inches high. The special Christmas shelf was the bottom shelf. As I was crawling around, a boy of about five, barely taller than the stacks, said, “What are you doing in here, Mister?”
“I’m looking for a book.”
“What book?”
“How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
“It’s not Christmas time.”
“I know that,” I said. Then I added defensively, “I’m writing a book.”[1]
There is almost a rule that you can’t do Christmas things at the wrong time. Doesn’t it feel odd to you to be singing Christmas carols today? It feels strange to me, but I think that there is value in the unfamiliar if it gets us to look at something important with new eyes, and to hear with new ears. Here’s how I have been thinking about this Christmas in July. Think about the moment in a wedding when the bride and groom share their vows. They come to that moment surrounded by family and friends, with their close friends or relatives standing here next to them, and all looking as good as ever. They come to this spot with beautiful music, flowers, and all the traditions behind them, and all of that adds to the meaning of those words: I promise to love you, to be faithful to you, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live.
That is a wonderful, holy moment. But how important it also is to think about the meaning of those words before the wedding day, and in the years after. That is our purpose in celebrating Christmas in July. The celebration of the birth of Jesus is central to our Christian faith. We proclaim Jesus as Lord and God, who was born in lowly circumstances to join our human condition and to share our common lot.
The Catholic theologian Ron Rolheiser suggests that “the central mystery within all Christianity, undergirding everything else, is the mystery of the incarnation. Unfortunately, it is also the mystery that is the most misunderstood or, more accurately, to coin a phrase, under-understood.”[2] And that is why we are centering this day on the birth of Jesus. We seek to move away from misunderstandings or under-understandings, and allow this mystery to give us life, because it is, as the angel said, “good news, which shall be for all people.”
Incarnation comes from the Latin word carnus, which means physical flesh, as in carnal or carnivore. Incarnation means that God took on human flesh. Rolheiser boils it down like this: “The mystery of the incarnation, simply stated, is the mystery of God taking on human flesh and dealing with human beings in a visible, tangible way.” Or as we heard in the gospel of John: the word, which is God, became flesh, and dwelt among us. Or, for a more direct translation of the Greek, “the word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.”
Incarnation is one of those churchy, theological words that gets used to describe a doctrine, or central concept of the church. I like the way that Rob Bell, a minister in Michigan, talks about doctrine.[3] He says that there are two ways to think about doctrine, one is helpful but the other is not. Sometimes we treat our doctrines like bricks. With bricks, we build a solid wall, brick by brick, of all the things one needs to believe in order to have a secure faith. Faith is seen as something vulnerable to protect, but the brick wall ends up trapping us.
Bell says that faith is more like a trampoline. The point of a trampoline is to jump, to play, to live! Doctrines are the springs in the trampoline that help us to jump. The point of religion is not our doctrines, not the springs themselves, but our doctrines do help us to live and to rise to new heights! If you are a child and you see another child jumping on a trampoline, it is almost impossible for you to not want to join in. That’s what Christian faith should look like. What an invitation!
The doctrine of the incarnation is not a test of how strong our belief is. It is a spring for our lives because it tells us that God is not distant and unconcerned; God has moved into the neighborhood. God draws close to us. That’s the God we worship. So great is God’s love for us that God comes to be with us, to live life as we live it, to be with us in even the most difficult, most painful moments of our lives. That’s what the incarnation means. Sometimes people get the idea that God sits way out there, absent from our lives except to look down and keep track of our balance of good and bad acts, to send on us reward or punishment accordingly. That’s what Job’s friends all said when his life fell apart. But Job knew better, and now we know better, because Jesus came as an answer for God’s bad reputation. We celebrate the birth of Jesus because it is in Jesus that we know God, in Jesus that we see God’s extravagant love, and in Jesus that we hear God’s passionate call for justice and mercy, for the lifting up of people who are down.
The birth of Jesus is good news, for all people, because Jesus shows us God. That is how the incarnation is mainly understood. But remember that I told you before that the incarnation is under-understood, and the part that we usually overlook is the human side of the incarnation. The mystery of the incarnation is that Jesus is both fully God and fully human. So we have in Jesus a clear way of seeing what God is like, but it also means that in Jesus we can clearly see what human beings are, or at least, what we can be. In human history we have always had the sense that we were not living up to our potential. In Jesus, we see what a fully realized human life can be, we see what the quality of our lives can be.
Wasn’t Jesus always inviting us to live as he did? He said take up your cross. He said abide in me; I am the vine and you are the branches. greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for a friend. He said I give you the keys to the kingdom: whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Jesus didn’t expect us just to see him as God and worship him. He expected us to see him as human and follow him.
Do I mean that anyone could be just like Jesus? No, I do believe that Jesus was the definitive revelation of God in human form. But we should not think that Jesus was so different from us, either. Sure, none of us will be Jesus, but none of us will be Mozart, either. We won’t think like Albert Einstein or write like Jane Austen, but we look to them to show us the human potential. Yes, Jesus shows us what God is, but he also shows us what human is. For us to live with the compassion of Jesus, with the strength and humility of Jesus would not mean that we were becoming God, but that we were becoming fully human, that we were living our lives at full force and greatest depth.
And so we come to the full mystery of the incarnation, and it is this: The incarnation is not over. The incarnation is not just a past event, lasting for the 33 years between the birth of Jesus and his ascension to heaven. The incarnation did not end; it just changed form. Jesus showed us how to be human and then he trusted us to be the incarnation of God to others. Remember how Rolheiser defined incarnation as “God taking on human flesh and dealing with human beings in a visible, tangible way.” Now that happens with us. When we listen and offer prayers, when we host a meal or take food to someone’s home, when we help a neighbor with a repair or work on a home in Kentucky, when we offer forgiveness for someone who has hurt us, and acceptance for someone who has been left out. When we do any of these things for a fellow person, we show God in our very lives. We are a part of the incarnation.
The word of God becomes flesh and dwells among us. This is good news, and it shall be for all people. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace. Amen.
[1] Shea, John, Starlight: Beholding the Christmas Miracle All Year Long, page
[2] Rolheiser, Ron. The Holy Longing. Page 75.
[3] Bell, Rob. Velvet Elvis.
John 1:1-14 Luke 2:8-20
Dedicated to this congregation; and always to the glory of God.
While John Shea was writing a book about the meaning of Christmas, and all of the cultural stories and legends that have grown up around it, he went one day to the library to look for the classic Dr. Seuss book about Christmas. It was July, and here is how he describes his experience:
The stacks in the children’s section have two shelves and are only three feet high. I am six feet, three inches high. The special Christmas shelf was the bottom shelf. As I was crawling around, a boy of about five, barely taller than the stacks, said, “What are you doing in here, Mister?”
“I’m looking for a book.”
“What book?”
“How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
“It’s not Christmas time.”
“I know that,” I said. Then I added defensively, “I’m writing a book.”[1]
There is almost a rule that you can’t do Christmas things at the wrong time. Doesn’t it feel odd to you to be singing Christmas carols today? It feels strange to me, but I think that there is value in the unfamiliar if it gets us to look at something important with new eyes, and to hear with new ears. Here’s how I have been thinking about this Christmas in July. Think about the moment in a wedding when the bride and groom share their vows. They come to that moment surrounded by family and friends, with their close friends or relatives standing here next to them, and all looking as good as ever. They come to this spot with beautiful music, flowers, and all the traditions behind them, and all of that adds to the meaning of those words: I promise to love you, to be faithful to you, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live.
That is a wonderful, holy moment. But how important it also is to think about the meaning of those words before the wedding day, and in the years after. That is our purpose in celebrating Christmas in July. The celebration of the birth of Jesus is central to our Christian faith. We proclaim Jesus as Lord and God, who was born in lowly circumstances to join our human condition and to share our common lot.
