Preached on January 11, 2008, Baptism of our Lord, at The First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.
Genesis 1:1-5; Acts 9:1-7
Dedicated to aid workers in Gaza, as the territory is under siege; and always to the glory of God.
“Did you receive the Holy Spirit?”[1] This is Paul’s question to these twelve people he finds when he gets to Ephesus who have already been baptized. Did you receive the Holy Spirit? This is a strange passage for us in the Congregationalist tradition, because Paul kind of sounds like he’s a Pentecostal preacher in a traveling tent revival. Did you receive the Holy Spirit?
But this is long before Christianity separated into different styles and denominations. He asks them because he wants to know if they understand that Christ meant for baptism to be much more than a means of membership in a group. What he means is that God will dwell with us, that God will be active in our very being and shown to others by our lives. The Holy Spirit is the spiritual presence of God with us, as close as our breath. I mean that literally, about our breath, but we’ll get to that later.
Paul says “did you receive the Holy Spirit?” And his face must have just fallen when they reply “No, we have not even heard that there was a Holy Spirit.”
Tom Steagald, a minister down in North Carolina, writes that this reminds him all too well of times in his own church when he has found that life-long Christians are sometimes just as stumped as those Ephesians about the basics of Christian faith. He wonders “who was preaching to them before I got here?” and his opinion of his predecessors becomes pretty low.[2]
If Paul was having similar thoughts, he doesn’t show it. He just calmly takes a step back to learn where they are coming from: “into what then were you baptized?” he says, which is his a way of asking “how did you understand your baptism? What did it mean? What was it for?”
Those are good questions for us on this day, on which we celebrate the baptism of young Aiden, and remember our own baptism, the sacrament by which everyone comes into the family of the Christian church. When we dedicated the new Atrium, we each added a bit of water to the fountain, and we blessed it, and now it reminds us of our baptism every time we enter the doors of the church. So our question today is “into what were we baptized? What did it mean? What was it for?”
The twelve Ephesians said that they were baptized into John’s baptism. That’s John the Baptist, who stood out in the Jordan river proclaiming a baptism of repentance. Repent means to turn around, to turn away from whatever it is that has become the center of our lives and return to God who is our true center, our true home. In our search for a life that we can live with, we turn to all kinds of things that are substitutes for God, and they are hollow centers. Sometimes these empty centers are obvious and widely recognized. But we also need to talk about the hollow centers of entertainment diversion, success, and security. When they become the center, many things begin to act like drugs to distract us and dull our attention to caring for ourselves, for our relationships, and for our neighbors. For substance abuse, there are recovery groups and the support of culture to turn around. In contrast, our culture praises entertainers, the ambitious, and the successful above all others, even as these pursuits just lead us farther and farther away from our true center in God.
John the Baptist called for repentance, to turn away from all of that, which is why people could only hear him out in the wilderness, where he could be heard above the noise of our distractions. So what is wrong with the baptism of repentance? Why does Paul think that the twelve Ephesians need more than John’s baptism? Because repentance is important as a first step. As John himself says “I baptize you with water, but the one who is coming will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”[3]
Here’s the basic difference. John called people to repent because God was coming. Jesus announced that the kingdom of God is here. He preached a new message. But just like those twelve that Paul met, we often get stuck in the old message. Too often, we think that Christianity is about showing our faith in God, being baptized for repentance, acting nice, and then waiting for the kingdom of God to come and change things. We’ve done our part, now let’s wait for God to shower us with blessings and ease our pain. Our faith too often treats God like a divine ATM. We put in the right code and wait for the goods to be dispensed.
Jesus said that God is here, the kingdom of God is among you, God’s Holy Spirit is in you. You can live in the kingdom of God right now. It won’t change your circumstances like magic - faith is not a makeover reality show. Our baptism is to put us into God’s kingdom right now. Instead of fasting like John had done, waiting for God to do something, Jesus feasted, because he wasn’t trying to earn God’s response, he was celebrating God’s grace already given. When will we give up trying to earn God’s grace and start celebrating that we already have it? Jesus lived and feasted in the kingdom of God with his disciples, with the poor and ill and hungry, and notorious sinners like the tax collectors, those Jews who took jobs with the empire, who were protected by Roman soldiers, and got rich by collecting and pocketing more than the amount that was due to Rome. The tax collectors had thought they could center their lives on great wealth and the security of the Roman army, but finally realized that all these were empty centers.
I wonder if the tax collectors are a warning for our country? How is it that we can live in the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world and be so filled with unhappiness, discontent, and fear? I heard this week about a study of the way we breathe in America. Healthy breathing takes about six breaths per minute, and they are deep, from the abdomen, all the way into the lungs. Let’s try some healthy breathing for one minute, six deep breaths.
