Preached on December 5, 2010, the second Sunday of Advent at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Listen to the sermon here.
Matthew 3:1-12
The season of Advent is a time of preparation that helps us to refocus our lives on what is good and essential, and to cast aside all that is harming us or distracting us.
In the summer of 2005, we were at a potato farm in eastern Missouri on a youth mission tour. We were harvesting potatoes for the local foodbank. A potato field that is ready for harvest looks like a carpet of green. The leaves of the potato plants spread out close to the ground, while the root system, with the potatoes, lies out of sight underground. Standing at the edge of the field, we watched the most amazing vehicle of farm machinery. It was monstrously sized, and as it drove across the field, it scooped up the top layer of soil and plants and swallowed everything into its body, which held a complex system of chutes and conveyor belts, and parts that moved and shook. I couldn’t figure out how it worked, so it seemed like a miracle of supernatural proportions to see how the machine got rid of its cargo. In the same way that it was constantly eating up the ground in front, the machine was also constantly throwing a heap of dirt and leaves and stalks and roots out the back, while a chute off to the side dropped a stream of potatoes onto the ground, or into a large cargo truck driving nearby. Somehow this machine could eat up dirt and plants, separate out just the potatoes, and throw the rest back onto the field, and all without ever stopping its forward march. It was an amazing machine for knowing what was good, and letting go of the rest.
Advent is a time when God helps us to get to what is good and nourishing in our own lives, and to let go of the rest.
John the Baptist is getting people ready for Jesus, and he describes Jesus using an old agricultural image that I had to look up before I could understand it. He says that Jesus will come with his winnowing fork in his hand, to clear the threshing floor, separating the wheat from the chaff in order to keep the wheat in the barn and burn off the chaff. I didn’t know what that meant. When I need wheat, I go to the store and buy a loaf of bread or some flour. Here’s what I learned about wheat and chaff: wheat is a grass, and back when wheat was harvested by hand, the wheat kernels were found attached at the long stalks, held in place by a sort of husk. The stalks would be broken off, and then the husks with the kernels would be battered in order to loosen the wheat kernel from the husky chaff. What you had then, was a lot of broken up wheat and chaff lying together on the floor. Rather than go through and pick out all the wheat by hand, they would take the winnowing fork, and just toss it all up in the air. You see, the chaff was very light, like flakes of straw, and would float away on the breeze, but the wheat was heavy, and would fall back to the threshing floor. It was a simple and effective method to separate what was good and nourishing from what you didn’t need or want. All it took was someone to come and stir up the whole pile, throwing everything up in the air.
Some people look at this image in the Gospel, and they say that what it means is that in the world there are good people and bad people, and Jesus is coming to separate the good people, the wheat, and take them into his barn, or heaven, while the bad people, the chaff, are being sent to the fire. Some people have said that, but I am not one of them. It is far to simplistic: no person on earth is either totally good or totally bad. All of us are some mixture of good and bad. In fact, I’m not sure that you can have one without the other.
For just a moment, let’s put aside Jesus and the threshing floor with the wheat and chaff, and go back to the beginning of Genesis, and Adam and Eve. You remember how Adam and Eve ate the fruit, right? They ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Sometimes we talk about them eating the fruit as the moment when everything went wrong. God told them not to eat the fruit, but they did, so it’s called the original sin, the fall of humanity from grace. But forget all of that for now, and think about this. The Rabbi Lawrence Kushner thinks that God actually meant for them to eat that fruit. God meant for humans to have knowledge of good and evil. Kushner wonders: if God really didn’t want them to eat the fruit, then why did God put it right in the middle of the garden and make such a big deal about it? It’s kind of like a parent saying to the kids “we’re going out for a bit, the house is yours, just don’t open the top drawer of my bedroom dresser.” Well, that’s the first thing they’re going to do, anyone knows that! Maybe the snake who told Adam and Eve to eat the fruit was working for God. Or do we suppose that God was outsmarted by the very people and creatures that God had just created?
I think that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Eden is the way that Genesis tells us what it means to be human. Every person is capable of both good and evil. We have the capacity for great good, for love and self-sacrifice and courage, but we also have the capacity for evil. If we can choose one, then we have to be able to choose the other. We have free will, which means that we can choose; we have both of them within us.
In this way, we are like the wheat and the husk that grow together: you can’t grow one without the other, so the time comes to separate them out. Jesus is not coming to separate good people from bad people. Jesus is coming to look into your lives and to call forth what is good within each of you.
At threshing time, the farmers take the winnowing forks and throw everything up in the air so that it can be sorted out. And sometimes our lives get thrown up in the air, in a way that helps us to sort out the good from the bad, but in a way we would never wish.
Several years ago, I shared with all of you the story of my car accident. Driving alone in a rain storm, my car spun off the highway and into a guardrail, and I was very fortunate to walk away unharmed from the wreck. But it could have been much different, and the experience of being so close to serious bodily harm and even death had a way of immediately focusing my attention on the few things that are really most important: my family, my friendships, the beauty of being alive, and the importance of giving love to the people who are important to me, and indeed, with everyone who crosses my path.
My life had been stirred up, and although I wish it hadn’t, I can’t deny that it helped me to separate what’s really valuable from what isn’t. Many of you shared with me stories of your own car accidents, and the same sense of how it reshaped your values and priorities. I know that the same thing can happen in other crises and tragedies of life: the onset of injury and illness, the loss of a job, a fire at home, or the death of a loved one. We would never wish for any these things, and we have the sense of our lives being thrown up in the air, the chaff blowing away, and the wheat gaining a renewed value.
Let’s not wait for some unexpected tragedy to shake up our lives. The season of Advent provides a safe, protected container to throw our lives into the air, and to remember, or rediscover what is good and valuable in our lives. This is a season to allow ourselves to be shaken up by the liturgy of worship, by the hymns and carols, by the scriptures full of hope and power, and by the presence of Christ, whose living presence today in our world we remember today in communion. What is most important in your life? What gifts have you been holding back? What things need to change, and it’s finally time to change them?
Jesus had a way of throwing our lives up in the air so that people began to see things differently. A dirty manger became a holy bed; a young, unmarried girl became the bearer of God’s son; some lowly fishermen became apostles; and the symbol of violent death became a symbol of love and hope.
Just as the farmers came to threshing time every year, we need to be shaken up on a regular basis. There is something about us, I believe, that resists having our lives resorted. Even when we know that our lives are off track, there is some comfort in the familiar. But we need to be shaken up. That is how God recovers the good that is within each person. And remember what John the Baptist said. The kingdom of heaven is near. When Jesus comes with his winnowing fork, and causes us to remember and recover what is good and most important, then we begin to live in the kingdom of heaven right here on earth.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Sermon - Communion
Preached on November 7, 2010 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC, prior to the sacrament of communion.
Mark 14:22-26
This morning I want to take you to a church that doesn’t exist anywhere except in my mind. I invented the church and its people so that I could tell you their stories. It’s a lot like this church, a little smaller, but with the same mix of people that you would find in this church or in many others, but please be aware that any similarities to real people are purely coincidental. I want to take you to this church on this Sunday morning, where the congregation sits together in the sanctuary near the end of their worship service. They have remembered the saints, they have offered their gifts to God, the minister has preached, and now she approaches the communion table, (and of course, no one in this church thinks it is unusual to have a female minister). At the communion table, the minister holds up the bread, and recites the words that she has spoken so many times before, the words of Jesus from the gospels: This is my body, broken for you.
In a pew, in the middle of the sanctuary, Frank’s mind begins to wander without his even being aware of it: the words are so familiar, even too familiar. His mind recognizes the pattern and then checks out. It isn’t because he dislikes communion, or wishes that it could go a little faster. He isn’t against it, but he’s not particularly for it, either. To him, communion is one of those things you do at church, unsure of why it’s so important. It is a mindless ritual, Frank thinks.
In another pew, Molly feels uneasy about communion. For her, communion conjures up a vague sense of guilt, a feeling that she shouldn’t be here; she isn’t faithful enough, or pious enough, and her belief in God is a bit wobbly. She remembers what she heard while growing up about how God makes us worthy to receive communion. But it seems like you have to be a better Christian for that to happen. Whenever she takes communion, she has that feeling she gets when she’s sees in her car’s rearview mirror, a police car driving behind her. Sure, she’s driving responsibly and within the speed limit, but she can’t help the feeling of having been caught at something. That’s how communion feels.
Sitting a few pews behind Molly, while Charles listens again to the story of the last supper, he remembers Thanksgiving at his grandparents’ house. Grandma had hosted a big Thanksgiving meal for as long as everyone could remember. Over all those years, while the people grew older around the table, as spouses first took their seats with the family, and then children, the food didn’t change at all. Every year, as Grandma surrounded the great turkey with her special recipe stuffing, the cranberry sauce, and grandma’s famous mashed potatoes, the smell and taste of the food brought back memories of years gone by, and they told the old stories and laughed at the old jokes. The food on the table was always a reminder that this was a family in which everyone was loved unconditionally, a family in which all are cared for and nourished.
Everything went just the same this past year, until Grandma told the family that she had an announcement for them. “This is my last year to host Thanksgiving,” she said. “I imagine I’ve got a few more years to enjoy the holiday, but I don’t have the strength anymore to prepare the meal, so I’ve written out all my recipes for each of you. Some of them come from my own grandmother. I hope that you will eat this food for years to come, and remember that you are loved, and that you will always have the support you need.”
Grandma’s Thanksgiving was never just about the food she served, it was about her life. Thanksgiving was wonderful because of the love and care that she gave to her children, her sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, her grandchildren, and to her friends and neighbors who often joined the table when they had no other plans to spend the holiday.
And so, it was never a question in the family of whether they would continue to share this meal, never a question as to whether they would make these recipes themselves. If anything, they were each eager to take up the mantle following Grandma’s last Thanksgiving.
Charles thinks about all of this as the deacons come forward to gather the serving trays and begin to carry those small, holy pieces of bread to the congregation. He thinks about how communion is also not just about the food that is served. Communion is a reminder of Jesus Christ’s entire life. After all, this wasn’t the first time that he had broken bread and blessed it and shared it. The gospel tells two stories of times when people came by the thousands to hear him teach, and Jesus took a few loaves and made them enough for everyone.
While other rabbis turned people away from their tables because they did not measure up to standards of conduct or purity, Jesus shared food with the most undesirable of sinners, lepers, and foreigners. He would do anything to make the God’s table big enough for all of us. He would even go to his death to make it big enough, his death that he knew was coming soon on the night he ate with the disciples and gave them bread and cup.
There they sat, celebrating the Passover meal, which was about God freeing the slaves from Egypt, and Jesus told them that God was still at work, freeing them from everything that could ever seek to oppress them. Freeing them – freeing us –from fear, from guilt, from isolation, from injustice, and even from death. Freeing is what God does, and the bread and cup remind us of that when we forget. Jesus invited everyone to share this meal, and we are eager to have our turn to do the same, to serve this meal to each other, to our families, and friends, and visitors, and strangers.
In another part of the sanctuary, as the last taste of the bread dissolves in her mouth, Cathy’s mind wanders back to a performance she saw years ago. It was Lily Tomlin’s one-woman show, in which she played a number of unforgettable characters, but most unforgettable was Trudy. Trudy was a bag lady who unexpectedly became the tour guide to a couple of aliens who visited Earth, showing them what human life was like. One day, the aliens discovered what it feels like to get goose bumps. After they left, Trudy recalls the experience:
(Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, 1985)
Cathy remembers that, because it is exactly how she feels today during communion. Maybe her attention is supposed to be on the table, or maybe she’s supposed to be thinking about her own life, and her own relationship with God. But what really knocks her out is the congregation. What she loves about communion is that even though the meal is from Jesus, and even though it’s the ministers who give the invitation, and even though it’s the deacons who come forward to carry the trays, when you get right down to it, this sacred little meal is served by all of us. Pew by pew, the congregation serves this meal to each other, and this is never more clear than when those heavy trays come around, with all those little symbolic-sized cups of juice, always on the verge of spilling. People are very careful as they pass it to their neighbors, and hold the tray for someone else to pick out the cups.
Sometimes she sees husband and wife serve each other, or parent and child; now two good friends, and now strangers, all serving each other. All these people, with all their stories and secrets, their struggles and accomplishments, so often divided by different goals and dreams, and different values, and different votes on election day, and maybe even different beliefs about what communion means, but still we serve each other this holy meal. And that reminds her of what Jesus said, that those who want to be great should be in service to everyone. Maybe the presence of Jesus is not only in the bread and cup, but also in the community of people who serve the bread and cup, who are bound together by the grace of God.
Who else sits in the pews of that church? What do they think about when they hear they see the bread held up just like it always is, and hear the same words that they have been hearing month after month, the same words that have been said for generations and centuries? All I can tell you is that even we remember the same story and the same simple meal in the same way, sometimes it becomes new, not because communion has changed, but because we have changed.
Mark 14:22-26
This morning I want to take you to a church that doesn’t exist anywhere except in my mind. I invented the church and its people so that I could tell you their stories. It’s a lot like this church, a little smaller, but with the same mix of people that you would find in this church or in many others, but please be aware that any similarities to real people are purely coincidental. I want to take you to this church on this Sunday morning, where the congregation sits together in the sanctuary near the end of their worship service. They have remembered the saints, they have offered their gifts to God, the minister has preached, and now she approaches the communion table, (and of course, no one in this church thinks it is unusual to have a female minister). At the communion table, the minister holds up the bread, and recites the words that she has spoken so many times before, the words of Jesus from the gospels: This is my body, broken for you.
In a pew, in the middle of the sanctuary, Frank’s mind begins to wander without his even being aware of it: the words are so familiar, even too familiar. His mind recognizes the pattern and then checks out. It isn’t because he dislikes communion, or wishes that it could go a little faster. He isn’t against it, but he’s not particularly for it, either. To him, communion is one of those things you do at church, unsure of why it’s so important. It is a mindless ritual, Frank thinks.
In another pew, Molly feels uneasy about communion. For her, communion conjures up a vague sense of guilt, a feeling that she shouldn’t be here; she isn’t faithful enough, or pious enough, and her belief in God is a bit wobbly. She remembers what she heard while growing up about how God makes us worthy to receive communion. But it seems like you have to be a better Christian for that to happen. Whenever she takes communion, she has that feeling she gets when she’s sees in her car’s rearview mirror, a police car driving behind her. Sure, she’s driving responsibly and within the speed limit, but she can’t help the feeling of having been caught at something. That’s how communion feels.
Sitting a few pews behind Molly, while Charles listens again to the story of the last supper, he remembers Thanksgiving at his grandparents’ house. Grandma had hosted a big Thanksgiving meal for as long as everyone could remember. Over all those years, while the people grew older around the table, as spouses first took their seats with the family, and then children, the food didn’t change at all. Every year, as Grandma surrounded the great turkey with her special recipe stuffing, the cranberry sauce, and grandma’s famous mashed potatoes, the smell and taste of the food brought back memories of years gone by, and they told the old stories and laughed at the old jokes. The food on the table was always a reminder that this was a family in which everyone was loved unconditionally, a family in which all are cared for and nourished.
Everything went just the same this past year, until Grandma told the family that she had an announcement for them. “This is my last year to host Thanksgiving,” she said. “I imagine I’ve got a few more years to enjoy the holiday, but I don’t have the strength anymore to prepare the meal, so I’ve written out all my recipes for each of you. Some of them come from my own grandmother. I hope that you will eat this food for years to come, and remember that you are loved, and that you will always have the support you need.”
Grandma’s Thanksgiving was never just about the food she served, it was about her life. Thanksgiving was wonderful because of the love and care that she gave to her children, her sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, her grandchildren, and to her friends and neighbors who often joined the table when they had no other plans to spend the holiday.
And so, it was never a question in the family of whether they would continue to share this meal, never a question as to whether they would make these recipes themselves. If anything, they were each eager to take up the mantle following Grandma’s last Thanksgiving.
Charles thinks about all of this as the deacons come forward to gather the serving trays and begin to carry those small, holy pieces of bread to the congregation. He thinks about how communion is also not just about the food that is served. Communion is a reminder of Jesus Christ’s entire life. After all, this wasn’t the first time that he had broken bread and blessed it and shared it. The gospel tells two stories of times when people came by the thousands to hear him teach, and Jesus took a few loaves and made them enough for everyone.
While other rabbis turned people away from their tables because they did not measure up to standards of conduct or purity, Jesus shared food with the most undesirable of sinners, lepers, and foreigners. He would do anything to make the God’s table big enough for all of us. He would even go to his death to make it big enough, his death that he knew was coming soon on the night he ate with the disciples and gave them bread and cup.
