Sermon originally preached on July 25, 2010 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC
Matthew 1:1-17 (the genealogy of Jesus)
Do you come from a good family? Do you come from good people?
Do we care about these questions as much as we used to? I don’t think so. It used to be that your family tree defined you. When I finished my sabbatical and went on vacation a couple weeks ago, I was so excited to read something that was just for fun. Don’t get me wrong, I loved all the books I read for my classes, but I really missed a good novel. So now I’m partway through a book called Wolf Hall, which takes place in the court of King Henry the VIII. So there’s Thomas More, and the Boleyn family, and the Duke of Norfolk, who is Anne Boleyn’s uncle, and who you are depends so much on your family tree.
I don’t think we care so much. I know that we are interested in our family trees, but it’s an interest of history and discovery, not because it defines you as a good or bad person. In fact, our society really celebrates people who go from rags to riches, and we celebrate first generation high school or college graduates. We like to hear the inspiring stories of people who overcame adversity in childhood to have success as adults, and our society no longer looks down on children who are born out of wedlock the way these children were once called names, and made to feel ashamed. And thank God for all of this!
Maybe some of you read Thomas Hardy in school, especially Tess of the D’Urbervilles, in which a poor man named John Durbeyfield is told that his family name was once D’Urberville, an old family of nobility and money. And the power that this news has on him sets in motion a very tragic tale in which Tess is ruined in her father’s quest to recover a good family name. Thomas Hardy critiqued the culture of family names and noble standing, showing that each person should be known for his or her own character. It is better to revere a saintly child of scandalous background than to admire a wicked person of good blood.
Or you might read the Harry Potter novels for a more recent critique of a culture based on the purity of noble-blooded ancestry. In Harry’s world, magical children who come from non-magical parents are called “mudbloods,” which is a derogatory slur of the worst order, when it is actually the pure-blooded wizard families who are often the worst people. Family trees.
So, do we still care so much about the family tree of Jesus? Does it matter to us as much as it once did that Jesus is a descendent of Isaac and Jacob, or even King David? We can recognize that all of this may have been very important to the Hebrew people of the first century, but maybe it’s not as important to us. Maybe, for us, the incarnation of God could have been born on Christmas into any family and we would follow that person because of the incredible presence of God, not because we are impressed by the family tree.
And yet, maybe impressing us is not the real point of the family tree in Matthew! We skip over it because we don’t known most of the names and we assume all those names are meant to be admired, but a closer look reveals that this is not an ordinary genealogy. For one thing, it stops being impressive after King David. The kings who follow, between David and the time of exile, were mostly a lousy lot. Only two of fourteen leave a good record in scripture. The rest of them ignored God, practiced all kinds of injustice, and drove the nations of Judah and Israel into the ground. Making a point of that ancestry doesn’t make Jesus look any better, in terms of family credibility. It’s not even impressive before King David! Jacob stole his brother’s birthright, Judah sold his brother Joseph into slavery, and even King David has a dark side in his affair with Bathsheba, of which Matthew 1 makes a point to remind us. That’s kind of strange.
In fact, there is a strange mention of the names of five women. It’s strange because this was written in a patriarchal society, in which family trees were only about the men: father to son, father to son, father to son. Matthew goes out of his way to include five women, and they are not the impressive women in this tree, women like Sarah and Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, the faithful wives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
But he does include Tamar. Now, just briefly, Tamar’s story is in Genesis. She was a Canaanite woman who married one of Judah’s sons, but the son died before they’d had children. By the law of that time, the deceased husband’s brother should have given her a child (children were about all that widows had in those days to support them, you see). But the brother would not, and Judah shunned his foreign daughter-in-law until she had to pose as a prostitute in order to seduce Judah into giving her the child that God’s law at that time required. At the same time, she exposed the injustice with which they had treated her. Does that summary raise more questions than it answers? Then I think the book of Genesis is in your future: not as boring as you thought! Tamar is in this family tree.
And then there is Rahab. Rahab was an actual prostitute at Jericho when Joshua led the Hebrew people into the promised land after the Exodus, and her kindness in sheltering the Hebrew spies helps them to victory at Jericho.
And then there’s Ruth, King David’s great-grandmother, who is a Moabite woman married into a Hebrew family. Her husband and her father-in-law both died, leaving her a widow, and she brought her widowed mother-in-law back to Israel. In Israel, Ruth becomes Jewish, marries Boaz and continues the family tree of Jesus.