Breathe in (five seconds). Breathe out (five seconds)….
Six breaths in one minute. On average, Americans take 20 breaths per minute, so that must have felt way too slow to you. We are absolutely out of control. It turns out that fast breathing is shallow and we miss as much as 70% of the energy and strength we should be getting just from our breath. There is a whole world of energy right around us that we are missing because we are moving so quickly to the next thing, because we are reacting to our worries, because we are distracted by the hollow centers that we create in our lives.
So these tax collectors who have been ruining their lives in the quest for wealth and security are among the first to respond to Jesus and begin living in the kingdom of God right now. They receive the holy spirit, and they not only give up their positions of privilege and pay back those they have cheated, they become disciples, creating a new way of living and treating one another. In other words, they not only repent, they expand the kingdom of God to more people. That’s because they were found by the Holy Spirit and they began to breathe easier. Did you know that the Hebrew word for Spirit, “ruah,” also means wind and it means breath? Just like real breathing, the Holy Spirit is a great source of strength and energy that is available to us that we so often don’t even know.
We get caught at the point of John’s baptism. We realize that something is wrong with the world, wrong with our lives, and we want a change. So then we do our ritual, our deal making, and we wait for God to make a change. But that is not our baptism. Our baptism was into the Christian faith that is no longer waiting, but is already creating the kingdom of God right here in the midst of all that is wrong in the world. This baptism means that when we encounter anger, despair, fear, and hatred, we have something to offer, a strength that is as close as our breath, because God is ready to be at work in us right now. If something isn’t right in the world, then live differently. You won’t have to rely on your strength alone. That is the good news we share. That is the work that is done with feasting and laughter and the celebration that we are already living in the kingdom of God.
[1] Acts 19:2
[2] “Blogging Toward Sunday: Let’s Step Back.” January 5, 2009 on Theolog.org, a blog for The Christian Century.
[3] Mark 1:8
Monday, January 12, 2009
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
New Year's Resolutions
I have a problem with New Year’s resolutions. My problem is not with the goals. Most resolutions are important, worthy aims: to get out of debt, to be in better shape, to spend more time with family, to help others. These are some of the most popular resolutions, and they are all great. But our success rate with these resolutions is low, and that tells me that something is wrong. My problem is with the way we in which think about these New Year’s resolutions. Basically, we have the idea that there is something wrong with our lives, or perhaps many things wrong with our lives, and that we can change ourselves merely by the force of our willpower to STICK TO OUR RESOLUTIONS. We live with the myth of individual determination, and it’s a story that doesn’t work very well.
Christianity suggests a different path. For starters, Christian faith does not begin with the idea that there is something wrong with us. We begin in Genesis with the claim that God created us and called us good and blessed us. It was only later that things got off track, when we became unhealthy and separated from what God created us to be. Instead of seeking to change ourselves with our resolutions, as if we were rotten people, our faith calls us to return to our true selves. We begin this path by confessing can confronting the sin that has gotten in the way. Instead of resolutions to be more healthy, more kind, we simply seek to be closer to God.
When we do this, when we give our lives in faith to God, we give up trying to be in control of improving our lives. We give up the story of self-improvement and find ourselves in the story of God’s grace. Now the metaphor for our lives is one that Jesus and Paul used. We are like a grape vine, which produces its fruit not by an act of will-power to change what it is, but as the natural expression of its true self. Paul wrote that the fruits of the spirit of God are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. That’s what we were created to grow, and growing fruit is better than making resolutions. It gets the focus off myself and onto God, which is where it has always belonged.
Christianity suggests a different path. For starters, Christian faith does not begin with the idea that there is something wrong with us. We begin in Genesis with the claim that God created us and called us good and blessed us. It was only later that things got off track, when we became unhealthy and separated from what God created us to be. Instead of seeking to change ourselves with our resolutions, as if we were rotten people, our faith calls us to return to our true selves. We begin this path by confessing can confronting the sin that has gotten in the way. Instead of resolutions to be more healthy, more kind, we simply seek to be closer to God.
When we do this, when we give our lives in faith to God, we give up trying to be in control of improving our lives. We give up the story of self-improvement and find ourselves in the story of God’s grace. Now the metaphor for our lives is one that Jesus and Paul used. We are like a grape vine, which produces its fruit not by an act of will-power to change what it is, but as the natural expression of its true self. Paul wrote that the fruits of the spirit of God are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. That’s what we were created to grow, and growing fruit is better than making resolutions. It gets the focus off myself and onto God, which is where it has always belonged.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Sermon - Watching for God in the Night
Originally preached on November 30, 2008, the first Sunday of Advent, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio UCC.