There they sat, celebrating the Passover meal, which was about God freeing the slaves from Egypt, and Jesus told them that God was still at work, freeing them from everything that could ever seek to oppress them. Freeing them – freeing us –from fear, from guilt, from isolation, from injustice, and even from death. Freeing is what God does, and the bread and cup remind us of that when we forget. Jesus invited everyone to share this meal, and we are eager to have our turn to do the same, to serve this meal to each other, to our families, and friends, and visitors, and strangers.
In another part of the sanctuary, as the last taste of the bread dissolves in her mouth, Cathy’s mind wanders back to a performance she saw years ago. It was Lily Tomlin’s one-woman show, in which she played a number of unforgettable characters, but most unforgettable was Trudy. Trudy was a bag lady who unexpectedly became the tour guide to a couple of aliens who visited Earth, showing them what human life was like. One day, the aliens discovered what it feels like to get goose bumps. After they left, Trudy recalls the experience:
Did I tell you what happened at the play? We were at the back of the theater, standing there in the dark, all of a sudden I feel one of 'em tug my sleeve, whispers, "Trudy, look." I said, "Yeah, goose bumps. You definitely got goose bumps. You really like the play that much?" They said it wasn't the play that gave 'em goose bumps, it was the audience.
I forgot to tell 'em to watch the play; they'd been watching the audience! Yeah, to see a group of strangers sitting together in the dark, laughing and crying about the same things...that just knocked 'em out.
(Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, 1985)
Cathy remembers that, because it is exactly how she feels today during communion. Maybe her attention is supposed to be on the table, or maybe she’s supposed to be thinking about her own life, and her own relationship with God. But what really knocks her out is the congregation. What she loves about communion is that even though the meal is from Jesus, and even though it’s the ministers who give the invitation, and even though it’s the deacons who come forward to carry the trays, when you get right down to it, this sacred little meal is served by all of us. Pew by pew, the congregation serves this meal to each other, and this is never more clear than when those heavy trays come around, with all those little symbolic-sized cups of juice, always on the verge of spilling. People are very careful as they pass it to their neighbors, and hold the tray for someone else to pick out the cups.
Sometimes she sees husband and wife serve each other, or parent and child; now two good friends, and now strangers, all serving each other. All these people, with all their stories and secrets, their struggles and accomplishments, so often divided by different goals and dreams, and different values, and different votes on election day, and maybe even different beliefs about what communion means, but still we serve each other this holy meal. And that reminds her of what Jesus said, that those who want to be great should be in service to everyone. Maybe the presence of Jesus is not only in the bread and cup, but also in the community of people who serve the bread and cup, who are bound together by the grace of God.
Who else sits in the pews of that church? What do they think about when they hear they see the bread held up just like it always is, and hear the same words that they have been hearing month after month, the same words that have been said for generations and centuries? All I can tell you is that even we remember the same story and the same simple meal in the same way, sometimes it becomes new, not because communion has changed, but because we have changed.
100 Posts!
This entry marks my 100th post to this blog, dating back to February 23, 2007. In that time, this blog has been visited by dozens of people, with 27 unique visitors in the past month alone! That number is up from 19 in the previous month, and with blog visits skyrocketing 42.11 percent, I am sure that corporate offers to monetize the blog with ads will be flooding in soon, possibly even as I now type. Do not fear, dear readers. I will resist the temptation. This remains your ad-free (for now) source for sermon transcripts and the occasional church newsletter column.
p.s. Those statistics are real. I am not making this up. Google Analytics keeps the numbers, and I can further tell you that all of the visitors came from within the USA and Canada, which is as much geographical specificity as they will report. The average time per visit is 00:01:10, which I am guessing to mean one hour and ten minutes, since I can't believe that it means one minute and ten seconds.
p.s. Those statistics are real. I am not making this up. Google Analytics keeps the numbers, and I can further tell you that all of the visitors came from within the USA and Canada, which is as much geographical specificity as they will report. The average time per visit is 00:01:10, which I am guessing to mean one hour and ten minutes, since I can't believe that it means one minute and ten seconds.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Sermon - The Vision
Part III of III in the series "Life in Exile"
Preached on October 17, 2010 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Jeremiah 31:27-34 and Revelation 21:1-2, 22-26
What if we decided that our vision in the church is to put the church out of business? What if that is God’s vision for the church?
The vision that is given to the people who struggle in exile, is that the day is coming when God will restore them to their true home. And in that home we will be so intimately related to, and connected to, God that there will be no need to teach about God because everyone will know God. God’s law will be written on our hearts. The vision is not just that they are going home to Jerusalem, but also that the day is coming when we will be as close to God as our own hearts beating within us.
At the end of the first century, several generations after the life of Christ, the writer of Revelation picks up on the idea of the exile because the early Christian church had the same feeling of being in exile, homeless in an empire that did not recognize them or give them any space to live in peace. And so we read in Revelation about God creating a new heaven and a new earth, and the holy city of Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven. And in the new Jerusalem there is no Temple, because just as Jeremiah had said, this new home is where all people will know God by heart. Our exile will come to an end.
Several days ago, in Chile, the 33 miners who were trapped for over sixty days were finally brought home to the surface. It occurred to me that when the mine caved in, those thirty-three men were cast into exile, cut off from their home. Very quickly, a small relief hole was drilled, and this small passage kept them alive during their exile. It brought them water and nourishment, and communication with their families. One of my favorite parts of the story is that someone figured out how to bake meat pies in the shape of a cylinder that would fit down the hole. That little hole kept them alive. But the real vision was the other, larger hole that they were drilling, the one that was just big enough to fit a metal tube that could carry the men one at a time to the surface. When the rescue hole was completed, it put the first hole out of business.
And that’s what I mean about putting the church out of business. The day is coming when we won’t need a sanctuary or temple because we will worship God and know God everywhere. We won’t need to learn about God because we will all know God by heart.
We have been thinking, these past weeks, about how you and I often feel that we are in exile, spiritually homeless, longing for the home that is true and secure. Sometimes we make a good home that may last for years or even decades, but nothing is permanent, and we soon we are looking again for a place to call home.
Our times of exile may be times to practice what it will be like when we are finally home. One day, we will know God by heart. Think about the other things you might know by heart: how to play an instrument, how to bake a pie, or swing a golf club. Think about what happens when you ride a bicycle. You keep your body in balance as your weight shifts from left pedal to right pedal. You must keep your legs moving in oppositional directions, alternating force from one foot to the other, and adjusting your speed of rotation according to the slope of the street, the traffic, and any turns you might make. These turns, by the way are made not so much by turning the handlebars as by leaning into the turn at a precise angle, and maintaining sufficient speed to avoid tipping over, and shifting at just the right moment from the braking to accelerating through the turn, and of course both your hands are operating these brakes and also shifting gears and signaling to traffic if necessary. Oh, and you’ll need to do all of these things by heart because your mind is busy remembering where you are going, how to get there, taking stock of your fatigue or need for water, and keeping an eye on your companions – especially if they are children. Now, how do we do all of these things at the same time, so smoothly and enjoyably? It seems miraculous. We do it because we have practiced it so well that it is a part of us. We know it by heart. That’s the vision.
Do you remember that Amish community in Pennsylvania, and the tragic day, three years ago now, when a man came to their school and killed their children and himself? The cruelty of the crime shocked us around the country, and then the Amish community shocked us again by their immediate acts of forgiveness for the shooter, and their compassion for the family he left behind. They comforted his wife, and offered support for his child. I can only think that this was possible because they have practiced their faith enough to make it written on their heart. Forgiveness comes to them as naturally as riding a bike comes to us after years and years of riding.
The church is where we practice, here and now, the home that we will one day have. Because we are now in exile, we have the church. This is the place to hear the vision of God’s power to make the world new. This is the place where we begin to act as if God has already made the world new. We’re not there yet, but we do have a home in the midst of the journey. When you are searching for your home, the home that is more complete than any home you have yet known, come and worship, and together we will find our way there.
There is a story of a man who was lost in a great woods. There were many paths in the woods, and he tried one after the other after the other. Sometimes he made his own paths, but none of these ever got him out. Finally, he caught a glimpse of a person ahead of him. He began to run and caught up with the other man in a clearing. “Thank God I’ve found you,” he said. “I have been lost for a long time, and I was worried that I’d never get out!”
The other man said “I’m sorry; I am lost as well. But let us walk together, because we can share all of the paths we have tried that didn’t work out, and together we will find a way home.”
Isn’t that a wonderful description of the church? We come together here, and in our lives we have all tried so many different ways to make a home where we are happy and secure and accepted, and here we come together to confess that we have not been able to do it on our own. Here we worship together the One who will bring us home to the place where we know God by heart, and we are welcomed home with open arms.
The visions that come to us in scripture are always attempts to capture something that is too wonderful, too big, too incomprehensible to be put into words. The visions that scripture gives us are glimpses of what God has in store. I’m thinking of the 23rd Psalm, and the house of the Lord where we will dwell forever. I’m thinking of Isaiah who speaks of a mountain where God removes the veil that covers all people. I’m thinking of Jesus who says “in my father’s house are many rooms.”
These glimpses can only be rendered poetically with the best images at hand: a house, a mountain, many rooms. They are meant to evoke a truth that his too big for words. There’s a wonderful movie, called The Postman, that tells the story of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and the postman who delivers his mail. They form a friendship of sorts, and as the postman begins to read Neruda’s poems, he comes him one day, points to one of his poems, and says “what does this mean?”
Neruda tells him “if I could say what it means in other words, I wouldn’t have written the poem.”
So it is with the visions of home in the scripture. These visions must be told in poetic language, metaphors of God’s law written on our hearts, or a city descending from heaven. These visions are true, not in the merely literal sense, but in the much grander sense of helping us to see a vision that is ultimately beyond our ability to see, at least for right now.
In Revelation, we are given a glimpse of a new heaven and a new earth, and the new city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is where the Jews exiled in Babylon wanted to get back to, and metaphorically, it is the heavenly city of God that will be the end of all our journeys, all our exiles. In Revelation we read that the new city of Jerusalem has its gates thrown open during the daytime, and that nightfall never, ever comes. It is always light in our new home. A poetic vision of a place where the gates are open during the day, and the gates never, ever close. In God’s city, you are always welcome home!
Maybe you have heard the saying that home is the only place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. Sadly, that may not be true for all of us. Sometimes we are not taken in by the places we have called home. But I can tell you this: God’s home, this new creation, is a place where you will be welcomed in.
I once conducted a funeral service, and in the service I described, as I always do, the glimpses of our eternal home that we read in scripture. I spoke of our faith that promises to us that God restores our lives, makes us new, and with love and grace God welcomes us into our eternal home. After the service, one man greeted me on his way out and said that he wished I had presented the gospel. I should have presented the gospel? I imagine that what he meant was that I should have told people the requirements that they must meet in order to be saved by God into God’s eternal home. But to me, the gospel, which literally means good news, is not a set of requirements that leads to salvation, like following a recipe that pays off with a fantastic pie. Gospel is the gift of God’s love, God’s merciful, compassionate, endless, grace-filled love. God begins with grace, and we respond with praise, thanksgiving, worship, faith. We respond by being in relationship with God, and learning to be God’s people.
Because one day our relationship with God will be so close, that we will do what we do in here all the time. On that day, we will give thanks for God’s goodness, we will experience forgiveness, we will clothe ourselves in God’s love, and we will praise God with our very lives, and we will do it all by heart. We will know that every place is a sanctuary of God’s presence. We ourselves, every one of us, will be a sanctuary of God’s presence.
Until then, this holy sanctuary reminds us of our potential and our gifts. Until then, we come to this sacred place because it helps us to see the sacredness of other places. We come together to praise God and experience God’s grace because from time to time we forget, and we need each other be the bearers of God’s vision.
Preached on October 17, 2010 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Jeremiah 31:27-34 and Revelation 21:1-2, 22-26
What if we decided that our vision in the church is to put the church out of business? What if that is God’s vision for the church?
The vision that is given to the people who struggle in exile, is that the day is coming when God will restore them to their true home. And in that home we will be so intimately related to, and connected to, God that there will be no need to teach about God because everyone will know God. God’s law will be written on our hearts. The vision is not just that they are going home to Jerusalem, but also that the day is coming when we will be as close to God as our own hearts beating within us.
At the end of the first century, several generations after the life of Christ, the writer of Revelation picks up on the idea of the exile because the early Christian church had the same feeling of being in exile, homeless in an empire that did not recognize them or give them any space to live in peace. And so we read in Revelation about God creating a new heaven and a new earth, and the holy city of Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven. And in the new Jerusalem there is no Temple, because just as Jeremiah had said, this new home is where all people will know God by heart. Our exile will come to an end.
Several days ago, in Chile, the 33 miners who were trapped for over sixty days were finally brought home to the surface. It occurred to me that when the mine caved in, those thirty-three men were cast into exile, cut off from their home. Very quickly, a small relief hole was drilled, and this small passage kept them alive during their exile. It brought them water and nourishment, and communication with their families. One of my favorite parts of the story is that someone figured out how to bake meat pies in the shape of a cylinder that would fit down the hole. That little hole kept them alive. But the real vision was the other, larger hole that they were drilling, the one that was just big enough to fit a metal tube that could carry the men one at a time to the surface. When the rescue hole was completed, it put the first hole out of business.
And that’s what I mean about putting the church out of business. The day is coming when we won’t need a sanctuary or temple because we will worship God and know God everywhere. We won’t need to learn about God because we will all know God by heart.
We have been thinking, these past weeks, about how you and I often feel that we are in exile, spiritually homeless, longing for the home that is true and secure. Sometimes we make a good home that may last for years or even decades, but nothing is permanent, and we soon we are looking again for a place to call home.
Our times of exile may be times to practice what it will be like when we are finally home. One day, we will know God by heart. Think about the other things you might know by heart: how to play an instrument, how to bake a pie, or swing a golf club. Think about what happens when you ride a bicycle. You keep your body in balance as your weight shifts from left pedal to right pedal. You must keep your legs moving in oppositional directions, alternating force from one foot to the other, and adjusting your speed of rotation according to the slope of the street, the traffic, and any turns you might make. These turns, by the way are made not so much by turning the handlebars as by leaning into the turn at a precise angle, and maintaining sufficient speed to avoid tipping over, and shifting at just the right moment from the braking to accelerating through the turn, and of course both your hands are operating these brakes and also shifting gears and signaling to traffic if necessary. Oh, and you’ll need to do all of these things by heart because your mind is busy remembering where you are going, how to get there, taking stock of your fatigue or need for water, and keeping an eye on your companions – especially if they are children. Now, how do we do all of these things at the same time, so smoothly and enjoyably? It seems miraculous. We do it because we have practiced it so well that it is a part of us. We know it by heart. That’s the vision.
Do you remember that Amish community in Pennsylvania, and the tragic day, three years ago now, when a man came to their school and killed their children and himself? The cruelty of the crime shocked us around the country, and then the Amish community shocked us again by their immediate acts of forgiveness for the shooter, and their compassion for the family he left behind. They comforted his wife, and offered support for his child. I can only think that this was possible because they have practiced their faith enough to make it written on their heart. Forgiveness comes to them as naturally as riding a bike comes to us after years and years of riding.
The church is where we practice, here and now, the home that we will one day have. Because we are now in exile, we have the church. This is the place to hear the vision of God’s power to make the world new. This is the place where we begin to act as if God has already made the world new. We’re not there yet, but we do have a home in the midst of the journey. When you are searching for your home, the home that is more complete than any home you have yet known, come and worship, and together we will find our way there.
There is a story of a man who was lost in a great woods. There were many paths in the woods, and he tried one after the other after the other. Sometimes he made his own paths, but none of these ever got him out. Finally, he caught a glimpse of a person ahead of him. He began to run and caught up with the other man in a clearing. “Thank God I’ve found you,” he said. “I have been lost for a long time, and I was worried that I’d never get out!”
The other man said “I’m sorry; I am lost as well. But let us walk together, because we can share all of the paths we have tried that didn’t work out, and together we will find a way home.”
Isn’t that a wonderful description of the church? We come together here, and in our lives we have all tried so many different ways to make a home where we are happy and secure and accepted, and here we come together to confess that we have not been able to do it on our own. Here we worship together the One who will bring us home to the place where we know God by heart, and we are welcomed home with open arms.
The visions that come to us in scripture are always attempts to capture something that is too wonderful, too big, too incomprehensible to be put into words. The visions that scripture gives us are glimpses of what God has in store. I’m thinking of the 23rd Psalm, and the house of the Lord where we will dwell forever. I’m thinking of Isaiah who speaks of a mountain where God removes the veil that covers all people. I’m thinking of Jesus who says “in my father’s house are many rooms.”
These glimpses can only be rendered poetically with the best images at hand: a house, a mountain, many rooms. They are meant to evoke a truth that his too big for words. There’s a wonderful movie, called The Postman, that tells the story of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and the postman who delivers his mail. They form a friendship of sorts, and as the postman begins to read Neruda’s poems, he comes him one day, points to one of his poems, and says “what does this mean?”