And then there is the wife of Uriah, Bathsheba, who was the “victim of [King] David’s lust,” (Raymond E. Brown, A Coming Christ in Advent) and we can only imagine the pressure that a king would bring to bear on her to make this happen. David had Bathsheba’s husband killed and took her as his wife. It is her son Solomon who continues the family tree.
Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba. All of them foreigners. All of them the victim of tragedy, often abuse. Why does Matthew go out of his way to name them? These are not the impressive names of a good family heritage, but more like the skeletons in the family closet. Why does Matthew want to remind people of these scandalous stories, these foreigners in the family tree of Jesus?
At least two reasons, I think. The first is that the last woman named in the family tree is Mary, who has her own scandal when she becomes pregnant out of wedlock. It may be that Matthew wants to prepare his hearers to accept Mary by reminding them that God has long been at work among the outcasts.
The second reason is that Matthew wants us to know that there is room for everyone in the family of Jesus. If it all begins with Jacob (who cheated his twin Esau) and Jacob’s son Judah (who sold off his brother and later shunned Tamar), Rahab and Ruth, and David with Bathsheba, and a bunch of bad kings, then we’ve got a family tree of saints and sinners, a family tree that you might want to hide as much as you’d want to celebrate it. This family tree reminds us, right at the beginning of the gospel, that God works with outcasts and foreigners, with people who are selfish and flawed and broken, just like most of us. And this is why Jesus always invited saints and sinners alike. This is why Jesus ate with tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, and also with Pharisees, Roman centurions, and really everyone else. Everyone was invited to the table of Christ, because his grace was for all people.
And if God’s grace is wide enough for all of them, if God was at work in such a gnarled and twisted family tree, then surely God is at work in our own family trees. Despite the failures, the scandals, the things we don’t want anyone to know about, we have a place in God’s family. The Christ child who was born in this family tree was born for every one of us.
And so the family tree of Jesus continues in his followers. During our bicentennial last year, we celebrated the many wonderful things about our heritage in this congregation. But it hasn’t all been so good. There are also stories of pettiness, exclusion, judgmental attitudes, and fights. Our family tree is still full of both saints and sinners.
This past spring when I traveled to Boston with the confirmation class to learn about the Congregational church, we celebrated their work for religious freedom, for the abolition of slavery, for the equality of women. But we also saw the grave marker, near the grave of John Hancock, of his servant Frank. No last name, probably a slave. And we visited beautiful Boston Common, the park where people gathered for public speeches and sermons, next to the magnificent state house. And I told them that this is also where they used to execute people: witches, and heretics, like those Quakers.
Why should we remember these stories? Because if we are not honest about our past, then we aren’t honest about our present. And if we don’t remember these failings, then we will get the idea that God only works in the lives of perfect people, people who make no mistakes, have no trace of ignorance, and are free from doubt and fear and the prejudices of their day. But if God only works through those kinds of people, then God can’t work through us.
That’s not what the family tree of Jesus proclaims. This family tree proclaims that God works through all of us. This family tree in Matthew is how we get from Abraham to Jesus, but I also imagine the family tree of faith, which shows how we get from Jesus to us. It, too, is full of saints and sinners. It’s got some big names that we recognize, like Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther, but it’s got many more names who do not make history.
Here’s an interesting thing about Matthew’s family tree from the time of the exile until Jesus. If you study the Old Testament, you will find only the first two names in that list. The rest have been lost to history, until Joseph and Mary. Unremembered, ordinary people, who never made the history books for their achievements. They were regular people like you and me. I wonder how God is working among us?
Do you come from a good family? Do you come from good people? Well, not good all the time. But we do come from God’s people. We come from God’s family tree.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Sermon - A Prophet for Our Time
Preached on July 18 2010 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.
Amos 8:1-12
What happens when a nation of people who come from humble, hard-working roots become, over generations, richer and richer? That was Israel in the 7th century before Christ, when Amos was a prophet. Sometimes we get the wrong idea about prophets, and imagine that they are like fortune tellers, predicting the future by magical communication with God. What prophets are really best at is not seeing the future, but seeing the present more clearly than anyone else, and telling the truth about it, especially the truth that upsets people in power. So Amos tells the truth to Israel, to a people who have forgotten where they came from, and have been blinded by their own success. “Hear this, you that trample the needy, and bring ruin to the poor of the land.”
I think that if Amos were around today doing his prophet gig, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. There's no shortage of targets.