Isaiah 64:1-9 Mark 13:24-37
Dedicated to Betsy on the weekend of our anniversary; and always to the glory of God.
Today I’m going to preach about the second coming of Christ. This may not be a subject you have spent much time thinking about, or that you expected to hear about this morning. Or, it may be something you have thought about a great deal. My fear is that it is a part of our Christian faith that has been confused by those who talk about it with wild predictions and fearful words, but we’ll get to that.
Let us pray: God of light in the darkness, illuminate the eyes of our hearts, that we may receive your word of hope, of faith, and of love. Amen.
This is the first Sunday in the season of Advent, which is a word that means “arrival” or “coming.” In this season, we prepare to celebrate the arrival of Jesus Christ, born to Mary in Bethlehem so many years ago. It is a story from the past that shapes us in the present: the first coming of Christ.
Isaiah gave voice to those who waited for a messiah, waited for God to tear open the heavens and come down. We know that it happened. God did tear open the heavens and came to us, only not exactly how Isaiah had thought that God would come, with power and might on display. Instead God came as a baby, who would live and grow as one of us, sharing our common lot; knowing what our lives are like, so that he may show us what our lives could be. Isaiah’s hope has come to pass.
Advent is also about the future arrival of Christ, who will return to complete the work that he began: to heal what is broken, to bring goodwill to humankind and on earth, peace. This is also the hope of Advent.
In Mark’s Gospel Jesus tells his disciples about the time to come when he will come in clouds with great power and glory. He tells them to wait with a watchful eye, like a doorkeeper watching in the night for the master of the house to return. In worship, when we proclaim that “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again,” we become those who are watching for God in the night.
Advent is a time when we look backwards and forward. Looking back, we proclaim that Jesus Christ has already come to reconcile the world to God. All is forgiven; grace has been granted; and evil is conquered. And yet…still, all is not yet right in the world. Christ has not yet made a new heaven and a new earth, has not wiped away every tear, has not brought peace to all the world. We live between the words “already” and “not yet.” We live in the middle of the story, but even in the middle, we know how it ends, and what a difference that makes. Imagine earlier times in your own lives that you would have lived much differently if you had known how uncertainty would be resolved. Imagine the confidence you would have brought to a time of fear or anxiety. For us, knowing the end of the story is what it means to have faith in the second coming of Christ.
It means that when we read the news reports from Mumbai, India of the innocent lives lost, or the reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, where soldiers and civilians are injured and killed, we trust that bombs and bullets will not have the last word. It means that when we hear the stories of neighbors having to choose between paying the heat bill and buying groceries, we trust that want and hunger will not have the last word. It means that tomorrow, on World AIDS day, when we remember the devastation caused by this disease in every corner of the world, we trust that illness will not have the last word. The second coming means that God will have the last word. We light candles and trust that the advent of Christ will set all things right in the end. And just as the birth of Christ in the past can shape our lives in the present, so the future coming of Christ also shapes our lives here and now.
To understand this frame of mind, it’s helpful to turn to our storytellers. One modern story of hope is told in the movie The Shawshank Redemption, set in Shawshank Prison. It is the story of men who have done terrible things which cannot be denied, but it is also the story of how the cruelty and despair of prison life slowly diminishes their souls. In one scene, a prisoner finds himself alone in an administrative office, reviewing books and records that have come for the prison library. He picks up a recording of one of Mozart’s operas and places it on the turntable. Then he realizes that the microphone for the prison’s speakers sits on the desk next to him. He locks the door and for several minutes broadcasts the music, a duet, to the entire prison. Every man stands still, in the prison yard of dirt and rocks, in the woodshop and laundry rooms where they labor, every man stares silently at the loudspeakers. One prisoner says later: “I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about…. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.” That’s what it means to know that the present moment is not the last word. We get glimpses of it, and it changes the shape of our lives.
But first there are some warnings we need to pay attention to, like the warnings you might read in the directions of some power tool. These are things that can do great work, but using their power carelessly, or in the wrong way, can do great harm.
The first warning is that the second coming is not for us to speculate about or make predictions. I think that one of the reasons why we in the mainline Protestant and Catholic churches don’t talk very often about the second coming of Christ is that there’s not much to tell in terms of specifics. There have been lots of people who think they know just how it will happen and event the date, but in century after century they have always been wrong, and the more they speculate, the more ridiculous the whole thing seems. Jesus said “about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the son, but only the father.” Speculation and the prediction are dead ends. It’s got to be more than that.
