South Bay Christian Church

New Website & Sermon Blog

2007-03-12T16:51:00.000-07:00

The sermons for South Bay Christian Church will now be posted at the new church website. Go to www.southbaychristianchurch.org, and follow the link that reads Sermons. This site will remain online as an archive. Thanks!

Sunday, February 25: 1st Sunday of Lent

2007-02-25T22:32:00.000-08:00

Luke 4:1-13

Last Tuesday night the folks who signed up for the Lenten Study gathered for our first meeting, an orientation to the bible study program we’ll be following throughout the weeks of Lent. Only Tuesday night technically wasn’t Lent yet, but the night when cities like New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro go wild with Marti Gras celebrations. In the spirit of carnival, I stopped at a bakery on the way to church to pick out a slightly-lopsided yet very delicious chocolate cake. Since a message in frosting came with the cost of the cake, I had the baker write “SBCC” across the top. At church, I joked with the bible study group that I’d considered having her write “Happy Lent,” but wasn’t sure how it would go over. Steve Cornwell commented that “Happy Lent” is an oxymoron, given that the 40 days before Easter are traditionally a time of penitence. I fired back some comment about how heartfelt penitence brings a joy deeper than happiness, and Steve jokingly accused me of sounding like SUCH a pastor. And that is how the title of this week’s message for the first Sunday of Lent came to be The “Joy” of Lent.

On the surface, Lent seems as far from joy as can be. There was a movie a few years ago called Chocolat that sharply lampooned dour, self-righteous expressions of Lenten piety. A woman moves into a small French village and opens a chocolate shop. This would seem harmless, but she is a stranger in a tight-knit community, and the grand opening of her confectionary coincided with Ash Wednesday. The village moralist is completely offended by her den of temptation, and tries everything in his power to stop the villagers from giving in to their chocolate cravings. To him, the greatest virtue is self-denial and the worst sin is pleasure.

I don’t think that’s what Lent is about. Yes, many folks give up chocolate for these forty days, but there is a deeper meaning to our discipline. Let’s turn to the scripture that is set forth as a framework, a guide for this season.

Today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke finds Jesus returning from the Jordan River. He has just been baptized by John. In his baptism these words descended from the heavens: “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.”

He is full of the Holy Spirit, which I think is to say that the fibers of his being are woven so tightly with the fibers of God’s being that you couldn’t tell the one from the other. He is as holy as he is human, and the time has come for him to get started on his divine mission. He is thirty years old, still young enough to be suspect in the eyes of his elders. If you didn’t know the story by heart, you might think that after such an exhilarating baptismal experience, Jesus might walk straight out of the water and begin the work of preaching and healing and teaching before his hair even dries. Instead, the Spirit that’s gotten under his skin and into his bloodstream shoves him into the wilderness, for forty days of solitude, with no one but the devil to keep him company. It’s a text about temptation, yes, but it’s more than that.
Frederick Buechner writes that Jesus goes into the desert to figure out “what it meant to be Jesus.”

The adversary he meets in the wilderness offers up one fine illusion after another. In the midst of profound hunger, Jesus is dared to use his God-given power to transform stones into bread. It would have been a fancy magic trick, one completely within the realm of Jesus’ power, but he refuses to play the trick. He decides that being the Son of God means that he has to trust the One who created him. He decides that he would not substitute the bread of magic for the bread of life. Even as he is still racked with pangs of hunger, the devil tried another tack. Maybe it would be power that would cause the Son of God to crumble. All Jesus had to do was worship the corrupt spirit, and he would have what so many have thirsted for: the glory and fame of absolute power.

Jesus again resists, and we who know the whole story can smirk here, for we can follow this foreshadowing to the time when Jesus will reign in heaven over all the kingdoms of the world, only in God’s way and in God’s time.

Then there’s the third temptation, the one that on first glance is the least tempting. Bread, yes. Power, yes. But what’s so alluring about tossing oneself from the edge of a building? And yet, what a building it is. The devil, whose name in the original Greek means to “stir things up,” knows just what pot he’s stirring when he plants Jesus on the pinnacle of the temple. That’s the place where the tests of the devil will pale in comparison to the tests of humankind. That’s the place where Jesus will be rejected, where his ministry will collapse into a wall of fear, of distrust, of retribution.

It is the place where his dreadful walk to Calvary will begin, and here, buoyed by the promise written in the very scriptures Jesus honored, he could step into the arms of waiting angels and avoid all that suffering. But he knows the escape hatch is mere illusion, and passes his final test.

So what does that have to do with us, with our journey through these forty days of Lent? Why, as followers of Christ, must we follow him through the treacherous desert? Just as the desert was the place Jesus went to figure out what it meant to be Jesus, we must go through the same process to figure out what it means to be followers of Jesus—what it means to be human. Confronting the temptations is ultimately about honesty, about facing who we are and who God is.

Barbara Brown Taylor likens Lent to a sort of Outward Bound for the soul. Folks who go on Outward Bound excursions willingly follow wilderness guides into dangerous situations. They climb mountains and hike long distances.
After a few weeks of training they are left alone, for one full revolution of the earth. It’s out there in those desolate twenty four hours that people learn what they’re really hooked on, what comforts and security blankets they can hardly bear to live without. Taylor writes that “without those things they are suddenly exposed, like someone addicted to painkillers whose prescription has just run out. It is hard. It is awful. It is necessary, to encounter the world without anesthesia, to find out what life is like with no comfort but God. I am convinced,” she writes, “That 99 percent of us are addicted to something, whether it is eating, shopping, blaming, or taking care of other people. The simplest definition of an addiction is anything we use to fill the empty place inside of us that belongs to God alone.” And then Reverend Taylor pulls out all the stops with one of those lines that earned her a slot in the list of the best living preachers. She writes, “The hollowness we sometimes feel is not a sign of something gone wrong. It is the holy of holies inside of us, the uncluttered throne room of the Lord our God.”

