Preached on Easter Sunday, April 4, 2010 at the historic First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC.
John 20:1-18
Dedicated to the Euclid Congregational United Church of Christ; and always to the glory of God.
When Mary began her day on that first Easter Sunday, she knew exactly what to expect. When she prepared for her visit to the tomb where the body of Jesus had been laid on Friday, she had a good idea of what it would be like. It had been a week of dashed hopes and unexpected turns, but all that was over now. She would go to the place where his body lay to remember, to honor his life, and to mourn his death. It was a ritual of grief and love that brought her to the tomb.
In the same way, we all knew exactly what to expect of this morning when we awoke. You guessed the songs we might sing, you remembered feel of the early morning air, and you knew for sure the story that we would tell. Whatever the turmoil of this past year, whatever unexpected turns we took in our lives, or saw in the world, on Easter morning we know what to expect. And, like Mary, our worship is a ritual of love.
When Mary arrives at the tomb and finds the stone rolled away, her mind grasps the only logical, rational conclusion. Someone has taken the body. She rushes to find Peter and John and tells them so. Then they all rush back to the tomb. Peter and John have a look and then return home, partly understanding and partly not. Then Mary finally looks in the tomb and we are told she sees two angels there. But her mind has no room for angels (how could it?) and so she asks them if they know who has taken the body. Finally, she turns around and runs right into Jesus. Only her mind, so filled with what it expects to see that it cannot see what she does not expect, does not recognize him. She guesses him to be the gardener, and asks him where the body of Jesus has been taken.
We began this day like Mary, knowing just what to expect on Easter Sunday. But quickly we find that our lives no longer match up. Mary’s expectations are shattered. It takes a few surprises to finally break through her expectations, but finally she can see what has happened.
There are two possibilities to explain why our morning is different from Mary’s: that is, why we have not encountered the unexpected. On one hand, we are not surprised because we live on this side of Easter. Mary couldn’t have known what to expect, but we do. The resurrection that surprised Mary no longer surprises us. On the other hand, can we really believe that God is done with surprises? Isn’t it possible that our expectations about today and every day make us just as blind to what God is doing as Mary’s expectations made her blind to Jesus standing in front of her? Might Jesus be present in our lives, mistaken by us for just an ordinary part of our experience? Maybe we have seen grace and called it luck. Maybe we have seen beauty and been unimpressed. Maybe we have seen people whose lives have been radically changed and thought they seemed phony. Maybe we are sometimes just as unseeing as Mary was, set in our expectations.
What if you had come to the church this morning and found it empty? Would you check your watch? Would you think about when the time change was? Would you wonder if the service had been moved to another location? Would you, perhaps, call someone and ask where the service had been moved? And how would the story continue from there? How might you meet the living presence of Christ in a way that undoes all of your expectations?
When Mary realizes that it is Jesus, she calls him Rabbouni, which means teacher, and was what his followers had called him for years. And then Jesus says something strange: “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” It’s a strange thing to say because it doesn’t seem like Mary is holding on to him. In her book Bread of Angels, Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor suggests that while Mary isn’t holding on to him physically, she is holding on to him in a different way. Rabbouni is what they used to call him. It’s his Friday name, but this is Sunday. It’s as if Mary is trying to hold on to the old Jesus, wanting to go back to the way things were before he was arrested and killed. Jesus explains that he is not coming back to her and the disciples like before. He is going to God. Jesus is going to God, and he is taking the whole world with him.
We have a tendency to want to hold on to Jesus right here with us. We’d rather keep him here, in the midst of our lives as we know them, where we feel comfortable. But that’s not the life of faith. We don’t hold on to God; God holds on to us, and takes us to the other side of the cross and out of the tomb.
Too many times, people have been taught that Jesus died as a substitution for us. Jesus died to pay a penalty on our behalf; he substituted his life for our lives. But that doesn’t cut it. Jesus died for us, yes, but not as a substitute. He died and rose as a representative. Jesus, who showed us who God is also showed us what humans can be. He showed us how we can commit our lives for the sake of love, conquering every fear, and conquering even death itself. He rose from the grave and comes to hold on to us, taking us to God.
It is as if when Christ died and was raised to life, that he showed us an open door that we may all pass through. He opened a door in the barricade of all that leads to death: violence and hatred, fear and selfishness, prejudice and everything else that has ever kept us from true life. Christ opened a door to the other side of all of that, and now he holds on to us, to take us with him. Take up your cross and follow me, he said.