The second warning is this: we can never assume that our own politics or agenda will be served by the second coming. This is not the time when all our enemies get what’s coming to them. This is the other problem with the predictors: it just happens that their enemies turn out to be the enemies of Christ. For years it was Russia who would be defeated by a triumphant returning Christ. Then it was Baghdad, the site of ancient Babylon and our newest enemy, and now it may be Iran. For those who didn’t like the United Nations, they predicted an anti-Christ there, and even in this country, political rivals are named the enemy of Christ in anonymous writings. All of this makes the mistake of thinking that when Christ comes back he will be different than he was before – as if he will make the world right by destroying his enemies. This kind of vengeance is totally at odds with the character of God, revealed to us in Jesus, who offered healing not only to the poor and powerless of Israel, but to Roman soldiers who occupied their land. He offered forgiveness not only to repentant sinners, but to the ones who crucified him. When Jesus comes to make all things new, he won’t do it by destroying evil but by transforming it, and reconciling all of creation to God. Any vision of the second coming which imagines that God would cause violence and suffering to increase goes against the life of Jesus Christ.
A third warning: Do not wait for God to do everything for us. When we read the New Testament, remember that these people expected Jesus to return within their lifetimes. And so Paul is writing to some of them who have decided that it doesn’t make much sense to plant crops, tend animals, or do maintenance on their homes. It’s not going to last anyway. Paul tells them to get back to the sacred work of caring for one another. Christ came and showed us how to live, told us to love other as he loves us. Showed us that peace can stand up to violence, love can conquer fear, and grace can transform hatred. It isn’t complete yet, but it has been started. Jesus said the kingdom of God is among you, so instead of waiting for God to make everything new in the end, we can work in our corner of the world to make it new right now.
Advent calls us to do just that. In our national news we’ve been following this strange time between the election and the inauguration of our new president, a time every four or eight years when the President-Elect has to wait until inauguration, but in the waiting there is much great work to be done. There’s always a transition team bringing great skill and creativity to their work. This is our image for Advent. We know what’s going to happen but it hasn’t happened yet, and we are God’s transition team. We can’t solve every problem or cure every ill. But we can solve this problem. We can cure this ill. We can give a bit more of ourselves, of our resources, our time, our love and attention to someone else. And how freeing it is to know it finally doesn’t depend on us alone, because God’s going to have the last word. We trust in the second coming not with specific predictions but with our faith put into action.
In this season of Advent, I invite you to do more than preparing for the celebration of Christmas with presents and treats and decorations. Those things are wonderful expressions of our joy, and they make this a magical time of year, but I invite you to let them be just the beginning of our preparation. Let us prepare for the coming of Christ by finding ways to create the kind of world that God will bring to completion.
You might suggest to certain people that instead of exchanging gifts, you might make donations in each other’s names, like a check to the Akron-Canton Foodbank or to the United Church of Christ Neighbors in Need fund.
You might send a card or even a dinner invitation to that person you are finally ready to forgive, because not forgiving is causing you too much hurt.
You might simply create a time of quiet this week at dinner to light one candle for hope, and two candles the next week, then three and four. Light candles and pray for God to heal this world. Light candles as a way to keep watch in the night.
Jesus tells his disciples to “keep awake,” and that is the word for the season of Advent. We wait in a night that often seems dark and cold, and we watch for God to come into the world and into our lives with a new movement of God’s soul healing grace and world changing love. It will be so, it will be so. Amen
Let us pray:
O God, you came to us a baby lying in a manger, and you dwell among us still. By faith, we trust that you will come again to make all things new. So call us to live in the holy present, help us to respond in these sacred moments to those small broken places where we can share your healing grace. Amen
Isaiah 64:1-9 Mark 13:24-37
Dedicated to Betsy on the weekend of our anniversary; and always to the glory of God.
Today I’m going to preach about the second coming of Christ. This may not be a subject you have spent much time thinking about, or that you expected to hear about this morning. Or, it may be something you have thought about a great deal. My fear is that it is a part of our Christian faith that has been confused by those who talk about it with wild predictions and fearful words, but we’ll get to that.
Let us pray: God of light in the darkness, illuminate the eyes of our hearts, that we may receive your word of hope, of faith, and of love. Amen.
This is the first Sunday in the season of Advent, which is a word that means “arrival” or “coming.” In this season, we prepare to celebrate the arrival of Jesus Christ, born to Mary in Bethlehem so many years ago. It is a story from the past that shapes us in the present: the first coming of Christ.