Lent is spring cleaning. It’s recognizing that we may have let the holy of holies get cluttered with junk. It’s looking in the mirror and seeing that we’ve filled up that God-shaped space with our need to be safe, or liked, or comfortable. And it’s an invitation to begin the work of recovery, to be weaned from the pale substitutes we prop up on the throne set aside for the Lord.

No one claims that Jesus was having a good time in the wilderness. The work of resisting temptation was difficult, and the devil makes for terrible company. Yet the bread he tasted after the forty day fast was that much sweeter because it had not been baked from stones.

Lent is not about refusing the pleasures of being human; if anything, it is about become more fully human. In Lent, Jesus leads us to the bread that will truly nourish us, the Kingdom that will truly harbor us, and the arms that will truly save us. It’s a harder-won joy, but may the joy of Lent be yours.

Sunday, February 18: Practicing Compassion

2007-02-25T22:29:00.000-08:00

Matthew 25: 31-46

There’s a trend in the Christian book market to publish books about how the gospel stories are revealed through various pop culture figures. If Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John don’t cut it for you, you can also read about the gospel according to Oprah, Harry Potter, or the Simpsons. And then there’s the Gospel according to Charles Shultz, the creator of Peanuts. Shultz was a deeply religious person, and he wove profound questions of faith into the simple stories of Charlie, Snoopy, and Peppermint Patty. In one comic strip, Snoopy is shown shivering in the doorway of his dog house, freezing in a snowstorm. It’s clearly Christmas, from the lights and decorations stapled to his roof. Charlie and Lucy pass by, shielded from the cold with warm coats and scarves. A cartoon bubble floats above Charlie’s head, filled with the words, “Be of good cheer, Snoopy.” Lucy repeats the same as they walk on by into the warmth of the house. The only thing that fills Snoopy’s cartoon bubble is more chattering of teeth. Charlie and Lucy meant well with their warm winter greeting—but what Snoopy needed more was a warm winter blanket. It’s a subtle jab – how easy it is to speak the words of compassion while failing to act compassionately.

Our gospel text for today is a difficult one. The images of Christ painted in this scripture are challenging—they seem to stretch our imaginations in opposite directions. There is Christ the mighty judge, who inspires fear in the hearts of the sheep and goats whose fates are determined by his holy rule. And then there is Christ as the one who is hungry, thirsty, alien, sick, imprisoned. Yet this Jesus who sits on a throne even as he inhabits the ghettos proclaims a message of justice and mercy. With a bit less subtlety than the cartoonist, the gospel of Matthew teaches the same lesson about the presence and absence of compassion.

I didn’t expect to work on my sermon while we were away, but the Holy Spirit sometimes has other ideas. One of the museums we toured while in Switzerland was the International Red Cross Museum. Situated in Geneva across from the headquarters of the United Nations and down the street from the World Council of Churches, the Red Cross museum communicates the history and purpose of the organization. Originally founded to provide medical care to wounded soldiers—regardless of nationality—the Red Cross has responded to natural and manmade disasters every year since its founding. But the first thing you see when you enter the exhibit is a dramatic presentation of holy scriptures from different religious traditions that inform the organization’s mission. Wisdom from Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, and Christian holy scriptures each echo the same sacred responsibility to offer compassion to the stranger. The text chosen from the New Testament was none other than today’s passage from Matthew 25.

The matters of compassion and its sister, justice, are certainly one of the most universal of religious practices. And they are also some of the most common matters in the Holy Bible. Poverty and oppression—and our responses to them— are a big deal to God. Some biblical scholars have noted that only the issue of idolatry receives more attention in the Old Testament.

Rev. Jim Wallis tells a story about this. He and his friends did an experiment while they were in seminary. They found and documented every single biblical reference to the poor, to God’s love for the poor, to images of God as a deliverer of the oppressed. I don’t know how they had time for all this between classes and internships, but Rev. Wallis and his friends collected thousands of verses that related to poverty and oppression. They even did some mathematical equations to demonstrate their point. They found that one of every sixteen verses of the New Testament related to the poor. In the Gospel of Luke, the ratio reached one of every seven. You might have guessed that the reason the seminarians started this experiment is that they didn’t think that their wealthy American churches were taking God’s concern for the poor seriously enough. They wanted to challenge fellow Christians to realize the omission. It wasn’t long before one of the students decided to illustrate their point in a shocking way. Seminarians do tend to be pretty good at being shocking. The student took an old, beat-up copy of the Holy Bible and took a pair of scissors to it. He painstakingly snipped out every last verse on their list. Rev. Wallis recalls that “when he was through, the Bible was very different, because when he came to Amos and read the words, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” he just cut it out. When he got to Isaiah and heard the prophet say, “Is this not the fast that I choose: to bring the homeless poor into your home, to break the yoke and let the oppressed go free?” he just cut it right out. All those psalms that see God as a deliverer of the oppressed, they disappeared. In the gospels, he came to Mary’s wonderful song where she says, “The might will be put down from their thrones, the lowly exalted, the poor filled with good things and the rich sent away empty.” Matthew 25, gone. The beatitudes, gone. The Holy Bible was so filled with holes that it almost completely fell apart. The seminarians believed it was the gospel according to America, because those scriptures were the ones their churches were ignoring.

