A few nights ago, I heard on the radio the voice of a reporter who had just arrived in Haiti to cover the aftermath of the earthquake that struck the day before, devastating the capital of Port-au-Prince. She had taken an extra seat on a chartered plane along with a small team of emergency medical specialists who were flying in from this country to help in any way that they could. She described how this small team had walked off the airplane directly into a makeshift medical center at the airport where they began to do triage work. They spent hours attending to the wounded, and were still at it when the reporter finally left for the night. I don’t know who those people were, or what motivated them to travel to Haiti and work long, exhausting hours. All I know is that in them, I recognize the grace of God at work.
On my computer, I looked up the United Church of Christ emergency fund, and an organization called Partners In Health, which has a long medical presence in Haiti, and is removed enough from the capital to have mainly survived the earthquake’s damage. I gave some money; it’s not much, but I want to support the people who have the necessary experience and relationships with Haitians to muster everything they can, as soon as they can. Haiti is one of the world’s nations least equipped to handle a disaster of this kind.
I am thankful for all of the ways in which compassion and relationships are not being held back at national borders, or contained within the boundaries of race, ethnicity, and religion. We live in an increasingly interrelated world, and I believe that our ethic of love must have all people in mind when we contemplate the old question “am I my brother’s keeper?”
This week, we remember Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. A year before he was killed, he spoke at Riverside Church on the urgency of ending the war in Vietnam and embracing a call for every nation to develop “loyalty to mankind as a whole.”
“This call for world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men” (From "A Time to Break Silence," preached on April 4, 1967).
I am thankful for all those Haitians and Americans and others who are at work to ease suffering. They are in my prayers, because they are doing God’s work.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
Sermon - Filling Up
Preached on January 17, 2010 at The First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC
John 2:1-11
Second Sunday of Epiphany
Dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and to all those who take up the cause of justice for which he gave so much; and always to the glory of God.
Early tomorrow morning I will have a health assessment, and so, last week, I was filling out some paperwork in preparation for this appointment. There was medical background, family history, a form for my blood work, and then there was a comprehensive survey about lifestyle. The survey covered the expected areas: How often do I exercise: do I smoke? how often do I eat breakfast? how many servings do I eat of foods high in fiber, fat, or calcium? No surprises. I estimated and checked the boxes. And then there were questions I hadn’t expected: big picture kind of questions.
Do you believe your current lifestyle positively or negatively affects your health?
Do your sleep patterns promote good health?
How often do friends or relatives suggest that you should slow down, take life easier, or relax more?
Do you think your current level of stress is high enough to affect your health or quality of life?
How often do you find yourself getting irritated or annoyed with others?
How often do you feel a chronic sense of struggle with daily events?
How are you doing? What I had thought was a simple health assessment was turning into an assessment of my whole life, even my spiritual health. And I had to admit that it made sense: our health encompasses every part of our lives. These questions reminded me that health is about more than jogging on a treadmill and skipping seconds on dessert. If one’s very spirit is in a state of stress and anger and chronic struggle, it isn’t going to help to just add some new, healthy tasks on top. Real health begins with emptying ourselves of everything that makes us unhealthy so that there is room to be filled up with all those things that will care for our bodies, our minds, and our souls.
Emptying and filling up are at the center of this mysterious, miraculous story of Jesus at the wedding in Cana. The jars have to be emptied of the water they contain so that they may be filled anew with water that will become the finest wine at the wedding party. It is a story that works on many levels. To begin, this is the first sign that Jesus performs in the gospel of John, and the signs are very important symbols in John. They are always meant to tell us something about Christ. This sign shows us that Jesus has the power to transform ordinary lives like ours into lives that are rich and deep and wonderful. Another layer here is that a wedding is an old scriptural symbol for God’s relationship to the people. Isaiah says that the land of Israel is married to God, and Hosea describes God caring for God’s people as a husband cares for his wife. All weddings can be tense, because we want them to go well, but when the wedding is between God and the land, the pressure is pretty high. So, when Mary tells her son that the wine has run out, it’s seems like a bad sign for Jesus at the beginning of his ministry. But his creative solution sends a quick message to us that God’s relationship to the land and to the people will not be harmed. Jesus is here to see to that, and he does it by inviting us to be emptied and filled anew.