Hear this A.I.G., Lehman Brothers, Bernie Madoff, and everyone who chased short-term profit over your responsibility to be honest and careful with our investments. You who brought ruin to people thrown out of homes, and let go from jobs, and cut off from the support that would give them just a bit of dignity.
In his day, Amos said: "[hear this, you who] say, ‘When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and when will the Sabbath [be over], so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.’”
Today he might say: Hear this, you who say that whatever you can get away with in business is just fine. You who open factories where there are no regulations for a living wage or even healthy working conditions, you who bury workers in debt and so own their lives like slaves, you who want to rush through your weekly appearance at the big downtown church so you can get back to trading stocks and betting riches where people’s real lives are at stake. Hear this, you who think only of the profit margin when drilling a mile beneath the most beautiful waters of the world, and forget your moral obligation to take such risks only with the greatest caution possible. Did any of you think that you could go on like this, and somehow avoid devastation?
Yes, Amos would have it pretty easy today. Different century, different part of the world, vastly more complex economies and globalized corporate interests: but the same story. And so we hear in Amos a tragic story that is only too real for us today:
“Shall not the land tremble on this account, and everyone mourn who lives in it, and all of it rise like the Nile, and be tossed about and sink again, like the Nile of Egypt? On that day, says the Lord GOD, I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day.”
Sobering, isn’t it? And whether we think that devastation is God’s punishment for injustice (which I do not), or that devastation is the natural consequence of reckless injustice, we recognize the story that Amos lived in 2,700 years ago as our story also.
And then Amos says this interesting thing: “The time is surely coming, says the Lord GOD, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it.”
A different kind of famine: not for bread or water, but a famine of the words of God. What kind of a famine is that?
The people are singing lamentations and mourning in sackcloths because all the prosperity that they’d enjoyed had been ruined, like a sandy beach covered in tar, and now they can’t hear the word of God. I wonder if it’s because things had been going too well for too long? I wonder if they had all benefited just enough when business was booming, when gas was cheap, when the DOW Jones was high, and everyone was buying so everyone was hiring.
Maybe they looked around and said “hey, we’re doing pretty well for ourselves. We’ve got our essential needs covered, we’ve got insurance and a safety net in case of emergency, and we’ve got enough left over to invent new needs and satisfy them.” And if you go along like that for long enough, it’s hard to see what you need to hear from God and so you forget how to listen. Oh, they still went to the temple and sang their psalms and prayed their prayers, but it was kind of just to keep up form. They had no needs, so they forgot how to listen to God’s word. And then when it all came crashing down, there was a famine for the word of God. I wonder if they had forgotten how to hear it.
You can’t ignore a garden, let the weeds grow and the soil dry up, and then one day when you really need a fresh tomato expect to go and find one waiting for you. You can’t stop practicing the piano, and then expect one day to be able to play Chopin. And you can’t ignore your friend’s phone calls, emails, invitations to dinner, and then suddenly reach some crisis in your life and call on that friend for support.
And so it is with our life with God. If things go too well for us for too long, sometimes we forget how to hear the word of God. And if you are not used to listening for the word of God, do you even notice that you’re missing it? I think about that when I read Amos, because the truth is that even though I would like to think about Amos ranting against BP and A.I.G. and whomever else I might blame, there is also a part of Amos that is speaking to me. Because when I am done with my anger at the trans-national corporations, and the government failures to regulate their greed and guard the common good, and when I am done with my frustration at the whole culture that values personal gain over responsibility to the human family and to the earth, then I have to recognize that I drive a car and I look for the cheapest gas without asking questions about why it’s so cheap. And I hope that the money in my pension fund grows big in the stock market without wondering what corners those companies are cutting to earn those profits. And I buy shoes and clothes with faraway labels without wondering if the workers are safe, or earn enough to live on.
It’s great when they speak against my enemies, but they also speak a difficult truth to me. The truth is that even if I didn’t set up the system, even if I never made a conscious choice to demand cheap gas despite the enormous risks, I am still a part of that system. I am a part of a lot of these horrors that we’ve brought down on ourselves. And even if I know that I cannot solve these large problems on my own, I cannot ignore the fact that I can make many smaller choices in a different way.
But my individual choices are not going to solve the big picture. So what’s the point, Amos? What am I supposed to do with this word about the great injustices of the world? I can’t solve them on my own. But then I realize, God doesn’t depend on us doing it on our own. God just wants us to know that God is against injustice. Famine or not, whether we hear God’s word or not, God’s word is resurrection; God’s word speaks new hope for the hopeless; God’s word creates new light when the night is most dark.