The Catholic theologian Ron Rolheiser suggests that “the central mystery within all Christianity, undergirding everything else, is the mystery of the incarnation. Unfortunately, it is also the mystery that is the most misunderstood or, more accurately, to coin a phrase, under-understood.”[2] And that is why we are centering this day on the birth of Jesus. We seek to move away from misunderstandings or under-understandings, and allow this mystery to give us life, because it is, as the angel said, “good news, which shall be for all people.”
Incarnation comes from the Latin word carnus, which means physical flesh, as in carnal or carnivore. Incarnation means that God took on human flesh. Rolheiser boils it down like this: “The mystery of the incarnation, simply stated, is the mystery of God taking on human flesh and dealing with human beings in a visible, tangible way.” Or as we heard in the gospel of John: the word, which is God, became flesh, and dwelt among us. Or, for a more direct translation of the Greek, “the word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.”
Incarnation is one of those churchy, theological words that gets used to describe a doctrine, or central concept of the church. I like the way that Rob Bell, a minister in Michigan, talks about doctrine.[3] He says that there are two ways to think about doctrine, one is helpful but the other is not. Sometimes we treat our doctrines like bricks. With bricks, we build a solid wall, brick by brick, of all the things one needs to believe in order to have a secure faith. Faith is seen as something vulnerable to protect, but the brick wall ends up trapping us.
Bell says that faith is more like a trampoline. The point of a trampoline is to jump, to play, to live! Doctrines are the springs in the trampoline that help us to jump. The point of religion is not our doctrines, not the springs themselves, but our doctrines do help us to live and to rise to new heights! If you are a child and you see another child jumping on a trampoline, it is almost impossible for you to not want to join in. That’s what Christian faith should look like. What an invitation!
The doctrine of the incarnation is not a test of how strong our belief is. It is a spring for our lives because it tells us that God is not distant and unconcerned; God has moved into the neighborhood. God draws close to us. That’s the God we worship. So great is God’s love for us that God comes to be with us, to live life as we live it, to be with us in even the most difficult, most painful moments of our lives. That’s what the incarnation means. Sometimes people get the idea that God sits way out there, absent from our lives except to look down and keep track of our balance of good and bad acts, to send on us reward or punishment accordingly. That’s what Job’s friends all said when his life fell apart. But Job knew better, and now we know better, because Jesus came as an answer for God’s bad reputation. We celebrate the birth of Jesus because it is in Jesus that we know God, in Jesus that we see God’s extravagant love, and in Jesus that we hear God’s passionate call for justice and mercy, for the lifting up of people who are down.
The birth of Jesus is good news, for all people, because Jesus shows us God. That is how the incarnation is mainly understood. But remember that I told you before that the incarnation is under-understood, and the part that we usually overlook is the human side of the incarnation. The mystery of the incarnation is that Jesus is both fully God and fully human. So we have in Jesus a clear way of seeing what God is like, but it also means that in Jesus we can clearly see what human beings are, or at least, what we can be. In human history we have always had the sense that we were not living up to our potential. In Jesus, we see what a fully realized human life can be, we see what the quality of our lives can be.
Wasn’t Jesus always inviting us to live as he did? He said take up your cross. He said abide in me; I am the vine and you are the branches. greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for a friend. He said I give you the keys to the kingdom: whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Jesus didn’t expect us just to see him as God and worship him. He expected us to see him as human and follow him.
Do I mean that anyone could be just like Jesus? No, I do believe that Jesus was the definitive revelation of God in human form. But we should not think that Jesus was so different from us, either. Sure, none of us will be Jesus, but none of us will be Mozart, either. We won’t think like Albert Einstein or write like Jane Austen, but we look to them to show us the human potential. Yes, Jesus shows us what God is, but he also shows us what human is. For us to live with the compassion of Jesus, with the strength and humility of Jesus would not mean that we were becoming God, but that we were becoming fully human, that we were living our lives at full force and greatest depth.
And so we come to the full mystery of the incarnation, and it is this: The incarnation is not over. The incarnation is not just a past event, lasting for the 33 years between the birth of Jesus and his ascension to heaven. The incarnation did not end; it just changed form. Jesus showed us how to be human and then he trusted us to be the incarnation of God to others. Remember how Rolheiser defined incarnation as “God taking on human flesh and dealing with human beings in a visible, tangible way.” Now that happens with us. When we listen and offer prayers, when we host a meal or take food to someone’s home, when we help a neighbor with a repair or work on a home in Kentucky, when we offer forgiveness for someone who has hurt us, and acceptance for someone who has been left out. When we do any of these things for a fellow person, we show God in our very lives. We are a part of the incarnation.
The word of God becomes flesh and dwells among us. This is good news, and it shall be for all people. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace. Amen.
[1] Shea, John, Starlight: Beholding the Christmas Miracle All Year Long, page
[2] Rolheiser, Ron. The Holy Longing. Page 75.
[3] Bell, Rob. Velvet Elvis.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Sermon - Be humble and bold
Originally preached on July 20, 2008 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC.
Genesis 28:10-19 Matthew 13:24-30
Dedicated to Gavin Scott Davis and Finley June Getch, on the day of their baptisms; and always to the glory of God.
When Betsy and I moved into a new home a few years ago, we knew that the previous owners had been great gardeners, and that there was in particular one large bed of perennial flowers in the back yard. But we moved into the house in February, so we weren’t sure just what to expect. In addition, I admit that I don’t know my way around the identification of plants, and there are a lot of different flowers in this large bed. Some bloom early, some bloom late, some bloom for a long time and others come in short-lived bursts.
Perhaps you see the problem. It happens every year. Plants start to grow in that bed, and I don’t know the difference between the ones that will bloom with beautiful flowers that I should allow to grow and the weeds that I should take out. So I let them all grow until I’m sure, and that can take awhile.
There’s another, related problem. Sometimes you are certain about which ones are the weeds and need to be taken out. You have no question. Years ago I heard a minister who was a grandfather talk about the weeds that were growing all along the back fence line of his yard. He’d been meaning to tear them all out, but you know how these things go; something always gets in the way. Finally he was ready to pull them all up one morning but a visit from his young granddaughter took precedence. They talked and played for a while, and then she went to play in the yard while he fixed some lunch. A few minutes later, she came inside, proudly bearing a bouquet of flowers as a gift to her grandpa for the lunch table. He found that she had picked every single one from weeds he had been planning to pull, and he was so glad he’d let them stand. So even when you think you know what needs to go, maybe you don’t.
Religion gets dangerous when we think we know enough to pass final judgment on others, because just like the weeds in my backyard, or the things that we might assume are weeds but to someone else might be valuable, God knows we don’t know enough about anyone else to pass a final judgment on them. God knows we don’t know enough to proclaim anyone beyond God’s love, beyond being good, beyond hope of redemption. Whenever we think we do, we don’t.
The parable Jesus told concerns a wheat field planted by the farmer, which is then also planted with weeds, sometimes translated as tares or most literally as darnel, which was actually a type of weed that looked very similar to wheat, and so was probably a common problem for farmers in Jesus’ time. The impulse, of course, is to go take it out, but Jesus has the farmer tell them no, because in doing so, they will also take out some wheat. When we assume a judgmental attitude toward people, we might be partly right, but we risk passing judgment on the good that is within them.
When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned under the apartheid regime of South Africa, he began to try negotiating with his oppressors. His colleagues in the movement criticized him, saying that negotiations with the enemy were out of the question, and that it was fundamentally wrong to offer any dialogue while being held in prison. Mandela disagreed. He clearly saw the evil of his oppressors, but he knew that in passing complete judgment on them, he would never be able to appeal to them good. He would be digging up the wheat along with the weeds. Mandela led a peaceful resolution to a brutal rule because he saw that good and evil lived side by side.
The genius of his parable is that Jesus recognizes that there is evil in the world. He doesn’t ask us to pull the wool over our eyes and just pretend that everything is happy. Allowing the weeds to grow does not mean pretending that everything is wheat, that everything in the world is just fine. Jesus recognizes evil in the world. At that time, his audience probably interpreted the weeds to be the oppression of the Roman Empire in the midst of the Hebrew people. Indeed, there were many zealots in Palestine (even some of the disciples) who wanted to go to war to throw the Romans out of their land. Talk about weeding your field. In generations since, we have found different ways of interpreting the weeds that grow among us. Jesus does not pretend that there isn’t evil interfering with good. But he cautions us to be humble in our judgment, and to leave final judgment to God. It is sadly too common for attempts to rid the world of evil to do great damage to life in the process.