In this culture, we are not very good with emptiness. Our tendency is to want more when we are already full. We want a life of joy and significance, with deep and meaningful relationships. And, we want to enjoy the new episode of Law & Order, and send funny YouTube videos to our friends, and follow the stories of Tiger Woods, Jon and Kate, and the balloon boy’s father. We lose the art of discerning the difference between what’s important and what isn’t, and so we overfill our time, our minds, and our spirit. Just like those jars at the wedding, God offers to fill us with graceful abundance. But before we can fill up, we have to make room. This is hard work.
Sometimes, we become emptied against our will, by events not of our choosing. It may be illness, dislocation, job loss, or the death of someone close. These events change our perception of what is important and what is not, and usually in a way that makes us realize that all those things that we thought were so important, the things we stayed up worrying about, the things that made our necks and shoulders tense with concern, those things were not really as important as we had thought.
This happened to me three summers ago when I was in a car accident. I was driving by myself on Interstate-77 in West Virginia, on my way back from taking our son James to spend a week with his cousins. It was mid-afternoon, and the road was almost empty when I drove into a rainstorm. It was dry road one moment and a downpour the next, with water pouring across the road like it was a shallow creek bed. My car hydroplaned, spun half way around and collided, back-first, into the guardrail. I was very fortunate to walk away without a scratch, but the suddenness of it, and a look at the crumpled trunk and back seat of the car, made me experience the full force of how fragile life is. It made me understand what a gift life is, a gift to be savored by filling it up with what is important, and not wasting a second on anything that takes up room from what really matters: not worry, not distraction or triviality, not anger or bitterness or hatred.
In this emptiness, I was filled with gratitude for time with my family, my friends, my neighbors and all the people I see in the regular course of my day. I saw with new eyes the things of wonder and beauty in this world: the sky looked brighter, and the hymns I sang sounded dearer. I was filled with thankfulness for the ways that I could do good in this world: be kind, contribute to change, act with courage on behalf of others. What a gift, what a gift life is. I had been emptied and filled again.
When I shared my experience with this congregation, many of you told me the stories of your own accidents, both your close calls and the ones that did not end well at all. You told me how those times, and the memory of what happened had reminded you of what’s important, had emptied and refilled you.
Inevitably, the freshness of these experiences fades, and the routines of life make us comfortable enough to forget those holy insights we had felt so strongly. We would never wish for a new scare or hardship to remind us, so how do we empty ourselves intentionally in between the scary and tragic events that do it to us?
One way to do it, I think, is what we are doing right now. When we gather regularly for worship, it is an act of emptying ourselves so that God can fill us anew. A car accident will bring us face to face with our mortality, but so will worship, as we stand before the cross and remember how Christ told his followers to take up their own crosses. We are emptied in worship as we pray for those of our community who are suffering, and pray for the people of Haiti who have lost their homes, their loved ones, and their lives. When we meditate on the words of scripture, hear the beauty of music, and reflect together on God’s grace for us, we return again and again to the question of what is really important.
It would be naïve to imagine that distraction, worry, anger, and triviality do not enter into our minds during worship. But, when we are focused, when we do the work of paying attention to our lives, then worship is a regular practice of being emptied and being filled up anew. And that’s why we keep coming back. When we can make a regular practice of saying that this hour is more important than anything else we might do on Sunday morning at this time, it is good practice for the many other choices we will make during the week.
So, I’ll go to this health assessment tomorrow, and I’ll be thinking about those questions as an invitation to change. Do I believe my current lifestyle positively or negatively affects my health? In other words: what needs to be emptied?
John 2:1-11
Second Sunday of Epiphany
Dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and to all those who take up the cause of justice for which he gave so much; and always to the glory of God.
Early tomorrow morning I will have a health assessment, and so, last week, I was filling out some paperwork in preparation for this appointment. There was medical background, family history, a form for my blood work, and then there was a comprehensive survey about lifestyle. The survey covered the expected areas: How often do I exercise: do I smoke? how often do I eat breakfast? how many servings do I eat of foods high in fiber, fat, or calcium? No surprises. I estimated and checked the boxes. And then there were questions I hadn’t expected: big picture kind of questions.
