The Paradox of Giving Thanks

For Thanksgiving, the sermon I preached this past Sunday evening at a Tallmadge ecumenical Thanksgiving service.

Scripture Reading - Deuteronomy 8:7-18

⁷For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, ⁸a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, ⁹a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper. ¹⁰You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you. ¹¹ Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today. ¹²When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, ¹³and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, ¹⁴then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, ¹⁵who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid waste-land with poisonous- snakes and scorpions. He made water flow for you from flint rock, ¹⁶and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good. ¹⁷Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.’  (NRSV)

Sermon

Oscar Wilde wrote that there are two tragedies in life.

            The first is not getting what you want.

            The second is getting it.

Getting what we want can be a tragedy.  God was bringing the Hebrew people into the promised land that would be their home, out of slavery in Egypt, and out of the hardship of the forty year wilderness journey.  At this defining moment, God gives them a message for them to remember in the years to follow.  There will come a time when life will be wonderful, when all good gifts will be full and abundant.  They will have all you want of grains and fruit, streams and wells for fresh water, shelter and security in a land of plenty.  And when that happens, they start to think that they did it all for themselves and it is no big deal.

When God freed them from slavery, and when they depended on God for water and manna to eat in the wilderness, they were as close to God as an infant to a mother, knowingly dependent and thankful for God’s constant care.  But when the days of crisis end, their dependence on God becomes more subtle, less obvious and desperate.  When that happens, it is harder to remember that these gifts are given by God.  The paradox of thanksgiving is that sometimes the more we have to be thankful for, the less thankful we are.  “Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God” the scripture says, to them and to us.

Reading tough parts of the Bible

The Bible can be a hard read.  Take Exodus, the great story of God freeing the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, with Moses in the lead, who went before Pharaoh and said “let my people go!”  Great story, right?

I was talking recently with a bring high school student in our church who had been reading Exodus, and got into an interesting discussion about some of the difficult parts of the account.  Specifically, why did God harden the Pharaoh’s heart over and over again.  Every time Pharaoh seemed about ready to let the Hebrews go, the scripture says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and Pharaoh did not let them go.  The thing that happens each time is that Moses has to go back again and say “let my people go!”  Then the really bad thing that happens each time is that God sends another plague to convince Pharaoh to listen to Moses.  There are locusts, frogs, the Nile river turns to blood, and at the very end, every first born animal and child of Egypt dies.

Why did God harden Pharaoh’s heart?

Why did God keep coming back for more?

These are important questions, and they are not easy.  The picture of God trying to increase the conflict is directly at odds with the revelation of God in Jesus, who endured violence rather than inflict it.  In a problem like this, I believe that we need to interpret one part of scripture in light of the other, and I’m always going to start with the character of Jesus.  Jesus shows us that God is not violent.   This is not to say that we should ignore Exodus.  Instead, we should trust God’s Spirit to be present as we interpret Exodus in light of God’s character.  Maybe Exodus is a story about how any change for good is a process, not easily obtained.  Maybe the ancient Jews couldn’t imagine the thought that Pharaoh could have denied God over and over again, and it was easier for them to assume that God had chosen to harden Pharaoh’s heart, even if it made God seem vindictive.  Maybe the Hebrew people started out understanding God as only caring about them, and grew to understand that God cares for all nations, with the help of prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Jonah.

Or, you could say that Exodus paints the truer picture of God, and Jesus is the exception.  It would certainly make it easier to be mean to your enemies.

Sermon - The Sound of God's Trumpet

Sermon preached on October 30 2011 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio UCC

A Broken Thumb

At the end of September, I broke a bone at the end of my right thumb, right under my thumbnail.

To answer the most common immediate questions:

1.  I broke it playing basketball.

2.  Yes, it is my writing hand.

3.  It was surgically reset, but the pin will come out in early November.

OK, so that’s out of the way.

I am amazed at how often we use our thumbs.  I’m wearing a splint while the bone heals, which leaves my four fingers free, but for most things, what you really need is the thumb: buttoning my shirtsleeve, opening a jar, brushing my teeth, writing and typing, holding a glass of water, playing guitar....  You get the picture.  All of this can be frustrating, as I'm sure you can imagine.  But that’s not the only thing that I feel.

I feel very blessed, and this injury has caused me to recognize and be thankful for things that I could easily take for granted.

I am blessed by the loving care and support of my wife, Betsy.

I am blessed by the great medical care that I have access to, and for my medical insurance.

I am blessed to be able to continue my work fairly easily, and to have an employer (my church) who is understanding and flexible.

I am blessed that my injury is not serious or permanent.  I  have to temporarily relearn how to do things, but others have to adapt for the rest of their lives.