In Christ, we die to everything in the world that holds us apart from God, and we die to everything inside of us that holds us apart from God. And because of Easter, we know that those powers are not nearly as strong as the power of God to give us new life. When we see Jesus on Easter morning, we discover not just something new about God. On Easter, we discover who we truly are.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Sermon - No Chance of Silence
Preached on Palm Sunday, March 28, 2010 at First Congreagational Church of Tallmadge, UCC.
Audio of the sermon is available here
Luke 19:28-48
Dedicated to the Confirmation I Class; and always to the glory of God.
As the crowds of pilgrims made their way to Jerusalem from every direction for the Passover festival, imagine the voices of the disciples rising above the noise, shouting and singing “blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” The gospel according to Luke recounts this day and tells us that they shouted for him these words of the psalms because of “all the deeds of power that they had seen.” Think of what they had seen in their time with Jesus. Here was a king they could get behind, one who was bringing about the kingdom of God, in which people received healing and mercy regardless of their wealth or purity or social status. Everyone was welcome by this king, and so they sang for him on the way to Jerusalem, and today we join in singing for him too. We also sing for the king who brings in God’s kingdom, who teaches that the grace of God meets us wherever we are and gives us new life. What a joyous day is this Palm Sunday! Who cares about the warning?
The warning is that we had better not get too carried away in our faith in Jesus, because it will cost too much. In fact, we had better just keep quiet about it all. The warning comes from some concerned Pharisees, who tell Jesus to make his disciples stop with the singing and shouting. Earlier in the gospel of Luke, when Jesus was up north in Galilee, some Pharisees had warned him there that the local Roman governor was looking to kill him. Now they are warning him again, because they know full well that you can’t ride into town with people singing “blessed is the king.” Jerusalem only recognizes the rule of Caesar, the Roman emperor, and his local stand-in Pontius Pilate. They’re in charge, and those who challenge them are not long for this world. Jesus himself had recently heard the reports of the men who had been killed by Pilate’s order in the Temple court. Pilate is a cruel and unjust ruler, but what can be done but to submit? It’s better to accept the way things are than to allow our faith to get us into trouble. “So, Jesus, if we could just get the disciples to stop.”
That warning has been repeated again and again to the followers of Christ. In the first centuries, people were warned not to admit being Christian during the Roman persecutions, because it might get you killed. You and I don’t have to worry about that anymore. In 16th century, people were warned not to own a Bible in translation, or worship in a Protestant community, because those might get you killed, and we don’t have to fear that either. In the middle of this last century, people were warned not to allow their faith to get them involved in demonstrations against the evils of segregation, because it only caused trouble and invited violence or prison. A group of white ministers asked Martin Luther King, Jr. to make them stop and be quiet, but he wrote them a letter from a Birmingham jail and told them why they could not be silent. We don’t have to worry about that danger either. But we might be warned in other ways not to go overboard with this whole business of following Christ. Some of those things he said, for instance, might really get in the way of life as we know it: his teachings about loving our enemies, and overcoming them with generosity, or turning the other cheek, carrying someone’s load the extra mile, being willing to drop our fishing nets, give away all that we have, pick up our cross, and follow him. These words are as clear as they are troubling. As someone once said, “it’s not the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that bother me. It’s the parts I do understand.” We had better stop our celebration before it costs us something we don’t want to give.
Which is what the Pharisees are recommending. But Jesus tells them that if the disciples were silent, the very stones would cry out. In other words, there is no chance of silence. The disciples might stop singing about a new king and a new kingdom, but what about those stones in the Temple court that are stained with blood? Will they keep silent about the need for the kingdom of God and the peace that it brings? And what about the stones of other cities, bearing witness to war and oppression, torture and apartheid? You can’t pretend that everything is all right in Jerusalem when the stones have blood on them. And that’s why Jesus has come, to proclaim a different kingdom in which the rich and the poor, the healthy and the sick alike are invited to share in the riches of God’s world, where curing the sick is more urgent than religious ceremony, and feeding the poor is more important than our own wants. He has come as a different kind of king, to confront all that is not right in the name of love. And it will cost him, and it will cost those who follow him, but you can’t sit by when the stones cry out. There are some things that cry out to us no matter how much we ignore them or try to silence them.