We are rooted in a very different tradition than Jim Wallis. He was brought up in the old fundamentalist church, which has focused heavily on personal salvation yet all but ignored gospel message of social justice. Many Disciples of Christ congregations have long been committed to participating in ministries of justice. Our history isn’t perfect, and our spiritual ancestors may have been goats as often as they were sheep. But our heritage includes Christians who challenged child labor, denounced slavery, and advocated for civil rights. These merciful actions, and so many more that don’t make the history books, are a faithful response to the gospel of grace. Just as Jesus was moved by compassion to heal the sick and befriend the outsiders, Christian men and women have healed and befriended Christ himself by responding to the cries of the needy.

I don’t think any other biblical text captures the miracle and mystery of the incarnation any more powerfully than the parable of the sheep and goats. We who welcomed Christ into this world as a wailing infant encounter him again and again in the faces of those who suffer. He turns up where we least expect him. The sheep aren’t rewarded for extending compassion toward the pretty and the powerful. It’s the ones who are in the margins of society, who can’t return favors. It’s the ones who may or may not have showered recently, who may or may not have good table manners, who may or may not have deserved the life sentence that has them locked up in prison. They are the ones in whom Jesus becomes most fully incarnate, and it is through serving the least that we are most able to be close to the one we call Lord and Savior.

Part of being in foreign countries was the constant struggle to translate what we were seeing and hearing. Usually it was a matter of language. We had to consult our travel books every time we ordered a sandwich or navigated a new place. But some of the translation was different. There was the time we walked into one of the gorgeous old Reformation churches to find a meal going on. Folks milling about, helping themselves to warmth and coffee and conversation. As we walked away, we translated: That’s like the Wednesday night meal at Shared Bread. That’s like when we serve breakfast every Sunday to whoever comes hungry. There was a lot of translation to do in the Red Cross museum. Learning about the compassionate work of that organization, I couldn’t help but think: that’s like how Week of Compassion funds have helped build a children’s ward in a hospital in Baghdad. That’s like how our donations and representatives have helped restore clean drinking water to the areas affected by the 2004 Tsunami. And that’s like how Week of Compassion is working with Church World Service to provide humanitarian care to the 2 million Sudanese refugees.

And the most challenging translation of all is that each one of those poor, hungry, wounded, and oppressed is like Christ, quietly hoping and praying that the gospel has transformed our hearts into gardens of compassion.

It is easy to talk, hard to act. There is so much in this world that can break our hearts that we might be tempted to avert our eyes from the pain. But in doing so, we avert our eyes from the cross. We deny the incarnation. We deny Jesus as surely as Peter denied him the night of his betrayal. Few scriptures are as damning as the parable of the sheep and goats. It has all the judgment but none of the triumphant vindication that makes the book of Revelation such a popular stop for apocalyptic enthusiasm. But we are not called to the life of Discipleship to figuratively—or literally—cut unpleasant scriptures from the canon.

None of us can respond to every need. But we can grow in our practice of compassion, as individuals and as the church. We can reflect God’s love for our families and communities by shaping our words and deeds according to the gospel. And we can reflect God’s love for this world by joining our gifts with many others to empower missionaries and relief organizations to reach the needs of those beyond our own reach. Through the practice of compassion, we can translate our blessings into blessings for all the world. May it be so. Amen.

Sunday, February 4th: Practicing Evangelism

2007-02-25T22:27:00.000-08:00

Matthew 28:16-20

I love music. There is no question that music is one of the things that gives me deep joy. I rarely go a full day without listening to music. I have a favorite band in particular. They are called Over the Rhine, named after a neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio. I love to tell the story of when I first discovered them—I was killing time in between classes at Kent State, spending some time in the student bookstore. Their most recent CD was set up at a listening booth, and I picked up the headphones at random. I listened to the first ten bars of the first song, and as the hair on the back of my neck stood up, I knew in an instant that I had discovered what would be my most favorite band for the rest of my life. I bought the CD—it wasn't even on sale, and I never buy anything that isn't on sale—and so far, my first impression has been true. I've seen them play nine times, I have accumulated every album they've released, and I could spend hours discussing their music and lyrics. In fact, I can get a little annoying when it comes to talking about Over the Rhine. Okay, I can get a lot annoying. But it's paid off. The weekend before I was ordained, I saw them play in Hollywood with a dozen or so friends from seminary, most of whom I'd introduced to the band. Even my parents, who generally don't care for pop music, have become fans.

You could say that I've been downright evangelical about Over the Rhine.

You could also say that I haven't been nearly as evangelical about my faith. I certainly have never invited a dozen folks to attend a worship service with me.

Why is it so easy to talk about some things, yet so hard to talk about our relationship with God? We talk up delicious recipes and pass along favorite books, but many Christians get their tongues tied up in a very tight knot when it comes to expressing what God has done in our lives.

It isn't that we aren't passionate about our faith. It isn't that we aren't interested in welcoming new members into the Body of Christ. We just tend to be very polite, and talking religion in mixed company doesn’t always make the etiquette cut.

But as followers of Christ, we are called to share the good news of what God has done—and continues to do—through Jesus Christ. If that calling makes you nervous, you're not alone. We live in a culture that is saturated with negative images of evangelists. Though many people—Christians and non Christians alike— have deep respect for Billy Graham, the same cannot be said for his colleagues. Whether or not the perception is true, evangelists are often seen as judgmental and pushy. And unfortunately, since Disciples and our brethren in the mainline Protestant traditions have been so quiet about our faith, there aren’t nearly as many public expressions of the Christian faith that reflect our witness and understanding of the gospel.

Now, I'm going to share a statistic with you. I've been waffling all week about whether or not I should include this statistic in the message today, because it's a humdinger. A study published this month contended that one half of one percent of mainline congregations are practicing effective evangelism. Ouch.