Do you remember a few minutes ago when I said that ignoring our relationship with God was like ignoring a friend’s calls and emails and invitations and then expecting that friend to be there when a crisis hits? Well, I bet that there were some of you who thought of a really good friend that you’ve had for a really long time, and you thought to yourself, that image doesn’t work. If life came crashing down, my friend would be there for me even if I’d been a bad friend for the past few weeks, months, or even years. Some of you did, didn’t you?
And isn’t God more faithful than our most faithful friend to whom we have shown no faith? Isn’t God the kind of creator who will restore life to a people even after they have been careless with life? Isn’t God the kind of parent who welcomes the prodigal sons and daughters home after they have destroyed their own inheritance and abandoned their homes?
Amos knew all this about God. Amos knew that God does not let devastation have the last word. Hold on, Amos says, because God isn’t done. We need to hear this from the end of the book of Amos: “On that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen, and repair its breaches, and raise up its ruins, and rebuild it as in the days of old… The time is surely coming, says the Lord, when …the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it. I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant them upon their land, and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land that I have given them, says the Lord your God. (Amos 9:11-15, selected).
Those are the final words of the book of Amos. Those are the words given to people who had forgotten how to hear God’s word. God restores our lives even when we have made a mess of them. This is the word that became flesh in the man from Nazareth, who saw the same things that Amos had talked about. Jesus saw injustice and violence. And he saw the sun turned to darkness in the middle of the day, a day when the evil of the world seemed like it was too much, when it seemed like the word of God, the very living word of God, would be forever silenced.
When it seems to us like the word of God is silenced, when it seems like the sun is blackened and we will be forever in darkness, forever hungry for the goodness of God, then remember how bad it looked on that day. Remember that the word of God cannot be silenced in a tomb. The word of God cannot be silenced by greed or cruelty or injustice of any kind. The word of God lives even when the world does it’s best to bury it. And the word of God will restore this world.
Amos 8:1-12
What happens when a nation of people who come from humble, hard-working roots become, over generations, richer and richer? That was Israel in the 7th century before Christ, when Amos was a prophet. Sometimes we get the wrong idea about prophets, and imagine that they are like fortune tellers, predicting the future by magical communication with God. What prophets are really best at is not seeing the future, but seeing the present more clearly than anyone else, and telling the truth about it, especially the truth that upsets people in power. So Amos tells the truth to Israel, to a people who have forgotten where they came from, and have been blinded by their own success. “Hear this, you that trample the needy, and bring ruin to the poor of the land.”
I think that if Amos were around today doing his prophet gig, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. There's no shortage of targets.
Hear this A.I.G., Lehman Brothers, Bernie Madoff, and everyone who chased short-term profit over your responsibility to be honest and careful with our investments. You who brought ruin to people thrown out of homes, and let go from jobs, and cut off from the support that would give them just a bit of dignity.
In his day, Amos said: "[hear this, you who] say, ‘When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and when will the Sabbath [be over], so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.’”
Today he might say: Hear this, you who say that whatever you can get away with in business is just fine. You who open factories where there are no regulations for a living wage or even healthy working conditions, you who bury workers in debt and so own their lives like slaves, you who want to rush through your weekly appearance at the big downtown church so you can get back to trading stocks and betting riches where people’s real lives are at stake. Hear this, you who think only of the profit margin when drilling a mile beneath the most beautiful waters of the world, and forget your moral obligation to take such risks only with the greatest caution possible. Did any of you think that you could go on like this, and somehow avoid devastation?
Yes, Amos would have it pretty easy today. Different century, different part of the world, vastly more complex economies and globalized corporate interests: but the same story. And so we hear in Amos a tragic story that is only too real for us today:
“Shall not the land tremble on this account, and everyone mourn who lives in it, and all of it rise like the Nile, and be tossed about and sink again, like the Nile of Egypt? On that day, says the Lord GOD, I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day.”
Sobering, isn’t it? And whether we think that devastation is God’s punishment for injustice (which I do not), or that devastation is the natural consequence of reckless injustice, we recognize the story that Amos lived in 2,700 years ago as our story also.
And then Amos says this interesting thing: “The time is surely coming, says the Lord GOD, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it.”
A different kind of famine: not for bread or water, but a famine of the words of God. What kind of a famine is that?