Isaiah gave voice to those who waited for a messiah, waited for God to tear open the heavens and come down. We know that it happened. God did tear open the heavens and came to us, only not exactly how Isaiah had thought that God would come, with power and might on display. Instead God came as a baby, who would live and grow as one of us, sharing our common lot; knowing what our lives are like, so that he may show us what our lives could be. Isaiah’s hope has come to pass.
Advent is also about the future arrival of Christ, who will return to complete the work that he began: to heal what is broken, to bring goodwill to humankind and on earth, peace. This is also the hope of Advent.
In Mark’s Gospel Jesus tells his disciples about the time to come when he will come in clouds with great power and glory. He tells them to wait with a watchful eye, like a doorkeeper watching in the night for the master of the house to return. In worship, when we proclaim that “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again,” we become those who are watching for God in the night.
Advent is a time when we look backwards and forward. Looking back, we proclaim that Jesus Christ has already come to reconcile the world to God. All is forgiven; grace has been granted; and evil is conquered. And yet…still, all is not yet right in the world. Christ has not yet made a new heaven and a new earth, has not wiped away every tear, has not brought peace to all the world. We live between the words “already” and “not yet.” We live in the middle of the story, but even in the middle, we know how it ends, and what a difference that makes. Imagine earlier times in your own lives that you would have lived much differently if you had known how uncertainty would be resolved. Imagine the confidence you would have brought to a time of fear or anxiety. For us, knowing the end of the story is what it means to have faith in the second coming of Christ.
It means that when we read the news reports from Mumbai, India of the innocent lives lost, or the reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, where soldiers and civilians are injured and killed, we trust that bombs and bullets will not have the last word. It means that when we hear the stories of neighbors having to choose between paying the heat bill and buying groceries, we trust that want and hunger will not have the last word. It means that tomorrow, on World AIDS day, when we remember the devastation caused by this disease in every corner of the world, we trust that illness will not have the last word. The second coming means that God will have the last word. We light candles and trust that the advent of Christ will set all things right in the end. And just as the birth of Christ in the past can shape our lives in the present, so the future coming of Christ also shapes our lives here and now.
To understand this frame of mind, it’s helpful to turn to our storytellers. One modern story of hope is told in the movie The Shawshank Redemption, set in Shawshank Prison. It is the story of men who have done terrible things which cannot be denied, but it is also the story of how the cruelty and despair of prison life slowly diminishes their souls. In one scene, a prisoner finds himself alone in an administrative office, reviewing books and records that have come for the prison library. He picks up a recording of one of Mozart’s operas and places it on the turntable. Then he realizes that the microphone for the prison’s speakers sits on the desk next to him. He locks the door and for several minutes broadcasts the music, a duet, to the entire prison. Every man stands still, in the prison yard of dirt and rocks, in the woodshop and laundry rooms where they labor, every man stares silently at the loudspeakers. One prisoner says later: “I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about…. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.” That’s what it means to know that the present moment is not the last word. We get glimpses of it, and it changes the shape of our lives.
But first there are some warnings we need to pay attention to, like the warnings you might read in the directions of some power tool. These are things that can do great work, but using their power carelessly, or in the wrong way, can do great harm.
The first warning is that the second coming is not for us to speculate about or make predictions. I think that one of the reasons why we in the mainline Protestant and Catholic churches don’t talk very often about the second coming of Christ is that there’s not much to tell in terms of specifics. There have been lots of people who think they know just how it will happen and event the date, but in century after century they have always been wrong, and the more they speculate, the more ridiculous the whole thing seems. Jesus said “about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the son, but only the father.” Speculation and the prediction are dead ends. It’s got to be more than that.
The second warning is this: we can never assume that our own politics or agenda will be served by the second coming. This is not the time when all our enemies get what’s coming to them. This is the other problem with the predictors: it just happens that their enemies turn out to be the enemies of Christ. For years it was Russia who would be defeated by a triumphant returning Christ. Then it was Baghdad, the site of ancient Babylon and our newest enemy, and now it may be Iran. For those who didn’t like the United Nations, they predicted an anti-Christ there, and even in this country, political rivals are named the enemy of Christ in anonymous writings. All of this makes the mistake of thinking that when Christ comes back he will be different than he was before – as if he will make the world right by destroying his enemies. This kind of vengeance is totally at odds with the character of God, revealed to us in Jesus, who offered healing not only to the poor and powerless of Israel, but to Roman soldiers who occupied their land. He offered forgiveness not only to repentant sinners, but to the ones who crucified him. When Jesus comes to make all things new, he won’t do it by destroying evil but by transforming it, and reconciling all of creation to God. Any vision of the second coming which imagines that God would cause violence and suffering to increase goes against the life of Jesus Christ.