I wonder what cries we try to silence. Perhaps it is the photograph of a brother or a daughter that you’ve hidden in a drawer because you don’t want to repair a relationship broken by anger and hurt? And yet it cries out from the drawer. Is it that email from a friend asking for some money for an agency in Africa that’s helping people to become educated and support their villages – they just need a bit of your support, but you can’t deal with one more thing, and so you’ve let the message get buried in your inbox? And yet it cries out to you still. Is it the road you drive by, where someone you know is very ill, but you are nervous around hospitals and nursing homes, so you decide that a visit from you isn’t really very important? The road cries out each time you pass it.
We don’t have time, we can’t solve anything ourselves, we’re too small to make a difference. With those words, many religious people in Jerusalem had learned to live with the blood on the stones. It was just the way things were, and in time, they stopped noticing. They didn’t weep over their city the way that Jesus came and wept over it, lamenting that its people did not know the things that make for peace.
Sometimes it takes a new eyes to see what we have become used to. This is what happened to Kevin and Joan Salwen one day when their daughter upended everything that they had tried to do as parents. The Salwens were a successful, and they had been able to provide many good things for their two children: music lessons, baseball camps, and a big house in a nice neighborhood, with plenty of room for sleepovers and games in the yard. They knew that the house was a bit over the top, but they were able to use it for good causes, like fundraisers for Habitat for Humanity, and they’d even taken in a family from New Orleans for a couple months after the hurricane, so they kind of got used to living in their dream house and didn’t think much of it.
One day, while Kevin was driving his daughter home, they pulled up at one of those intersections where the traffic is always backed up, and there on the roadside was a man holding a sign that said “homeless. hungry. please help.” Then a brand new Mercedes pulled up beside them: black, convertible. Hannah looked at the car and looked at the man with the sign, and she said “if that man had a less nice car then that man could have something to eat.”
Now, these are important moments for a parent, and so Kevin said “well honey, if we had a less nice car then that man could have something to eat.” You really have to watch what you say to your kids, because this stuck with Hannah, and she talked about it that night at dinner, and then a few days later she brought it up again and said that she didn’t want to be a family that talked about things, she wanted to be a family who did things. So her mom decided to test her conviction, which was kind of like the warning of the Pharisees about not getting carried away. She asked Hannah “would you be willing to sell our house and buy a smaller one so that we could give half of the money to the poor.” Hannah said “yes. That is absolutely what we should do.” And that’s what they did. We should not underestimate the willingness of people to accept the cost of acting when they see that something is not right in the world. (The Salwen story is told by Kevin and Hannah in The Power of Half).
And we should not underestimate ourselves. We are invited to join the joyful procession of Palm Sunday, following Jesus Christ, even though we are fully aware that he will give his life at the end of this journey, and that following him will cost us something too. But what is the alternative? Even if the procession is silenced, still we will hear the stones cry out, still we will hear the voice from somewhere deep inside us that calls us to do our little part for the kingdom of God. There’s no chance of silence.
Audio of the sermon is available here
Luke 19:28-48
Dedicated to the Confirmation I Class; and always to the glory of God.
As the crowds of pilgrims made their way to Jerusalem from every direction for the Passover festival, imagine the voices of the disciples rising above the noise, shouting and singing “blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” The gospel according to Luke recounts this day and tells us that they shouted for him these words of the psalms because of “all the deeds of power that they had seen.” Think of what they had seen in their time with Jesus. Here was a king they could get behind, one who was bringing about the kingdom of God, in which people received healing and mercy regardless of their wealth or purity or social status. Everyone was welcome by this king, and so they sang for him on the way to Jerusalem, and today we join in singing for him too. We also sing for the king who brings in God’s kingdom, who teaches that the grace of God meets us wherever we are and gives us new life. What a joyous day is this Palm Sunday! Who cares about the warning?
The warning is that we had better not get too carried away in our faith in Jesus, because it will cost too much. In fact, we had better just keep quiet about it all. The warning comes from some concerned Pharisees, who tell Jesus to make his disciples stop with the singing and shouting. Earlier in the gospel of Luke, when Jesus was up north in Galilee, some Pharisees had warned him there that the local Roman governor was looking to kill him. Now they are warning him again, because they know full well that you can’t ride into town with people singing “blessed is the king.” Jerusalem only recognizes the rule of Caesar, the Roman emperor, and his local stand-in Pontius Pilate. They’re in charge, and those who challenge them are not long for this world. Jesus himself had recently heard the reports of the men who had been killed by Pilate’s order in the Temple court. Pilate is a cruel and unjust ruler, but what can be done but to submit? It’s better to accept the way things are than to allow our faith to get us into trouble. “So, Jesus, if we could just get the disciples to stop.”