The people are singing lamentations and mourning in sackcloths because all the prosperity that they’d enjoyed had been ruined, like a sandy beach covered in tar, and now they can’t hear the word of God. I wonder if it’s because things had been going too well for too long? I wonder if they had all benefited just enough when business was booming, when gas was cheap, when the DOW Jones was high, and everyone was buying so everyone was hiring.
Maybe they looked around and said “hey, we’re doing pretty well for ourselves. We’ve got our essential needs covered, we’ve got insurance and a safety net in case of emergency, and we’ve got enough left over to invent new needs and satisfy them.” And if you go along like that for long enough, it’s hard to see what you need to hear from God and so you forget how to listen. Oh, they still went to the temple and sang their psalms and prayed their prayers, but it was kind of just to keep up form. They had no needs, so they forgot how to listen to God’s word. And then when it all came crashing down, there was a famine for the word of God. I wonder if they had forgotten how to hear it.
You can’t ignore a garden, let the weeds grow and the soil dry up, and then one day when you really need a fresh tomato expect to go and find one waiting for you. You can’t stop practicing the piano, and then expect one day to be able to play Chopin. And you can’t ignore your friend’s phone calls, emails, invitations to dinner, and then suddenly reach some crisis in your life and call on that friend for support.
And so it is with our life with God. If things go too well for us for too long, sometimes we forget how to hear the word of God. And if you are not used to listening for the word of God, do you even notice that you’re missing it? I think about that when I read Amos, because the truth is that even though I would like to think about Amos ranting against BP and A.I.G. and whomever else I might blame, there is also a part of Amos that is speaking to me. Because when I am done with my anger at the trans-national corporations, and the government failures to regulate their greed and guard the common good, and when I am done with my frustration at the whole culture that values personal gain over responsibility to the human family and to the earth, then I have to recognize that I drive a car and I look for the cheapest gas without asking questions about why it’s so cheap. And I hope that the money in my pension fund grows big in the stock market without wondering what corners those companies are cutting to earn those profits. And I buy shoes and clothes with faraway labels without wondering if the workers are safe, or earn enough to live on.
It’s great when they speak against my enemies, but they also speak a difficult truth to me. The truth is that even if I didn’t set up the system, even if I never made a conscious choice to demand cheap gas despite the enormous risks, I am still a part of that system. I am a part of a lot of these horrors that we’ve brought down on ourselves. And even if I know that I cannot solve these large problems on my own, I cannot ignore the fact that I can make many smaller choices in a different way.
But my individual choices are not going to solve the big picture. So what’s the point, Amos? What am I supposed to do with this word about the great injustices of the world? I can’t solve them on my own. But then I realize, God doesn’t depend on us doing it on our own. God just wants us to know that God is against injustice. Famine or not, whether we hear God’s word or not, God’s word is resurrection; God’s word speaks new hope for the hopeless; God’s word creates new light when the night is most dark.
Do you remember a few minutes ago when I said that ignoring our relationship with God was like ignoring a friend’s calls and emails and invitations and then expecting that friend to be there when a crisis hits? Well, I bet that there were some of you who thought of a really good friend that you’ve had for a really long time, and you thought to yourself, that image doesn’t work. If life came crashing down, my friend would be there for me even if I’d been a bad friend for the past few weeks, months, or even years. Some of you did, didn’t you?
And isn’t God more faithful than our most faithful friend to whom we have shown no faith? Isn’t God the kind of creator who will restore life to a people even after they have been careless with life? Isn’t God the kind of parent who welcomes the prodigal sons and daughters home after they have destroyed their own inheritance and abandoned their homes?
Amos knew all this about God. Amos knew that God does not let devastation have the last word. Hold on, Amos says, because God isn’t done. We need to hear this from the end of the book of Amos: “On that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen, and repair its breaches, and raise up its ruins, and rebuild it as in the days of old… The time is surely coming, says the Lord, when …the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it. I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant them upon their land, and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land that I have given them, says the Lord your God. (Amos 9:11-15, selected).
Those are the final words of the book of Amos. Those are the words given to people who had forgotten how to hear God’s word. God restores our lives even when we have made a mess of them. This is the word that became flesh in the man from Nazareth, who saw the same things that Amos had talked about. Jesus saw injustice and violence. And he saw the sun turned to darkness in the middle of the day, a day when the evil of the world seemed like it was too much, when it seemed like the word of God, the very living word of God, would be forever silenced.