A third warning: Do not wait for God to do everything for us. When we read the New Testament, remember that these people expected Jesus to return within their lifetimes. And so Paul is writing to some of them who have decided that it doesn’t make much sense to plant crops, tend animals, or do maintenance on their homes. It’s not going to last anyway. Paul tells them to get back to the sacred work of caring for one another. Christ came and showed us how to live, told us to love other as he loves us. Showed us that peace can stand up to violence, love can conquer fear, and grace can transform hatred. It isn’t complete yet, but it has been started. Jesus said the kingdom of God is among you, so instead of waiting for God to make everything new in the end, we can work in our corner of the world to make it new right now.
Advent calls us to do just that. In our national news we’ve been following this strange time between the election and the inauguration of our new president, a time every four or eight years when the President-Elect has to wait until inauguration, but in the waiting there is much great work to be done. There’s always a transition team bringing great skill and creativity to their work. This is our image for Advent. We know what’s going to happen but it hasn’t happened yet, and we are God’s transition team. We can’t solve every problem or cure every ill. But we can solve this problem. We can cure this ill. We can give a bit more of ourselves, of our resources, our time, our love and attention to someone else. And how freeing it is to know it finally doesn’t depend on us alone, because God’s going to have the last word. We trust in the second coming not with specific predictions but with our faith put into action.
In this season of Advent, I invite you to do more than preparing for the celebration of Christmas with presents and treats and decorations. Those things are wonderful expressions of our joy, and they make this a magical time of year, but I invite you to let them be just the beginning of our preparation. Let us prepare for the coming of Christ by finding ways to create the kind of world that God will bring to completion.
You might suggest to certain people that instead of exchanging gifts, you might make donations in each other’s names, like a check to the Akron-Canton Foodbank or to the United Church of Christ Neighbors in Need fund.
You might send a card or even a dinner invitation to that person you are finally ready to forgive, because not forgiving is causing you too much hurt.
You might simply create a time of quiet this week at dinner to light one candle for hope, and two candles the next week, then three and four. Light candles and pray for God to heal this world. Light candles as a way to keep watch in the night.
Jesus tells his disciples to “keep awake,” and that is the word for the season of Advent. We wait in a night that often seems dark and cold, and we watch for God to come into the world and into our lives with a new movement of God’s soul healing grace and world changing love. It will be so, it will be so. Amen
Let us pray:
O God, you came to us a baby lying in a manger, and you dwell among us still. By faith, we trust that you will come again to make all things new. So call us to live in the holy present, help us to respond in these sacred moments to those small broken places where we can share your healing grace. Amen
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Sermon - Mixed Blessings
First preached on November 2, 2008, All Saints' Day, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio UCC.
Matthew 5:1-12
Dedicated to my Uncle Michael; and always to the glory of God.
Jesus begins his sermon on the mount by telling us the surprising news of the people who really have it great. They are blessed, he says – which translates better as “happy!” They are blessed and happy. The latin prase is Beatitude, and so that’s what we’ve come to name this magnificent section of the gospel: the beatitudes.
A minister I know once went to the bedside of an elderly woman, who was dying – they both knew it. He asked if there was anything he could do for her, and she said, “why don’t you take that Bible there and read the Beatitudes. My mother used to read those to us all the time. I didn’t understand them as a child, still wrestle with them today.”
And so he read those words, just as we heard them read this morning. Afterward there was silence, and then she said to him “I don’t know. Kind of sounds like a mixed blessing.” She was right.[1]
The problem is that the ones Jesus calls blessed do not look much like the people we would generally consider blessed – assuming, that is, that being blessed has something to do with being well off, comfortable, entertained, and healthy. That’s what we usually mean by the words blessed and happy. So what do we do with what Jesus says, that you are blessed if you are poor in spirit, mournful, meek, and persecuted? Even the nice sounding ones are a good bit of work: to be merciful, peacemakers, pure of heart, or to hunger for righteousness.
It’s not the kind of list we are used to, but then isn’t that why we are here – shift our perspective, to change our paradigm, to realign our direction. After Jesus is baptized, the first words out of his mouth are “repent, the kingdom of God is near.” Repent – it means turn around, go in a new direction. And the reason we turn around, the reason we trade in our old list of blessings for a new one is because the kingdom of God is near, and we can enter it right now. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Listen to how Eugene Peterson translates that teaching:
“You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God.” Sometimes it takes the failure of our old blessing system before we are ready to live in the kingdom of God.