Neruda tells him “if I could say what it means in other words, I wouldn’t have written the poem.”
So it is with the visions of home in the scripture. These visions must be told in poetic language, metaphors of God’s law written on our hearts, or a city descending from heaven. These visions are true, not in the merely literal sense, but in the much grander sense of helping us to see a vision that is ultimately beyond our ability to see, at least for right now.
In Revelation, we are given a glimpse of a new heaven and a new earth, and the new city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is where the Jews exiled in Babylon wanted to get back to, and metaphorically, it is the heavenly city of God that will be the end of all our journeys, all our exiles. In Revelation we read that the new city of Jerusalem has its gates thrown open during the daytime, and that nightfall never, ever comes. It is always light in our new home. A poetic vision of a place where the gates are open during the day, and the gates never, ever close. In God’s city, you are always welcome home!
Maybe you have heard the saying that home is the only place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. Sadly, that may not be true for all of us. Sometimes we are not taken in by the places we have called home. But I can tell you this: God’s home, this new creation, is a place where you will be welcomed in.
I once conducted a funeral service, and in the service I described, as I always do, the glimpses of our eternal home that we read in scripture. I spoke of our faith that promises to us that God restores our lives, makes us new, and with love and grace God welcomes us into our eternal home. After the service, one man greeted me on his way out and said that he wished I had presented the gospel. I should have presented the gospel? I imagine that what he meant was that I should have told people the requirements that they must meet in order to be saved by God into God’s eternal home. But to me, the gospel, which literally means good news, is not a set of requirements that leads to salvation, like following a recipe that pays off with a fantastic pie. Gospel is the gift of God’s love, God’s merciful, compassionate, endless, grace-filled love. God begins with grace, and we respond with praise, thanksgiving, worship, faith. We respond by being in relationship with God, and learning to be God’s people.
Because one day our relationship with God will be so close, that we will do what we do in here all the time. On that day, we will give thanks for God’s goodness, we will experience forgiveness, we will clothe ourselves in God’s love, and we will praise God with our very lives, and we will do it all by heart. We will know that every place is a sanctuary of God’s presence. We ourselves, every one of us, will be a sanctuary of God’s presence.
Until then, this holy sanctuary reminds us of our potential and our gifts. Until then, we come to this sacred place because it helps us to see the sacredness of other places. We come together to praise God and experience God’s grace because from time to time we forget, and we need each other be the bearers of God’s vision.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Sermon - While We Wait
Part II of III in the series “Life in Exile”
Preached on October 10, 2010 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
Introduction: This is the second of a three week series called Life in Exile. The Biblical texts for this series are the passages that speak of the nation of Israel when they were taken as a people into exile in Babylon, an experience which reverberates throughout the Bible. The subtext for this series, and the real reason for preaching it, is that the experience of exile is a metaphor for our own lives, especially the difficult times when we do not feel at home even in our own homes.
There is an old folk story about the people of a small village who were suffering from hunger in a time when food was scarce. Each household had a bit of something or other leftover, some extra potatoes in one house, some extra onions or carrots in others, but not enough to make a good meal. Each night, people went to bed hungry. One day a traveler arrived, and began to talk in the village square about the wonderful soup that he was going to make and share with everyone in town. He set a fire in the square, and set over it a large pot, like a cauldron. He filled it with water, and then he pulled from his bag a very smooth stone. He eyed it carefully, sniffed it, and then dropped it into the pot.
“I’m making Stone Soup!” he said. “It’s going to be delicious!”
Well, people were excited about the offer of soup, for they were very hungry, but they were skeptical about the taste of stone soup. One person approached the traveler and asked how stone soup could be any good. The traveler said “I understand your hesitation, but I assure you that this soup is wonderful. You’ll be surprised and amazed at how good it tastes…although I will admit that it could use just a bit more to heighten the taste.”
“Well,” said the villager, “I have some potatoes at home, would that help?”
“Oh, potatoes, that would be the perfect addition!” the traveler said.
Another villager came by to check on the pot and express her doubts. “It doesn’t smell very good” she said.
The traveler said “oh, just wait, when it’s done you won’t believe how good it will smell and taste, although I will admit that it could us just bit more to enhance the flavor.”
“I have some parsley at home,” the woman said.
And so it went. Carrots, salt, onions, barley, pepper, cream: a great many things were all added to the stone soup, and when it was finished, every person in the village shared the best meal that they had eaten in weeks.
In times of hardship, in times of crisis, people often draw back and hunker down, focused on their own security. When tragedy strikes a blow to our lives, when we have lost something so important we become like a turtle, retreating into our shell, holding on to what little we have, when it would actually be better for us to do just the opposite. And that is what God calls us to do.
It was 2600 years ago that Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and took the people into exile. Their homes were destroyed and they carried great losses into their new life. They had to trust their grief and their anger to God, lest it destroy their spirits or destroy those around them.
In a way, we are also in exile. We might be in exile from the wonderful home of the good old days that we remember with fondness and sadness: the days when we could leave our homes unlocked, and trust the neighbors to look after our children as they roamed the streets; the days before the recession, or the terrorist attacks; the days when we went to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving. Or maybe we never had good old days, and we are in exile from a home we have never really known. Maybe we don’t so much look back at the home we lost, but search for the home we dream of that we have never found. In any case, when we are in exile, then we tend to become extra guarded about what little we have and to cling to it tight. Generosity seems like a risk. We have lost enough and we need to focus on keeping what little we have left.
Jeremiah knows that this is what the people in exile want to do. They want to huddle close together and tell themselves that their exile will only last a couple years, a few seasons. They just have to wait it out and everything will return to normal. So Jeremiah gives them a reality check. He tells them that the exile will last two generations. What this meant is that the ones who remember Jerusalem will never go home, but only their children and grandchildren. Jeremiah told them to make themselves at home in this new reality: to plant gardens, to give their children in marriage, and to seek the welfare of the city where they’d been exiled.
Seek the welfare of the city. Seek the welfare of the kingdom of Babylon. Seek the welfare of the people who had destroyed their homes and forced them to leave their land. Seek the welfare of the people you call your enemies! Last week, do you remember, they prayed to God that they wanted to turn the full force of their anger upon these people, and what happens next is miraculous: they seek the welfare of their enemies.
In our own exile, when we wish that someone would tell us how we can recover the home we have longed for, when we wish that religion offered a miraculous fix for our own hardships, God sends a prophet to tell us that he way through our own exile is to show goodness to other people. It is one of the great truths of our faith that the only things we really keep are the things that we learn to give. Our security comes not by what we get, but by what we give.
It seems like it’s just the opposite of what we expect. It seems like a mismatch of what should happen. Shouldn’t the ones who have suffered be the ones receiving help? When we lose something, isn’t it right for others to do good for us? How can we wrap our minds around this concept of giving to others as a way through our own hardship?
I know that many of you know exactly what I’m talking about. I see this wonderful dynamic of faith become real in your lives. In the last few weeks, my friend John Schluep preached about the blessing of the elders. I can tell you that some of our elders in this church have lost more in their lives than I hope the rest of us will ever have to lose. These people have had to redefine what home means again and again as their old homes were lost to them. And what they have done is miraculous. They have learned to seek the welfare of the people around them, and in doing so they have healed and they have been a blessing to others. I cannot tell you how many people I have talked to who tell me about their lives and then they lean in close and tell me, like it’s a great secret: “You know, I received more than I ever gave.”
I need to tell you the story of a man who made a lot of money in the stock market. This was the 1920’s, things were booming, and he did very, very well. He somehow got connected with a group in Africa that wanted to establish a university, and he gave them a bunch of money to get them started. You can guess what happened in 1929 when the stock market crashed. It was devastating. He lost everything, and lived for years in poverty.
Years later, this university in Africa was celebrating an anniversary - 30 years, or something – and the students said, where is this man, he should come. They finally found him in a tenement building on the south side of Chicago, and they invited him to come over for the celebration. He said “I can’t, I don’t have any money,” and they said “we’ll take care of that,” and they flew him over. In the middle of the celebration, with this wonderful music, and a crowd of alumni, and so many grateful people, this man turned to the president of the school and said, “you know, it’s strange: everything I kept, I lost. What I gave is all that I have.”
Seek the well-being of those around you, because in their well-being you will find your well-being. And now, here in this congregation we are working to send money toward a new school in Mali, in west Africa. I wonder how it will work that the welfare of Africa is related to our welfare? I can’t tell you exactly, but the words of Jeremiah, and the words of Jesus invite me to trust that this is so. The world is becoming smaller, and we are realizing more and more just how interdependent we are. We must realize that the well-being of people around the world, their peace, their security, their health, their prosperity, is where we will secure our own well-being. And it is also true right here in this community that we discover the same truth.
It was during their time in exile that the chosen people of God began to see that their identity was not to be people who were protected on Mount Zion by God’s strength, but to be people who created God’s reality wherever they ended up by the power of God’s goodness working through them. I think that this is what Jesus had in mind when he said that the kingdom of God is within you. If the kingdom of God is within you, than the kingdom is not built on the outside, with sturdy wall to keep the good people safe, and well fed. No, the kingdom is within us, so that wherever we are, even when we are in exile, we bring a bit of God’s kingdom into being by seeking what is good for our neighbors.
The kingdom of God is within you, and it is stronger than any kingdom built with strong walls and powerful armies. It is stronger because even when the walls come down around us and we lose our homes, we can still find ourselves in the kingdom of God, where we learn the miracle of having more by giving more away.
The stone soup is cooking on the fire. There’s enough for everyone.
Preached on October 10, 2010 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
Introduction: This is the second of a three week series called Life in Exile. The Biblical texts for this series are the passages that speak of the nation of Israel when they were taken as a people into exile in Babylon, an experience which reverberates throughout the Bible. The subtext for this series, and the real reason for preaching it, is that the experience of exile is a metaphor for our own lives, especially the difficult times when we do not feel at home even in our own homes.
There is an old folk story about the people of a small village who were suffering from hunger in a time when food was scarce. Each household had a bit of something or other leftover, some extra potatoes in one house, some extra onions or carrots in others, but not enough to make a good meal. Each night, people went to bed hungry. One day a traveler arrived, and began to talk in the village square about the wonderful soup that he was going to make and share with everyone in town. He set a fire in the square, and set over it a large pot, like a cauldron. He filled it with water, and then he pulled from his bag a very smooth stone. He eyed it carefully, sniffed it, and then dropped it into the pot.
“I’m making Stone Soup!” he said. “It’s going to be delicious!”
Well, people were excited about the offer of soup, for they were very hungry, but they were skeptical about the taste of stone soup. One person approached the traveler and asked how stone soup could be any good. The traveler said “I understand your hesitation, but I assure you that this soup is wonderful. You’ll be surprised and amazed at how good it tastes…although I will admit that it could use just a bit more to heighten the taste.”
“Well,” said the villager, “I have some potatoes at home, would that help?”
“Oh, potatoes, that would be the perfect addition!” the traveler said.
Another villager came by to check on the pot and express her doubts. “It doesn’t smell very good” she said.
The traveler said “oh, just wait, when it’s done you won’t believe how good it will smell and taste, although I will admit that it could us just bit more to enhance the flavor.”
“I have some parsley at home,” the woman said.
And so it went. Carrots, salt, onions, barley, pepper, cream: a great many things were all added to the stone soup, and when it was finished, every person in the village shared the best meal that they had eaten in weeks.
In times of hardship, in times of crisis, people often draw back and hunker down, focused on their own security. When tragedy strikes a blow to our lives, when we have lost something so important we become like a turtle, retreating into our shell, holding on to what little we have, when it would actually be better for us to do just the opposite. And that is what God calls us to do.
It was 2600 years ago that Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and took the people into exile. Their homes were destroyed and they carried great losses into their new life. They had to trust their grief and their anger to God, lest it destroy their spirits or destroy those around them.
In a way, we are also in exile. We might be in exile from the wonderful home of the good old days that we remember with fondness and sadness: the days when we could leave our homes unlocked, and trust the neighbors to look after our children as they roamed the streets; the days before the recession, or the terrorist attacks; the days when we went to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving. Or maybe we never had good old days, and we are in exile from a home we have never really known. Maybe we don’t so much look back at the home we lost, but search for the home we dream of that we have never found. In any case, when we are in exile, then we tend to become extra guarded about what little we have and to cling to it tight. Generosity seems like a risk. We have lost enough and we need to focus on keeping what little we have left.
Jeremiah knows that this is what the people in exile want to do. They want to huddle close together and tell themselves that their exile will only last a couple years, a few seasons. They just have to wait it out and everything will return to normal. So Jeremiah gives them a reality check. He tells them that the exile will last two generations. What this meant is that the ones who remember Jerusalem will never go home, but only their children and grandchildren. Jeremiah told them to make themselves at home in this new reality: to plant gardens, to give their children in marriage, and to seek the welfare of the city where they’d been exiled.
Seek the welfare of the city. Seek the welfare of the kingdom of Babylon. Seek the welfare of the people who had destroyed their homes and forced them to leave their land. Seek the welfare of the people you call your enemies! Last week, do you remember, they prayed to God that they wanted to turn the full force of their anger upon these people, and what happens next is miraculous: they seek the welfare of their enemies.
In our own exile, when we wish that someone would tell us how we can recover the home we have longed for, when we wish that religion offered a miraculous fix for our own hardships, God sends a prophet to tell us that he way through our own exile is to show goodness to other people. It is one of the great truths of our faith that the only things we really keep are the things that we learn to give. Our security comes not by what we get, but by what we give.
It seems like it’s just the opposite of what we expect. It seems like a mismatch of what should happen. Shouldn’t the ones who have suffered be the ones receiving help? When we lose something, isn’t it right for others to do good for us? How can we wrap our minds around this concept of giving to others as a way through our own hardship?
I know that many of you know exactly what I’m talking about. I see this wonderful dynamic of faith become real in your lives. In the last few weeks, my friend John Schluep preached about the blessing of the elders. I can tell you that some of our elders in this church have lost more in their lives than I hope the rest of us will ever have to lose. These people have had to redefine what home means again and again as their old homes were lost to them. And what they have done is miraculous. They have learned to seek the welfare of the people around them, and in doing so they have healed and they have been a blessing to others. I cannot tell you how many people I have talked to who tell me about their lives and then they lean in close and tell me, like it’s a great secret: “You know, I received more than I ever gave.”
I need to tell you the story of a man who made a lot of money in the stock market. This was the 1920’s, things were booming, and he did very, very well. He somehow got connected with a group in Africa that wanted to establish a university, and he gave them a bunch of money to get them started. You can guess what happened in 1929 when the stock market crashed. It was devastating. He lost everything, and lived for years in poverty.
Years later, this university in Africa was celebrating an anniversary - 30 years, or something – and the students said, where is this man, he should come. They finally found him in a tenement building on the south side of Chicago, and they invited him to come over for the celebration. He said “I can’t, I don’t have any money,” and they said “we’ll take care of that,” and they flew him over. In the middle of the celebration, with this wonderful music, and a crowd of alumni, and so many grateful people, this man turned to the president of the school and said, “you know, it’s strange: everything I kept, I lost. What I gave is all that I have.”
Seek the well-being of those around you, because in their well-being you will find your well-being. And now, here in this congregation we are working to send money toward a new school in Mali, in west Africa. I wonder how it will work that the welfare of Africa is related to our welfare? I can’t tell you exactly, but the words of Jeremiah, and the words of Jesus invite me to trust that this is so. The world is becoming smaller, and we are realizing more and more just how interdependent we are. We must realize that the well-being of people around the world, their peace, their security, their health, their prosperity, is where we will secure our own well-being. And it is also true right here in this community that we discover the same truth.
It was during their time in exile that the chosen people of God began to see that their identity was not to be people who were protected on Mount Zion by God’s strength, but to be people who created God’s reality wherever they ended up by the power of God’s goodness working through them. I think that this is what Jesus had in mind when he said that the kingdom of God is within you. If the kingdom of God is within you, than the kingdom is not built on the outside, with sturdy wall to keep the good people safe, and well fed. No, the kingdom is within us, so that wherever we are, even when we are in exile, we bring a bit of God’s kingdom into being by seeking what is good for our neighbors.
The kingdom of God is within you, and it is stronger than any kingdom built with strong walls and powerful armies. It is stronger because even when the walls come down around us and we lose our homes, we can still find ourselves in the kingdom of God, where we learn the miracle of having more by giving more away.