When it seems to us like the word of God is silenced, when it seems like the sun is blackened and we will be forever in darkness, forever hungry for the goodness of God, then remember how bad it looked on that day. Remember that the word of God cannot be silenced in a tomb. The word of God cannot be silenced by greed or cruelty or injustice of any kind. The word of God lives even when the world does it’s best to bury it. And the word of God will restore this world.
Column - The World Cup Final
This past Sunday afternoon, while Betsy, Sam and I were on vacation with my extended family in northern Michigan, we went to a restaurant to watch the final of the World Cup. Allow me emphasize, because a part of me can’t believe that this happened: On a gorgeous afternoon, we left the cottages we were renting on a lakeshore, drove into town, and went inside to watch a soccer game between Spain and the Netherlands, two teams about which we knew next to nothing.
Why did I do it? It was partly because I had missed almost every other World Cup game during my summer class schedule, and partly because it seemed like a memorable afternoon for us to spend with my brothers, and partly because it was the last chance for a World Cup game until 2014, and maybe just a little bit because LeBron James had just announced his departure from Cleveland, and I needed to show that my interests are bigger that local sports.
Soccer is a cool sport. The action is non-stop: no commercials, no huddles, no signals between pitcher and catcher, and hardly any substitutions. These players run almost continuously for the entire ninety minutes of play (and, in this case, the thirty minutes of overtime). The scores may be low, but the action is great. You really just never know when that vital goal is going to be kicked (or headed) past the goalkeeper. Also, although there are star players, soccer seems to be more dependent on teamwork than many other team sports in which star players more easily dominate.
In other words, soccer is a community effort, sustained with steady energy over a long period of time, with only occasional tangible results.
Now, doesn’t that sound like our lives? A community effort, sustained by steady energy for a logn time with only occasional tangible results. Doesn’t that sound like raising children, or improving living conditions, or overcoming prejudice? It sounds to me like the Christian faith. We are a community, sustaining energy in our worship, our service, and our spiritual growth. It is a lifelong journey, and only occasionally do we reach those thin places where we catch a glimpse of God, where we enter into mystical communion with the divine. In the meantime, isn't it great to be on the field?
Why did I do it? It was partly because I had missed almost every other World Cup game during my summer class schedule, and partly because it seemed like a memorable afternoon for us to spend with my brothers, and partly because it was the last chance for a World Cup game until 2014, and maybe just a little bit because LeBron James had just announced his departure from Cleveland, and I needed to show that my interests are bigger that local sports.
Soccer is a cool sport. The action is non-stop: no commercials, no huddles, no signals between pitcher and catcher, and hardly any substitutions. These players run almost continuously for the entire ninety minutes of play (and, in this case, the thirty minutes of overtime). The scores may be low, but the action is great. You really just never know when that vital goal is going to be kicked (or headed) past the goalkeeper. Also, although there are star players, soccer seems to be more dependent on teamwork than many other team sports in which star players more easily dominate.
In other words, soccer is a community effort, sustained with steady energy over a long period of time, with only occasional tangible results.
Now, doesn’t that sound like our lives? A community effort, sustained by steady energy for a logn time with only occasional tangible results. Doesn’t that sound like raising children, or improving living conditions, or overcoming prejudice? It sounds to me like the Christian faith. We are a community, sustaining energy in our worship, our service, and our spiritual growth. It is a lifelong journey, and only occasionally do we reach those thin places where we catch a glimpse of God, where we enter into mystical communion with the divine. In the meantime, isn't it great to be on the field?
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Sermon - The Call of Wisdom
Preached on Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2010 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-32
John 16:12-15
Dedicated to the new High School Graduates of this congregation; and always to the glory of God.
Do you remember Robert Fulghum, the Unitarian minister who wrote that book called Everything I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten? Here is what he wrote in that essay about wisdom:
“All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday School. These are the things I learned:
Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. …
Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.” (All I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, p 6-7)
There’s not much there to disagree with, is there? But this wisdom gets complicated. Think of Fulghum’s list in terms of big adult issues like foreign policy and war, the oil spill in the gulf of Mexico, the derivatives, credit-default swaps, and bundled mortgages on Wall Street, the priorities of our nation’s budget, or the priorities of our own budgets. Wisdom seems easier to apply in kindergarten.