This is why Jesus did not go along with plans to take up arms against the Roman Empire. When a Roman soldier forced you to carry a load one mile, Jesus said to carry it a second mile, just to show him that love was more powerful than oppression. When someone slapped you on the cheek, Jesus said to turn the other one as well, to show that love is stronger than fear. The importance of love for our enemies in the new testament is not just a naïve ideal, it is actually the only way to avoid the escalation of violence.
Jesus tells us to let the whole field grow, wheat and weeds. When it comes to judgment, be humble. You never know which Roman centurion will join your cause.
Jacob’s nighttime dream teaches the same lesson. On a journey far from home Jacob goes to sleep one night and receives a message from God, a promise, in fact, that was given to Abraham and to Isaac, and now to Jacob himself. When he awakes, he says “God was in this place and I did not know.” What a remarkable statement. God was at work in a place that I did not know. So before we become judgmental about a person, about a nation, or about another religion, let us wonder if we could be like Jacob, not realizing that God is at work in places we don’t know. Think of that in terms of the middle east, or in terms of the person at work or in your neighborhood who has been the thorn in your side.
The title of this sermon is “be humble and bold,” but so far I’ve only given reasons for our humility. If we are to be humble in our judgment people, then when are we to be bold?
I want to tell you a story about the boldness of the early church. This is recorded in the book of Acts, which tells of the early apostles and the issues that they wrestled with in the first generation after Christ. One of the big issues in Acts, which also shows up in some of Paul’s letters, is what to do about all of the non-Jews who are becoming Christians. The very first followers of Jesus were practicing Jews. They observed the Jewish rituals, they ate kosher, and they had faith in Jesus. That’s what the early church looked like at the very first. But then all these non-Jews, called Gentiles, started to become Christian, and they had to decide whether all Christians should start to observe all the Jewish practices. There was nothing in the scripture to prepare them for this. In fact, there was nothing in the scripture to prepare them for the idea of sharing a common faith with gentiles. Their scripture was actually fairly opposed to including gentiles. So what should they do?
In the fifteenth chapter of Acts, it says that all the apostles discussed this matter greatly and prayed about it, and finally decided that gentile converts did not need to follow all the Jewish observances, but simply needed to refrain from meals sacrificed to other gods. And here is the message they sent out. They said “it seemed good to the holy spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following” (Acts 15:28). Did you catch that? It seemed good. That’s how they put it. They had enough humility to know that they might not always make the right judgments, but they also knew they had to decide something, so they were bold in their welcome for gentile Christians.
They didn’t prove their claim by quoting scripture, or act as if they alone were the ultimate authority. But they did boldly say that the outsider gentile were welcome just as they were. They didn’t need to be just the same. The apostles trusted that God’s holy spirit helping them to see something good, and to boldly call it good based on their judgment.
When it comes to the weeds, be humble; don’t pass judgment, because you may do more harm than good. And you may be wrong. But when it comes to the wheat, be bold! Celebrate goodness wherever you find it, because all goodness and all truth comes from God. Be bold in proclaiming God’s love that extends farther than we ever realized. Then perhaps we will one day look back and say, along with Jacob, God was in this place, and I did not know. And we will give thanks.
Genesis 28:10-19 Matthew 13:24-30
Dedicated to Gavin Scott Davis and Finley June Getch, on the day of their baptisms; and always to the glory of God.
When Betsy and I moved into a new home a few years ago, we knew that the previous owners had been great gardeners, and that there was in particular one large bed of perennial flowers in the back yard. But we moved into the house in February, so we weren’t sure just what to expect. In addition, I admit that I don’t know my way around the identification of plants, and there are a lot of different flowers in this large bed. Some bloom early, some bloom late, some bloom for a long time and others come in short-lived bursts.
Perhaps you see the problem. It happens every year. Plants start to grow in that bed, and I don’t know the difference between the ones that will bloom with beautiful flowers that I should allow to grow and the weeds that I should take out. So I let them all grow until I’m sure, and that can take awhile.
There’s another, related problem. Sometimes you are certain about which ones are the weeds and need to be taken out. You have no question. Years ago I heard a minister who was a grandfather talk about the weeds that were growing all along the back fence line of his yard. He’d been meaning to tear them all out, but you know how these things go; something always gets in the way. Finally he was ready to pull them all up one morning but a visit from his young granddaughter took precedence. They talked and played for a while, and then she went to play in the yard while he fixed some lunch. A few minutes later, she came inside, proudly bearing a bouquet of flowers as a gift to her grandpa for the lunch table. He found that she had picked every single one from weeds he had been planning to pull, and he was so glad he’d let them stand. So even when you think you know what needs to go, maybe you don’t.
Religion gets dangerous when we think we know enough to pass final judgment on others, because just like the weeds in my backyard, or the things that we might assume are weeds but to someone else might be valuable, God knows we don’t know enough about anyone else to pass a final judgment on them. God knows we don’t know enough to proclaim anyone beyond God’s love, beyond being good, beyond hope of redemption. Whenever we think we do, we don’t.
The parable Jesus told concerns a wheat field planted by the farmer, which is then also planted with weeds, sometimes translated as tares or most literally as darnel, which was actually a type of weed that looked very similar to wheat, and so was probably a common problem for farmers in Jesus’ time. The impulse, of course, is to go take it out, but Jesus has the farmer tell them no, because in doing so, they will also take out some wheat. When we assume a judgmental attitude toward people, we might be partly right, but we risk passing judgment on the good that is within them.
When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned under the apartheid regime of South Africa, he began to try negotiating with his oppressors. His colleagues in the movement criticized him, saying that negotiations with the enemy were out of the question, and that it was fundamentally wrong to offer any dialogue while being held in prison. Mandela disagreed. He clearly saw the evil of his oppressors, but he knew that in passing complete judgment on them, he would never be able to appeal to them good. He would be digging up the wheat along with the weeds. Mandela led a peaceful resolution to a brutal rule because he saw that good and evil lived side by side.
The genius of his parable is that Jesus recognizes that there is evil in the world. He doesn’t ask us to pull the wool over our eyes and just pretend that everything is happy. Allowing the weeds to grow does not mean pretending that everything is wheat, that everything in the world is just fine. Jesus recognizes evil in the world. At that time, his audience probably interpreted the weeds to be the oppression of the Roman Empire in the midst of the Hebrew people. Indeed, there were many zealots in Palestine (even some of the disciples) who wanted to go to war to throw the Romans out of their land. Talk about weeding your field. In generations since, we have found different ways of interpreting the weeds that grow among us. Jesus does not pretend that there isn’t evil interfering with good. But he cautions us to be humble in our judgment, and to leave final judgment to God. It is sadly too common for attempts to rid the world of evil to do great damage to life in the process.
This is why Jesus did not go along with plans to take up arms against the Roman Empire. When a Roman soldier forced you to carry a load one mile, Jesus said to carry it a second mile, just to show him that love was more powerful than oppression. When someone slapped you on the cheek, Jesus said to turn the other one as well, to show that love is stronger than fear. The importance of love for our enemies in the new testament is not just a naïve ideal, it is actually the only way to avoid the escalation of violence.
Jesus tells us to let the whole field grow, wheat and weeds. When it comes to judgment, be humble. You never know which Roman centurion will join your cause.
Jacob’s nighttime dream teaches the same lesson. On a journey far from home Jacob goes to sleep one night and receives a message from God, a promise, in fact, that was given to Abraham and to Isaac, and now to Jacob himself. When he awakes, he says “God was in this place and I did not know.” What a remarkable statement. God was at work in a place that I did not know. So before we become judgmental about a person, about a nation, or about another religion, let us wonder if we could be like Jacob, not realizing that God is at work in places we don’t know. Think of that in terms of the middle east, or in terms of the person at work or in your neighborhood who has been the thorn in your side.