That warning has been repeated again and again to the followers of Christ. In the first centuries, people were warned not to admit being Christian during the Roman persecutions, because it might get you killed. You and I don’t have to worry about that anymore. In 16th century, people were warned not to own a Bible in translation, or worship in a Protestant community, because those might get you killed, and we don’t have to fear that either. In the middle of this last century, people were warned not to allow their faith to get them involved in demonstrations against the evils of segregation, because it only caused trouble and invited violence or prison. A group of white ministers asked Martin Luther King, Jr. to make them stop and be quiet, but he wrote them a letter from a Birmingham jail and told them why they could not be silent. We don’t have to worry about that danger either. But we might be warned in other ways not to go overboard with this whole business of following Christ. Some of those things he said, for instance, might really get in the way of life as we know it: his teachings about loving our enemies, and overcoming them with generosity, or turning the other cheek, carrying someone’s load the extra mile, being willing to drop our fishing nets, give away all that we have, pick up our cross, and follow him. These words are as clear as they are troubling. As someone once said, “it’s not the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that bother me. It’s the parts I do understand.” We had better stop our celebration before it costs us something we don’t want to give.
Which is what the Pharisees are recommending. But Jesus tells them that if the disciples were silent, the very stones would cry out. In other words, there is no chance of silence. The disciples might stop singing about a new king and a new kingdom, but what about those stones in the Temple court that are stained with blood? Will they keep silent about the need for the kingdom of God and the peace that it brings? And what about the stones of other cities, bearing witness to war and oppression, torture and apartheid? You can’t pretend that everything is all right in Jerusalem when the stones have blood on them. And that’s why Jesus has come, to proclaim a different kingdom in which the rich and the poor, the healthy and the sick alike are invited to share in the riches of God’s world, where curing the sick is more urgent than religious ceremony, and feeding the poor is more important than our own wants. He has come as a different kind of king, to confront all that is not right in the name of love. And it will cost him, and it will cost those who follow him, but you can’t sit by when the stones cry out. There are some things that cry out to us no matter how much we ignore them or try to silence them.
I wonder what cries we try to silence. Perhaps it is the photograph of a brother or a daughter that you’ve hidden in a drawer because you don’t want to repair a relationship broken by anger and hurt? And yet it cries out from the drawer. Is it that email from a friend asking for some money for an agency in Africa that’s helping people to become educated and support their villages – they just need a bit of your support, but you can’t deal with one more thing, and so you’ve let the message get buried in your inbox? And yet it cries out to you still. Is it the road you drive by, where someone you know is very ill, but you are nervous around hospitals and nursing homes, so you decide that a visit from you isn’t really very important? The road cries out each time you pass it.
We don’t have time, we can’t solve anything ourselves, we’re too small to make a difference. With those words, many religious people in Jerusalem had learned to live with the blood on the stones. It was just the way things were, and in time, they stopped noticing. They didn’t weep over their city the way that Jesus came and wept over it, lamenting that its people did not know the things that make for peace.
Sometimes it takes a new eyes to see what we have become used to. This is what happened to Kevin and Joan Salwen one day when their daughter upended everything that they had tried to do as parents. The Salwens were a successful, and they had been able to provide many good things for their two children: music lessons, baseball camps, and a big house in a nice neighborhood, with plenty of room for sleepovers and games in the yard. They knew that the house was a bit over the top, but they were able to use it for good causes, like fundraisers for Habitat for Humanity, and they’d even taken in a family from New Orleans for a couple months after the hurricane, so they kind of got used to living in their dream house and didn’t think much of it.
One day, while Kevin was driving his daughter home, they pulled up at one of those intersections where the traffic is always backed up, and there on the roadside was a man holding a sign that said “homeless. hungry. please help.” Then a brand new Mercedes pulled up beside them: black, convertible. Hannah looked at the car and looked at the man with the sign, and she said “if that man had a less nice car then that man could have something to eat.”
Now, these are important moments for a parent, and so Kevin said “well honey, if we had a less nice car then that man could have something to eat.” You really have to watch what you say to your kids, because this stuck with Hannah, and she talked about it that night at dinner, and then a few days later she brought it up again and said that she didn’t want to be a family that talked about things, she wanted to be a family who did things. So her mom decided to test her conviction, which was kind of like the warning of the Pharisees about not getting carried away. She asked Hannah “would you be willing to sell our house and buy a smaller one so that we could give half of the money to the poor.” Hannah said “yes. That is absolutely what we should do.” And that’s what they did. We should not underestimate the willingness of people to accept the cost of acting when they see that something is not right in the world. (The Salwen story is told by Kevin and Hannah in The Power of Half).