Dick Howser was a baseball player in the major leagues and went on to manage the Royals and the Yankees. His wife Nancy used to say “it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” I remember learning that myself as a child, don’t you? And Dick would say to her, “that’s very nice, but in the real world, you’ve got to win.”
Then he got two brain tumors, and had to resign from baseball, and life wasn’t so certain anymore. Looking back, he saw that the real world had taught him “blessed are those who believe in themselves for theirs is the kingdom of success.” But two tumors taught him that “the gospel of self-sufficiency needs to move over and give room to divine dependence.”[2]
What would be our wake-up call to tell us that the blessing system designed for the kingdom of success isn’t working and isn’t worth it? What is the wake-up call? That might come in different ways for each of us, but on this day, I want to suggest that it will come from listening to our ancestors, the saints who have gone before us.
The finality of death and the memory of our ancestors has a way of re-ordering our priorities in a wonderful way, and that is partly the reason why we take this day to remember our saints, and this is partly their gift to us.
One of the great privileges in my ministry is to be with families when someone has died. We gather in a room and we make arrangements for the memorial service, and then I get to hear the family stories. I want to tell you that the most treasured memories, the gifts that mean the most, are not their successes and achievements, awards or titles, proud as we may be of those honors. The most important stories have to do with the blessings in the Beatitudes. We tell stories of challenges faced and faith deepened, of mourning in sadness and finding comfort and strength, of making peace in the face of conflict and strife, and of being pure of heart when surrounded by corruption, by jealousy, by greed. In the last accounting of a life, those are the stories we tell, the lessons we take, the gifts that we receive.
So why then, do we get stuck in this thinking that what life is really about is keeping everything smooth, secure, and fun? We want to make ourselves invulnerable to heartache, sadness, and pain, and the longer we can walk that tightrope, the more we consider ourselves blessed. We make the pain-free, struggle-free life our goal. Even worse, we make it our responsibility, so much so that when something does inevitably go wrong, we actually blame ourselves.
And yet, when we remember our saints, when we think about their lives, we realize that we often saw their best when they faced challenges: when they were poor in spirit, mourning, even persecuted – when they had said and done things for which they needed mercy. It was in those times that they found the blessings of God: when they received comfort, when they received mercy, when they found the kingdom of God that cannot be taken away by our pain, our mistakes, our failures, or our grief.
The beatitudes remind us that God does not promise to take away sadness or pain or even death, not in this life. In this life, hardship comes to everyone. The kingdom of God does not mean a short cut to easy street. What it means is that even when we face the tough times that are a part of every life, our suffering does not define who we are. We will not be remembered by the number of nights we went to bed with full stomachs, the worth of our home or the size of our bank accounts. We will be remembered, rather, by the number of nights we went to bed with a peaceful soul, the worth of our mercy, and the size of our love.
Funny how often we lose sight of all that. Funny how quickly we fall back into thinking that being blessed and happy is about being well off, comfortable, entertained and healthy. And I’m not saying that there’s something wrong with any of that. We should take care of our bodies and our homes; we’d be irresponsible not to. But if we get really good at taking care of ourselves, then we need a word of warning that we are in danger of thinking that we are not dependent on God but only ourselves.
On All Saints’ Day, let their lives be that warning, that reminder, that wake-up call to us, that we might seek a different set of blessings. The path to the beatitudes begins when we join with the poor in spirit to remember that even we who like to declare our independence really need to make a declaration of dependence on God. “You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God.” More of God is no mixed blessing. It is what we’ve been longing for all along.
[1] Dr. Richard Wing, from his sermon titled “The Fifty-first State”
[2] Quoted by Dr. Richard Wing, in his sermon titled “The Fifty-first State”
Matthew 5:1-12
Dedicated to my Uncle Michael; and always to the glory of God.
Jesus begins his sermon on the mount by telling us the surprising news of the people who really have it great. They are blessed, he says – which translates better as “happy!” They are blessed and happy. The latin prase is Beatitude, and so that’s what we’ve come to name this magnificent section of the gospel: the beatitudes.
A minister I know once went to the bedside of an elderly woman, who was dying – they both knew it. He asked if there was anything he could do for her, and she said, “why don’t you take that Bible there and read the Beatitudes. My mother used to read those to us all the time. I didn’t understand them as a child, still wrestle with them today.”