In a poetic section of the book of proverbs, wisdom is personified as a woman who partnered with God to create all things in the world. God created wisdom first, and then she assisted God in the creation of everything else. Ever since, she has been standing at the busiest intersections of the world, calling out to all who live. This image suggests to me that our Jewish ancestors saw the world as a place governed and ordered by wisdom, and that this wisdom was a creation of God and a gift to the world. Now, this doesn’t mean that if you are wise then everything will always work out for you (see the book of Job to dispel that misguided idea). It just means that wisdom is the principle of creation, and it is available to everyone.
You don’t have to be smart to have wisdom. You don’t have to be educated, or know a lot, to be wise. This is a strange thing to say on a day when we are giving thanks for education as a gift from God. Today we celebrate our high school graduates, and we offer our support for higher education. But there is a difference between wisdom and knowledge. You can be wise without being smart or knowing a lot of things. And you be smart and educated without being wise. We value education because we want the tools of knowledge to be wielded by people who also have wisdom. Some of the best, most creative and innovative works have been done by smart, well educated people. But the most awful, destructive things have also been done by smart, well educated people. Education is not, in itself, a promise of wisdom.
The call of wisdom is a message to all who live. You don’t have to be approved to receive it; you don’t have to travel to a holy shrine, or discover ancient scriptures in a desert cave, or attend secret ceremonies to receive it. You don’t even need to belong to a certain religion to receive it.
This past Monday, the New York Times published a column written by the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, who lives in exile in India. He wrote about how people of all faiths have discovered the same wisdom of living with compassion. When he was young, he used to think that Buddhism was the only religion with wisdom, but as an adult he met with people like the Catholic monk Thomas Merton, and talked about the centrality of compassion in both Christianity and Buddhism. He wrote about similar conversations with Jews and Hindus…and Muslims – Muslims who point out that in the Koran, the very name for God is the “Compassionate and Merciful.”
God’s wisdom calls out to all people. She speaks to us about what we choose to value, how we shape our relationships, and how we live in the world with compassion. Wisdom is available to everyone because it is woven right into the act of creation. And wisdom is simple enough to be distilled from what we learn in Kindergarten. So…what gives? If wisdom is so obvious, why do we so often live foolishly, rather than wisely? Why do we so often live with self-centeredness instead of compassion? Why do we live with bitterness rather than wonder? When you put the choices like that, they seem like no-brainers. No one wakes up in the morning and says “today I’d really like to be foolish, selfish, and bitter. That seems like a good way to spend the day.”
But let’s put the questions differently, and see how they sound. Why do we so often choose what is easy instead of what is difficult? Why do we so often try to fit in, instead of acting from our convictions? Why do we live in a way that makes us feel safe and secure, rather than living in a way that faces our fears and self-doubt with courage, even if we aren’t sure of the outcome?
Doesn’t it turn out that God’s wisdom takes us away from lives that are easy, comfortable, and secure? No wonder we have trouble with it.
Wisdom is not something we can learn one day in kindergarten and master over the weekend, certainly not on our own, anyway. We need help. In the gospel according to John, Jesus is speaking with his disciples on their last night together before his death, and he says to them “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.” Could this mean that wisdom (what Jesus called truth) is a process, something that we aren’t ready for all at once? Could it mean that we don’t have to achieve wisdom all on our own?
As Jesus said to the disciples, so God says to us: receive the Spirit of truth, that you may hear the ongoing call of wisdom. Remember that you do not have to do it on your own. Wisdom will be challenging. It will demand all of our attention and energy, and we will need the strength of God working within us. If we were athletes, our coach would tell us that when it comes to wisdom, leave it all on the field; give wisdom everything you’ve got.
The Reverend Frederick Buechner wrote that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” (Beyond Words, p 405) So, to our graduates, our scholars, pursue your interest, in science, the arts, business, religion, health, mechanics, or whatever it may be. Learn all about it, and then match your knowledge and your intelligence to a place where you find the world’s deep hunger.
Remember that our lives are like the seeds we grew in cups as children: our lives are mysterious gifts…and they don’t last forever. God has given us the wisdom we need, so “share everything. Don’t hit people. Clean up your own mess. And when you go out into the world, hold hands and stick together.”
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-32
John 16:12-15
Dedicated to the new High School Graduates of this congregation; and always to the glory of God.
Do you remember Robert Fulghum, the Unitarian minister who wrote that book called Everything I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten? Here is what he wrote in that essay about wisdom:
“All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday School. These are the things I learned:
Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. …
Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.” (All I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, p 6-7)
There’s not much there to disagree with, is there? But this wisdom gets complicated. Think of Fulghum’s list in terms of big adult issues like foreign policy and war, the oil spill in the gulf of Mexico, the derivatives, credit-default swaps, and bundled mortgages on Wall Street, the priorities of our nation’s budget, or the priorities of our own budgets. Wisdom seems easier to apply in kindergarten.