And we should not underestimate ourselves. We are invited to join the joyful procession of Palm Sunday, following Jesus Christ, even though we are fully aware that he will give his life at the end of this journey, and that following him will cost us something too. But what is the alternative? Even if the procession is silenced, still we will hear the stones cry out, still we will hear the voice from somewhere deep inside us that calls us to do our little part for the kingdom of God. There’s no chance of silence.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Reflections on faith in the Oscar nominees
The Oscars will be presented this week, which is my annual excuse to use this space to comment on the intersection of movies and religion.
This year, Avatar is the big story, with its innovative effects and its box office records. I enjoyed Avatar, although I don’t think it deserves the best picture award. One aspect of the story that interests me is the issue of the human character’s incarnation as a Nav’i, the alien species who inhabit the distant moon. Our Christian story tells of the word of God becoming incarnate as a human out of God’s love for us. In Avatar, the protagonist becomes incarnate for rather mixed motives. At first, he means the Nav’i harm, but he is changed by his actual encounter with them, and he finally becomes instrumental in their survival. This is a complex incarnation, but it does show us the importance of actually experiencing life from the point of view of another person (or species).
I haven’t seen all the nominees, but my favorite is the Pixar animated movie Up. There is a magical quality to Mr. Fredricksen’s house flying away from the city, lifted into the air by hundreds of brightly colored balloons. It speaks to the complex emotional ties we all have to home, and to our things, especially when those things are attached to important memories and strong emotions. In this case, everything in the house is attached to his wife, who has recently died. In a metaphoric way, many of us move through life carrying our history with us.
One of the real joys of Up is the way in which Mr. Fredricksen is transformed by his engagement with the needs of the young boy Russell. He is reluctant to get involved at first. He is set in his ways. And yet, because he is stuck as the temporary caretaker of this young boy, he develops a fondness and love for him in the course of his unwanted obligation. His change speaks a truth about how we are often changed. Sometimes we have to do the compassionate thing before we have the feeling of compassion. Sometimes it is the fulfillment of our duty that leads us to a new way of feeling, thinking, and viewing the world. We act our way into a new way of thinking, rather than the other way around.
This year, Avatar is the big story, with its innovative effects and its box office records. I enjoyed Avatar, although I don’t think it deserves the best picture award. One aspect of the story that interests me is the issue of the human character’s incarnation as a Nav’i, the alien species who inhabit the distant moon. Our Christian story tells of the word of God becoming incarnate as a human out of God’s love for us. In Avatar, the protagonist becomes incarnate for rather mixed motives. At first, he means the Nav’i harm, but he is changed by his actual encounter with them, and he finally becomes instrumental in their survival. This is a complex incarnation, but it does show us the importance of actually experiencing life from the point of view of another person (or species).
I haven’t seen all the nominees, but my favorite is the Pixar animated movie Up. There is a magical quality to Mr. Fredricksen’s house flying away from the city, lifted into the air by hundreds of brightly colored balloons. It speaks to the complex emotional ties we all have to home, and to our things, especially when those things are attached to important memories and strong emotions. In this case, everything in the house is attached to his wife, who has recently died. In a metaphoric way, many of us move through life carrying our history with us.
One of the real joys of Up is the way in which Mr. Fredricksen is transformed by his engagement with the needs of the young boy Russell. He is reluctant to get involved at first. He is set in his ways. And yet, because he is stuck as the temporary caretaker of this young boy, he develops a fondness and love for him in the course of his unwanted obligation. His change speaks a truth about how we are often changed. Sometimes we have to do the compassionate thing before we have the feeling of compassion. Sometimes it is the fulfillment of our duty that leads us to a new way of feeling, thinking, and viewing the world. We act our way into a new way of thinking, rather than the other way around.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Sermon Audio
In a bold new experiment, audio files of our sermons at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC, are available on the website, at least for now. You can listen or download an mp3 file right here.
Since I'm also still posting the text of the sermons, I should explain that the text is more or less what I had prepared to preach, and the audio is the record of what I actually preached.
Since I'm also still posting the text of the sermons, I should explain that the text is more or less what I had prepared to preach, and the audio is the record of what I actually preached.
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