The stone soup is cooking on the fire. There’s enough for everyone.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Sermon - Not At Home
Part I of III in the series “Life in Exile”
Preached on October 3, 2010 World Communion Sunday, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Lamentations 1:1-6 Psalm 137
Sometimes I wonder if our lives are normally stable and secure, only to be interrupted by problems that alter our lives, or if our lives are normally unstable and changing, and we try to carve out periods of relative security while the world shakes around us. Maybe it is a little bit of each. One thing we do know is that if we ever have a period of time when we feel stable, comfortable, and settled, it’s not going to last. Something always happens to topple that fleeting sense of being at home.
It happened in a very big way to the people of Israel in the year 587 BC, the year that the kingdom to their east, Babylon, came and conquered Israel, not only the villages and farms, but the very city of Jerusalem, the city of peace, built on the safe heights of Mount Zion. The city was destroyed; the Temple was torn down, and the its people were taken into captivity in exile in Babylon, while those who escaped fled to hide in other nations.
The people of Israel lost their home, and with it their religious and cultural identity. The prophetic book of Lamentations is a discourse in grief and anger at what happened to Jerusalem, and the words of Psalm 137 come from this very specific time and place. By the waters of Babylon, we lay down and wept.
They wept, because the people who had captured them began to mock them, telling them to sing some of their songs of Zion. But those songs must be sung in Zion, those are songs of the Temple, songs of home. Those songs don’t make any sense in Babylon. Those songs are too heartbreaking to sing when their home has been taken from them.
There are many ways that our sense of being at home, safe and comfortable, can be cut away from us. The minister Frederick Buechner wrote about the Longing for Home, and he said that “To be homeless the way people like you and me are apt to be homeless is to have homes all over the place but not really to be home in any of them.”
Being homeless, even in our own homes, brings a sense of great grief. Some of the people who know the most about walking through grief in this church are those who serve as Stephen Ministers. One of the books that they have studied for their ministry of giving care has a title that would have made sense to the Israelites in Babylon. The title of the book is Don’t Sing Songs to a Heavy Heart. Sometimes we are in a place where songs don’t make sense. Sometimes we are by our own waters of Babylon, cursing whatever has happened to tear us from the life we used to have. Maybe you have been in a place of great grief, and you have had someone try to cheer you up in a way that seemed just totally false and unkind, even if well intentioned. Don’t sing songs to a heavy heart.
When we are hurting inside, what we most need is someone who is strong enough just to come be with us in that painful and difficult place, to remind us that we are not alone. This is the guiding principle of Stephen Ministry. The spiritual writer Parker Palmer was talking about the time when he suffered a deep depression. He said that when someone is depressed, they lose the ability to even experience the things that would normally bring joy: like sunshine, and a walk on a cool autumn day. There was a member of his Quaker church, one of the elders, who discovered the only thing that helped. This man would come, once a week, and without saying more than a few words, would sit across from him and massage his feet. It was the only way that Parker could be reminded that he was not alone.
The Psalm says that they can’t sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land. All they can feel is a rage against their enemies. The rage builds in this psalm until it ends with that last violent idea, imagining how happy it would feel to take the children of their oppressors and bash their heads against a rock. It is one of the most awful images in all of scripture, but also one of the most honest. Anger is what they feel! Beneath the sadness of their losses, beneath the grief for everything that has been destroyed, they are angry, and they want revenge!
I’ve seen that feeling. After the attacks of September 11, so much about our lives came to a standstill. We didn’t know how to go on with our lives. The things that seemed important suddenly seemed trivial, and the things we had forgotten became important. We couldn’t go on singing the same songs. We couldn’t go on as if life were the same, because the home we knew was gone. Home was not what we had thought it was.
I remember one day I went to a grocery store, and I was talking with the guy who was working the register while he scanned by purchases. Those were the weeks when you started talking to strangers sometimes as if you were continuing a discussion from the day before. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.” “My neighbor was stranded for three days; he finally got a flight home.” Things like that. So we started talking, and this man said that we should go over there and kill the families of every man who hijacked an airplane on that day. Kill their families, their neighbors, and bomb their cities. Didn’t a lot of us feel that? Even if a part of us knew that it wouldn’t solve anything, that it would only intensify the vicious circle of violence, didn’t we have a sense of wanting to somehow lash out and make someone else more vulnerable than us? We lost our home in the United States as we had known it. And with the loss came anger.
There are too many ways for us to lose a sense of a home that is safe and secure. The tragedies may be national or personal. If not on September 11, 2001, maybe it was the financial collapse of 2008 and the loss of your retirement savings. Or maybe it is the somber doctor’s quiet diagnosis, the betrayal of a friend, the job layoffs, or the death of a spouse. When someone dies, sometimes there are songs that are too painful to hear, or places that are too painful to go. We can’t sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land.
Sometimes there is a target for our anger, and sometimes we lash out for any target that seems available: Wall Street, congress, co-workers, people who are different from us, or just a generalized anger that has no target. It just builds up and spills out onto innocent bystanders over minor inconveniences, or trivial misunderstandings. Sometimes our families get the worst of it.
This anger is nothing new. Scripture records the rage of the Israelites who were so deluded by their madness that they thought the massacre of innocent children would bring relief. “Bomb their homes into oblivion,” the man at the grocery store said to me. He might as well have pulled out a Bible and said “Happy are those who would dash their children against the rocks.” Those words are not in the Bible because they tell us something true about God. They tell us something true about ourselves. They tell us about how loss is connected to anger and how that anger gets directed at innocent people.
So how do we keep our anger from escalating in a never-ending circle of violence between nations, or between friends, or between brothers and sisters? How do we understand the violent image in scripture, and what do we do with these ugly feelings inside of us?
As I asked that question this past week, I had this memory of someone else asking that question. I remembered Mr. Rogers asking that question to children. You remember Mr. Rogers, don’t you? He’d begin each show with that song about the wonderful day in the neighborhood, and won’t you be my neighbor? And he’d hang his jacket in the closet and put on a cardigan, and his indoor shoes. Mr. Rogers wrote all of his own music for the show, including one that began with my question.
What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems Oh so wrong
And nothing you do seems very right?
What do you do? Do you punch a bag?
Do you pound some clay or some dough?
Do you round up friends for a game of tag?
Or see how fast you can go?
Did you know that Fred Rogers went to seminary? Got his Masters of Divinity; he was going to be a minister, but then his life went a different direction, into children’s television, but I don’t think he ever got away from ministry, because what he’s telling children – that they need a safe container for their anger – is the same thing that the scripture of Lamentations and the Palms tells us: We need a place that is strong enough to receive our anger safely. We need a way to get our anger out of ourselves, so that it doesn’t hurt us, and into someplace safe, so that it doesn’t hurt others. And that safe place is God. Be angry with God, because God is the only one who can receive the anger of the world without being killed by it.
In this culture, we in the church have lost our legacy of lament. We don’t do lament. When awful things happen, when we have suffered great losses, we want to go immediately to comfort, skipping over the stage of anger. Because we want to be strong; we want to be in control; we want to show how we can move on. We want to move right to comfort, but there should be a place in prayer, even in worship for us to be angry. Why have you allowed this to happen, God? It isn’t fair! It isn’t right! Send this suffering on someone else. Why aren’t you doing anything?
When Jesus Christ hung on the cross, he used the words of the 22nd Psalm to challenge God: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The anger of the world put him on the cross, but it couldn’t kill the life of God or the grace of God. And that is where our anger needs to go: to God. When you have lost something, be angry at God. Let anger take over your prayers. Feel anger within the safe walls of this sanctuary. Because no one else is strong enough to safely hold your anger and dissolve it into nothing.
John Schluep and others from this community are in Vietnam today with people who were enemies in a terrible war. He has told us how true peace will not be found until we heal the wounds of war, and part of the healing is being honest about the wounds.
We need to be honest about our losses, and this is the place to do it. Today is worldwide communion Sunday, and every time we come to the table, we are reminded of loss, the broken body and spilled blood of Christ. But we are also reminded that loss does not have the last word. And loss did not have the last word for the people in Exile long ago. The first step is to lament what was lost, to throw that anger at God so that you don’t throw it at anyone else. Next week, we’ll talk about what happened after the anger, but for now, know this: it was miraculous, and it couldn’t have happened if they had not found a place to be angry in safety.
Preached on October 3, 2010 World Communion Sunday, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Lamentations 1:1-6 Psalm 137
Sometimes I wonder if our lives are normally stable and secure, only to be interrupted by problems that alter our lives, or if our lives are normally unstable and changing, and we try to carve out periods of relative security while the world shakes around us. Maybe it is a little bit of each. One thing we do know is that if we ever have a period of time when we feel stable, comfortable, and settled, it’s not going to last. Something always happens to topple that fleeting sense of being at home.
It happened in a very big way to the people of Israel in the year 587 BC, the year that the kingdom to their east, Babylon, came and conquered Israel, not only the villages and farms, but the very city of Jerusalem, the city of peace, built on the safe heights of Mount Zion. The city was destroyed; the Temple was torn down, and the its people were taken into captivity in exile in Babylon, while those who escaped fled to hide in other nations.
The people of Israel lost their home, and with it their religious and cultural identity. The prophetic book of Lamentations is a discourse in grief and anger at what happened to Jerusalem, and the words of Psalm 137 come from this very specific time and place. By the waters of Babylon, we lay down and wept.
They wept, because the people who had captured them began to mock them, telling them to sing some of their songs of Zion. But those songs must be sung in Zion, those are songs of the Temple, songs of home. Those songs don’t make any sense in Babylon. Those songs are too heartbreaking to sing when their home has been taken from them.
There are many ways that our sense of being at home, safe and comfortable, can be cut away from us. The minister Frederick Buechner wrote about the Longing for Home, and he said that “To be homeless the way people like you and me are apt to be homeless is to have homes all over the place but not really to be home in any of them.”
Being homeless, even in our own homes, brings a sense of great grief. Some of the people who know the most about walking through grief in this church are those who serve as Stephen Ministers. One of the books that they have studied for their ministry of giving care has a title that would have made sense to the Israelites in Babylon. The title of the book is Don’t Sing Songs to a Heavy Heart. Sometimes we are in a place where songs don’t make sense. Sometimes we are by our own waters of Babylon, cursing whatever has happened to tear us from the life we used to have. Maybe you have been in a place of great grief, and you have had someone try to cheer you up in a way that seemed just totally false and unkind, even if well intentioned. Don’t sing songs to a heavy heart.
When we are hurting inside, what we most need is someone who is strong enough just to come be with us in that painful and difficult place, to remind us that we are not alone. This is the guiding principle of Stephen Ministry. The spiritual writer Parker Palmer was talking about the time when he suffered a deep depression. He said that when someone is depressed, they lose the ability to even experience the things that would normally bring joy: like sunshine, and a walk on a cool autumn day. There was a member of his Quaker church, one of the elders, who discovered the only thing that helped. This man would come, once a week, and without saying more than a few words, would sit across from him and massage his feet. It was the only way that Parker could be reminded that he was not alone.
The Psalm says that they can’t sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land. All they can feel is a rage against their enemies. The rage builds in this psalm until it ends with that last violent idea, imagining how happy it would feel to take the children of their oppressors and bash their heads against a rock. It is one of the most awful images in all of scripture, but also one of the most honest. Anger is what they feel! Beneath the sadness of their losses, beneath the grief for everything that has been destroyed, they are angry, and they want revenge!
I’ve seen that feeling. After the attacks of September 11, so much about our lives came to a standstill. We didn’t know how to go on with our lives. The things that seemed important suddenly seemed trivial, and the things we had forgotten became important. We couldn’t go on singing the same songs. We couldn’t go on as if life were the same, because the home we knew was gone. Home was not what we had thought it was.
I remember one day I went to a grocery store, and I was talking with the guy who was working the register while he scanned by purchases. Those were the weeks when you started talking to strangers sometimes as if you were continuing a discussion from the day before. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.” “My neighbor was stranded for three days; he finally got a flight home.” Things like that. So we started talking, and this man said that we should go over there and kill the families of every man who hijacked an airplane on that day. Kill their families, their neighbors, and bomb their cities. Didn’t a lot of us feel that? Even if a part of us knew that it wouldn’t solve anything, that it would only intensify the vicious circle of violence, didn’t we have a sense of wanting to somehow lash out and make someone else more vulnerable than us? We lost our home in the United States as we had known it. And with the loss came anger.
There are too many ways for us to lose a sense of a home that is safe and secure. The tragedies may be national or personal. If not on September 11, 2001, maybe it was the financial collapse of 2008 and the loss of your retirement savings. Or maybe it is the somber doctor’s quiet diagnosis, the betrayal of a friend, the job layoffs, or the death of a spouse. When someone dies, sometimes there are songs that are too painful to hear, or places that are too painful to go. We can’t sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land.
Sometimes there is a target for our anger, and sometimes we lash out for any target that seems available: Wall Street, congress, co-workers, people who are different from us, or just a generalized anger that has no target. It just builds up and spills out onto innocent bystanders over minor inconveniences, or trivial misunderstandings. Sometimes our families get the worst of it.
This anger is nothing new. Scripture records the rage of the Israelites who were so deluded by their madness that they thought the massacre of innocent children would bring relief. “Bomb their homes into oblivion,” the man at the grocery store said to me. He might as well have pulled out a Bible and said “Happy are those who would dash their children against the rocks.” Those words are not in the Bible because they tell us something true about God. They tell us something true about ourselves. They tell us about how loss is connected to anger and how that anger gets directed at innocent people.
So how do we keep our anger from escalating in a never-ending circle of violence between nations, or between friends, or between brothers and sisters? How do we understand the violent image in scripture, and what do we do with these ugly feelings inside of us?
As I asked that question this past week, I had this memory of someone else asking that question. I remembered Mr. Rogers asking that question to children. You remember Mr. Rogers, don’t you? He’d begin each show with that song about the wonderful day in the neighborhood, and won’t you be my neighbor? And he’d hang his jacket in the closet and put on a cardigan, and his indoor shoes. Mr. Rogers wrote all of his own music for the show, including one that began with my question.
What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems Oh so wrong
And nothing you do seems very right?
What do you do? Do you punch a bag?
Do you pound some clay or some dough?
Do you round up friends for a game of tag?
Or see how fast you can go?
Did you know that Fred Rogers went to seminary? Got his Masters of Divinity; he was going to be a minister, but then his life went a different direction, into children’s television, but I don’t think he ever got away from ministry, because what he’s telling children – that they need a safe container for their anger – is the same thing that the scripture of Lamentations and the Palms tells us: We need a place that is strong enough to receive our anger safely. We need a way to get our anger out of ourselves, so that it doesn’t hurt us, and into someplace safe, so that it doesn’t hurt others. And that safe place is God. Be angry with God, because God is the only one who can receive the anger of the world without being killed by it.
In this culture, we in the church have lost our legacy of lament. We don’t do lament. When awful things happen, when we have suffered great losses, we want to go immediately to comfort, skipping over the stage of anger. Because we want to be strong; we want to be in control; we want to show how we can move on. We want to move right to comfort, but there should be a place in prayer, even in worship for us to be angry. Why have you allowed this to happen, God? It isn’t fair! It isn’t right! Send this suffering on someone else. Why aren’t you doing anything?
When Jesus Christ hung on the cross, he used the words of the 22nd Psalm to challenge God: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The anger of the world put him on the cross, but it couldn’t kill the life of God or the grace of God. And that is where our anger needs to go: to God. When you have lost something, be angry at God. Let anger take over your prayers. Feel anger within the safe walls of this sanctuary. Because no one else is strong enough to safely hold your anger and dissolve it into nothing.
John Schluep and others from this community are in Vietnam today with people who were enemies in a terrible war. He has told us how true peace will not be found until we heal the wounds of war, and part of the healing is being honest about the wounds.
We need to be honest about our losses, and this is the place to do it. Today is worldwide communion Sunday, and every time we come to the table, we are reminded of loss, the broken body and spilled blood of Christ. But we are also reminded that loss does not have the last word. And loss did not have the last word for the people in Exile long ago. The first step is to lament what was lost, to throw that anger at God so that you don’t throw it at anyone else. Next week, we’ll talk about what happened after the anger, but for now, know this: it was miraculous, and it couldn’t have happened if they had not found a place to be angry in safety.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Sermon - Stories of Grace
Preached on September 12, 2010 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC.
1 Timothy 1:12-17
Picture yourself waiting at an airport, surrounded by strangers. You arrived early in case of delays, but the security line was short and now you have to wait until they call for boarding. You can see out the window that the airplane hasn’t even arrived yet. You’re going to be waiting awhile, so you’re kind of stuck when one of those strangers sitting nearby turns and asks you “what comes into your mind if I tell you that I am a Christian?”
As an experiment, the Christian journalist Phillip Yancey asked this question at airports, and the responses he got were overwhelmingly that people thought he would be judgmental and bigoted, and the next thing he would probably say is that they are going to hell unless they believe like he does (What's So Amazing About Grace?)