The title of this sermon is “be humble and bold,” but so far I’ve only given reasons for our humility. If we are to be humble in our judgment people, then when are we to be bold?
I want to tell you a story about the boldness of the early church. This is recorded in the book of Acts, which tells of the early apostles and the issues that they wrestled with in the first generation after Christ. One of the big issues in Acts, which also shows up in some of Paul’s letters, is what to do about all of the non-Jews who are becoming Christians. The very first followers of Jesus were practicing Jews. They observed the Jewish rituals, they ate kosher, and they had faith in Jesus. That’s what the early church looked like at the very first. But then all these non-Jews, called Gentiles, started to become Christian, and they had to decide whether all Christians should start to observe all the Jewish practices. There was nothing in the scripture to prepare them for this. In fact, there was nothing in the scripture to prepare them for the idea of sharing a common faith with gentiles. Their scripture was actually fairly opposed to including gentiles. So what should they do?
In the fifteenth chapter of Acts, it says that all the apostles discussed this matter greatly and prayed about it, and finally decided that gentile converts did not need to follow all the Jewish observances, but simply needed to refrain from meals sacrificed to other gods. And here is the message they sent out. They said “it seemed good to the holy spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following” (Acts 15:28). Did you catch that? It seemed good. That’s how they put it. They had enough humility to know that they might not always make the right judgments, but they also knew they had to decide something, so they were bold in their welcome for gentile Christians.
They didn’t prove their claim by quoting scripture, or act as if they alone were the ultimate authority. But they did boldly say that the outsider gentile were welcome just as they were. They didn’t need to be just the same. The apostles trusted that God’s holy spirit helping them to see something good, and to boldly call it good based on their judgment.
When it comes to the weeds, be humble; don’t pass judgment, because you may do more harm than good. And you may be wrong. But when it comes to the wheat, be bold! Celebrate goodness wherever you find it, because all goodness and all truth comes from God. Be bold in proclaiming God’s love that extends farther than we ever realized. Then perhaps we will one day look back and say, along with Jacob, God was in this place, and I did not know. And we will give thanks.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Hoosiers
At the end of the movie Hoosiers, when the small farm-town Indiana high school team beats the big city school for the 1952 state championship, a chill runs up the back of my neck. It happens every time, and it feels wonderful. If you have never seen it, let me tell you why it’s so wonderful when the team from Hickory wins, and by the way, I don’t think it spoils the movie for you to know the ending. What makes the end so great is that by this point in the movie, you have come to care about this small town. You know how the coach was given a second chance after a career ruined by some awful choices. You know how the star player has overcome great losses in his life. You know the townspeople who have had their fights with each other and with the coach, but who are there at the big game together and cheering for all they’ve got.
And you know about one player’s father who can’t be there because he has finally checked himself into a hospital to treat his alcoholism, but who listens to the game on his little radio.
Frankly, the ending isn’t so moving unless you know all their stories. It’s much more than a basketball championship. It’s the celebration for a town full of broken people who thought they had no hope. When the game ends and the music swells, I feel like I’ve had a spiritual experience. And in a way, I have.
There are so many hints of the spirit of God in our lives. There’s a hint of the spirit in the feeling we get in a crowd cheering for our team. There’s a hint in the feeling we get at a concert (an orchestra or a rock band, depending on your preference) when the music envelopes us and makes us feel like we are a part of something bigger. There’s a hint of God’s spirit in a well told story, be it in a movie, novel, television show, or anything that reminds us that love is a powerful force in the world, and that we are connected to causes bigger than ourselves.
I think that all of these experiences should be celebrated, and they should tell us that there is something true about these wonderful, spiritual feelings. We are truly a part of something bigger than ourselves, and ultimately it is not a game, concert, or story. It is God. And just like the end of Hoosiers, God’s church is a celebration for broken people who thought they had no hope.
And you know about one player’s father who can’t be there because he has finally checked himself into a hospital to treat his alcoholism, but who listens to the game on his little radio.
Frankly, the ending isn’t so moving unless you know all their stories. It’s much more than a basketball championship. It’s the celebration for a town full of broken people who thought they had no hope. When the game ends and the music swells, I feel like I’ve had a spiritual experience. And in a way, I have.
There are so many hints of the spirit of God in our lives. There’s a hint of the spirit in the feeling we get in a crowd cheering for our team. There’s a hint in the feeling we get at a concert (an orchestra or a rock band, depending on your preference) when the music envelopes us and makes us feel like we are a part of something bigger. There’s a hint of God’s spirit in a well told story, be it in a movie, novel, television show, or anything that reminds us that love is a powerful force in the world, and that we are connected to causes bigger than ourselves.
I think that all of these experiences should be celebrated, and they should tell us that there is something true about these wonderful, spiritual feelings. We are truly a part of something bigger than ourselves, and ultimately it is not a game, concert, or story. It is God. And just like the end of Hoosiers, God’s church is a celebration for broken people who thought they had no hope.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Sermon - What was he thinking?
Preached on June 29 2008 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC
Genesis 22:1-18 Matthew 10:37-42
Dedicated to the members of the 2008 mission tour; and always to the glory of God.
Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac is a difficult story. We come to the Bible trusting that it contains a word for us about our God and God’s relationship to us, but we often come away from this story disturbed because we don’t understand what that message can possibly be. Or perhaps we are disturbed because we are worried that we do understand the message of the story and we want nothing to do with it because it seems totally at odds with the message of Jesus Christ, which is the lens by which we view all scripture.
This story has two main points that disturb us. The first is that God tells Abraham to take his son, his and Sarah’s only son, whom he loves, Isaac, up to a mountaintop and sacrifice him as a burnt offering. How could God demand such a violent and senseless act? This is not the God we see in Jesus Christ, who came to give life. The second disturbing point is that Abraham agrees to do it.
What was he thinking? How can he possibly obey this command to kill his son? After World War II we heard the Nazis talk about how they were just following orders and we did not accept that excuse. In the movie A Few Good Men, we contemplated the same idea in our own military in the story of two Marines who were ordered to give their fellow Marine a code red, a kind of hazing punishment. Weren’t they able to recognize an immoral order and refuse to obey? Are we supposed to do something that is wrong and harmful just because we are told to do it by a commanding officer? And now in our country we are wrestling with the question of soldiers who were told to treat prisoners cruelly in order to soften them up for interrogation.
But what if God is the one who orders violence? The religious community has some history of this idea: burning heretics, the Salem witch trials, gunning down doctors, and calling for war against Muslims in the crusades, or in modern times painting Islam broadly as a religion of violence and hate. These people tragically thought that they were doing the will of God, and we needed more people to question their claims. So don’t we need a better model than Abraham, who doesn’t even question God’s order to kill his son? This story has some real problems!
How could any parent agree to give up the life of a child, and how could anyone let God get away with making such a mean demand? When Abraham set out for the mountain with his son Isaac, we must ask what was he thinking?
James Kugel, a scholar of the Hebrew scriptures, reminds us to be aware of the context in which this story was first told.[1] In the ancient middle east, offering your child as a sacrifice to your god was well accepted among nations in t region. More than an animal sacrifice, the gift of a child was the ultimate sign of your devotion. In the book of 2nd Kings, we read of the Moabite king who sacrifices his child to their god Molech to restore his people to the god’s good favor (2 Kings 3:26-27). Here’s the point: the Hebrews who first heard this story would not have found it very unusual or shocking that Abraham planned to sacrifice his son as a sign of great faithfulness to their God Yahweh. Instead, the extraordinary aspect of this story is that Yahweh, unlike other gods, stops the sacrifice. This story may have been the one that was told when Hebrew children asked why their religion was different from the neighboring nations. “Why are we the only ones who do not sacrifice children?” they may have asked. And the answer would come: “let me tell you about Abraham, the father of our people.