There is a tradition within Christian practice of discovering blessings in the midst of suffering.  Sometimes, it is in the midst of difficulty that we become more aware of God's blessings.  We learn to accept the help of others and give up the illusion of self-reliance.  And we increase our compassion for the burdens carried by others.  I don't believe - I DO NOT believe - that God causes suffering in order to impart these lessons.  God had nothing to do with my broken bone, or with any of the more seriously injured who received medical attention that day.  I don't believe that God inflicts harm in order to open our eyes, but I do believe that God is involved in the opening of our eyes.

Sermon - In The Vineyard

Sermon preached on September 18 2011 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.

R.E.M.

(Reprinted from the church newsletter of First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC)

The band R.E.M. officially retired this month, after 15 albums and thousands of concerts over more than thirty years.  They started as a group of friends from Athens, Georgia, became a favorite of the college scene, and then became nationally prominent in the 1990’s with songs like “The One I Love,” “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” and “Losing My Religion” before fading from their peak of success during the past decade.

I’ve been a fan since I first heard them in the early 90’s and have seen them live three times.  Betsy and I last saw them in concert at Blossom about seven years ago.  I used to play their songs in a band with my friends, and I still listen to them when I’m working out.  I imagine that there are many other R.E.M. fans in this church, while many of you have no idea what I’m talking about.

I want to pay tribute, because here is a rock band who managed a long career of touring and writing music without scandal, without succumbing to the excesses of rock and roll temptation, and without wanting to kill each other.  They’re still friends.  They showed that you can be mature and kind, and also have a great time and be just crazy enough. 

They showed that you can write a thoughtful, hit song about how people struggle with religion and spirituality.  Hit songs don’t have to be shallow, and losing your religion doesn’t have to mean becoming a shallow person.  I’ve always thought that the alternative to bad religion is good religion.

Many people lose the religion of their earlier lives, because it was scary, judgmental, exclusive, or incomprehensible.  Sometimes religion is harmful, and sometimes it seems so harmless and facile that you wonder what’s the point?  All of these are distortions of the holy religion that binds us together with God and with one another.  I don’t know what the members of R.E.M. call their religion, but I’m thankful that they shared their struggles with honesty and integrity.

R.E.M., Thanks for the music, and may your retirement be blessed.

Honor Your Parents

Honor your father and your mother.  This is one of the commandments given by God to the Hebrew nation when they escaped slavery and were faced with the challenge of governing themselves.  The commandments they received were the basis of their society, because any society needs laws, rules, and norms to live by.  In the middle of our American culture of individualism, I think that we often mistakenly think of the ten commandments as commands directed at individuals.

“Honor your father and your mother” means more than the duty of each person to his or her parents.  It means that we are all responsible to honor the generation that has gone before us.  It is a collective responsibility, and it promotes the well-being of us all.  On the personal level, it means that I show love and support for my parents, and treat them with dignity.  On the collective level, it means that I gladly pay my social security and medicare taxes, for the support of many people I don’t know, people who may or may not have children who are able to support them.  Social Security and Medicare are, of course, governmental programs that are not exclusively religiously based.  They are programs that stabilize the national economy in addition to meeting individual needs.  But, from my perspective, they are also ways in which I fulfill God’s commandment to honor our fathers and mothers.

God’s work in Jesus Christ is to reconcile the world to God (see Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 5:19).  Christ did not come for individuals, but for everyone.  And so we gather for worship on Sunday mornings in community, seeking to follow Christ together.

Biblical Reinterpretation

When Jesus taught his disciples about the Hebrew scriptures, he said that he had come to fulfill the law. And yet, he was often accused of breaking God’s law, as when he healed on the Sabbath, or allowed his disciples to harvest grain on the Sabbath because they were hungry. Both healing and picking grain were considered work, and the Sabbath is for rest, according to how the law was interpreted at that time. Jesus gave a different interpretation: that the Sabbath was made for people, and not people for the Sabbath. He emphasized different parts of the scripture in order to fit his time and place.

In his book Way of Blessing, Way of Life, theologian Clark M Williamson describes the Jewish tradition of halakha, which is “a process of interpreting and reinterpreting the law. Over time, old laws become irrelevant or fail to respond adequately to the voice of the vulnerable other in a new and different context. So each generation reinterprets its obligations. Halakha explicitly recognizes that God who gives the law also transcends it, and that no law is ever final. It is not fundamentalist with regard to the law.”

This is an important reminder to us of our heritage from the Jewish tradition and from the example of Christ. God’s law is made for human righteousness, and especially to protect the vulnerable. When God’s law becomes a barrier to wholeness, or when it is used as a club to hammer any group of people, then it is time for a faithful reinterpretation.