I would probably have said the same thing – but not because I think that about Christians in general. I only think that about the kind who accost me in public and want to tell me all about God.
A friend of mine is a minister who used to serve a church in a small town. He knew most of the other ministers (because it was a small town), and there was one in particular who saw it as a part of his calling to talk to everyone he met about God, and to offer them God’s salvation. Both ministers used to work out at the local Y, and my friend noticed that when this other minister was in the locker room, that area would kind of clear out. They saw him coming, and no one wanted to get trapped in a conversation that wasn’t about business or baseball.
This guy tried to save the other ministers because he worried about the heresy of their beliefs. One day he stopped my friend on the jogging track and began to talk to him about his Christian beliefs, and my friend said “I am a Christian, and right now I’m jogging. Bye.” That’s a line you can use.
Too many of us have heard too much of religious talk that comes across as pushy, boastful, self-centered, and offensive. We hear it on television, from strangers, neighbors, and sometimes from our friends and relatives. And so we react against it by going to the other extreme. Better not to talk about it at all. Or maybe it’s that we don’t know how to put our faith into words because we don’t have it all figured out, and we worry that we will say the wrong thing. Either way, we prefer to let our actions speak for themselves. It’s both easier, in the sense of being less vulnerable, and less offensive, in the sense that we won’t be forcing our beliefs on anyone else.
Instead, our message will be in the way we treat people. We like what St Francis of Assisi said about preach the gospel always, and if necessary, use words. That is how I understand Christianity: it is a way of living that invites people to know God through acts of love, not by the power of argument or persuasion.
So it kind of bothers me to open the Bible and read Paul’s words about what a big sinner he was – “the worst of sinners” - and how he received grace when Jesus Christ called him, was patient with him, and made him a new person. I would rather he not make such a big deal about himself. My first reaction is that Paul reminds me of someone who traps me in a corner and says “I want to tell you what God is doing in my life.” It seems more than a little manipulative.
And yet, that’s not really what Paul is doing.
Paul is not cornering strangers here. When we read this letter, we are listening in on a very intimate conversation from a long time ago, between two people who knew each other very well. Timothy knew Paul’s character, and he already knew Paul’s history. We’re listening in on a conversation between two people who are very close, and I almost think that Paul is whispering, as he tells his story of grace. This isn’t a story about Paul, it’s a story about grace. It’s a story told to Timothy as he faces a community full of competing ideas about what is true and what is important. Paul writes as someone who has been through it to someone who is in the midst of it: “remember that God’s grace is at the center of this faith.”
I have been on the Timothy side of these conversations with some of you. In quiet places, you have told me the stories of grace from your lives, and those stories are a gift to me. You do not tell them in order to call attention to yourselves, and even when these stories are of dramatic, life-changing moments, you are not boastful. You would never get on Oprah’s couch and tell these stories. But in a quiet voice, without agenda or judgment, you share them with me; you share them with friends, with your children, with your neighbors and co-workers.
I do believe that actions speak louder than words, and I believe that we say the most about God’s grace when we show it in our lives, rather than saying it with our lips. But with people who know us, there is also the right time and place for us to say a word or two.
Tell them that the reason you took food to a neighbor when her mother died is that the surest evidence for God that you have ever known was when you were in pain and people you barely knew gave you the support you needed. They held a light for you as you walked though the darkness, and you remember how it made such a difference.
If people in the office collect donations for flood relief in New Orleans, or Pakistan, say that we’ve been praying for these places when you add your $10 to the hat. Say that this is a church without boundaries, and you know this because they accepted you when you thought that you were unlovable. When you had given up on yourself, grace broke through.
If someone asks you about the Florida minister in the news who planned and then cancelled a burning of the Koran, then tell them that you see God in acts of giving rather than acts of antagonism. Tell them that you attend a church that cares for people of any religion, or none at all, and that on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks, your church was gathered in a memorial service to care for a family, while volunteers were helping at a mobile foodbank to give food to people who needed a bit of help.
If you have children, let them know that worship is important to you: “worship is where I get the strength for the difficult things in life.” Let them know that your family gives money to the church: take turns placing the offering envelope in the plate. Tell them what you are thankful for when you sit down for dinner.
Most of us are not called like Paul to travel the world and spread the gospel, but a plate of food for a neighbor, a contribution to flood relief, giving away groceries: these are all stories of God’s grace at work in our lives. Why not say so, in the right place and the right time?
I heard the story of a group of missionaries who wanted to begin work in a new country. They got clearance from the government, made all the arrangements to move their homes and equipment, and then they were told “just one more thing. Christianity is not recognized here. You cannot speak about your faith.” They said, “well, that’s fine,” and they set up medical care, and helped to dig new wells for clean water, and provided education. And eventually, some of the townspeople came to them in private and asked them “why did you come here? Why are you doing these things?” And, very quietly, the missionaries said “because of a man named Jesus Christ, who is the son of God. Jesus Christ is why we are here.” We tell our stories in a whisper.
To tell a story of grace is simply to put into words what is true for you. And if it is true for you, then it’s worth telling people about. To tell a story of grace is not to try to change someone, but to trust them with your story with no strings attached.
These stories are not really about us. These stories are about God. Paul didn’t write all those letters so that he would become the hero of the New Testament. He didn’t think that there would be a New Testament! He wrote them because he had experienced God’s grace in his life, and he wanted that grace to be at the center of the life of his friend Timothy, and of the life of Timothy’s church.
To tell my own story of grace I must go back to my teen years, when I was much more quiet and reserved than you know me now – and I know that’s really saying something. I was very unsure of myself, worried about not fitting in, worried about being judged by others as somehow not measuring up. Mostly, I kept myself in the background, and tried to observe life around me; I held my own gifts back. I suppose this is not so uncommon for adolescents. Many young people live with great sensitivity to being judged.
It seemed that the only place outside of my home where I felt free to be myself was in the family of the church. Here I met people who carried themselves with confidence, and they certainly were not cool enough to earn such confidence in the way of the world. How could these regular, un-cool people be so confident? I discovered that they were confident because they experienced God’s unconditional love; God’s grace. They could never lose it, so they could risk giving themselves in grace to others, including me. Through them, God’s grace changed my life.
Grace continues to change my life, and the changes tend to be gradual. As I grow in God, I let go of those inner worries that damage my soul. I focus less on how other people treat me, and more on how I want to treat other people with compassion. As I learn to live move fully in grace, my life becomes more whole, more joyful, and more secure.
Our time of worship will close with a hymn, "Amazing Grace," which was written by a man who once worked on a ship to transport slaves. John Newton’s change came gradually. It was some years between his conversion to Christianity and his decision to quit the slave trade, and some more years before he entered Christian ministry. But along the way there were certain, crystallizing moments. In this hymn, Newton describes his encounter with the grace of God, and says that the change in his life was so great, it was as if he had been blind, and now he sees.
1 Timothy 1:12-17
Picture yourself waiting at an airport, surrounded by strangers. You arrived early in case of delays, but the security line was short and now you have to wait until they call for boarding. You can see out the window that the airplane hasn’t even arrived yet. You’re going to be waiting awhile, so you’re kind of stuck when one of those strangers sitting nearby turns and asks you “what comes into your mind if I tell you that I am a Christian?”
As an experiment, the Christian journalist Phillip Yancey asked this question at airports, and the responses he got were overwhelmingly that people thought he would be judgmental and bigoted, and the next thing he would probably say is that they are going to hell unless they believe like he does (What's So Amazing About Grace?)
I would probably have said the same thing – but not because I think that about Christians in general. I only think that about the kind who accost me in public and want to tell me all about God.
A friend of mine is a minister who used to serve a church in a small town. He knew most of the other ministers (because it was a small town), and there was one in particular who saw it as a part of his calling to talk to everyone he met about God, and to offer them God’s salvation. Both ministers used to work out at the local Y, and my friend noticed that when this other minister was in the locker room, that area would kind of clear out. They saw him coming, and no one wanted to get trapped in a conversation that wasn’t about business or baseball.
This guy tried to save the other ministers because he worried about the heresy of their beliefs. One day he stopped my friend on the jogging track and began to talk to him about his Christian beliefs, and my friend said “I am a Christian, and right now I’m jogging. Bye.” That’s a line you can use.
Too many of us have heard too much of religious talk that comes across as pushy, boastful, self-centered, and offensive. We hear it on television, from strangers, neighbors, and sometimes from our friends and relatives. And so we react against it by going to the other extreme. Better not to talk about it at all. Or maybe it’s that we don’t know how to put our faith into words because we don’t have it all figured out, and we worry that we will say the wrong thing. Either way, we prefer to let our actions speak for themselves. It’s both easier, in the sense of being less vulnerable, and less offensive, in the sense that we won’t be forcing our beliefs on anyone else.
Instead, our message will be in the way we treat people. We like what St Francis of Assisi said about preach the gospel always, and if necessary, use words. That is how I understand Christianity: it is a way of living that invites people to know God through acts of love, not by the power of argument or persuasion.
So it kind of bothers me to open the Bible and read Paul’s words about what a big sinner he was – “the worst of sinners” - and how he received grace when Jesus Christ called him, was patient with him, and made him a new person. I would rather he not make such a big deal about himself. My first reaction is that Paul reminds me of someone who traps me in a corner and says “I want to tell you what God is doing in my life.” It seems more than a little manipulative.
And yet, that’s not really what Paul is doing.
Paul is not cornering strangers here. When we read this letter, we are listening in on a very intimate conversation from a long time ago, between two people who knew each other very well. Timothy knew Paul’s character, and he already knew Paul’s history. We’re listening in on a conversation between two people who are very close, and I almost think that Paul is whispering, as he tells his story of grace. This isn’t a story about Paul, it’s a story about grace. It’s a story told to Timothy as he faces a community full of competing ideas about what is true and what is important. Paul writes as someone who has been through it to someone who is in the midst of it: “remember that God’s grace is at the center of this faith.”
I have been on the Timothy side of these conversations with some of you. In quiet places, you have told me the stories of grace from your lives, and those stories are a gift to me. You do not tell them in order to call attention to yourselves, and even when these stories are of dramatic, life-changing moments, you are not boastful. You would never get on Oprah’s couch and tell these stories. But in a quiet voice, without agenda or judgment, you share them with me; you share them with friends, with your children, with your neighbors and co-workers.
I do believe that actions speak louder than words, and I believe that we say the most about God’s grace when we show it in our lives, rather than saying it with our lips. But with people who know us, there is also the right time and place for us to say a word or two.
Tell them that the reason you took food to a neighbor when her mother died is that the surest evidence for God that you have ever known was when you were in pain and people you barely knew gave you the support you needed. They held a light for you as you walked though the darkness, and you remember how it made such a difference.
If people in the office collect donations for flood relief in New Orleans, or Pakistan, say that we’ve been praying for these places when you add your $10 to the hat. Say that this is a church without boundaries, and you know this because they accepted you when you thought that you were unlovable. When you had given up on yourself, grace broke through.
If someone asks you about the Florida minister in the news who planned and then cancelled a burning of the Koran, then tell them that you see God in acts of giving rather than acts of antagonism. Tell them that you attend a church that cares for people of any religion, or none at all, and that on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks, your church was gathered in a memorial service to care for a family, while volunteers were helping at a mobile foodbank to give food to people who needed a bit of help.
If you have children, let them know that worship is important to you: “worship is where I get the strength for the difficult things in life.” Let them know that your family gives money to the church: take turns placing the offering envelope in the plate. Tell them what you are thankful for when you sit down for dinner.
Most of us are not called like Paul to travel the world and spread the gospel, but a plate of food for a neighbor, a contribution to flood relief, giving away groceries: these are all stories of God’s grace at work in our lives. Why not say so, in the right place and the right time?
I heard the story of a group of missionaries who wanted to begin work in a new country. They got clearance from the government, made all the arrangements to move their homes and equipment, and then they were told “just one more thing. Christianity is not recognized here. You cannot speak about your faith.” They said, “well, that’s fine,” and they set up medical care, and helped to dig new wells for clean water, and provided education. And eventually, some of the townspeople came to them in private and asked them “why did you come here? Why are you doing these things?” And, very quietly, the missionaries said “because of a man named Jesus Christ, who is the son of God. Jesus Christ is why we are here.” We tell our stories in a whisper.
To tell a story of grace is simply to put into words what is true for you. And if it is true for you, then it’s worth telling people about. To tell a story of grace is not to try to change someone, but to trust them with your story with no strings attached.
These stories are not really about us. These stories are about God. Paul didn’t write all those letters so that he would become the hero of the New Testament. He didn’t think that there would be a New Testament! He wrote them because he had experienced God’s grace in his life, and he wanted that grace to be at the center of the life of his friend Timothy, and of the life of Timothy’s church.
To tell my own story of grace I must go back to my teen years, when I was much more quiet and reserved than you know me now – and I know that’s really saying something. I was very unsure of myself, worried about not fitting in, worried about being judged by others as somehow not measuring up. Mostly, I kept myself in the background, and tried to observe life around me; I held my own gifts back. I suppose this is not so uncommon for adolescents. Many young people live with great sensitivity to being judged.
It seemed that the only place outside of my home where I felt free to be myself was in the family of the church. Here I met people who carried themselves with confidence, and they certainly were not cool enough to earn such confidence in the way of the world. How could these regular, un-cool people be so confident? I discovered that they were confident because they experienced God’s unconditional love; God’s grace. They could never lose it, so they could risk giving themselves in grace to others, including me. Through them, God’s grace changed my life.
Grace continues to change my life, and the changes tend to be gradual. As I grow in God, I let go of those inner worries that damage my soul. I focus less on how other people treat me, and more on how I want to treat other people with compassion. As I learn to live move fully in grace, my life becomes more whole, more joyful, and more secure.
Our time of worship will close with a hymn, "Amazing Grace," which was written by a man who once worked on a ship to transport slaves. John Newton’s change came gradually. It was some years between his conversion to Christianity and his decision to quit the slave trade, and some more years before he entered Christian ministry. But along the way there were certain, crystallizing moments. In this hymn, Newton describes his encounter with the grace of God, and says that the change in his life was so great, it was as if he had been blind, and now he sees.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Sermon - Faith...We're Working On It
Sermon originally preached on August 8, 2010, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC. The worship service on this day included a time of sharing the news from the summer mission trip.
Matthew 21:28-31
When I go on a mission tour like this one to Henderson Settlement in Kentucky, I have to realize that I don’t know much about home repair. I should be singing my own version of that Sam Cooke song, the one on which he sings:
Don’t know much about history.
Don’t know much biology.
Don’t know much about a science book.
Don’t know much about the French I took.
((What a) Wonderful World)
My version would go like this:
Don’t know much about carpentry.
Don’t know much stone masonry.
Don’t know much about the hammer claw.
Don’t know much about power saw.
I don’t mean to be overly modest. I’m handy enough around my home when it comes to small projects (painting, new faucet handles, changing light bulbs – even the tricky ones). But when these home repair projects get bigger, I find I am out of my league. I’m happy to do help, but my mind doesn’t have that knack for envisioning the steps of a project. And I don’t yet have much experience to guide me. In these ways, I am a lot like most of the people who go on these mission tours. We’re happy to help, and we’re not totally clueless. With those qualifications, we go out to meet these wonderful families along the Kentucky-Tennessee border, who really need basic repairs and improvements and are short on options. We look at the homes and think about the project, and we don’t have a clue where to begin. I don’t know where to begin, even though I was just in the meeting with the work supervisor of Henderson Settlement, in which he gave instructions about the project. It looked simple on paper, but now I look at all the irregularities that any home has, and his sound guidance melts from my mind. There are a lot of things that can’t be accounted for in the instructions. We have to figure it out on-site, and I don’t know where to begin.
Faith is also a work in progress. Sometimes faith seems straightforward, especially in these times when we sit together in church, and we talk about how faith means trusting God. Faith is following the way of Jesus. Faith is acted out in what Jesus said were the two greatest commandments: 1) Love God, and 2) love your neighbor as yourself. We say all those things, and we believe them, and we are happy to do them. But then we leave church and we arrive on-site at our lives, and things are not so simple. We can change light bulbs all right, and paint the walls, but we don’t know where to begin with the larger remodeling project of bringing our lives into faithful repair. As the saints of the Orthodox church would say, we all contain within ourselves the damaged image of God that God is trying to restore. But how does that begin?
Our lives are too complicated for us to give simple answers on Sunday. Yes, love your neighbor, and it is easy when that means to be friendly and pick up the newspapers when they’re away. But what if your neighbor leaves trash in your yard, and ignores your polite requests to pick it up? What if you hear fights from inside their home? When is it love to live and let live, and when is it love to confront your neighbor, or call the police? What if it’s your brother, or your daughter? How do we love others when the choices are difficult? How do you begin?