Do you believe your current lifestyle positively or negatively affects your health?
Do your sleep patterns promote good health?
How often do friends or relatives suggest that you should slow down, take life easier, or relax more?
Do you think your current level of stress is high enough to affect your health or quality of life?
How often do you find yourself getting irritated or annoyed with others?
How often do you feel a chronic sense of struggle with daily events?
How are you doing? What I had thought was a simple health assessment was turning into an assessment of my whole life, even my spiritual health. And I had to admit that it made sense: our health encompasses every part of our lives. These questions reminded me that health is about more than jogging on a treadmill and skipping seconds on dessert. If one’s very spirit is in a state of stress and anger and chronic struggle, it isn’t going to help to just add some new, healthy tasks on top. Real health begins with emptying ourselves of everything that makes us unhealthy so that there is room to be filled up with all those things that will care for our bodies, our minds, and our souls.
Emptying and filling up are at the center of this mysterious, miraculous story of Jesus at the wedding in Cana. The jars have to be emptied of the water they contain so that they may be filled anew with water that will become the finest wine at the wedding party. It is a story that works on many levels. To begin, this is the first sign that Jesus performs in the gospel of John, and the signs are very important symbols in John. They are always meant to tell us something about Christ. This sign shows us that Jesus has the power to transform ordinary lives like ours into lives that are rich and deep and wonderful. Another layer here is that a wedding is an old scriptural symbol for God’s relationship to the people. Isaiah says that the land of Israel is married to God, and Hosea describes God caring for God’s people as a husband cares for his wife. All weddings can be tense, because we want them to go well, but when the wedding is between God and the land, the pressure is pretty high. So, when Mary tells her son that the wine has run out, it’s seems like a bad sign for Jesus at the beginning of his ministry. But his creative solution sends a quick message to us that God’s relationship to the land and to the people will not be harmed. Jesus is here to see to that, and he does it by inviting us to be emptied and filled anew.
In this culture, we are not very good with emptiness. Our tendency is to want more when we are already full. We want a life of joy and significance, with deep and meaningful relationships. And, we want to enjoy the new episode of Law & Order, and send funny YouTube videos to our friends, and follow the stories of Tiger Woods, Jon and Kate, and the balloon boy’s father. We lose the art of discerning the difference between what’s important and what isn’t, and so we overfill our time, our minds, and our spirit. Just like those jars at the wedding, God offers to fill us with graceful abundance. But before we can fill up, we have to make room. This is hard work.
Sometimes, we become emptied against our will, by events not of our choosing. It may be illness, dislocation, job loss, or the death of someone close. These events change our perception of what is important and what is not, and usually in a way that makes us realize that all those things that we thought were so important, the things we stayed up worrying about, the things that made our necks and shoulders tense with concern, those things were not really as important as we had thought.
This happened to me three summers ago when I was in a car accident. I was driving by myself on Interstate-77 in West Virginia, on my way back from taking our son James to spend a week with his cousins. It was mid-afternoon, and the road was almost empty when I drove into a rainstorm. It was dry road one moment and a downpour the next, with water pouring across the road like it was a shallow creek bed. My car hydroplaned, spun half way around and collided, back-first, into the guardrail. I was very fortunate to walk away without a scratch, but the suddenness of it, and a look at the crumpled trunk and back seat of the car, made me experience the full force of how fragile life is. It made me understand what a gift life is, a gift to be savored by filling it up with what is important, and not wasting a second on anything that takes up room from what really matters: not worry, not distraction or triviality, not anger or bitterness or hatred.
In this emptiness, I was filled with gratitude for time with my family, my friends, my neighbors and all the people I see in the regular course of my day. I saw with new eyes the things of wonder and beauty in this world: the sky looked brighter, and the hymns I sang sounded dearer. I was filled with thankfulness for the ways that I could do good in this world: be kind, contribute to change, act with courage on behalf of others. What a gift, what a gift life is. I had been emptied and filled again.