Sometimes we worry that we shouldn’t be in the business interpretation. We think that we ought to respect the words as they are written, and that any human interpretation is putting our thoughts above God’s. In fact, human interpretation has always been a part of God’s method of revelation. There is no such thing as a reading that is free of interpretation. Let us continue to interpret carefully, boldly, and faithfully.

Sorry for the delay

I apologize to regular readers of this blog (if there are any, or ever were) for the lengthy hiatus. I knew that I was behind, but didn't realize just how far. I've just put up the working text of two sermons from this summer. Audio files of almost all sermons from First Congregational Church of Tallmadge can be found on the website.

Peace, Matt

Sermon - On The Inside

Preached on July 10, 2011 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.

Biblical text: Romans 8:1-11

I grew up watching Mr. Rogers on television. Mr. Rogers was trained as a minister, but he decided instead to learn about child development and to host a television show. I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was that every afternoon, Mr. Rogers called me his neighbor, and he said “I like you, just the way you are.”

A journalist was interviewing Mr. Rogers some years ago, and as they walked together on a city street, they saw a young boy of about six or seven, out with his mother, brandishing a long toy sword. Mr. Rogers said to the journalist, “often when children carry weapons, it’s because they don’t feel strong on the inside.”

Paul was writing a letter to the Romans, and I think that if he had known that people would read his letter for centuries all over the world, he would have been a little less honest, and a lot more protective about the things he chose to share. Or maybe not. Either way, Paul isn’t carrying any swords. He opens up and lets it all out there. Paul is telling his secrets.

Writing to the church in Rome, he admits to them that even though he wants to be a person of righteousness, a person of integrity, compassion, generosity, a person who fulfills his potential and measures up for God, in fact he makes a mess of it. He can’t live it. Not because he doesn’t want to, and not because he doesn’t know what that life would look like. He just can’t. He tells them:

“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.”
(Romans 7:15, 18b-19a?)

Those lines come just before the part that we heard today, and he’s probably still thinking about himself when he talks about what it’s like to live in the flesh. Now, the flesh is a concept of Paul’s that needs some defining. What he means is the part of being human that gets lost even when we’re sure we know the way. He means the part of being human that breaks something by accident and then just walks away if no one was looking. It means the part of being human that is so broken, we don’t do what we want and we do what we don’t want. That’s the flesh, for Paul, so then he says:

“Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires…the mind governed by the flesh is death.”

To live in the flesh is to live only by what you can do on your own, and no matter who it is, Paul knows that to live on your own is a losing race. He can’t do it on his own. His own failings get in the way.

Paul tells his secrets in this letter, but I wonder if Paul is also telling our secrets.

How many times do we fail to live as we would want to, and the next week, or the next day, or even in the next moment we wonder “why did I do that?”

Someone’s cell phone rings, and the name on the screen is that of an old friend, a friend whose elderly parents have recently died, and who probably spent the day cleaning out their home. So why doesn’t this person answer the phone. Not wanting the friend’s pain as an interruption, the call goes to voicemail. Why did I do that?

A mother wonders why she screamed at her children in the parking lot after the baseball game? They were tired and she was tired, and they were late for dinner at grandma’s, and the kids just couldn’t pay attention.

A man asks himself, after a couple at church has asked if he would help them to prepare dinner for the homeless families staying at our church, why did he say “next time” when in fact that is the answer I’ve given every time.

It isn’t that we don’t want to be people of goodness and compassion, and it isn’t because we don’t know what that looks like, Paul says. It is something inside us that turns us the other way. We can see the person we want to be, and we can even pretend that we are that person, but the secret we hold inside is that we are not. We do not measure up.

When Mr. Rogers was describing that young boy with the sword, he could have been talking about any of us. We don’t feel strong on the inside, but instead of carrying swords, we put on a good show of having things together. We create an identity that is successful, and happy, and most of all, lovable. And we really do love that image that we carry around. But inside, we’re not so strong. Inside, we’re not so lovable, because we know the things that we’ve done and the things we have failed to do. But that’s not the face we show. In public, we carry the sword.

Thankfully, God has never been one to just sit back and wait for us to get it right. We do not worship a God who is keeping track of good deeds and bad deeds and assigning our names to one list or the other. We worship a God who is with us, whose Spirit lives within us. We are not on our own. At the center of our lives is not the secret of our failings. At the center of each of us is God.

Paul writes about the frustration of failure and the sickness we feel about our shortcomings. I know how it feels, he says. I can’t do it either. No one can. But you are not alone. You are not alone, because the Spirit of God dwells in you. Deep inside of you, at the centermost place, is the Spirit of God.

Listen to his words again:
“Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free.
…You are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, since indeed the Spirit of God lives in you.
…And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.”