I don't share this statistic to make us feel badly. I think it helps to know that we aren't the only ones struggling to share our faith. But I also think it helps to get a wake-up call from time to time. I once heard someone say that mainline churches such as the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) are greatest commandment churches. We do a good job of loving God with all our hearts and loving our neighbors as ourselves. But the other part of the observation was the criticism that mainline congregations tend not to be great commission churches. We get to the end of the book of Matthew, where Jesus tells the eleven to make disciples of all nations, and we quickly turn the page and change the subject. Forty or fifty years ago, mainline churches could get away with that. Churches certainly engaged in intentional practices of evangelism, but simply opening the doors on a Sunday morning meant that people would come. People would hear the gospel, and people would become disciples of Christ. Our world has changed—and so our understanding and practice of evangelism needs to change.

The pastor and writer Brian McClaren suggests this vision of responding to the Great Commission. “Good evangelists… are people who engage others in good conversation about important and profound topics such as faith, values, hope, meaning, purpose, goodness, beauty, truth, life after death, life before death, and God. They do this not because they like to be experts and impose their views on others, but because they feel they are in fact sent by God to do so… Evangelists are people with a mission from God and a passion to love and serve their neighbors.” The portrait of an evangelist, according to Pastor McClaren, is less like a used-car salesman and more like a humble and loving spiritual friend.

It’s a powerful thing when people start talking about what really matters to them; sometimes sharing your story in a real and honest way offers a much-needed invitation for others to give voice to the depths of their own hearts. When you think about it, a whole lot of language is spent on things that aren’t about important and profound topics. Words are used to sell, to persuade, to pass the side dishes—but we can go days without telling our stories or expressing our spirits. Recently I was listening to NPR in the late afternoon, and it was one of those days where the news was just frustrating. Important issues were being politicized in a way that just amounted to a lot of empty spin doctoring. I was about to change the dial when the host announced the next segment: an installment of the ongoing NPR series “This I Believe.” If you haven’t heard it, the show “is based on a 1950s radio program of the same name, hosted by acclaimed journalist Edward R. Murrow. In creating This I Believe, Murrow said the program sought "to point to the common meeting grounds of beliefs, which is the essence of brotherhood and the floor of our civilization." For the next three minutes, I listened to a woman explain that she is the designated celebrator in her family, the one who makes sure everyone gets together for the holidays. She said, “I believe that in this world there is and always has been so much sadness and sorrow, so much uncertainty, that if we didn't set aside time for merriment, gifts, music and laughter with family and friends, we might just forget to celebrate all together. We'd just plod along in life.” As the woman explain her beliefs, I realized something I believe: We’d just plod along in life if all we talk about is work and weather. We need the language of grace. We need the language of confession. We need the language of discipleship, where our lives are shaped not by small talk but by the Word of God.

Evangelism can be scary and unpopular and impolite. But it can also be joyful and exciting and authentic. When we reveal our experience of God, sharing generously with our words and actions the grace that has been poured into our lives through Jesus Christ, we are a blessing. When we have the courage to start conversations with humility and respect, we are a blessing. When we provide the challenge and the care to assist the Holy Spirit in making disciples of all nations, we are a blessing. As the Catholic monk Thomas Merton says, “All the good you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love.” May it be so. Amen.

Sunday, January 28: Practicing Forgiveness

2007-01-29T15:30:00.000-08:00

Matthew 18:21-35

Then Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.
The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant

‘For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow-slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, “Pay what you owe.” Then his fellow-slave fell down and pleaded with him, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you.” But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he should pay the debt. When his fellow-slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow-slave, as I had mercy on you?” And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he should pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’ (NRSV)

Ever since the Sunday of Epiphany, we've been spending some time considering the central practices of the Christian faith. I'm a firm believer that being a Christian isn't just about having a moment of conversion. Being Christian means living our lives in response to God's grace revealed in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. There are beliefs, for sure—the journey starts with the confession that Jesus is our Lord and Savior. But Jesus didn't leave the fishermen in their boats. He didn't leave them floating on the water with little more than a good story of encountering the Son of God. He challenged them to be his followers, his Disciples. Their lives would never be the same, not just because of the moment that Jesus called them, but because Jesus continued to call them in every moment that followed.

So in these weeks between the seasons of Christmas and Lent we're looking at the Holy Scriptures and church tradition that teach us how to respond to the call to discipleship. We're rehearsing what it means to live a Christian life. So far we've considered the practices of worship, healing, and hospitality, and we will yet ponder the work of evangelism and compassion. But today we wrestle with one of the most difficult Christian practices of all: forgiveness.

We're following Jesus up a steep slope today. Forgiveness is irrational. A psychologist will tell you that human beings aren't wired to forgive. When our loved ones or we are wronged, our impulses tend toward vengeance, bitterness, hatred. Mahatma Gandhi wisely observed that an "eye for an eye and soon the world is blind" – but the last time we think to quote Gandhi is when we've been wounded – intentionally or not —by another human being.

It may clash with our natural instincts, but forgiveness is fundamental to Christian spirituality. Each week we pray the words that Jesus taught us—forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. There are records from a church council in sixteenth-century Switzerland that preserve the story of a man who took that prayer quite seriously— so seriously he pretended didn't know the words. He knew that if joined his congregation in speaking them, he would have to forgive the man who had swindled him at the marketplace.

We are a forgiven people called to be a forgiving people. When Jesus taught his followers to forgive—not seven times, but seventy times seven times—it wasn't a footnote to our salvation. Forgiveness is the heart of redemption. Instead of letting his beloved creation remain shackled and suffering, God acted. God poured himself into the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus revealed the mercy of God and absorbed the evil of the world. Instead of condemnation or punishment, Jesus preached the vastness of God's love – a love that overcomes sin in all its forms.