The parable Jesus told about two sons raises that question, and many more. The first son tells his father that he will not work in the field and then he does. The second son says that he will work in the field, and then he doesn’t. It’s one thing for Jesus to ask which brother did the will of his father, but I want to ask what happened to the second son? Was he lying from the start? Or did he have good intentions to work, only to realize that he was unprepared. Maybe the work was overwhelming, and he didn’t know where to begin. And it can be hard to ask for help, especially when you are the farmer’s son, and you think that you should know better. It can be hard to ask for help when you have been a Christian for years and years, and you think that you should know by now.
On the mission tour, I am so thankful for people who have the experience and construction I.Q. to devise solutions for all our complications: people like Scott Kemph and Dee West, John King, Mike and Ingrid Woodling, and from previous years, Ben Warner and Ken Brown. Without people like them, the rest of us would be like the farmer’s son and say “Yes, we’ll go work on the mission tour!” But then we would not do the project because we wouldn’t know how to begin.
How do we begin to work at our faith? For me, it is much like the work of construction. I bring what little I know and have experienced, and then I look to those who have been doing this for a long time. I look to those who have the experience of loving people in difficult relationships. I look to people who are able to be generous even when they seem to have little. I look to people who have found God’s presence not only in good times, but in times of grief and sorrow. They show me how to begin.
On the Monday morning of this past mission tour, when I arrived with half of our group at a home to which we were to install insulation and new siding over top of the existing, damaged siding, I looked at all the difficulties: irregular windows, damaged walls, porch floors and roof that were in the way. I thought…this is too much. But then Dee showed a few of us how to prepare a window with new strips of wood around it to hold the J-channel for the siding. And, instead of looking at all the different windows, especially the ones that would require a ladder to be stood on a hillside, a few of us just started with one window. And then we went to the next window.
All of the greatest saints began with no more experience than any of us has right now. Their faith was no bigger. Jesus said that faith the size of a little, itty-bitty mustard seed is plenty big enough. It is enough, first of all, because we are not alone. There are others, who have great experience, to show us the way. And with us always is God. So we can sing with Sam Cooke all we want to about the things we don’t know. Don’t know much about history or biology. Don’t know much about the Bible, or how to love when I’m angry, or how to give when I’m afraid, or how to trust in God more than in things.
It doesn’t matter what we don’t know. What matters is that God loves us, just as we are, and God’s grace makes us new, makes of us what we are meant to be deep down. By God’s grace we can begin with the one moment in front of us, and then move to the next, and in that way we will grow, and we will learn all of the wonderful riches of faith together. We will become master builders.
Do you know the rest of Sam Cooke’s song? After we admit all of the things we don’t know much about, this is the part of the song that God sings with us.
But I do know that I love you.
And I know that if you love me too,
What a wonderful world this would be.
Matthew 21:28-31
When I go on a mission tour like this one to Henderson Settlement in Kentucky, I have to realize that I don’t know much about home repair. I should be singing my own version of that Sam Cooke song, the one on which he sings:
Don’t know much about history.
Don’t know much biology.
Don’t know much about a science book.
Don’t know much about the French I took.
((What a) Wonderful World)
My version would go like this:
Don’t know much about carpentry.
Don’t know much stone masonry.
Don’t know much about the hammer claw.
Don’t know much about power saw.
I don’t mean to be overly modest. I’m handy enough around my home when it comes to small projects (painting, new faucet handles, changing light bulbs – even the tricky ones). But when these home repair projects get bigger, I find I am out of my league. I’m happy to do help, but my mind doesn’t have that knack for envisioning the steps of a project. And I don’t yet have much experience to guide me. In these ways, I am a lot like most of the people who go on these mission tours. We’re happy to help, and we’re not totally clueless. With those qualifications, we go out to meet these wonderful families along the Kentucky-Tennessee border, who really need basic repairs and improvements and are short on options. We look at the homes and think about the project, and we don’t have a clue where to begin. I don’t know where to begin, even though I was just in the meeting with the work supervisor of Henderson Settlement, in which he gave instructions about the project. It looked simple on paper, but now I look at all the irregularities that any home has, and his sound guidance melts from my mind. There are a lot of things that can’t be accounted for in the instructions. We have to figure it out on-site, and I don’t know where to begin.
Faith is also a work in progress. Sometimes faith seems straightforward, especially in these times when we sit together in church, and we talk about how faith means trusting God. Faith is following the way of Jesus. Faith is acted out in what Jesus said were the two greatest commandments: 1) Love God, and 2) love your neighbor as yourself. We say all those things, and we believe them, and we are happy to do them. But then we leave church and we arrive on-site at our lives, and things are not so simple. We can change light bulbs all right, and paint the walls, but we don’t know where to begin with the larger remodeling project of bringing our lives into faithful repair. As the saints of the Orthodox church would say, we all contain within ourselves the damaged image of God that God is trying to restore. But how does that begin?
Our lives are too complicated for us to give simple answers on Sunday. Yes, love your neighbor, and it is easy when that means to be friendly and pick up the newspapers when they’re away. But what if your neighbor leaves trash in your yard, and ignores your polite requests to pick it up? What if you hear fights from inside their home? When is it love to live and let live, and when is it love to confront your neighbor, or call the police? What if it’s your brother, or your daughter? How do we love others when the choices are difficult? How do you begin?
The parable Jesus told about two sons raises that question, and many more. The first son tells his father that he will not work in the field and then he does. The second son says that he will work in the field, and then he doesn’t. It’s one thing for Jesus to ask which brother did the will of his father, but I want to ask what happened to the second son? Was he lying from the start? Or did he have good intentions to work, only to realize that he was unprepared. Maybe the work was overwhelming, and he didn’t know where to begin. And it can be hard to ask for help, especially when you are the farmer’s son, and you think that you should know better. It can be hard to ask for help when you have been a Christian for years and years, and you think that you should know by now.
On the mission tour, I am so thankful for people who have the experience and construction I.Q. to devise solutions for all our complications: people like Scott Kemph and Dee West, John King, Mike and Ingrid Woodling, and from previous years, Ben Warner and Ken Brown. Without people like them, the rest of us would be like the farmer’s son and say “Yes, we’ll go work on the mission tour!” But then we would not do the project because we wouldn’t know how to begin.
How do we begin to work at our faith? For me, it is much like the work of construction. I bring what little I know and have experienced, and then I look to those who have been doing this for a long time. I look to those who have the experience of loving people in difficult relationships. I look to people who are able to be generous even when they seem to have little. I look to people who have found God’s presence not only in good times, but in times of grief and sorrow. They show me how to begin.
On the Monday morning of this past mission tour, when I arrived with half of our group at a home to which we were to install insulation and new siding over top of the existing, damaged siding, I looked at all the difficulties: irregular windows, damaged walls, porch floors and roof that were in the way. I thought…this is too much. But then Dee showed a few of us how to prepare a window with new strips of wood around it to hold the J-channel for the siding. And, instead of looking at all the different windows, especially the ones that would require a ladder to be stood on a hillside, a few of us just started with one window. And then we went to the next window.
All of the greatest saints began with no more experience than any of us has right now. Their faith was no bigger. Jesus said that faith the size of a little, itty-bitty mustard seed is plenty big enough. It is enough, first of all, because we are not alone. There are others, who have great experience, to show us the way. And with us always is God. So we can sing with Sam Cooke all we want to about the things we don’t know. Don’t know much about history or biology. Don’t know much about the Bible, or how to love when I’m angry, or how to give when I’m afraid, or how to trust in God more than in things.
It doesn’t matter what we don’t know. What matters is that God loves us, just as we are, and God’s grace makes us new, makes of us what we are meant to be deep down. By God’s grace we can begin with the one moment in front of us, and then move to the next, and in that way we will grow, and we will learn all of the wonderful riches of faith together. We will become master builders.
Do you know the rest of Sam Cooke’s song? After we admit all of the things we don’t know much about, this is the part of the song that God sings with us.
But I do know that I love you.
And I know that if you love me too,
What a wonderful world this would be.
Sermon - Family Tree
Sermon originally preached on July 25, 2010 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC
Matthew 1:1-17 (the genealogy of Jesus)
Do you come from a good family? Do you come from good people?
Do we care about these questions as much as we used to? I don’t think so. It used to be that your family tree defined you. When I finished my sabbatical and went on vacation a couple weeks ago, I was so excited to read something that was just for fun. Don’t get me wrong, I loved all the books I read for my classes, but I really missed a good novel. So now I’m partway through a book called Wolf Hall, which takes place in the court of King Henry the VIII. So there’s Thomas More, and the Boleyn family, and the Duke of Norfolk, who is Anne Boleyn’s uncle, and who you are depends so much on your family tree.
I don’t think we care so much. I know that we are interested in our family trees, but it’s an interest of history and discovery, not because it defines you as a good or bad person. In fact, our society really celebrates people who go from rags to riches, and we celebrate first generation high school or college graduates. We like to hear the inspiring stories of people who overcame adversity in childhood to have success as adults, and our society no longer looks down on children who are born out of wedlock the way these children were once called names, and made to feel ashamed. And thank God for all of this!
Maybe some of you read Thomas Hardy in school, especially Tess of the D’Urbervilles, in which a poor man named John Durbeyfield is told that his family name was once D’Urberville, an old family of nobility and money. And the power that this news has on him sets in motion a very tragic tale in which Tess is ruined in her father’s quest to recover a good family name. Thomas Hardy critiqued the culture of family names and noble standing, showing that each person should be known for his or her own character. It is better to revere a saintly child of scandalous background than to admire a wicked person of good blood.
Or you might read the Harry Potter novels for a more recent critique of a culture based on the purity of noble-blooded ancestry. In Harry’s world, magical children who come from non-magical parents are called “mudbloods,” which is a derogatory slur of the worst order, when it is actually the pure-blooded wizard families who are often the worst people. Family trees.
So, do we still care so much about the family tree of Jesus? Does it matter to us as much as it once did that Jesus is a descendent of Isaac and Jacob, or even King David? We can recognize that all of this may have been very important to the Hebrew people of the first century, but maybe it’s not as important to us. Maybe, for us, the incarnation of God could have been born on Christmas into any family and we would follow that person because of the incredible presence of God, not because we are impressed by the family tree.
And yet, maybe impressing us is not the real point of the family tree in Matthew! We skip over it because we don’t known most of the names and we assume all those names are meant to be admired, but a closer look reveals that this is not an ordinary genealogy. For one thing, it stops being impressive after King David. The kings who follow, between David and the time of exile, were mostly a lousy lot. Only two of fourteen leave a good record in scripture. The rest of them ignored God, practiced all kinds of injustice, and drove the nations of Judah and Israel into the ground. Making a point of that ancestry doesn’t make Jesus look any better, in terms of family credibility. It’s not even impressive before King David! Jacob stole his brother’s birthright, Judah sold his brother Joseph into slavery, and even King David has a dark side in his affair with Bathsheba, of which Matthew 1 makes a point to remind us. That’s kind of strange.
In fact, there is a strange mention of the names of five women. It’s strange because this was written in a patriarchal society, in which family trees were only about the men: father to son, father to son, father to son. Matthew goes out of his way to include five women, and they are not the impressive women in this tree, women like Sarah and Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, the faithful wives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
But he does include Tamar. Now, just briefly, Tamar’s story is in Genesis. She was a Canaanite woman who married one of Judah’s sons, but the son died before they’d had children. By the law of that time, the deceased husband’s brother should have given her a child (children were about all that widows had in those days to support them, you see). But the brother would not, and Judah shunned his foreign daughter-in-law until she had to pose as a prostitute in order to seduce Judah into giving her the child that God’s law at that time required. At the same time, she exposed the injustice with which they had treated her. Does that summary raise more questions than it answers? Then I think the book of Genesis is in your future: not as boring as you thought! Tamar is in this family tree.
And then there is Rahab. Rahab was an actual prostitute at Jericho when Joshua led the Hebrew people into the promised land after the Exodus, and her kindness in sheltering the Hebrew spies helps them to victory at Jericho.
And then there’s Ruth, King David’s great-grandmother, who is a Moabite woman married into a Hebrew family. Her husband and her father-in-law both died, leaving her a widow, and she brought her widowed mother-in-law back to Israel. In Israel, Ruth becomes Jewish, marries Boaz and continues the family tree of Jesus.
And then there is the wife of Uriah, Bathsheba, who was the “victim of [King] David’s lust,” (Raymond E. Brown, A Coming Christ in Advent) and we can only imagine the pressure that a king would bring to bear on her to make this happen. David had Bathsheba’s husband killed and took her as his wife. It is her son Solomon who continues the family tree.
Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba. All of them foreigners. All of them the victim of tragedy, often abuse. Why does Matthew go out of his way to name them? These are not the impressive names of a good family heritage, but more like the skeletons in the family closet. Why does Matthew want to remind people of these scandalous stories, these foreigners in the family tree of Jesus?
At least two reasons, I think. The first is that the last woman named in the family tree is Mary, who has her own scandal when she becomes pregnant out of wedlock. It may be that Matthew wants to prepare his hearers to accept Mary by reminding them that God has long been at work among the outcasts.
The second reason is that Matthew wants us to know that there is room for everyone in the family of Jesus. If it all begins with Jacob (who cheated his twin Esau) and Jacob’s son Judah (who sold off his brother and later shunned Tamar), Rahab and Ruth, and David with Bathsheba, and a bunch of bad kings, then we’ve got a family tree of saints and sinners, a family tree that you might want to hide as much as you’d want to celebrate it. This family tree reminds us, right at the beginning of the gospel, that God works with outcasts and foreigners, with people who are selfish and flawed and broken, just like most of us. And this is why Jesus always invited saints and sinners alike. This is why Jesus ate with tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, and also with Pharisees, Roman centurions, and really everyone else. Everyone was invited to the table of Christ, because his grace was for all people.
And if God’s grace is wide enough for all of them, if God was at work in such a gnarled and twisted family tree, then surely God is at work in our own family trees. Despite the failures, the scandals, the things we don’t want anyone to know about, we have a place in God’s family. The Christ child who was born in this family tree was born for every one of us.
And so the family tree of Jesus continues in his followers. During our bicentennial last year, we celebrated the many wonderful things about our heritage in this congregation. But it hasn’t all been so good. There are also stories of pettiness, exclusion, judgmental attitudes, and fights. Our family tree is still full of both saints and sinners.
This past spring when I traveled to Boston with the confirmation class to learn about the Congregational church, we celebrated their work for religious freedom, for the abolition of slavery, for the equality of women. But we also saw the grave marker, near the grave of John Hancock, of his servant Frank. No last name, probably a slave. And we visited beautiful Boston Common, the park where people gathered for public speeches and sermons, next to the magnificent state house. And I told them that this is also where they used to execute people: witches, and heretics, like those Quakers.
Why should we remember these stories? Because if we are not honest about our past, then we aren’t honest about our present. And if we don’t remember these failings, then we will get the idea that God only works in the lives of perfect people, people who make no mistakes, have no trace of ignorance, and are free from doubt and fear and the prejudices of their day. But if God only works through those kinds of people, then God can’t work through us.
That’s not what the family tree of Jesus proclaims. This family tree proclaims that God works through all of us. This family tree in Matthew is how we get from Abraham to Jesus, but I also imagine the family tree of faith, which shows how we get from Jesus to us. It, too, is full of saints and sinners. It’s got some big names that we recognize, like Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther, but it’s got many more names who do not make history.
Here’s an interesting thing about Matthew’s family tree from the time of the exile until Jesus. If you study the Old Testament, you will find only the first two names in that list. The rest have been lost to history, until Joseph and Mary. Unremembered, ordinary people, who never made the history books for their achievements. They were regular people like you and me. I wonder how God is working among us?
Do you come from a good family? Do you come from good people? Well, not good all the time. But we do come from God’s people. We come from God’s family tree.
Matthew 1:1-17 (the genealogy of Jesus)
Do you come from a good family? Do you come from good people?
Do we care about these questions as much as we used to? I don’t think so. It used to be that your family tree defined you. When I finished my sabbatical and went on vacation a couple weeks ago, I was so excited to read something that was just for fun. Don’t get me wrong, I loved all the books I read for my classes, but I really missed a good novel. So now I’m partway through a book called Wolf Hall, which takes place in the court of King Henry the VIII. So there’s Thomas More, and the Boleyn family, and the Duke of Norfolk, who is Anne Boleyn’s uncle, and who you are depends so much on your family tree.
I don’t think we care so much. I know that we are interested in our family trees, but it’s an interest of history and discovery, not because it defines you as a good or bad person. In fact, our society really celebrates people who go from rags to riches, and we celebrate first generation high school or college graduates. We like to hear the inspiring stories of people who overcame adversity in childhood to have success as adults, and our society no longer looks down on children who are born out of wedlock the way these children were once called names, and made to feel ashamed. And thank God for all of this!