In a poetic section of the book of proverbs, wisdom is personified as a woman who partnered with God to create all things in the world. God created wisdom first, and then she assisted God in the creation of everything else. Ever since, she has been standing at the busiest intersections of the world, calling out to all who live. This image suggests to me that our Jewish ancestors saw the world as a place governed and ordered by wisdom, and that this wisdom was a creation of God and a gift to the world. Now, this doesn’t mean that if you are wise then everything will always work out for you (see the book of Job to dispel that misguided idea). It just means that wisdom is the principle of creation, and it is available to everyone.
You don’t have to be smart to have wisdom. You don’t have to be educated, or know a lot, to be wise. This is a strange thing to say on a day when we are giving thanks for education as a gift from God. Today we celebrate our high school graduates, and we offer our support for higher education. But there is a difference between wisdom and knowledge. You can be wise without being smart or knowing a lot of things. And you be smart and educated without being wise. We value education because we want the tools of knowledge to be wielded by people who also have wisdom. Some of the best, most creative and innovative works have been done by smart, well educated people. But the most awful, destructive things have also been done by smart, well educated people. Education is not, in itself, a promise of wisdom.
The call of wisdom is a message to all who live. You don’t have to be approved to receive it; you don’t have to travel to a holy shrine, or discover ancient scriptures in a desert cave, or attend secret ceremonies to receive it. You don’t even need to belong to a certain religion to receive it.
This past Monday, the New York Times published a column written by the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, who lives in exile in India. He wrote about how people of all faiths have discovered the same wisdom of living with compassion. When he was young, he used to think that Buddhism was the only religion with wisdom, but as an adult he met with people like the Catholic monk Thomas Merton, and talked about the centrality of compassion in both Christianity and Buddhism. He wrote about similar conversations with Jews and Hindus…and Muslims – Muslims who point out that in the Koran, the very name for God is the “Compassionate and Merciful.”
God’s wisdom calls out to all people. She speaks to us about what we choose to value, how we shape our relationships, and how we live in the world with compassion. Wisdom is available to everyone because it is woven right into the act of creation. And wisdom is simple enough to be distilled from what we learn in Kindergarten. So…what gives? If wisdom is so obvious, why do we so often live foolishly, rather than wisely? Why do we so often live with self-centeredness instead of compassion? Why do we live with bitterness rather than wonder? When you put the choices like that, they seem like no-brainers. No one wakes up in the morning and says “today I’d really like to be foolish, selfish, and bitter. That seems like a good way to spend the day.”
But let’s put the questions differently, and see how they sound. Why do we so often choose what is easy instead of what is difficult? Why do we so often try to fit in, instead of acting from our convictions? Why do we live in a way that makes us feel safe and secure, rather than living in a way that faces our fears and self-doubt with courage, even if we aren’t sure of the outcome?
Doesn’t it turn out that God’s wisdom takes us away from lives that are easy, comfortable, and secure? No wonder we have trouble with it.
Wisdom is not something we can learn one day in kindergarten and master over the weekend, certainly not on our own, anyway. We need help. In the gospel according to John, Jesus is speaking with his disciples on their last night together before his death, and he says to them “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.” Could this mean that wisdom (what Jesus called truth) is a process, something that we aren’t ready for all at once? Could it mean that we don’t have to achieve wisdom all on our own?
As Jesus said to the disciples, so God says to us: receive the Spirit of truth, that you may hear the ongoing call of wisdom. Remember that you do not have to do it on your own. Wisdom will be challenging. It will demand all of our attention and energy, and we will need the strength of God working within us. If we were athletes, our coach would tell us that when it comes to wisdom, leave it all on the field; give wisdom everything you’ve got.
The Reverend Frederick Buechner wrote that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” (Beyond Words, p 405) So, to our graduates, our scholars, pursue your interest, in science, the arts, business, religion, health, mechanics, or whatever it may be. Learn all about it, and then match your knowledge and your intelligence to a place where you find the world’s deep hunger.
Remember that our lives are like the seeds we grew in cups as children: our lives are mysterious gifts…and they don’t last forever. God has given us the wisdom we need, so “share everything. Don’t hit people. Clean up your own mess. And when you go out into the world, hold hands and stick together.”
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