The forgiveness of God is paving the way to a reconciled and restored Creation, one sinner at a time. But when we accept the gift of God's forgiveness, we become beholden to grace. Like the slave whose debts were pardoned by the king in the parable, we must share the gift of forgiveness. It has been said that once we have received the grace of God, we no longer "live for [ourselves]. We live instead as God's servants on behalf of a world that lives too deeply in alienation, bitterness, and various states of war. At our best, we who make up Christ's body in this world offer to this world a new model of handling the sins that grow profusely as crabgrass."

We witnessed a Christian community at its best this past year—and in the midst of the worst this world has to offer. Most of us heard about the tragedy that occurred in Lancaster County Pennsylvania last October, when five schoolgirls were killed in a random and unthinkable act of violence.

Instead of responding in the language of retribution, the girls' Amish community quietly but firmly let it be known that they forgave the man who was responsible. They even made sure that the man's widow would receive a portion of the donations that poured in from sympathetic neighbors. Baffled reporters described their dignity and humanity, and many an editorial echoed the sentiment that the world would be a better place if only more communities could summon that spirit of goodwill.

Yet in the days after the incident, the Jewish writer John Podhoretz, argued that "anger can be as righteous as forgiveness." After all, God cares passionately for justice, too. Without justice, the damage of wrongdoings cannot be restored. But damage cannot be restored without forgiveness, too. Pursuing justice without practicing forgiveness puts us in danger of being overwhelmed by rage and consumed by bitterness. And then we are simply chained to whatever or whoever has hurt us, unable to heal or to imagine any other future but the one imposed by pain.

So I've managed to talk for some time about forgiveness without actually considering how we, as individuals and as a community, might practice forgiveness. We know it's the basis of our relationship with God, we know it is something we are called to do—but how? In my reading this week, I spent a lot of time with an article by L. Gregory Jones on the Christian practice of forgiveness. He manages to address all the complexity and impossibility of forgiveness yet is also practical and hopeful. I want to share some of his suggestions for practicing forgiveness when we have been wronged.

First, we have to become willing to speak truthfully and patiently about the conflict. Tertullian, an early Christian writer, called patience the "mother of mercy." Once we have that measure of calm, its time to acknowledge our anger. I think this is the difference between authentic forgiveness and sweeping transgressions under a rug.

It does no good to pretend that you aren't furious about a thoughtless remark or intentional cruelty. But in the work of forgiveness, the other side of recognizing anger and bitterness is desiring to overcome them. We have to want to let our animosity dissolve. The next piece is to accept that the person who has wronged us is a child of God. We cannot simply paint the ones who have hurt us as soulless enemies. God breathed his spirit into every one of us, even the most egregious sinners. As we consider that the one who has hurt is a beloved child of God, we must remember that we too are loved by God. We have received God's grace and forgiveness, and most likely continue to stand in need of mercy. Strengthened by the grace we ourselves have received, the practice of forgiveness calls us to make a commitment to struggle to change whatever caused the conflict or injury. I think this is where forgiveness makes true justice possible. Many victims become powerful advocates for change, channeling their pain into helping others.

It was only after I read this process of forgiveness a few times that I realized a familiar understanding of forgiveness was missing. Nowhere are we encouraged to "accept an apology." The practice of Christian forgiveness is rooted in God's love, not whether or not the one who has hurt us has repented. The condition for forgiveness is that God has forgiven us.

The reality is that this is profoundly difficult work. Sometimes all we can do is confess to God that we’re working on it, and keep praying that that He will keep working on us. Ultimately, forgiving isn’t something we do in a breath or a day. It’s a way of life that requires a whole lot of prayer. C.S. Lewis wrote this in his journal: “Last week, while at prayer, I suddenly discovered—or felt as if I did—that I had really forgiven someone I have been trying to forgive for over thirty years. Trying, and praying that I might.”

May God give us the strength, the honesty, the patience, and the mercy to be a forgiven and forgiving people. Amen.

January 14, 2007: Practicing Healing

2007-01-15T10:04:00.000-08:00

Matthew 9:18-26

A Girl Restored to Life and a Woman Healed

While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader of the synagogue came in and knelt before him, saying, ‘My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.’ And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, ‘If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.’ Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, ‘Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.’ And instantly the woman was made well. When Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute-players and the crowd making a commotion, he said, ‘Go away; for the girl is not dead but sleeping.’ And they laughed at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. And the report of this spread throughout that district. (NRSV)

What do you think of when you think of healing? Do you think of doctors and nurses? Their vocation is certainly about healing. In medical centers in our neighborhood and throughout the world, trained professionals diagnose sicknesses, treat injuries, research diseases, and work to prevent the onset of pain and illness. Whether in a state-of-the-art cardiac unit or a traveling free clinic, medical workers routinely participate in the physical healing of men, women, and children.

So what do you think of when you think of Christian healing? Does your mind automatically switch channels to the worst of what religious broadcasting has to offer? There are a lot of hucksters out there, dangling the promise of miraculous cures to those who would just summon the faith to buy them. There is never a lack of suffering in this world, and with the right balance of illusion and charisma, con artists can make big bucks by exploiting it.