We talk about God out there, but Paul talks about God in here. The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus Christ, also dwells in you, and who knows what new life will rise within you? Yes, you’re still you, you still have a mixed up human life that fails you, but you aren’t living in your failings, you’re living in God’s Spirit. There is something more within you, and the something more in you, the something more that does more than you can do alone is God, a spiritual presence working in you and with you to live more fully than you even think is possible.

In Christ, God has dealt with our failings, and they no longer keep us from God. God loves us in the midst of our broken promises and broken dreams. God loves us when we are unlovable. And God’s love actually frees us from the power that our failings have over us.

God frees us from a law we had to live up to, and the result of this freedom is that we can finally fulfill the law through the power of Christ dwelling inside. We finally do that which we want to do, not by redoubling our efforts, not by telling ourselves sternly that next time will be different, but by the outpouring of God’s spirit, the way a that a dry river bed, when the snows in the mountains melt and the spring rains fall, fills with water that splashes onto the riverbanks. It isn’t our own resources, but God’s. God sees that we are just tripping all over ourselves trying to earn God’s love, and God comes in and loves us preemptively. God dwells within us, and God’s spirit wells up from within us to fulfill all that we were meant to be.

By God’s resources, we answer the phone to share the burdens of a friend; we find reserves of patience when we are tired, and we throw our hands into service even when it makes us uncomfortable.

I think of mission trips that I have taken to meet our brothers and sisters and to be of service to them. A cluster of comfortable, middle class people like me show up at their homes, and the first thing we see is the rusting laundry machine in the yard where the children play, the soaked and decomposing sofa cushions strewn on the dirt lawn, the car battery, leaking acid, and the smell of rotten food. We show up and take in the sights and sounds, and some of the kids, and especially some of the adults have an involuntary physical aversion. They have come here to love and serve with these neighbors in Christ, but how can they do that if they feel too ill to stay more than five minutes? But there is something else within them. The desire to turn away passes, and they do love their neighbors, they embrace their neighbors, and later in the week, looking back on that first day, they say that it was the love of God inside of them.

“I would never have done that on my own, but something inside me kept me going.” That something inside is the Spirit of God, doing more in you, and more in all of us, than we could ever do ourselves.

The mother of the boy with the sword recognized Mr. Rogers. “Look, son, it’s Mr. Rogers.” And the boy slips slightly behind his mother’s legs. Mr. Rogers kneels down at the boy’s level, leans in and whispers in the boy’s ear.

Walking away, the journalist asks him. What did you whisper back there? What did you say to that boy with the sword?
What he whispered was this “you are strong on the inside.”

Hear the words of Paul, writing with such honesty, because these are words about you. Paul kneels down beside you, with your sword in your hand, and he whispers in your ear: “On the inside, in the centermost place. That’s where God lives. The Spirit of God lives in you, is a part of you, makes you who you truly are. Put away your swords. You are strong, on the inside."

- The article about Mr. Rogers is "Can You Say...'Hero'?" by Tom Junod, first published in Esquire, and collected in The Best Spiritual Writing 1999, edited by Philip Zaleski.

Sermon - Now What?

Preached on June 5, 2011 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.

Biblical texts: 1 Peter 4:12-14 and Acts 1:6-14

Forty days after the resurrection, Jesus ascended into heaven. That’s what the author of Luke and Acts tells us. Just as the prophet Elijah had ascended directly to heaven long ago, without dying, so Jesus ascends. He goes up, which is where the people of the first century understood heaven to be. As mysterious as Jesus ascending to heaven is, the really interesting part of the story is to focus on the disciples who stand there watching him. For about three years, following Jesus had been their life and their identity. Where he decided to go, they went, when he taught, they listened; what he did, they remembered. So there is this amazing moment right after Jesus has ascended when the disciples are still standing there, all looking up into the sky. And the question on everybody’s minds is this. Now what?

On the day when something that has shaped your life comes to an end, somewhere deep inside you ask this question.
On the day your youngest child begins school and the days are wide open…Now what?
Or, later, the day your last child leaves the home…Now what?
On the day you retire…Now what?
On the day after the funeral for your spouse funeral…Now what?
And, as we are reminded today: On the day of your graduation…Now what?

The disciples stood looking up in the air. Their rabbi was gone, and they asked the question. Read just a bit further in Acts, and these disciples find their answer. They couldn’t physically walk beside Jesus, but they would still walk like Jesus. The answer they found was to live the way Jesus lived. They committed themselves to the practice of Jesus-living: Compassionate, welcoming, strong in the face of injustice and cruelty, joyful and sacrificially loving. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? But they also know that living like Jesus means suffering like Jesus. Peter says that suffering is not an anomaly; it is the expectation. “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you.” We get the idea that suffering is what God is supposed to save us from, but Peter says that suffering is what we should expect.