Do you see the difference it makes to read the story in that context? We read it and think that God might ask for a person’s death. They told it to make the opposite point, that our God does not desire anyone to be killed. Let’s keep that in mind, but to be honest, if that’s the only good we can find here, then this story has outlived its use. No one ever asks why God doesn’t ask for child sacrifice, and the very idea of it in our scriptures is troubling. So why do people continue to claim this story as holy?
The Jewish tradition is filled with rabbis who have found this story disturbing and tried to make sense of if for their lives. In one line of interpretation, they figured that Isaac must have been in on the plan and been willing to give himself as a sacrifice to God. In this reading, Abraham is not the monster who almost kills his frightened boy, but the father who sadly shares this mournful journey with his faithful son. If this still seems strange and abhorrent, then think of Jesus willingly walking to the cross, followed by his mother Mary in tears. Perhaps Abraham and Isaac trusted that God’s plan might be bigger than death.
In a way, the willingness of Abraham and Isaac to sacrifice so greatly might stand as a challenge to us. How much are we willing to sacrifice in order to give our lives to God? I confess that I often hide from this question. I hide because there are many things that I do not want to give up. But at the same time many of the things I do give my time and energy to are not worth the sacrifice. We could name the obvious idols to whom we give our time and our efforts: anger, fear, addiction, ambition. We sacrifice much to these things, and although they are easy to name they are difficult to overcome. But even beyond those debilitating gods, we often sacrifice our lives to the trivial. We are always giving our time and attention to something, and if I could ever add up all my time and money and attention that I give to things that don’t really mean very much, I would be appalled. At certain times, we all sacrifice our lives, only to find that we have sacrificed them for not much at all.
The story of Abraham and Isaac might remind us that only when we give our lives to God are we giving ourselves to something that is really worth everything we have.
Now, let me give you a different take on our story. Pay attention to verse five. At the foot of the mountain, Abraham turns to the servants who have accompanied them on the journey and says “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.” Listen again: “We will worship and then we will come back to you.” Why does he say that both he and Isaac will come back if Isaac is going to die on the mountain? You might say that he is being deceptive, but I don’t think that fits his character or the way this story is told. I think that perhaps Abraham trusts that God will not allow the death of Isaac, who is, after all, the son that God promised to Abraham and Sarah in their old age. Abraham trusts God enough to follow the command to go and sacrifice his son, but also trusts in God to bring about a good conclusion in a way that he cannot yet see.
Down in Kentucky last week, there was little banner in the church at Henderson Settlement with these words “the sign that you are following God is that you will be led where you did not plan to go.” We are used to making our own plans, but this story of Abraham reminds us that sometimes we might follow the calling of God into a journey we did not plan, to which we don’t know the conclusion. What a freeing idea it is that we don’t have to know how God’s calling in our lives will work out in the end before we begin. Just get started. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t do the responsible work of planning and working toward a vision – we’ve got lots of people in this church who do that planning very well. What I mean is that we shouldn’t be paralyzed by waiting until we are certain that every outcome is accounted for and everything is safe.
The rabbis tell a story, called a midrash, about the crossing of the Red Sea. It’s a story that is not in the Bible, but offers insight on the Biblical story. You probably remember how the Hebrews reached the edge of the red sea and Moses lifted his rod to make the waters part. But in this midrash, Moses lifts his rod and nothing happens. And so, with the Egyptian army on its way, a Hebrew man named Naschon begins to walk into the sea. He wades in up to his ankles, then his knees, waist, and chest. Just before the water reaches his nostrils, the red sea parts. The point is that sometimes miracles only happen after we jump in.[2] To trust God is to commit yourself even when you don’t know exactly how things will turn out.
I hope that this story of Abraham and Isaac is working now on different levels. The story of Abraham and Isaac challenges us to give all that we have to God, and to carefully examine where we have sacrificed parts of our lives to things that don’t deserve it. This story also gives us confidence to answer God’s call and take action even when we don’t know how God is going to be at work. This is a story that tells us that the God who asks everything of us is also one who loves us and values our lives so deeply that God is the chief mourner over every child of this earth whose life is ever lost.
We are held close by God, and God calls us to give all that we are so that we can be who God created us to be.
[1] Kugel, James L. How To Read The Bible: A guide to scripture, then and now. 2007. I am grateful to this book for much of the background in this sermon.
[2] Jacobs, A.J. The Year of Living Biblically, page 13
Genesis 22:1-18 Matthew 10:37-42
Dedicated to the members of the 2008 mission tour; and always to the glory of God.
Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac is a difficult story. We come to the Bible trusting that it contains a word for us about our God and God’s relationship to us, but we often come away from this story disturbed because we don’t understand what that message can possibly be. Or perhaps we are disturbed because we are worried that we do understand the message of the story and we want nothing to do with it because it seems totally at odds with the message of Jesus Christ, which is the lens by which we view all scripture.
This story has two main points that disturb us. The first is that God tells Abraham to take his son, his and Sarah’s only son, whom he loves, Isaac, up to a mountaintop and sacrifice him as a burnt offering. How could God demand such a violent and senseless act? This is not the God we see in Jesus Christ, who came to give life. The second disturbing point is that Abraham agrees to do it.
What was he thinking? How can he possibly obey this command to kill his son? After World War II we heard the Nazis talk about how they were just following orders and we did not accept that excuse. In the movie A Few Good Men, we contemplated the same idea in our own military in the story of two Marines who were ordered to give their fellow Marine a code red, a kind of hazing punishment. Weren’t they able to recognize an immoral order and refuse to obey? Are we supposed to do something that is wrong and harmful just because we are told to do it by a commanding officer? And now in our country we are wrestling with the question of soldiers who were told to treat prisoners cruelly in order to soften them up for interrogation.
But what if God is the one who orders violence? The religious community has some history of this idea: burning heretics, the Salem witch trials, gunning down doctors, and calling for war against Muslims in the crusades, or in modern times painting Islam broadly as a religion of violence and hate. These people tragically thought that they were doing the will of God, and we needed more people to question their claims. So don’t we need a better model than Abraham, who doesn’t even question God’s order to kill his son? This story has some real problems!
How could any parent agree to give up the life of a child, and how could anyone let God get away with making such a mean demand? When Abraham set out for the mountain with his son Isaac, we must ask what was he thinking?
James Kugel, a scholar of the Hebrew scriptures, reminds us to be aware of the context in which this story was first told.[1] In the ancient middle east, offering your child as a sacrifice to your god was well accepted among nations in t region. More than an animal sacrifice, the gift of a child was the ultimate sign of your devotion. In the book of 2nd Kings, we read of the Moabite king who sacrifices his child to their god Molech to restore his people to the god’s good favor (2 Kings 3:26-27). Here’s the point: the Hebrews who first heard this story would not have found it very unusual or shocking that Abraham planned to sacrifice his son as a sign of great faithfulness to their God Yahweh. Instead, the extraordinary aspect of this story is that Yahweh, unlike other gods, stops the sacrifice. This story may have been the one that was told when Hebrew children asked why their religion was different from the neighboring nations. “Why are we the only ones who do not sacrifice children?” they may have asked. And the answer would come: “let me tell you about Abraham, the father of our people.
Do you see the difference it makes to read the story in that context? We read it and think that God might ask for a person’s death. They told it to make the opposite point, that our God does not desire anyone to be killed. Let’s keep that in mind, but to be honest, if that’s the only good we can find here, then this story has outlived its use. No one ever asks why God doesn’t ask for child sacrifice, and the very idea of it in our scriptures is troubling. So why do people continue to claim this story as holy?
The Jewish tradition is filled with rabbis who have found this story disturbing and tried to make sense of if for their lives. In one line of interpretation, they figured that Isaac must have been in on the plan and been willing to give himself as a sacrifice to God. In this reading, Abraham is not the monster who almost kills his frightened boy, but the father who sadly shares this mournful journey with his faithful son. If this still seems strange and abhorrent, then think of Jesus willingly walking to the cross, followed by his mother Mary in tears. Perhaps Abraham and Isaac trusted that God’s plan might be bigger than death.