There is a deep need for and interest in healing. You might even say that healing is one of the most relevant topics of the day. The airwaves are constantly full of talk about how to improve healthcare. The cost of insurance and prescription drugs is a hot-button issue. The AIDS pandemic in Africa is a medical and moral emergency. Our home, the earth, is bruised from centuries of misuse. And without a doubt, each and every one of us has longed for healing, for ourselves and for our families, our friends, and our neighbors—the ones that are right next door, and the ones that are on the other side of the world. John Koenig writes that "Though we sometimes try to deny it, illness, injury, and psychological distress dog virtually every step of our daily walk through life. They grip us and the people we love with pain, touching every thought and motion by their presence, often briefly but sometimes for years on end" (Practicing Our Faith, 149). We are hungry for healing.

Our culture is mostly comfortable defining healing as the work that happens in the operating room and the doctor's office. A healthy understanding of healing will include the gift of medical treatment. But for Christians, healing is also more than pills and procedures.

I want to talk about healing today— healing as it is practiced in our Christian tradition. But before we go any further, we have to recognize that healing as a Christian practice needs to be healed. I want to change the channel on the faith healers that do more harm than good to the hopeful believers who seek their services, pull the plug on the so-called healing that is all spectacle and corruption. Today we celebrate and explore the practice of healing that is sacred and compassionate and real.

At the heart of Christian healing is this simple truth: God wants us to be whole. God wants us to be restored, redeemed, reborn into the fullness of who He created us to be. God wants this for each of us, and God wants this for all of us, for all of Creation. We know this for the same reason we know who God is: because his Son, Jesus Christ, revealed it through his life and ministry.

Jesus was a preacher, a teacher, and a healer. Jesus challenged demons to flee and commanded wounds to close. He empowered the eyes of blind men to open and the skin of lepers to be restored. Jesus had a God-given authority to heal through words and touch, and for a very important reason. Though Jesus' reputation as a healer was like a magnet for the suffering people of Galilee, he resisted that easy fame.

Jesus healed for the same reason he shared parables with the people: he was showing them the nature of God's gracious Kingdom. Just as the Kingdom of Heaven is like the smallest seed that grows into the largest tree, so is the Kingdom of Heaven like a woman who touched the hem of Jesus' garment.

Jesus healed the woman. Or rather, her faith healed her. The blood that had flowed from her body for twelve years slowed and stopped, freeing her from a life of physical and social anemia. For the woman's affliction affected much more than her body. Her Jewish culture had strict guidelines for cleanliness. A bleeding woman was considered unclean. She could not participate in the religious life of her community. What's more, anyone who came into contact with her would also be considered ritualistically unclean.

She had been living in the margins for twelve years. Barred from religious expression, denied any human touch, and always on the brink of death, the chronic hemorrhage had literally drained the life of out of the woman. And then she was caught in a radical act: her hand reached out, clutching the edge of Jesus' cloak. Her bold move posed a terrible threat to Jesus. Because he had been touched by an untouchable, the very Son of God could be labeled unclean. But the power of the Holy Spirit flowed from him to her, and in the twinkling of an eye, the woman's life was saved. Jesus made her whole, restoring her body as well as her place within her community.

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a woman who touched the hem of Jesus' garment.

When theologians talk about the Kingdom of God, they often lament that it is "already but not yet." Through his life and ministry, Jesus planted seeds of God's reign and expected his followers to nurture those seeds. We see glimpses of the Kingdom of God in the scriptures, as Jesus moved among the people. We see glimpses of the Kingdom of God when faithful Disciples embody the compassionate wisdom of Christ. And we see glimpses of the Kingdom when we discern God's work in the world. Already, but not yet.

The promise of the gospels, the promise of this text witnessing to not one but two miraculous healings, is that we will be healed: body, mind, and spirit. The human community will be made whole. Suffering will cease, and sins will be wiped away. Creation will be restored to a realm of justice and beauty. This is the great work that God began through the incarnation of his Son, Christ Jesus. And in the fullness of time, this vision of shalom will be a reality.

As Christian people endeavoring to live a way of life shaped by our Savior, we have work to do. We are called to participate in the unfolding of God's great plan. We are called to be healers, even as we are still wounded by loss and pain ourselves.

The practice of Christian healing is not about magic. Not every disease can be cured. Not every life can be preserved. The kind of healing revealed by Jesus is bigger than life, and claims victory over death.

Healing isn't about cultivating false hope. One of the most humble healers I've ever encountered is a pediatrician at a local hospital whose specialty is hospice care for children. Every young patient he treats has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and his job is to find ways to alleviate their physical pain.

It is grueling work that could easily scour away all hope. Yet even in a context where physical cures are out of the question, healing happens. Healing happens when a devastated mother witnesses her child's pain diminish long enough for him to enjoy a visit with his siblings.

Moments of healing take place every day, in ordinary and extraordinary ways. "When we embody God's healing presence to others through touch, concern, or liturgy, we take part in God's activity of healing the world" (quote from John Koenig: couldn't figure out how to acknowledge that without losing momentum). Sharing a plate of cookies with a grieving family. Listening to a stranger in crisis. Comforting a feverish grandchild. Praying for a friend fighting cancer. This is all holy work, healing work. And these healing ministries, woven with the power of the Holy Spirit, invite the Kingdom of Heaven to blossom in the soil of Creation.

When faced with the possibility of healing, the mourners gathered around the dead girl's house laughed. They laughed at Jesus. I can only think of one other time in the gospels when Jesus was so blatantly mocked—when he himself was on the edge of death, when his own body and spirit seemed a million miles from wholeness. And yet the wounds of the cross were healed. Jesus was made whole again, restored, resurrected into new life.

Our God is a lover of life. He will transform every tear of grief into a tear of joy. He will forge a new beginning out of every ending. The good news of Jesus Christ is that we will be redeemed, we will be saved, we will be healed. And so we must hope and pray and work for God’s gracious will to be done on earth as it is in the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.