Now, historically, at the time that Peter writes, part of Christian suffering was from direct persecution, and we can be thankful that our lives are not in danger simply for bearing the Christian name. But beyond persecution, Christians suffered because they lived like Jesus lived, and Jesus suffered because he was willing to sacrifice his own well-being for the well-being of someone else. They did the same. If someone was hungry, they shared from their own plates. If someone needed clothing, they emptied their own closets. If others were being hurt or cast aside, they went to stand with those people and accept the same abuse. If their neighbors were sick, they would put aside their own schedules and make the journey to visit them and give them care, and they did the same for their neighbors in prison.

Day after day, they did these things, and every act of care, every act of standing up for justice, every bit of goods given away, came at a cost to themselves. But this is was what Jesus had done. Never are we more like God than when we accept discomfort, tears, and hardship for the well-being of someone else.

Any parent knows about the personal cost of caring for children.
Anyone who arranges a days off to take aging parents to a doctor’s appointments;
anyone who takes food to a neighbor after a death in the family and sits with them in silence and shares their tears;
anyone who sticks up for a person who is picked on, only to find themselves ostracized from the group as well;
anyone who casts votes on election day in the interest of others;
anyone who travels a long way to visit a friend in the hospital, even if the long journey is just around the corner, knows about the personal cost of caring for others.

You know what it is to accept suffering for the well-being of someone else. And in many of those instances, you probably don’t even think of it as suffering. It’s just what you do. It’s the right thing to do. “They would do the same for me,” you probably say.

I suggest that the reason you do these things so often and hardly think of doing otherwise is because you are in a sacred covenant relationship. A covenant binds people together in a sacred relationship of shared joy and sorrow.

We live in covenant. At the beginning of a wedding, I stand before the bride and groom and ask if they are willing to enter into the covenant of marriage. When we come here on Sunday mornings and listen to the scriptures, they tell the story of God’s covenant with God’s people. God makes a commitment to us, and we commit ourselves to God and to each other. Covenant is a commitment to others, and it is what I see people doing all the time, whether they have heard the word covenant or not.

Next Sunday is Pentecost Sunday, and we plan to celebrate a Covenant Renewal in the worship service. We invite you to affirm your covenant with God, within this faith community. It’s not about who is a member of the church or not, it’s about all of us being in a sacred relationship, committed to one another in the spirit of God. Yes, our commitments will entail sacrifice and loss, it will mean that we give to others instead of spending on ourselves, it will mean that we turn over our “Me time,” our days off and evenings, to sing in the choir, to teach a youth Sunday School class, to maintain the church building, to go on service trips, to talk to someone after worship and really listen to them the way that maybe no one else quite listens to them all during the week.

Peter writes to the Christian church and tells them that their suffering is not strange, it’s to be expected, but he also tells them this. The source of your suffering is also the source of fulfillment and salvation. These covenantal relationships that cause us so much trouble and worry and heartache at times, and demand so much of us, are also the source of God’s greatest blessing and fulfillment of our lives. And that is why we often don’t notice the hardship so much.

So, to our high school graduates: I hope that as you seek to find your place in the world, that you will find happiness and success, but I also know that you not find these things by pursuing them just for yourselves. And so I must also hope that you will open your lives to the greater sacrifice that comes from living in covenant.

The minister Frederick Buechner, who is one of my favorite writers, talked about how we find our callings. He said that we should follow our passion and our delight, because it does no one much good to pursue a joyless life. But he also said that we will not find our true calling until we find the place where our greatest joy meets the world’s deep need.

May you find the place where your great joy meets the world’s deep need. May you find the place where you are needed by others, whether it be to represent a Congressional district of thousands, to lead a company of 300 workers, to teach a classroom of 20, to assist the six people each day who come to you for support, or to care intimately for just one person. Be needed by others.

Jesus said that we achieve greatness when we learn how to be of service to others. If you would be great, learn to serve. Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for your friends. When we follow his life, when we commit ourselves to Jesus-living, we will find that in the midst of all that we give up for others, God blesses us beyond anything we could ever hope or imagine.

It was the Indian poet Tagore who captured the truth of what it means to follow Jesus. He wrote “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”

Jesus showed us that the way to God is to accept whatever it costs to live in loving covenant with others. Surely, this was what echoed in the minds of the disciples as they stood looking up at the place where he had just left, as they stood their watching, with each mouth forming the silent question. Now what?