In a way, the willingness of Abraham and Isaac to sacrifice so greatly might stand as a challenge to us. How much are we willing to sacrifice in order to give our lives to God? I confess that I often hide from this question. I hide because there are many things that I do not want to give up. But at the same time many of the things I do give my time and energy to are not worth the sacrifice. We could name the obvious idols to whom we give our time and our efforts: anger, fear, addiction, ambition. We sacrifice much to these things, and although they are easy to name they are difficult to overcome. But even beyond those debilitating gods, we often sacrifice our lives to the trivial. We are always giving our time and attention to something, and if I could ever add up all my time and money and attention that I give to things that don’t really mean very much, I would be appalled. At certain times, we all sacrifice our lives, only to find that we have sacrificed them for not much at all.
The story of Abraham and Isaac might remind us that only when we give our lives to God are we giving ourselves to something that is really worth everything we have.
Now, let me give you a different take on our story. Pay attention to verse five. At the foot of the mountain, Abraham turns to the servants who have accompanied them on the journey and says “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.” Listen again: “We will worship and then we will come back to you.” Why does he say that both he and Isaac will come back if Isaac is going to die on the mountain? You might say that he is being deceptive, but I don’t think that fits his character or the way this story is told. I think that perhaps Abraham trusts that God will not allow the death of Isaac, who is, after all, the son that God promised to Abraham and Sarah in their old age. Abraham trusts God enough to follow the command to go and sacrifice his son, but also trusts in God to bring about a good conclusion in a way that he cannot yet see.
Down in Kentucky last week, there was little banner in the church at Henderson Settlement with these words “the sign that you are following God is that you will be led where you did not plan to go.” We are used to making our own plans, but this story of Abraham reminds us that sometimes we might follow the calling of God into a journey we did not plan, to which we don’t know the conclusion. What a freeing idea it is that we don’t have to know how God’s calling in our lives will work out in the end before we begin. Just get started. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t do the responsible work of planning and working toward a vision – we’ve got lots of people in this church who do that planning very well. What I mean is that we shouldn’t be paralyzed by waiting until we are certain that every outcome is accounted for and everything is safe.
The rabbis tell a story, called a midrash, about the crossing of the Red Sea. It’s a story that is not in the Bible, but offers insight on the Biblical story. You probably remember how the Hebrews reached the edge of the red sea and Moses lifted his rod to make the waters part. But in this midrash, Moses lifts his rod and nothing happens. And so, with the Egyptian army on its way, a Hebrew man named Naschon begins to walk into the sea. He wades in up to his ankles, then his knees, waist, and chest. Just before the water reaches his nostrils, the red sea parts. The point is that sometimes miracles only happen after we jump in.[2] To trust God is to commit yourself even when you don’t know exactly how things will turn out.
I hope that this story of Abraham and Isaac is working now on different levels. The story of Abraham and Isaac challenges us to give all that we have to God, and to carefully examine where we have sacrificed parts of our lives to things that don’t deserve it. This story also gives us confidence to answer God’s call and take action even when we don’t know how God is going to be at work. This is a story that tells us that the God who asks everything of us is also one who loves us and values our lives so deeply that God is the chief mourner over every child of this earth whose life is ever lost.
We are held close by God, and God calls us to give all that we are so that we can be who God created us to be.
[1] Kugel, James L. How To Read The Bible: A guide to scripture, then and now. 2007. I am grateful to this book for much of the background in this sermon.
[2] Jacobs, A.J. The Year of Living Biblically, page 13
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Sermon - When the Waters Roar
Preached June 1, 2008 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Psalm 46 Matthew 7:21-29
Dedicated to this year’s high school graduates of our church family; and always to the glory of God.
Jesus once said that “the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.
In other words, if you give everything you have and everything that you are toward a life in God, it’s worth it. I suppose this could sound like bad news. “Everything I have? That’s too much.”
But I think it’s good news, because even though nothing is as valuable in a life in God, even so, we can all afford it! All you have to give is all you have for this pearl of great price.
And what do we get with this offer? Well, I can tell you what we don’t get. We do not get a life of ease and comfort. Religion is not a free pass to save us from injury and illness, the hardship of danger or loss, or any other storm that life can bring to us.
Life with God is so valuable that it is worth everything you have. I just can’t tell you that it will protect you from the storms in life.
But here’s the thing: nothing will. The storms hit us no matter what we do.
Jesus said, at the end of the sermon on the mount, at the conclusion of his teaching on how to live, that if you put his words into practice (that is, if you give all you have for God) you are like the wise person who built a house on rock instead of sand. But the storm comes anyway. The storm came for Jesus; it came for his disciples; it came for the early church under persecution, and for the missionaries in South America who stood up for the oppressed natives, for the pilgrims who crossed the ocean to worship with integrity, for the those who stood firm for equality and were beaten back with hoses, dogs, and fists.
Doesn’t it seem as if a life in God actually gets us into trouble, rather than saving us from it? Jesus doesn’t promise that the storm won’t come, but he does tell us that we have a choice about where and how to build our lives.
So what is it about building a life in God that is so valuable?
The psalm that we heard said “Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.”
When the waters roar, we will not fear.
Let me show you what I think that looks like. Rabbi Abraham Heschel was born in Warsaw, Poland and studied at Berlin, Germany in the early part of last century, the descendent of generations of rabbis before him. He fled from the Nazis and arrived in the United States in 1940, although many in his immediate family were killed in the war and the holocaust. In the 1960’s, he was a leader for civil rights. He marched beside Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, because he saw in the scriptures a clear call for justice and equality for God’s people. Rabbi Heschel once wrote “I did not ask for success, I asked for wonder.”
At the end of his life, after suffering a heart attack that almost killed him, he said “when I regained consciousness, my first feelings were not of despair or anger. I felt only gratitude to God for my life, for every moment I had lived. I was ready to depart. ‘Take me, O Lord,’ I thought, ‘I have seen so many miracles in my lifetime.’” Exhausted by the effort, he paused for a moment, then added, “That is what I meant when I wrote, ‘I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder. And [God] gave it to me.’”
We want to be successful. We want our graduates to be successful in what they do, and that’s a good thing. Let us hope for their success, not as an end but only as a means toward giving yourself to a life in God. Let us not strive for success; let us strive for God. Success, in itself, is not a guarantee of safety, happiness, or health. Rabbi Heschel knew that the storms of life will bring pain and loss, but he also knew that the world is full of the wonder of God.
Albert Schweitzer was a successful man who realized that success wasn’t enough. At the turn of last century he was an internationally renowned organist and teacher of theology. His 1906 book, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, is still a landmark in New Testament studies. He was doing very well. But the words of Jesus in the sermon on the mount stuck with him, and he decided that the best way for him to live that out was to go live among the poorest of the poor in equatorial Africa, not as a doctor of theology to preach to them, but as a medical doctor to care for them. And so this accomplished scholar and organist went to medical school for seven years, and then founded a hospital in Africa where he spent most of the rest of his life easing the suffering of our poor brothers and sisters.
Listen to his words: “The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”
Does this make any sense? Usually we hope for success, which will make us safe, secure, and happy. But it turns out that all our success is not as valuable as the life that Jesus calls us to live. Just like the pearl merchant who sold everything for the great pearl, a life in God is worth everything. Living the way of Christ is worth more than success, wealth, or fame.
Phillip Yancey tells about his time interviewing two groups of people. The first are the rich and famous, and he found them to be a hopeless lot: depressed and insecure, propped up by power and medication. Then he interviewed people who’s lives are given to the work of service. He wrote that while he was prepared to admire them, he was not prepared to envy them. They were content, happy, at home in the world.
Do you know people like that? People who give themselves to the world in love and service, and even when they suffer pain and loss they seem to have that calm of the faithful? We will not fear when the waters roar.