Maybe some of you read Thomas Hardy in school, especially Tess of the D’Urbervilles, in which a poor man named John Durbeyfield is told that his family name was once D’Urberville, an old family of nobility and money. And the power that this news has on him sets in motion a very tragic tale in which Tess is ruined in her father’s quest to recover a good family name. Thomas Hardy critiqued the culture of family names and noble standing, showing that each person should be known for his or her own character. It is better to revere a saintly child of scandalous background than to admire a wicked person of good blood.
Or you might read the Harry Potter novels for a more recent critique of a culture based on the purity of noble-blooded ancestry. In Harry’s world, magical children who come from non-magical parents are called “mudbloods,” which is a derogatory slur of the worst order, when it is actually the pure-blooded wizard families who are often the worst people. Family trees.
So, do we still care so much about the family tree of Jesus? Does it matter to us as much as it once did that Jesus is a descendent of Isaac and Jacob, or even King David? We can recognize that all of this may have been very important to the Hebrew people of the first century, but maybe it’s not as important to us. Maybe, for us, the incarnation of God could have been born on Christmas into any family and we would follow that person because of the incredible presence of God, not because we are impressed by the family tree.
And yet, maybe impressing us is not the real point of the family tree in Matthew! We skip over it because we don’t known most of the names and we assume all those names are meant to be admired, but a closer look reveals that this is not an ordinary genealogy. For one thing, it stops being impressive after King David. The kings who follow, between David and the time of exile, were mostly a lousy lot. Only two of fourteen leave a good record in scripture. The rest of them ignored God, practiced all kinds of injustice, and drove the nations of Judah and Israel into the ground. Making a point of that ancestry doesn’t make Jesus look any better, in terms of family credibility. It’s not even impressive before King David! Jacob stole his brother’s birthright, Judah sold his brother Joseph into slavery, and even King David has a dark side in his affair with Bathsheba, of which Matthew 1 makes a point to remind us. That’s kind of strange.
In fact, there is a strange mention of the names of five women. It’s strange because this was written in a patriarchal society, in which family trees were only about the men: father to son, father to son, father to son. Matthew goes out of his way to include five women, and they are not the impressive women in this tree, women like Sarah and Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, the faithful wives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
But he does include Tamar. Now, just briefly, Tamar’s story is in Genesis. She was a Canaanite woman who married one of Judah’s sons, but the son died before they’d had children. By the law of that time, the deceased husband’s brother should have given her a child (children were about all that widows had in those days to support them, you see). But the brother would not, and Judah shunned his foreign daughter-in-law until she had to pose as a prostitute in order to seduce Judah into giving her the child that God’s law at that time required. At the same time, she exposed the injustice with which they had treated her. Does that summary raise more questions than it answers? Then I think the book of Genesis is in your future: not as boring as you thought! Tamar is in this family tree.
And then there is Rahab. Rahab was an actual prostitute at Jericho when Joshua led the Hebrew people into the promised land after the Exodus, and her kindness in sheltering the Hebrew spies helps them to victory at Jericho.
And then there’s Ruth, King David’s great-grandmother, who is a Moabite woman married into a Hebrew family. Her husband and her father-in-law both died, leaving her a widow, and she brought her widowed mother-in-law back to Israel. In Israel, Ruth becomes Jewish, marries Boaz and continues the family tree of Jesus.
And then there is the wife of Uriah, Bathsheba, who was the “victim of [King] David’s lust,” (Raymond E. Brown, A Coming Christ in Advent) and we can only imagine the pressure that a king would bring to bear on her to make this happen. David had Bathsheba’s husband killed and took her as his wife. It is her son Solomon who continues the family tree.
Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba. All of them foreigners. All of them the victim of tragedy, often abuse. Why does Matthew go out of his way to name them? These are not the impressive names of a good family heritage, but more like the skeletons in the family closet. Why does Matthew want to remind people of these scandalous stories, these foreigners in the family tree of Jesus?
At least two reasons, I think. The first is that the last woman named in the family tree is Mary, who has her own scandal when she becomes pregnant out of wedlock. It may be that Matthew wants to prepare his hearers to accept Mary by reminding them that God has long been at work among the outcasts.
The second reason is that Matthew wants us to know that there is room for everyone in the family of Jesus. If it all begins with Jacob (who cheated his twin Esau) and Jacob’s son Judah (who sold off his brother and later shunned Tamar), Rahab and Ruth, and David with Bathsheba, and a bunch of bad kings, then we’ve got a family tree of saints and sinners, a family tree that you might want to hide as much as you’d want to celebrate it. This family tree reminds us, right at the beginning of the gospel, that God works with outcasts and foreigners, with people who are selfish and flawed and broken, just like most of us. And this is why Jesus always invited saints and sinners alike. This is why Jesus ate with tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, and also with Pharisees, Roman centurions, and really everyone else. Everyone was invited to the table of Christ, because his grace was for all people.
And if God’s grace is wide enough for all of them, if God was at work in such a gnarled and twisted family tree, then surely God is at work in our own family trees. Despite the failures, the scandals, the things we don’t want anyone to know about, we have a place in God’s family. The Christ child who was born in this family tree was born for every one of us.
And so the family tree of Jesus continues in his followers. During our bicentennial last year, we celebrated the many wonderful things about our heritage in this congregation. But it hasn’t all been so good. There are also stories of pettiness, exclusion, judgmental attitudes, and fights. Our family tree is still full of both saints and sinners.
This past spring when I traveled to Boston with the confirmation class to learn about the Congregational church, we celebrated their work for religious freedom, for the abolition of slavery, for the equality of women. But we also saw the grave marker, near the grave of John Hancock, of his servant Frank. No last name, probably a slave. And we visited beautiful Boston Common, the park where people gathered for public speeches and sermons, next to the magnificent state house. And I told them that this is also where they used to execute people: witches, and heretics, like those Quakers.
Why should we remember these stories? Because if we are not honest about our past, then we aren’t honest about our present. And if we don’t remember these failings, then we will get the idea that God only works in the lives of perfect people, people who make no mistakes, have no trace of ignorance, and are free from doubt and fear and the prejudices of their day. But if God only works through those kinds of people, then God can’t work through us.
That’s not what the family tree of Jesus proclaims. This family tree proclaims that God works through all of us. This family tree in Matthew is how we get from Abraham to Jesus, but I also imagine the family tree of faith, which shows how we get from Jesus to us. It, too, is full of saints and sinners. It’s got some big names that we recognize, like Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther, but it’s got many more names who do not make history.
Here’s an interesting thing about Matthew’s family tree from the time of the exile until Jesus. If you study the Old Testament, you will find only the first two names in that list. The rest have been lost to history, until Joseph and Mary. Unremembered, ordinary people, who never made the history books for their achievements. They were regular people like you and me. I wonder how God is working among us?
Do you come from a good family? Do you come from good people? Well, not good all the time. But we do come from God’s people. We come from God’s family tree.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Sermon - A Prophet for Our Time
Preached on July 18 2010 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.
Amos 8:1-12
What happens when a nation of people who come from humble, hard-working roots become, over generations, richer and richer? That was Israel in the 7th century before Christ, when Amos was a prophet. Sometimes we get the wrong idea about prophets, and imagine that they are like fortune tellers, predicting the future by magical communication with God. What prophets are really best at is not seeing the future, but seeing the present more clearly than anyone else, and telling the truth about it, especially the truth that upsets people in power. So Amos tells the truth to Israel, to a people who have forgotten where they came from, and have been blinded by their own success. “Hear this, you that trample the needy, and bring ruin to the poor of the land.”
I think that if Amos were around today doing his prophet gig, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. There's no shortage of targets.
Hear this A.I.G., Lehman Brothers, Bernie Madoff, and everyone who chased short-term profit over your responsibility to be honest and careful with our investments. You who brought ruin to people thrown out of homes, and let go from jobs, and cut off from the support that would give them just a bit of dignity.
In his day, Amos said: "[hear this, you who] say, ‘When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and when will the Sabbath [be over], so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.’”
Today he might say: Hear this, you who say that whatever you can get away with in business is just fine. You who open factories where there are no regulations for a living wage or even healthy working conditions, you who bury workers in debt and so own their lives like slaves, you who want to rush through your weekly appearance at the big downtown church so you can get back to trading stocks and betting riches where people’s real lives are at stake. Hear this, you who think only of the profit margin when drilling a mile beneath the most beautiful waters of the world, and forget your moral obligation to take such risks only with the greatest caution possible. Did any of you think that you could go on like this, and somehow avoid devastation?
Yes, Amos would have it pretty easy today. Different century, different part of the world, vastly more complex economies and globalized corporate interests: but the same story. And so we hear in Amos a tragic story that is only too real for us today:
“Shall not the land tremble on this account, and everyone mourn who lives in it, and all of it rise like the Nile, and be tossed about and sink again, like the Nile of Egypt? On that day, says the Lord GOD, I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day.”
Sobering, isn’t it? And whether we think that devastation is God’s punishment for injustice (which I do not), or that devastation is the natural consequence of reckless injustice, we recognize the story that Amos lived in 2,700 years ago as our story also.
And then Amos says this interesting thing: “The time is surely coming, says the Lord GOD, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it.”
A different kind of famine: not for bread or water, but a famine of the words of God. What kind of a famine is that?
The people are singing lamentations and mourning in sackcloths because all the prosperity that they’d enjoyed had been ruined, like a sandy beach covered in tar, and now they can’t hear the word of God. I wonder if it’s because things had been going too well for too long? I wonder if they had all benefited just enough when business was booming, when gas was cheap, when the DOW Jones was high, and everyone was buying so everyone was hiring.
Maybe they looked around and said “hey, we’re doing pretty well for ourselves. We’ve got our essential needs covered, we’ve got insurance and a safety net in case of emergency, and we’ve got enough left over to invent new needs and satisfy them.” And if you go along like that for long enough, it’s hard to see what you need to hear from God and so you forget how to listen. Oh, they still went to the temple and sang their psalms and prayed their prayers, but it was kind of just to keep up form. They had no needs, so they forgot how to listen to God’s word. And then when it all came crashing down, there was a famine for the word of God. I wonder if they had forgotten how to hear it.
You can’t ignore a garden, let the weeds grow and the soil dry up, and then one day when you really need a fresh tomato expect to go and find one waiting for you. You can’t stop practicing the piano, and then expect one day to be able to play Chopin. And you can’t ignore your friend’s phone calls, emails, invitations to dinner, and then suddenly reach some crisis in your life and call on that friend for support.
And so it is with our life with God. If things go too well for us for too long, sometimes we forget how to hear the word of God. And if you are not used to listening for the word of God, do you even notice that you’re missing it? I think about that when I read Amos, because the truth is that even though I would like to think about Amos ranting against BP and A.I.G. and whomever else I might blame, there is also a part of Amos that is speaking to me. Because when I am done with my anger at the trans-national corporations, and the government failures to regulate their greed and guard the common good, and when I am done with my frustration at the whole culture that values personal gain over responsibility to the human family and to the earth, then I have to recognize that I drive a car and I look for the cheapest gas without asking questions about why it’s so cheap. And I hope that the money in my pension fund grows big in the stock market without wondering what corners those companies are cutting to earn those profits. And I buy shoes and clothes with faraway labels without wondering if the workers are safe, or earn enough to live on.
It’s great when they speak against my enemies, but they also speak a difficult truth to me. The truth is that even if I didn’t set up the system, even if I never made a conscious choice to demand cheap gas despite the enormous risks, I am still a part of that system. I am a part of a lot of these horrors that we’ve brought down on ourselves. And even if I know that I cannot solve these large problems on my own, I cannot ignore the fact that I can make many smaller choices in a different way.
But my individual choices are not going to solve the big picture. So what’s the point, Amos? What am I supposed to do with this word about the great injustices of the world? I can’t solve them on my own. But then I realize, God doesn’t depend on us doing it on our own. God just wants us to know that God is against injustice. Famine or not, whether we hear God’s word or not, God’s word is resurrection; God’s word speaks new hope for the hopeless; God’s word creates new light when the night is most dark.
Do you remember a few minutes ago when I said that ignoring our relationship with God was like ignoring a friend’s calls and emails and invitations and then expecting that friend to be there when a crisis hits? Well, I bet that there were some of you who thought of a really good friend that you’ve had for a really long time, and you thought to yourself, that image doesn’t work. If life came crashing down, my friend would be there for me even if I’d been a bad friend for the past few weeks, months, or even years. Some of you did, didn’t you?
And isn’t God more faithful than our most faithful friend to whom we have shown no faith? Isn’t God the kind of creator who will restore life to a people even after they have been careless with life? Isn’t God the kind of parent who welcomes the prodigal sons and daughters home after they have destroyed their own inheritance and abandoned their homes?
Amos knew all this about God. Amos knew that God does not let devastation have the last word. Hold on, Amos says, because God isn’t done. We need to hear this from the end of the book of Amos: “On that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen, and repair its breaches, and raise up its ruins, and rebuild it as in the days of old… The time is surely coming, says the Lord, when …the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it. I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant them upon their land, and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land that I have given them, says the Lord your God. (Amos 9:11-15, selected).
Those are the final words of the book of Amos. Those are the words given to people who had forgotten how to hear God’s word. God restores our lives even when we have made a mess of them. This is the word that became flesh in the man from Nazareth, who saw the same things that Amos had talked about. Jesus saw injustice and violence. And he saw the sun turned to darkness in the middle of the day, a day when the evil of the world seemed like it was too much, when it seemed like the word of God, the very living word of God, would be forever silenced.
When it seems to us like the word of God is silenced, when it seems like the sun is blackened and we will be forever in darkness, forever hungry for the goodness of God, then remember how bad it looked on that day. Remember that the word of God cannot be silenced in a tomb. The word of God cannot be silenced by greed or cruelty or injustice of any kind. The word of God lives even when the world does it’s best to bury it. And the word of God will restore this world.
Amos 8:1-12
What happens when a nation of people who come from humble, hard-working roots become, over generations, richer and richer? That was Israel in the 7th century before Christ, when Amos was a prophet. Sometimes we get the wrong idea about prophets, and imagine that they are like fortune tellers, predicting the future by magical communication with God. What prophets are really best at is not seeing the future, but seeing the present more clearly than anyone else, and telling the truth about it, especially the truth that upsets people in power. So Amos tells the truth to Israel, to a people who have forgotten where they came from, and have been blinded by their own success. “Hear this, you that trample the needy, and bring ruin to the poor of the land.”
I think that if Amos were around today doing his prophet gig, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. There's no shortage of targets.
Hear this A.I.G., Lehman Brothers, Bernie Madoff, and everyone who chased short-term profit over your responsibility to be honest and careful with our investments. You who brought ruin to people thrown out of homes, and let go from jobs, and cut off from the support that would give them just a bit of dignity.
In his day, Amos said: "[hear this, you who] say, ‘When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and when will the Sabbath [be over], so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.’”
Today he might say: Hear this, you who say that whatever you can get away with in business is just fine. You who open factories where there are no regulations for a living wage or even healthy working conditions, you who bury workers in debt and so own their lives like slaves, you who want to rush through your weekly appearance at the big downtown church so you can get back to trading stocks and betting riches where people’s real lives are at stake. Hear this, you who think only of the profit margin when drilling a mile beneath the most beautiful waters of the world, and forget your moral obligation to take such risks only with the greatest caution possible. Did any of you think that you could go on like this, and somehow avoid devastation?
Yes, Amos would have it pretty easy today. Different century, different part of the world, vastly more complex economies and globalized corporate interests: but the same story. And so we hear in Amos a tragic story that is only too real for us today:
“Shall not the land tremble on this account, and everyone mourn who lives in it, and all of it rise like the Nile, and be tossed about and sink again, like the Nile of Egypt? On that day, says the Lord GOD, I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day.”
Sobering, isn’t it? And whether we think that devastation is God’s punishment for injustice (which I do not), or that devastation is the natural consequence of reckless injustice, we recognize the story that Amos lived in 2,700 years ago as our story also.
And then Amos says this interesting thing: “The time is surely coming, says the Lord GOD, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it.”
A different kind of famine: not for bread or water, but a famine of the words of God. What kind of a famine is that?
The people are singing lamentations and mourning in sackcloths because all the prosperity that they’d enjoyed had been ruined, like a sandy beach covered in tar, and now they can’t hear the word of God. I wonder if it’s because things had been going too well for too long? I wonder if they had all benefited just enough when business was booming, when gas was cheap, when the DOW Jones was high, and everyone was buying so everyone was hiring.