Sermon - Making It Right

Preached on February 20, 2011 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC as a part of a sermon series preached by senior minister, Dr. John Schluep.
Luke 19:1-10

Introduction
We are in the midst of a series of sermons in which we looking together at how the witness of the scriptures and of our own experiences might paint for us a picture of one way to view the church. In this painting, the church appears before our eyes as a healing center. For all of the wounds that we carry - wounds from things done to us, and things that we have done to others - the church is a place for healing: not a place to cover up the pain, or to distract us from the pain, but a place to heal, and sometimes that healing means that we have to go right through the pain which is at the center of the wound.

Dr. John has been describing this process, the process of cleansing the wound, being honest about our lives through confession, through forgiveness, both received forgiveness and forgiveness given to others, and the process of reconciliation. All of these are a part of healing from our wounds. Today, I want us to think about what God helps us to do to make it right again. I want us to consider this question: after the wounding, what kind of restitution can be made that will help us to heal?

Let us pray: O God of our wounded days and our healing days, we know that there is a time for tearing down and a time for building up, a time to sow and a time to reap. Give us the courage for this time, this day, this hour. Amen.

Zacchaeus is our story today, because Zacchaeus is someone who is wounded. He is wounded both by what has been done to him, and by what he has done to others.
What has been done to him is that he has been shunned by his community. No one likes him, no one acknowledges him, and they pick on the little guy, keeping him in the back of the crowd even though he’s shorter than anyone else and can’t see the famous rabbi who has come to town.

What he has done to them is to collect taxes for the empire. Israel was conquered by the Roman Empire, and now Zacchaeus is collecting the taxes that make Rome richer and Israel poorer. This is kind of like the Star Wars movies (If you will make that leap with me). In Star Wars, a strong empire, led by the emperor and Darth Vader, rules over all the planetary systems in the galaxy, does what it wants with them. And what Zacchaeus has done would be like if Luke Skywalker, instead of becoming a Jedi Knight, had taken a job with the empire and started showing up at all his neighbors’ houses with ten storm troopers behind him, shaking them down for taxes.

Or, if Star Wars isn’t your thing, it’s like Zacchaeus is with the mob, showing up at the neighborhood stores and saying “this is a nice place you got here. It would be a shame if anything happened to it. I bet it’s worth $500 a month to make sure you don’t have any accidents.” The Roman Empire is like having the mob for your government, and that’s only a partial historical exaggeration.

So, that’s what Zacchaeus has done, and maybe he deserves the scorn of all his neighbors. Or, maybe Zacchaeus thinks that they have pushed him around long enough, and he took this job so he could finally get some respect from them after years of being the little guy. And this is the problem with most of the wounds we carry. It’s not always easy to say who’s responsible. Who started it, me or you? Who started it, the person who hurt me, or the person who hurt them before and messed them up?

A few weeks ago, Dr. John preached on the importance of forgiveness in the process of healing, and he defined forgiveness as abandoning all hope of a better past. When we forgive, we accept the past as it is, for better or worse, and we let go of the past, we slip out of the grip that it has on us.

When Jesus comes to Jericho, where Zacchaeus and the community stand against each other, mutually wounded, Jesus doesn’t worry about the past. He doesn’t worry about who deserves blame. Instead, Jesus does a simple thing to restore Zacchaeus to the community. Jesus says that he himself, the famous rabbi that everyone has come out to see, will eat dinner with Zacchaeus.

Sometimes, something happens in our lives to remind us that we are connected to other people, and that they are connected to us. That’s what Jesus did back then, and it’s what God continues to do for us. Whatever wounds we have given each other, we are connected: you to them and them to you. And the next part of the process, the next part of healing from the wounds we carry, is to make things right. Restitution. Restoration of whatever was hurt, or stolen, or broken.

Zacchaeus says “I will give half my money to the poor, and for all the people I have defrauded, I will pay them back four times.” And four times, by the way, comes from the laws of the Old Testament. Zacchaeus wants to make things right. He wants to make restitution.

Now, as we consider restitution, we need to begin by getting rid of bad ideas. We need to say what restitution is not.

First. Restitution is not what we do to earn God’s forgiveness or grace. God does not wait for us to pay our penance, or fix what we’ve done, in order to forgive our sins. That’s not true. What is true is that we are loved, accepted, and forgiven just as we are. Zacchaeus doesn’t make restitution in order to earn the love of Jesus, he does it because it’s a part of his own healing, and the healing of the community.

Secondly, we need to dispel the idea that restitution can make things just the way they were. Restitution will not make things the way they were. There is almost nothing that can be fixed so well that it is like it never happened. Now, if you come to my office and borrow a book, and then your dog chews it up, and so you say “Matt, let me make that up to you” and buy a new copy, that’s like it never happened. But that is small potatoes.

What happens when you have lost or broken something that cannot be replaced? A fragile family heirloom, or a set of letters from the war?

You can’t un-ring a bell. You can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube. You can’t unsay what you have said.