In two weeks some of us will be on our way to Henderson Settlement in Frakes, Kentucky, deep in the Appalachian mountains of beauty and hardship. Many of you have gone before, or you have gone to other places to live out the way of Christ. Here’s the thing that’s strange about this trip. It’s not a vacation. There’s no resort, no sleeping in, and no relaxing days by the water. We’re going to do difficult work.
So why is it that every year, people go on a mission tour and talk about what a great week it is? Why do people give up their time, give up money they could be earning at work, and pay their way, give their energy and strength to work on homes for strangers whom we will never see again?
I guess it’s because life can’t be just about ourselves, our own success, our own security. Life can’t be just about guarding against the storms that are going to come anyway.
Life is about wonder. Life is about love for neighbors, even strangers and enemies. The waters are going to roar, but where are you going to build your life?
I hope for all of us, that we build it on the way of Christ. Do not ask for success. Ask for wonder. Ask to be more aware of the great gift of this world, of God’s unconditional love for the unloveable, and of God’s power to make us more than we thought we could be. Ask for these things. God will give it to you.
Psalm 46 Matthew 7:21-29
Dedicated to this year’s high school graduates of our church family; and always to the glory of God.
Jesus once said that “the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.
In other words, if you give everything you have and everything that you are toward a life in God, it’s worth it. I suppose this could sound like bad news. “Everything I have? That’s too much.”
But I think it’s good news, because even though nothing is as valuable in a life in God, even so, we can all afford it! All you have to give is all you have for this pearl of great price.
And what do we get with this offer? Well, I can tell you what we don’t get. We do not get a life of ease and comfort. Religion is not a free pass to save us from injury and illness, the hardship of danger or loss, or any other storm that life can bring to us.
Life with God is so valuable that it is worth everything you have. I just can’t tell you that it will protect you from the storms in life.
But here’s the thing: nothing will. The storms hit us no matter what we do.
Jesus said, at the end of the sermon on the mount, at the conclusion of his teaching on how to live, that if you put his words into practice (that is, if you give all you have for God) you are like the wise person who built a house on rock instead of sand. But the storm comes anyway. The storm came for Jesus; it came for his disciples; it came for the early church under persecution, and for the missionaries in South America who stood up for the oppressed natives, for the pilgrims who crossed the ocean to worship with integrity, for the those who stood firm for equality and were beaten back with hoses, dogs, and fists.
Doesn’t it seem as if a life in God actually gets us into trouble, rather than saving us from it? Jesus doesn’t promise that the storm won’t come, but he does tell us that we have a choice about where and how to build our lives.
So what is it about building a life in God that is so valuable?
The psalm that we heard said “Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.”
When the waters roar, we will not fear.
Let me show you what I think that looks like. Rabbi Abraham Heschel was born in Warsaw, Poland and studied at Berlin, Germany in the early part of last century, the descendent of generations of rabbis before him. He fled from the Nazis and arrived in the United States in 1940, although many in his immediate family were killed in the war and the holocaust. In the 1960’s, he was a leader for civil rights. He marched beside Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, because he saw in the scriptures a clear call for justice and equality for God’s people. Rabbi Heschel once wrote “I did not ask for success, I asked for wonder.”
At the end of his life, after suffering a heart attack that almost killed him, he said “when I regained consciousness, my first feelings were not of despair or anger. I felt only gratitude to God for my life, for every moment I had lived. I was ready to depart. ‘Take me, O Lord,’ I thought, ‘I have seen so many miracles in my lifetime.’” Exhausted by the effort, he paused for a moment, then added, “That is what I meant when I wrote, ‘I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder. And [God] gave it to me.’”
We want to be successful. We want our graduates to be successful in what they do, and that’s a good thing. Let us hope for their success, not as an end but only as a means toward giving yourself to a life in God. Let us not strive for success; let us strive for God. Success, in itself, is not a guarantee of safety, happiness, or health. Rabbi Heschel knew that the storms of life will bring pain and loss, but he also knew that the world is full of the wonder of God.
Albert Schweitzer was a successful man who realized that success wasn’t enough. At the turn of last century he was an internationally renowned organist and teacher of theology. His 1906 book, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, is still a landmark in New Testament studies. He was doing very well. But the words of Jesus in the sermon on the mount stuck with him, and he decided that the best way for him to live that out was to go live among the poorest of the poor in equatorial Africa, not as a doctor of theology to preach to them, but as a medical doctor to care for them. And so this accomplished scholar and organist went to medical school for seven years, and then founded a hospital in Africa where he spent most of the rest of his life easing the suffering of our poor brothers and sisters.
Listen to his words: “The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”
Does this make any sense? Usually we hope for success, which will make us safe, secure, and happy. But it turns out that all our success is not as valuable as the life that Jesus calls us to live. Just like the pearl merchant who sold everything for the great pearl, a life in God is worth everything. Living the way of Christ is worth more than success, wealth, or fame.
Phillip Yancey tells about his time interviewing two groups of people. The first are the rich and famous, and he found them to be a hopeless lot: depressed and insecure, propped up by power and medication. Then he interviewed people who’s lives are given to the work of service. He wrote that while he was prepared to admire them, he was not prepared to envy them. They were content, happy, at home in the world.
Do you know people like that? People who give themselves to the world in love and service, and even when they suffer pain and loss they seem to have that calm of the faithful? We will not fear when the waters roar.
In two weeks some of us will be on our way to Henderson Settlement in Frakes, Kentucky, deep in the Appalachian mountains of beauty and hardship. Many of you have gone before, or you have gone to other places to live out the way of Christ. Here’s the thing that’s strange about this trip. It’s not a vacation. There’s no resort, no sleeping in, and no relaxing days by the water. We’re going to do difficult work.
So why is it that every year, people go on a mission tour and talk about what a great week it is? Why do people give up their time, give up money they could be earning at work, and pay their way, give their energy and strength to work on homes for strangers whom we will never see again?
I guess it’s because life can’t be just about ourselves, our own success, our own security. Life can’t be just about guarding against the storms that are going to come anyway.
Life is about wonder. Life is about love for neighbors, even strangers and enemies. The waters are going to roar, but where are you going to build your life?
I hope for all of us, that we build it on the way of Christ. Do not ask for success. Ask for wonder. Ask to be more aware of the great gift of this world, of God’s unconditional love for the unloveable, and of God’s power to make us more than we thought we could be. Ask for these things. God will give it to you.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Shaped by our Past, We Shape our Future
Originally preached on May 11, 2008, Pentecost Sunday, and the day on which the Confirmation Class became members of the church, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC.
Acts 2:2-21
Dedicated to the twenty-three students of the Confirmation II Class; and always to the glory of God.
In the gospels of the New Testament, we hear the story of God’s good news revealed through Jesus Christ, the son of God. In the book of Acts, we still hear the story of God’s good news, but now it is revealed through the church. Pentecost is a story that reminds us that the church is created by God’s Holy Spirit, and held together by God’s Holy Spirit. The book of Acts says that when the Holy Spirit came among them, it was like a rushing wind, like flames of fire that landed above each person. In other words, it was difficult to explain; it was energizing, illuminating, and unpredictable.
I’m interested in what happened right after God’s spirit swept into their lives. The very first thing that happens is that a whole list of people from nations, tribes and ethnicities that we can’t fully pronounce all began to hear the good news of Jesus Christ in their own languages. Now, don’t get caught up trying to work out how that happened or you’ll miss the point! When God’s spirit moves in our lives, it doesn’t matter what barriers of history, culture, war, or language have divided us. We will all hear the good news in a way we can understand. We will be united. We will be the church.
Today, these students of the Confirmation class are joining this congregation as members. You are joining the church, and it doesn’t matter if you understand God with a different language shaped by your generation and your life’s experience. Just remember the story of God’s spirit on Pentecost. That’s our story. That’s us.
This year in Confirmation, we have been learning about the First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, the history of Congregationalism, and the character of our denomination, the United Church of Christ.