January 7, 2007

2007-01-10T15:37:00.000-08:00

This is the first in a sermon series on the practices of the Christian faith; we focused on the practice of worship, and also celebrated epiphany.

Matthew 2:1-12

In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’” Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” (NRSV)

When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

Magi from the East came to Jerusalem. That little phrase has fertilized the imagination of the church ever since Matthew first jotted down his version of Jesus’ birth. The details we adore about this tale were mostly conjured up in the centuries to follow. Matthew doesn’t tell us how many Magi made the journey— but tradition has assigned one wise man to each of the three gifts presented to the Christ child. Directors of Christmas pageants doled out camels for them to ride, and the British poet, Longfellow, christened them Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthasar. It’s easy to forget which of these details are rooted in biblical text, and which were added by faithful storytellers who spun a more vibrant yarn about the great journey to Bethlehem. Indeed, when I went to find the particular bible translation that inspired the title of my sermon, Home by Another Way, my search led me not to the King James Version or the New International Version, but the gospel according to James Taylor, the folksinger. His song by the same name begins: “Those magic men the magi/ Some people call them wise/ Or oriental, even kings/ Well anyway, those guys/ They visited with jesus/ They sure enjoyed their stay/ Then warned in a dream of king herods scheme/ They went home by another way.” But I’m not so sure the difference between what is in the text and what we see in our mind’s eye when we hear this scripture is of much concern in this case. The songs and stories about the Three Kings of the Orient—fanciful though they may be— do a fine job of pointing to the path the Magi cleared. The path that leads us to Jesus.

The reason this story draws us in so very much is that it is so very rich. It is a true adventure story: a journey marked by danger, a tale of good and evil, a drama filled with magical stars, uncontainable joy, precious gifts, and profound worship. And it is a story marked by transformation, for the wise men go home by another way.

Today marks the first Sunday of a sermon series I have been working on for some time, a series based in the book of Matthew and focusing on the vital practices of the Christian faith, the way we live in response to God’s grace. The first practice is worship. The first act of the Magi upon encountering the Christ child was to worship him—to kneel and adore the gift of Light into the world.

In this and many stories, worship happens while on a journey. There’s the classic allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, in which a Christian suffers the distracting influence of characters such as Mr. Worldly Wiseman and Mr. Legality on his harrowing journey from a sin-sick world to the gates of the Celestial City. Even our ordinary Sunday worship begins with a little pilgrimage. What is the simple act of driving a car or walking a few blocks any other day of the week takes a different meaning on Sunday morning. For all our other reasons for showing up, our central purpose is to gather as a community to praise God, to rejoice in the light of Christ, to bask in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit— and that makes the simple act of walking out your front door the first step of a holy journey.

Of course, journeys toward worship can be much more roundabout. The first time I left home—really left home—for my freshman year of college was also the only year of my life that I did not regularly attend a worship service. I was there, but not, as a teenager, so when I had my first taste of freedom, the last thing on my mind was looking up a local congregation. But I was on a spiritual journey. That year I joined a student organization with a lofty title. We were the Spiritual Truth Seekers. Each week, we met up in the student lounge to talk about religion and philosophy. We also heard from different speakers. A faithful Unitarian. A convert to Buddhism. A Christian pastor who had lost his faith only to rediscover it in new and unexpected form. Our meetings were more about seeking than finding, though. I’m not sure we ever landed on the capital T truth we were searching for. But something shifted, something changed in me during that year I went to school in Northwest Ohio. I transferred to a university close to home, but I did not simply retrace my steps. I went home by another way, so that at my new school I didn’t join the philosophy club, but found myself at church every Sunday morning, worshipping. The journey had changed me from a person who wanted to search for truth to a person who wanted to stand in awe of it, and pray.

It has been said that the deep wisdom of the Magi is this: “The Magi represent forever and for all of us the wisdom that recognizes human life to be a journey taken in search of the One who calls us beyond ourselves and into faithful service—One before whom we are prepared to kneel, and to whom we offer the best of our gifts, flawed and unworthy though they may be.”*

Consider that. Your life is a journey. It is a mission to find God—just as the mystical Kings undertook their marathon trek across the desert to find the holy newborn. Though we seek God, it is God who is calling us to make the journey. It is God who forges the star that illuminates the path, a light so bright it cannot be ignored. And when you get to the place where God is calling you, the thing to do is worship.

I wonder if one of the Magi, tired and sore from days spent between the humps of a camel, turned back before they reached Jerusalem. Maybe an unmentioned fourth wise man wasn’t so wise after all, and decided against dirtying his tapestry cloak to honor the child of Jewish peasants. He probably went home the same way he came, as proud as ever. The true Magi were possessed of perfect vision and a willingness to act on what they saw. They saw the star, and followed. They saw the glory of the Lord hidden in the flesh of an infant, and they knelt in worship, offering their finest treasures. They saw murder in the eyes of King Herod, and resisted the call of darkness.

Even though a star doesn’t hang over this sanctuary to guide our steps here, this is the place that God has called us to look upon his Son and give thanks. Maybe our hearts do not throb and swell with joy every single Sunday, the way the prophet Isaiah proclaimed they would when we encountered God’s light. Maybe the gifts we give aren’t quite as valuable as gold. Maybe we feel like we don’t know what we’re doing, even though we’ve been doing it for years.

The living Christ, the Light of the World, is just as manifest here as he was in that ramshackle crib.

And we are called here to worship, to bend our hearts, if not our knees, into that curlicue position of prayer. What we are searching for has been searching for us, and we are found just in time to give ourselves away. From this sacred place, we go home by another way—the way of Christ, who is our light, and our truest home. Amen.