What happens when the damage is intangible, when you have lied to a co-worker, friend, or spouse?
What if there has been abuse in the home?
What if violence has been committed?
What if we have waged war, and the damage is permanent?

So, OK, Zacchaeus can give back four times to the people he has cheated, but what if he has been cheating them for years? What if they have lost their house along the way? What if they lost their jobs and health insurance, and now they walk with a permanent limp because an injury went untreated? Getting their money back now won’t fix those things.

The point of restitution can’t be to make things just the way they used to be. The past is the past, and we need forgiveness. But the past does not have to define us. Our old wounds do not have to define us. And that is why we make restitution. That is why Zacchaeus makes restitution. It’s a way of setting a new course.

I think of Clint Eastwood in the movie Million Dollar Baby, about a stubborn old boxing trainer named Frankie Dunn. No one plays stubborn and hard-edged like Clint Eastwood. In the movie, we learn that Frankie is estranged from his daughter. We don’t know what has happened, but the wounds run deep, and even though he reaches out to her, he can’t make it right. He writes her letters, and they are all returned unopened.

One day, a young woman named Maggie comes to the gym, determined to be a professional boxer. Frankie says “I don’t train girls.” But Maggie keeps coming, and eventually he relents, and then, slowly, he comes to care for her. He gives her the support that she doesn’t get from her family. He gives up much of what he has and who he is for her sake. Just before one of Maggie’s fights, he presents to her a new robe for her to wear for her entrance to the ring. On the back it says Mo Cuishle. Mo Chuishle is a Gaelic phrase that means “my darling, my blood.”

He becomes a father to a woman who needs a father. Restitution. It can come in different forms, and along strange avenues. And just because we cannot undo what has been done, we can work toward restoration in this world. We can work to balance the scales. And in that work, we find healing.

In this congregation’s work with veterans, some of those who have been in war seek to make restitution as a part of their healing. If war has made orphans of children, then let us provide for the care of children in that country: schools and orphanages. Restitution.

If we have been hurt and wounded by others, then let us allow the wounding to stop with us. Instead of retaliation, let us choose restoration. Is there any more holy work, than to make right this broken world, in whatever way we can. Never are we closer to God. And here’s the amazing truth. When we work to restore things out in the world, we find healing in ourselves. And then, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, “your light will break forth like the dawn. You will be called repairer of the breach, and restorer of streets to live in.”

Sermon - Made in Heaven

Preached on January 16, 2011 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC.
Genesis 1:1-5 and John 1:1-5

When you think about the world, taking everything into account, do you think that the world is basically a good place or a bad place? Is this basically a sacred world into which terrible things intrude, or is the world basically a broken and evil place in which moments of goodness are the exception?

Maybe you remember the joke that Woody Allen tells at the beginning of the movie Annie Hall. "Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says 'Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.' The other one says 'Yeah, I know. And such small portions.'" Allen’s character goes on to say “that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.”

We all know that life in this world is a mix of both goodness and evil, both joy and suffering. But which is the starting place? Deep down, is the world a sacred and holy place, or not? How you come down on that question makes a real difference, I think, because if you believe that the world is basically a broken and evil place (and I know that you can make a strong argument for that) then the sensible response is to escape the world, to find a safe place and hunker down. If you have this view, then you might see the sanctuary as a haven of sacredness, a place to find rest from the hardship and pain of the world, a place to be close to the God who is absent from the world outside.

But, on the other hand, if you believe that the world is basically a good and sacred place, then you come to church in order to celebrate the sacredness that surrounds you all the time. You come to thank God for being present to us everywhere. And if the week has been a hard one, then you come to remember the deep down goodness and gift of life.

The witness of the scriptures affirms this second view. Today we heard the opening words of Genesis, which proclaims that the world comes from God from the very beginning. I don’t believe that Genesis is a scientific story that explains how life arose on this planet; it is a theological story that proclaims God’s work in all the universe, and tells us that this world is shot through with the goodness of God from the very first word: let there be light.

And then there’s the gospel of John. These opening words from John’s gospel are interesting, because we find them to be beautiful and much loved, we also find them difficult to understand. They fall on our ears like poetry, and like poetry, they contain layers of meaning. The gospel begins with those words from Genesis: “In the beginning.” He’s quoting Genesis, so we know that this is going to be a universal kind of proclamation about what the world is and where it came from.

“In the beginning was the Word.” Now, in the original Greek language of the New Testament, it says “In the beginning was the Logos.” Logos is a Greek word that has a great depth of meaning. It means wisdom and intelligence, the unifying order of reason and creativity. Logos is a creative power. So in the beginning was this creative power.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” You probably already know that in just a few verses, the gospel is going to tell us that this Word becomes flesh in the life of Jesus, and that’s why there’s this confusing language about how the Word is both with God and is God. That’s how we understand Jesus. Jesus is with God, and Jesus is God.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” In other words, the world is God’s creation, all of it made by Christ, and it is good.