One evening in Boston, near the end of our year, we reflected on our experiences. We had been talking about what it was like to visit these historic places that they had learned about in school. It was in the congregational church that the sons of liberty met before the Boston tea party; it was in our church that they protested slavery, reached out to the Native Americans, and continued to stand up in God’s name for freedom and the equality for all people. One of them said that she was amazed to learn that those people from history class were our Congregationalist ancestors. She said “that’s us!” and in those words she summed up the entire year.
We who make up the First Congregational Church of Tallmadge have been shaped by our past, and this gives us strength and courage to shape our future.
We are shaped by those who worked and sacrificed for a church building to center our life of worship here in Tallmadge. Our first members donated lumber from their own trees, and they worked from 1821 until 1825, when surely their own new homes still needed much attention, to complete the church on the circle. Over the years the congregation had to make changes to keep the church open and inviting. They installed stoves, and later a furnace. They changed the box pews (with the walls to keep in heat) for open pews. They put up space in other buildings for offices, classes, and fellowship across the street. In the 1960’s, they (and many of you) constructed this building for the generations to follow. Now after four decades, we have broken ground for the first expansion to that building, so that we can continue to invite people to worship. That’s our story. That’s us.
In Boston we visited Harvard University, founded in 1636 – 1636! – by our Congregationalist ancestors. It was the first institution of higher learning in the colonies. Education has always been important in our tradition. It needs to be for a church in which the members make decisions. Our church members helped to found the college of the Western Reserve in 1826, and served on its faculty.
We continue to value education in this church. We celebrate and bless our high school graduates; we provide opportunities at church for all ages to learn about our faith. One of our confirmation students, writing about why she wants to join this church wrote, “I’ve learned that we’re never done learning, and there’s always going to be something new for God to teach us.” That is very true. In fact, when the Pilgrims came on the Mayflower, their minister John Robinson did not make the journey, but he told them “God hath yet more truth and light to break forth from his holy word.” Or, to put it in the words that we use in the United Church of Christ, “God is still speaking.” That’s our story. That’s us.
In 1833, not long after the College of the Western Reserve was founded, some of our church’s members on the faculty resigned in protest because they favored immediate emancipation of slaves, while a majority of trustees disagree, favoring instead the slaves’ eventual return to Africa.
The president of the college resigned with him, and later that year he came to the historic church on the circle to speak on the abolition of slavery. This is one of my favorite stories in our history. It seems that some local opposition to the abolitionist cause got to the church building and boarded up the doors and all the windows in order to prevent the speech. But the abolitionist movement had a great many supporters who went to work and quickly to remove the barricades. An eyewitness recalls “what a racket there was as the rails came flying out of the windows on top of each other and men shouting and some I fear were swearing.”
We are shaped by our past – by our ancestors who have stood up for anyone who was excluded from freedom and full participation in the life of faith. That’s our story. That’s us.
God founded the church on Pentecost by bringing people together, despite all their differences, and we hold to that promise. We in this church don’t all have the same experiences or points of view. We have different languages of thought and perspective. But God’s spirit binds us together. That’s the promise of Pentecost.
Another of our Confirmands had this to say about the class. She wrote about how we had fun together, made trips, and learned about God. Then she observed “In the beginning we all didn’t really know each other that well, ut in the end, we all became good friends.”
That is a gift from God. It is what happened on Pentecost, and it is what happens still. That’s our story. That’s us.
Acts 2:2-21
Dedicated to the twenty-three students of the Confirmation II Class; and always to the glory of God.
In the gospels of the New Testament, we hear the story of God’s good news revealed through Jesus Christ, the son of God. In the book of Acts, we still hear the story of God’s good news, but now it is revealed through the church. Pentecost is a story that reminds us that the church is created by God’s Holy Spirit, and held together by God’s Holy Spirit. The book of Acts says that when the Holy Spirit came among them, it was like a rushing wind, like flames of fire that landed above each person. In other words, it was difficult to explain; it was energizing, illuminating, and unpredictable.
I’m interested in what happened right after God’s spirit swept into their lives. The very first thing that happens is that a whole list of people from nations, tribes and ethnicities that we can’t fully pronounce all began to hear the good news of Jesus Christ in their own languages. Now, don’t get caught up trying to work out how that happened or you’ll miss the point! When God’s spirit moves in our lives, it doesn’t matter what barriers of history, culture, war, or language have divided us. We will all hear the good news in a way we can understand. We will be united. We will be the church.
Today, these students of the Confirmation class are joining this congregation as members. You are joining the church, and it doesn’t matter if you understand God with a different language shaped by your generation and your life’s experience. Just remember the story of God’s spirit on Pentecost. That’s our story. That’s us.
This year in Confirmation, we have been learning about the First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, the history of Congregationalism, and the character of our denomination, the United Church of Christ.
One evening in Boston, near the end of our year, we reflected on our experiences. We had been talking about what it was like to visit these historic places that they had learned about in school. It was in the congregational church that the sons of liberty met before the Boston tea party; it was in our church that they protested slavery, reached out to the Native Americans, and continued to stand up in God’s name for freedom and the equality for all people. One of them said that she was amazed to learn that those people from history class were our Congregationalist ancestors. She said “that’s us!” and in those words she summed up the entire year.
We who make up the First Congregational Church of Tallmadge have been shaped by our past, and this gives us strength and courage to shape our future.
We are shaped by those who worked and sacrificed for a church building to center our life of worship here in Tallmadge. Our first members donated lumber from their own trees, and they worked from 1821 until 1825, when surely their own new homes still needed much attention, to complete the church on the circle. Over the years the congregation had to make changes to keep the church open and inviting. They installed stoves, and later a furnace. They changed the box pews (with the walls to keep in heat) for open pews. They put up space in other buildings for offices, classes, and fellowship across the street. In the 1960’s, they (and many of you) constructed this building for the generations to follow. Now after four decades, we have broken ground for the first expansion to that building, so that we can continue to invite people to worship. That’s our story. That’s us.
In Boston we visited Harvard University, founded in 1636 – 1636! – by our Congregationalist ancestors. It was the first institution of higher learning in the colonies. Education has always been important in our tradition. It needs to be for a church in which the members make decisions. Our church members helped to found the college of the Western Reserve in 1826, and served on its faculty.
We continue to value education in this church. We celebrate and bless our high school graduates; we provide opportunities at church for all ages to learn about our faith. One of our confirmation students, writing about why she wants to join this church wrote, “I’ve learned that we’re never done learning, and there’s always going to be something new for God to teach us.” That is very true. In fact, when the Pilgrims came on the Mayflower, their minister John Robinson did not make the journey, but he told them “God hath yet more truth and light to break forth from his holy word.” Or, to put it in the words that we use in the United Church of Christ, “God is still speaking.” That’s our story. That’s us.
In 1833, not long after the College of the Western Reserve was founded, some of our church’s members on the faculty resigned in protest because they favored immediate emancipation of slaves, while a majority of trustees disagree, favoring instead the slaves’ eventual return to Africa.
The president of the college resigned with him, and later that year he came to the historic church on the circle to speak on the abolition of slavery. This is one of my favorite stories in our history. It seems that some local opposition to the abolitionist cause got to the church building and boarded up the doors and all the windows in order to prevent the speech. But the abolitionist movement had a great many supporters who went to work and quickly to remove the barricades. An eyewitness recalls “what a racket there was as the rails came flying out of the windows on top of each other and men shouting and some I fear were swearing.”
We are shaped by our past – by our ancestors who have stood up for anyone who was excluded from freedom and full participation in the life of faith. That’s our story. That’s us.
God founded the church on Pentecost by bringing people together, despite all their differences, and we hold to that promise. We in this church don’t all have the same experiences or points of view. We have different languages of thought and perspective. But God’s spirit binds us together. That’s the promise of Pentecost.
Another of our Confirmands had this to say about the class. She wrote about how we had fun together, made trips, and learned about God. Then she observed “In the beginning we all didn’t really know each other that well, ut in the end, we all became good friends.”
That is a gift from God. It is what happened on Pentecost, and it is what happens still. That’s our story. That’s us.
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