And so he read those words, just as we heard them read this morning. Afterward there was silence, and then she said to him “I don’t know. Kind of sounds like a mixed blessing.” She was right.[1]
The problem is that the ones Jesus calls blessed do not look much like the people we would generally consider blessed – assuming, that is, that being blessed has something to do with being well off, comfortable, entertained, and healthy. That’s what we usually mean by the words blessed and happy. So what do we do with what Jesus says, that you are blessed if you are poor in spirit, mournful, meek, and persecuted? Even the nice sounding ones are a good bit of work: to be merciful, peacemakers, pure of heart, or to hunger for righteousness.
It’s not the kind of list we are used to, but then isn’t that why we are here – shift our perspective, to change our paradigm, to realign our direction. After Jesus is baptized, the first words out of his mouth are “repent, the kingdom of God is near.” Repent – it means turn around, go in a new direction. And the reason we turn around, the reason we trade in our old list of blessings for a new one is because the kingdom of God is near, and we can enter it right now. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Listen to how Eugene Peterson translates that teaching:
“You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God.” Sometimes it takes the failure of our old blessing system before we are ready to live in the kingdom of God.
Dick Howser was a baseball player in the major leagues and went on to manage the Royals and the Yankees. His wife Nancy used to say “it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” I remember learning that myself as a child, don’t you? And Dick would say to her, “that’s very nice, but in the real world, you’ve got to win.”
Then he got two brain tumors, and had to resign from baseball, and life wasn’t so certain anymore. Looking back, he saw that the real world had taught him “blessed are those who believe in themselves for theirs is the kingdom of success.” But two tumors taught him that “the gospel of self-sufficiency needs to move over and give room to divine dependence.”[2]
What would be our wake-up call to tell us that the blessing system designed for the kingdom of success isn’t working and isn’t worth it? What is the wake-up call? That might come in different ways for each of us, but on this day, I want to suggest that it will come from listening to our ancestors, the saints who have gone before us.
The finality of death and the memory of our ancestors has a way of re-ordering our priorities in a wonderful way, and that is partly the reason why we take this day to remember our saints, and this is partly their gift to us.
One of the great privileges in my ministry is to be with families when someone has died. We gather in a room and we make arrangements for the memorial service, and then I get to hear the family stories. I want to tell you that the most treasured memories, the gifts that mean the most, are not their successes and achievements, awards or titles, proud as we may be of those honors. The most important stories have to do with the blessings in the Beatitudes. We tell stories of challenges faced and faith deepened, of mourning in sadness and finding comfort and strength, of making peace in the face of conflict and strife, and of being pure of heart when surrounded by corruption, by jealousy, by greed. In the last accounting of a life, those are the stories we tell, the lessons we take, the gifts that we receive.
So why then, do we get stuck in this thinking that what life is really about is keeping everything smooth, secure, and fun? We want to make ourselves invulnerable to heartache, sadness, and pain, and the longer we can walk that tightrope, the more we consider ourselves blessed. We make the pain-free, struggle-free life our goal. Even worse, we make it our responsibility, so much so that when something does inevitably go wrong, we actually blame ourselves.
And yet, when we remember our saints, when we think about their lives, we realize that we often saw their best when they faced challenges: when they were poor in spirit, mourning, even persecuted – when they had said and done things for which they needed mercy. It was in those times that they found the blessings of God: when they received comfort, when they received mercy, when they found the kingdom of God that cannot be taken away by our pain, our mistakes, our failures, or our grief.
The beatitudes remind us that God does not promise to take away sadness or pain or even death, not in this life. In this life, hardship comes to everyone. The kingdom of God does not mean a short cut to easy street. What it means is that even when we face the tough times that are a part of every life, our suffering does not define who we are. We will not be remembered by the number of nights we went to bed with full stomachs, the worth of our home or the size of our bank accounts. We will be remembered, rather, by the number of nights we went to bed with a peaceful soul, the worth of our mercy, and the size of our love.
Funny how often we lose sight of all that. Funny how quickly we fall back into thinking that being blessed and happy is about being well off, comfortable, entertained and healthy. And I’m not saying that there’s something wrong with any of that. We should take care of our bodies and our homes; we’d be irresponsible not to. But if we get really good at taking care of ourselves, then we need a word of warning that we are in danger of thinking that we are not dependent on God but only ourselves.
On All Saints’ Day, let their lives be that warning, that reminder, that wake-up call to us, that we might seek a different set of blessings. The path to the beatitudes begins when we join with the poor in spirit to remember that even we who like to declare our independence really need to make a declaration of dependence on God. “You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God.” More of God is no mixed blessing. It is what we’ve been longing for all along.
[1] Dr. Richard Wing, from his sermon titled “The Fifty-first State”
[2] Quoted by Dr. Richard Wing, in his sermon titled “The Fifty-first State”
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