When I shared my experience with this congregation, many of you told me the stories of your own accidents, both your close calls and the ones that did not end well at all. You told me how those times, and the memory of what happened had reminded you of what’s important, had emptied and refilled you.
Inevitably, the freshness of these experiences fades, and the routines of life make us comfortable enough to forget those holy insights we had felt so strongly. We would never wish for a new scare or hardship to remind us, so how do we empty ourselves intentionally in between the scary and tragic events that do it to us?
One way to do it, I think, is what we are doing right now. When we gather regularly for worship, it is an act of emptying ourselves so that God can fill us anew. A car accident will bring us face to face with our mortality, but so will worship, as we stand before the cross and remember how Christ told his followers to take up their own crosses. We are emptied in worship as we pray for those of our community who are suffering, and pray for the people of Haiti who have lost their homes, their loved ones, and their lives. When we meditate on the words of scripture, hear the beauty of music, and reflect together on God’s grace for us, we return again and again to the question of what is really important.
It would be naïve to imagine that distraction, worry, anger, and triviality do not enter into our minds during worship. But, when we are focused, when we do the work of paying attention to our lives, then worship is a regular practice of being emptied and being filled up anew. And that’s why we keep coming back. When we can make a regular practice of saying that this hour is more important than anything else we might do on Sunday morning at this time, it is good practice for the many other choices we will make during the week.
So, I’ll go to this health assessment tomorrow, and I’ll be thinking about those questions as an invitation to change. Do I believe my current lifestyle positively or negatively affects my health? In other words: what needs to be emptied?
Monday, January 4, 2010
Thoughts on the New Year 2010
As the year 2010 has begun, we begin to have perspective on the first decade of the 21st century. For our country, this decade is largely defined by the attack on September 11, 2001, and the two wars we began in the years since. Although there are many achievements and acts of courage, beauty, and love from this decade to be treasured, I know that many of us hope for better years ahead on the large scale. And we are not alone.
On Christmas, my wife, Betsy, gave me a book written by Eboo Patel, who is the founder of Interfaith Youth Core, an organization that seeks to foster interfaith dialogue and good relationships among young people. He recognizes that religion is a central element in much of the conflict and hatred of recent years, and that young people are being actively recruited to continue down that road. Patel wants to help people stand on the other side of what he calls the “faith line.” In his view, the faith line does not separate Christians from Muslims, or pit any one religion against the other. Rather, people of any religion who seek to live together peacefully, with respect for each other’s dignity, are on one side of the faith line, while those of any religion who view their own religion in totalitarian terms are on the other side of the line. The shape of our future hinges on which side prevails.
Similar work is being done with a movement gathered around the “Charter for Compassion.” This Charter was developed by people of many faiths in response to the advocacy of religious historian Karen Armstrong. The third paragraph of the charter reads as follows:
“We therefore call upon all men and women to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion; to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate; to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures; to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity; to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.”
I’m not suggesting that we join up with this movement; I believe that we are, because of our faithfulness to the way of Jesus Christ, already a part of it.
On Christmas, my wife, Betsy, gave me a book written by Eboo Patel, who is the founder of Interfaith Youth Core, an organization that seeks to foster interfaith dialogue and good relationships among young people. He recognizes that religion is a central element in much of the conflict and hatred of recent years, and that young people are being actively recruited to continue down that road. Patel wants to help people stand on the other side of what he calls the “faith line.” In his view, the faith line does not separate Christians from Muslims, or pit any one religion against the other. Rather, people of any religion who seek to live together peacefully, with respect for each other’s dignity, are on one side of the faith line, while those of any religion who view their own religion in totalitarian terms are on the other side of the line. The shape of our future hinges on which side prevails.
Similar work is being done with a movement gathered around the “Charter for Compassion.” This Charter was developed by people of many faiths in response to the advocacy of religious historian Karen Armstrong. The third paragraph of the charter reads as follows:
“We therefore call upon all men and women to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion; to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate; to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures; to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity; to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.”
I’m not suggesting that we join up with this movement; I believe that we are, because of our faithfulness to the way of Jesus Christ, already a part of it.
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