Maybe they looked around and said “hey, we’re doing pretty well for ourselves. We’ve got our essential needs covered, we’ve got insurance and a safety net in case of emergency, and we’ve got enough left over to invent new needs and satisfy them.” And if you go along like that for long enough, it’s hard to see what you need to hear from God and so you forget how to listen. Oh, they still went to the temple and sang their psalms and prayed their prayers, but it was kind of just to keep up form. They had no needs, so they forgot how to listen to God’s word. And then when it all came crashing down, there was a famine for the word of God. I wonder if they had forgotten how to hear it.
You can’t ignore a garden, let the weeds grow and the soil dry up, and then one day when you really need a fresh tomato expect to go and find one waiting for you. You can’t stop practicing the piano, and then expect one day to be able to play Chopin. And you can’t ignore your friend’s phone calls, emails, invitations to dinner, and then suddenly reach some crisis in your life and call on that friend for support.
And so it is with our life with God. If things go too well for us for too long, sometimes we forget how to hear the word of God. And if you are not used to listening for the word of God, do you even notice that you’re missing it? I think about that when I read Amos, because the truth is that even though I would like to think about Amos ranting against BP and A.I.G. and whomever else I might blame, there is also a part of Amos that is speaking to me. Because when I am done with my anger at the trans-national corporations, and the government failures to regulate their greed and guard the common good, and when I am done with my frustration at the whole culture that values personal gain over responsibility to the human family and to the earth, then I have to recognize that I drive a car and I look for the cheapest gas without asking questions about why it’s so cheap. And I hope that the money in my pension fund grows big in the stock market without wondering what corners those companies are cutting to earn those profits. And I buy shoes and clothes with faraway labels without wondering if the workers are safe, or earn enough to live on.
It’s great when they speak against my enemies, but they also speak a difficult truth to me. The truth is that even if I didn’t set up the system, even if I never made a conscious choice to demand cheap gas despite the enormous risks, I am still a part of that system. I am a part of a lot of these horrors that we’ve brought down on ourselves. And even if I know that I cannot solve these large problems on my own, I cannot ignore the fact that I can make many smaller choices in a different way.
But my individual choices are not going to solve the big picture. So what’s the point, Amos? What am I supposed to do with this word about the great injustices of the world? I can’t solve them on my own. But then I realize, God doesn’t depend on us doing it on our own. God just wants us to know that God is against injustice. Famine or not, whether we hear God’s word or not, God’s word is resurrection; God’s word speaks new hope for the hopeless; God’s word creates new light when the night is most dark.
Do you remember a few minutes ago when I said that ignoring our relationship with God was like ignoring a friend’s calls and emails and invitations and then expecting that friend to be there when a crisis hits? Well, I bet that there were some of you who thought of a really good friend that you’ve had for a really long time, and you thought to yourself, that image doesn’t work. If life came crashing down, my friend would be there for me even if I’d been a bad friend for the past few weeks, months, or even years. Some of you did, didn’t you?
And isn’t God more faithful than our most faithful friend to whom we have shown no faith? Isn’t God the kind of creator who will restore life to a people even after they have been careless with life? Isn’t God the kind of parent who welcomes the prodigal sons and daughters home after they have destroyed their own inheritance and abandoned their homes?
Amos knew all this about God. Amos knew that God does not let devastation have the last word. Hold on, Amos says, because God isn’t done. We need to hear this from the end of the book of Amos: “On that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen, and repair its breaches, and raise up its ruins, and rebuild it as in the days of old… The time is surely coming, says the Lord, when …the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it. I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant them upon their land, and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land that I have given them, says the Lord your God. (Amos 9:11-15, selected).
Those are the final words of the book of Amos. Those are the words given to people who had forgotten how to hear God’s word. God restores our lives even when we have made a mess of them. This is the word that became flesh in the man from Nazareth, who saw the same things that Amos had talked about. Jesus saw injustice and violence. And he saw the sun turned to darkness in the middle of the day, a day when the evil of the world seemed like it was too much, when it seemed like the word of God, the very living word of God, would be forever silenced.
When it seems to us like the word of God is silenced, when it seems like the sun is blackened and we will be forever in darkness, forever hungry for the goodness of God, then remember how bad it looked on that day. Remember that the word of God cannot be silenced in a tomb. The word of God cannot be silenced by greed or cruelty or injustice of any kind. The word of God lives even when the world does it’s best to bury it. And the word of God will restore this world.
Column - The World Cup Final
This past Sunday afternoon, while Betsy, Sam and I were on vacation with my extended family in northern Michigan, we went to a restaurant to watch the final of the World Cup. Allow me emphasize, because a part of me can’t believe that this happened: On a gorgeous afternoon, we left the cottages we were renting on a lakeshore, drove into town, and went inside to watch a soccer game between Spain and the Netherlands, two teams about which we knew next to nothing.
Why did I do it? It was partly because I had missed almost every other World Cup game during my summer class schedule, and partly because it seemed like a memorable afternoon for us to spend with my brothers, and partly because it was the last chance for a World Cup game until 2014, and maybe just a little bit because LeBron James had just announced his departure from Cleveland, and I needed to show that my interests are bigger that local sports.
Soccer is a cool sport. The action is non-stop: no commercials, no huddles, no signals between pitcher and catcher, and hardly any substitutions. These players run almost continuously for the entire ninety minutes of play (and, in this case, the thirty minutes of overtime). The scores may be low, but the action is great. You really just never know when that vital goal is going to be kicked (or headed) past the goalkeeper. Also, although there are star players, soccer seems to be more dependent on teamwork than many other team sports in which star players more easily dominate.
In other words, soccer is a community effort, sustained with steady energy over a long period of time, with only occasional tangible results.
Now, doesn’t that sound like our lives? A community effort, sustained by steady energy for a logn time with only occasional tangible results. Doesn’t that sound like raising children, or improving living conditions, or overcoming prejudice? It sounds to me like the Christian faith. We are a community, sustaining energy in our worship, our service, and our spiritual growth. It is a lifelong journey, and only occasionally do we reach those thin places where we catch a glimpse of God, where we enter into mystical communion with the divine. In the meantime, isn't it great to be on the field?
Why did I do it? It was partly because I had missed almost every other World Cup game during my summer class schedule, and partly because it seemed like a memorable afternoon for us to spend with my brothers, and partly because it was the last chance for a World Cup game until 2014, and maybe just a little bit because LeBron James had just announced his departure from Cleveland, and I needed to show that my interests are bigger that local sports.
Soccer is a cool sport. The action is non-stop: no commercials, no huddles, no signals between pitcher and catcher, and hardly any substitutions. These players run almost continuously for the entire ninety minutes of play (and, in this case, the thirty minutes of overtime). The scores may be low, but the action is great. You really just never know when that vital goal is going to be kicked (or headed) past the goalkeeper. Also, although there are star players, soccer seems to be more dependent on teamwork than many other team sports in which star players more easily dominate.
In other words, soccer is a community effort, sustained with steady energy over a long period of time, with only occasional tangible results.
Now, doesn’t that sound like our lives? A community effort, sustained by steady energy for a logn time with only occasional tangible results. Doesn’t that sound like raising children, or improving living conditions, or overcoming prejudice? It sounds to me like the Christian faith. We are a community, sustaining energy in our worship, our service, and our spiritual growth. It is a lifelong journey, and only occasionally do we reach those thin places where we catch a glimpse of God, where we enter into mystical communion with the divine. In the meantime, isn't it great to be on the field?
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Sermon - The Call of Wisdom
Preached on Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2010 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-32
John 16:12-15
Dedicated to the new High School Graduates of this congregation; and always to the glory of God.
Do you remember Robert Fulghum, the Unitarian minister who wrote that book called Everything I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten? Here is what he wrote in that essay about wisdom:
“All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday School. These are the things I learned:
Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. …
Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.” (All I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, p 6-7)
There’s not much there to disagree with, is there? But this wisdom gets complicated. Think of Fulghum’s list in terms of big adult issues like foreign policy and war, the oil spill in the gulf of Mexico, the derivatives, credit-default swaps, and bundled mortgages on Wall Street, the priorities of our nation’s budget, or the priorities of our own budgets. Wisdom seems easier to apply in kindergarten.
In a poetic section of the book of proverbs, wisdom is personified as a woman who partnered with God to create all things in the world. God created wisdom first, and then she assisted God in the creation of everything else. Ever since, she has been standing at the busiest intersections of the world, calling out to all who live. This image suggests to me that our Jewish ancestors saw the world as a place governed and ordered by wisdom, and that this wisdom was a creation of God and a gift to the world. Now, this doesn’t mean that if you are wise then everything will always work out for you (see the book of Job to dispel that misguided idea). It just means that wisdom is the principle of creation, and it is available to everyone.
You don’t have to be smart to have wisdom. You don’t have to be educated, or know a lot, to be wise. This is a strange thing to say on a day when we are giving thanks for education as a gift from God. Today we celebrate our high school graduates, and we offer our support for higher education. But there is a difference between wisdom and knowledge. You can be wise without being smart or knowing a lot of things. And you be smart and educated without being wise. We value education because we want the tools of knowledge to be wielded by people who also have wisdom. Some of the best, most creative and innovative works have been done by smart, well educated people. But the most awful, destructive things have also been done by smart, well educated people. Education is not, in itself, a promise of wisdom.
The call of wisdom is a message to all who live. You don’t have to be approved to receive it; you don’t have to travel to a holy shrine, or discover ancient scriptures in a desert cave, or attend secret ceremonies to receive it. You don’t even need to belong to a certain religion to receive it.
This past Monday, the New York Times published a column written by the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, who lives in exile in India. He wrote about how people of all faiths have discovered the same wisdom of living with compassion. When he was young, he used to think that Buddhism was the only religion with wisdom, but as an adult he met with people like the Catholic monk Thomas Merton, and talked about the centrality of compassion in both Christianity and Buddhism. He wrote about similar conversations with Jews and Hindus…and Muslims – Muslims who point out that in the Koran, the very name for God is the “Compassionate and Merciful.”
God’s wisdom calls out to all people. She speaks to us about what we choose to value, how we shape our relationships, and how we live in the world with compassion. Wisdom is available to everyone because it is woven right into the act of creation. And wisdom is simple enough to be distilled from what we learn in Kindergarten. So…what gives? If wisdom is so obvious, why do we so often live foolishly, rather than wisely? Why do we so often live with self-centeredness instead of compassion? Why do we live with bitterness rather than wonder? When you put the choices like that, they seem like no-brainers. No one wakes up in the morning and says “today I’d really like to be foolish, selfish, and bitter. That seems like a good way to spend the day.”
But let’s put the questions differently, and see how they sound. Why do we so often choose what is easy instead of what is difficult? Why do we so often try to fit in, instead of acting from our convictions? Why do we live in a way that makes us feel safe and secure, rather than living in a way that faces our fears and self-doubt with courage, even if we aren’t sure of the outcome?
Doesn’t it turn out that God’s wisdom takes us away from lives that are easy, comfortable, and secure? No wonder we have trouble with it.
Wisdom is not something we can learn one day in kindergarten and master over the weekend, certainly not on our own, anyway. We need help. In the gospel according to John, Jesus is speaking with his disciples on their last night together before his death, and he says to them “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.” Could this mean that wisdom (what Jesus called truth) is a process, something that we aren’t ready for all at once? Could it mean that we don’t have to achieve wisdom all on our own?
As Jesus said to the disciples, so God says to us: receive the Spirit of truth, that you may hear the ongoing call of wisdom. Remember that you do not have to do it on your own. Wisdom will be challenging. It will demand all of our attention and energy, and we will need the strength of God working within us. If we were athletes, our coach would tell us that when it comes to wisdom, leave it all on the field; give wisdom everything you’ve got.
The Reverend Frederick Buechner wrote that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” (Beyond Words, p 405) So, to our graduates, our scholars, pursue your interest, in science, the arts, business, religion, health, mechanics, or whatever it may be. Learn all about it, and then match your knowledge and your intelligence to a place where you find the world’s deep hunger.
Remember that our lives are like the seeds we grew in cups as children: our lives are mysterious gifts…and they don’t last forever. God has given us the wisdom we need, so “share everything. Don’t hit people. Clean up your own mess. And when you go out into the world, hold hands and stick together.”
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-32
John 16:12-15
Dedicated to the new High School Graduates of this congregation; and always to the glory of God.
Do you remember Robert Fulghum, the Unitarian minister who wrote that book called Everything I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten? Here is what he wrote in that essay about wisdom:
“All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday School. These are the things I learned:
Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. …
Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.” (All I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, p 6-7)
There’s not much there to disagree with, is there? But this wisdom gets complicated. Think of Fulghum’s list in terms of big adult issues like foreign policy and war, the oil spill in the gulf of Mexico, the derivatives, credit-default swaps, and bundled mortgages on Wall Street, the priorities of our nation’s budget, or the priorities of our own budgets. Wisdom seems easier to apply in kindergarten.
In a poetic section of the book of proverbs, wisdom is personified as a woman who partnered with God to create all things in the world. God created wisdom first, and then she assisted God in the creation of everything else. Ever since, she has been standing at the busiest intersections of the world, calling out to all who live. This image suggests to me that our Jewish ancestors saw the world as a place governed and ordered by wisdom, and that this wisdom was a creation of God and a gift to the world. Now, this doesn’t mean that if you are wise then everything will always work out for you (see the book of Job to dispel that misguided idea). It just means that wisdom is the principle of creation, and it is available to everyone.
You don’t have to be smart to have wisdom. You don’t have to be educated, or know a lot, to be wise. This is a strange thing to say on a day when we are giving thanks for education as a gift from God. Today we celebrate our high school graduates, and we offer our support for higher education. But there is a difference between wisdom and knowledge. You can be wise without being smart or knowing a lot of things. And you be smart and educated without being wise. We value education because we want the tools of knowledge to be wielded by people who also have wisdom. Some of the best, most creative and innovative works have been done by smart, well educated people. But the most awful, destructive things have also been done by smart, well educated people. Education is not, in itself, a promise of wisdom.
The call of wisdom is a message to all who live. You don’t have to be approved to receive it; you don’t have to travel to a holy shrine, or discover ancient scriptures in a desert cave, or attend secret ceremonies to receive it. You don’t even need to belong to a certain religion to receive it.
This past Monday, the New York Times published a column written by the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, who lives in exile in India. He wrote about how people of all faiths have discovered the same wisdom of living with compassion. When he was young, he used to think that Buddhism was the only religion with wisdom, but as an adult he met with people like the Catholic monk Thomas Merton, and talked about the centrality of compassion in both Christianity and Buddhism. He wrote about similar conversations with Jews and Hindus…and Muslims – Muslims who point out that in the Koran, the very name for God is the “Compassionate and Merciful.”
God’s wisdom calls out to all people. She speaks to us about what we choose to value, how we shape our relationships, and how we live in the world with compassion. Wisdom is available to everyone because it is woven right into the act of creation. And wisdom is simple enough to be distilled from what we learn in Kindergarten. So…what gives? If wisdom is so obvious, why do we so often live foolishly, rather than wisely? Why do we so often live with self-centeredness instead of compassion? Why do we live with bitterness rather than wonder? When you put the choices like that, they seem like no-brainers. No one wakes up in the morning and says “today I’d really like to be foolish, selfish, and bitter. That seems like a good way to spend the day.”
But let’s put the questions differently, and see how they sound. Why do we so often choose what is easy instead of what is difficult? Why do we so often try to fit in, instead of acting from our convictions? Why do we live in a way that makes us feel safe and secure, rather than living in a way that faces our fears and self-doubt with courage, even if we aren’t sure of the outcome?
Doesn’t it turn out that God’s wisdom takes us away from lives that are easy, comfortable, and secure? No wonder we have trouble with it.
Wisdom is not something we can learn one day in kindergarten and master over the weekend, certainly not on our own, anyway. We need help. In the gospel according to John, Jesus is speaking with his disciples on their last night together before his death, and he says to them “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.” Could this mean that wisdom (what Jesus called truth) is a process, something that we aren’t ready for all at once? Could it mean that we don’t have to achieve wisdom all on our own?
As Jesus said to the disciples, so God says to us: receive the Spirit of truth, that you may hear the ongoing call of wisdom. Remember that you do not have to do it on your own. Wisdom will be challenging. It will demand all of our attention and energy, and we will need the strength of God working within us. If we were athletes, our coach would tell us that when it comes to wisdom, leave it all on the field; give wisdom everything you’ve got.
The Reverend Frederick Buechner wrote that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” (Beyond Words, p 405) So, to our graduates, our scholars, pursue your interest, in science, the arts, business, religion, health, mechanics, or whatever it may be. Learn all about it, and then match your knowledge and your intelligence to a place where you find the world’s deep hunger.
Remember that our lives are like the seeds we grew in cups as children: our lives are mysterious gifts…and they don’t last forever. God has given us the wisdom we need, so “share everything. Don’t hit people. Clean up your own mess. And when you go out into the world, hold hands and stick together.”
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