And now listen to the next sentence, and how it makes room for the mixed experience of life. “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

So, where did the darkness come from? The gospel doesn’t say. It says that the Word, which is life and light, created everything we know. So you would think that everything in the universe would be light and life, wouldn’t you? That would be the logical conclusion. But that would be false. We know that there is darkness, which is to say brokenness, suffering, ignorance, and evil. Wherever it came from, it is here. But the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. In just a few lines, the gospel describes our life as a mix of sacredness and brokenness, light and dark, but it proclaims that the goodness of God is at the center.

We come to worship in order to celebrate the sacredness of the world. That’s not to say that we never need the church to be a safe haven of escape. I know that some of you came to church last Sunday, and again this Sunday, with a great burden of grief for the victims of the shooting in Arizona. And there are some among us every Sunday who come with the specific burdens of their lives: grief, loneliness, anger. Sometimes we come to the sanctuary with our burdens, needing a place to be at rest and at peace, and that is what this place should be. But there is a problem with viewing the church only as a place for escaping the difficulties of life, and that is when we turn faith into just one more means of escape, alongside other ways of escaping the pain of life, from mindless entertainment to food, to cynicism, to alcohol and drug abuse. The danger is that church could become a way of shutting ourselves off from the presence of God in all of the world, when church should be the place that reaches out beyond these walls.

Some of you have told me that this is a place that helps you to see life with the right kind of eyes, to see the world as God’s gift to us, even with its hardships. In those weeks when it seems like all of your best efforts achieve nothing, worship reminds you that your work is a holy calling. When the people closest to you are driving you crazy, worship reminds you that these are sacred bonds of family and friendship. When the news is full of senseless heartache, worship reminds you that there is an ultimate order to our lives, watched over by God. Sometimes we lose our sight, and we turn to Jesus to restore our vision.

Some of my favorite stories speak of the same truth. I think George Bailey in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. We’re past Christmas now, so you won’t see it on tv for awhile. But I’m sure many of you remember the story of George, frustrated by his limited opportunities in Bedford Falls, and hounded by Mr. Potter. On Christmas Eve, a business mistake becomes a crisis and threatens to send him to jail. In his panic, he loses sight of the goodness that is all around him, until an angel shows him what the world would look like if he had never been born. Do you remember how this vision changes George, and how he celebrates his life, even when he still thinks he’s losing his business and going to jail? He runs through the streets yelling Merry Christmas to everyone, even old man Potter, and then he goes home and grabs his children close, and he is ready to turn himself over for arrest with a smile on his face, until his wife comes home, followed by all of the love and support of the whole town. The world is a sacred place.

I know many of you have also been surprised by the amount of care and support that surrounds you when your own life was in crisis. It was always there; you simply hadn’t seen it.

I was a junior in High School when we were assigned to read the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder. I went back to it this week, and read that scene at the end, in which we meet the townspeople who have died, and they are talking, and Emily, who is the most recently deceased, asks them if she can go back and relive a day from her life. Yes, you can, they tell her, but be careful, because it is so good, so wonderful, that it can be difficult.

Emily chooses her twelfth birthday. The first thing she hears is her mother calling up from the kitchen for the children to wake up for school. She hears her mother’s voice, telling her where to find her hair ribbon, chiding her to hurry, and all she can think is how beautiful is her mother’s voice, and how young she looks, and how sacred was every single day. “Oh earth,” she says “you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?”

That is a holy way of seeing, and of celebrating our lives and this sacred world! And God knows I need God to help me with those kinds of eyes, to see not just the church as sacred, but also the sunshine and the snow, the mountains and valleys, to see every regular family task as a fortunate moment to cherish each other, to see holiness in the faces of neighbors in these pews, and strangers I pass on the street. It was Gandhi who said that “If you don't find God in the next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him further.”

Have you ever seen an old photograph and been amazed at how lucky you were back then to be at that age, and to be in that particular place, and to be with those people. You’ve felt that, haven’t you? Remember that we will feel that way later when we look back on this day. What a gift it is to be alive on this day.

This is a sacred world. And yes, there is also evil and pain and brokenness, but healing from those things does not come from hiding out in the sanctuary. Healing comes when we find the strength from God to invest ourselves in the sacredness of the whole world; to see the world as it truly is and to give ourselves to it.

When Christ came into this world, when Christ became flesh and dwelt among us, he was not coming as a stranger from heaven to earth, he was coming home, to a home that he had made himself. He did not come to save us from the world. He came to save us for the world. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it!