*Herbert O’Driskoll, Kingly Presence.

Sunday, December 31st

2007-01-04T16:29:00.000-08:00

Luke 2:41-52

Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he said to them. Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor. (NRSV)

After the last candles were extinguished and the building was locked up tight on Christmas Eve, Ben and I headed north on the 5 to my sister's house in Mountain House, California. The big plan was to surprise my nieces, Gracie and Maddie, on Christmas morning. Even though we arrived well after midnight, I was so anxious to see the girls that I haven't woken up so early on Christmas in 20 years. When Maddie padded downstairs in her footie pjs and saw Uncle Ben's shoes, she thought they were Santa's. Mission accomplished. We had a wonderful visit, from start to finish. Just in the time since we saw them last, Gracie's learned hundreds of new words and developed an attention span long enough to listen to stacks of library books. Maddie easily works 100-piece puzzles and can totally outwit her Aunt Katherine at hide-and-go-seek. I looked for that child for a good fifteen minutes one morning, and she was right under my nose, quiet as a church mouse. The days when she would go hide only to jump out and shout "here I am" as soon as I started looking for her are over.

It is an amazing thing to watch children learn and grow. Ben and I have six nieces and nephews with another on the way, and witnessing their journey through childhood is a true gift.

The scripture we're pondering today is the only canonical account of Jesus as a child—the only such story that is included in our Holy Scriptures. Many, many more stories have been told about Jesus as a boy. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an ancient text that was written a couple centuries after the gospel of Luke, imagines the Savior accomplishing amazing feats while yet a child. And just last year, Anne Rice, formerly of vampire novels, wrote a book narrated by a twelve-year-old Jesus.

The impulse to imagine what Jesus was like as a boy is a strong one. As Christians, we believe that the babe born in Bethlehem was fully human and fully divine. We testify that his nativity in ancient Judea ushered in a new realm of God's reconciling work. We are here today because we have heard and responded to the call to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. It's only human that many Christians have wondered just how old Jesus was when he took his first step.

As much as we may wish for a chance to page through Mary's scrapbook of the early years of her holy son, we have instead the gospels. They are less interested in recording the childhood adventures of Jesus than in tapping into the meaning of his life and ministry. This episode from the Gospel of Luke, though cherished as one of the few windows into Jesus' early life, is included in scripture because of what it reveals about God.

The Jesus we encounter in this scripture is just like any adolescent. How many twelve-year-olds have made nervous wrecks of their parents by disappearing into a crowd? How many parents have been reduced to tears of angry relief when the lost child is found safe and sound? The story here, on one level, is as ordinary as any family lore. You can almost hear the echoes of its retelling around the holiday dinner table for years to come. The kid who worried everyone rolls his eyes and blushes while the family patriarch recounts the embarrassing highlights one more time.

And yet on another level, this story is anything but ordinary. The wayward child is not off fishing or making mischief in the marketplace. He has found his way to the center of his community's religious life and has astounded the learned rabbis with his articulate questions and wise observations. The boy in the temple is no run-of-the-mill spiritual prodigy, but the Son of God. He may have strayed from his earthly parents, but Jesus makes it clear that he had simply gone on furlough to his Heavenly Father's temple.

Luke recorded this story as a testimony to the paradox of Christmas. In this brief interlude between the birth of Christ and the inception of his ministry some thirty years later, we get a sense of what it meant for Jesus to be fully human and fully divine. The presence of God's Spirit in Jesus is clear. He doesn't simply have wisdom beyond his years; he has wisdom beyond the ages. And yet he is just a little boy, entrusted to the care of a mother and a father.

Our Lord wasn't deposited on earth as a full-grown man. He was born as any other, learned to walk and to speak as any other, and grew in his faith and understanding as any other. The Jesus we encounter in this text is actively engaged in the ordinary stuff of life. He practiced the Jewish faith, journeying with his family to the temple each year for Passover. He asked questions. As he increased in years he increased in wisdom, learning and growing into the one who would be our salvation.

Again, I say, we are here because we have heard and responded to the call to follow Jesus. We usually pay the most attention to his teachings and actions as an adult. But there is nothing that says we should not also follow the Jesus of this story. The path of growth and learning set forth here is not just for children and youth. The pattern for living culled from this text is a worthy way of life for God's children of all ages. Like Mary and Joseph, most of us have a hard time keeping up with Jesus. And yet keeping up with Jesus is what we are called to do as Christians.

We are on the edge of another new year. I usually am a bit of a cynic about New Years resolutions, having broken too many too count. But there is something so hopeful about turning the calendar page to a new year. There's a contemporary Christmas song that goes, "Maybe this Christmas will mean something more, Maybe this year love will appear, Deeper than ever before."

When I sang alone in the car this week, I changed the words to "new year." Maybe this New Year will mean something more. Maybe this will be the year when the long overdue change or the much-needed growth will take root and flourish.

In the Message bible, this passage concludes by saying that in the following years, Jesus grew up in both body and spirit. Other translations read that Jesus "increased in wisdom" as he increased in years. Maybe this New Year is the time to faithfully commit to growing up in spirit, to hold God's wisdom at the center of our lives if it hasn't already taken its rightful place there.

Jesus and his family made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem every year for Passover. Maybe this is the year you will make the pilgrimage to worship God every single Sunday of the year.

Jesus prayerfully studied the Holy Scriptures. Maybe this is the year you will join in on the ambitious project to read the whole bible in one year, or start attending Sunday School, or commit to participating in the Lenten Bible study a few months from now.

Jesus challenged tradition and asked probing questions. Maybe this is the year you will bravely work through your own questions of faith in the safe space of this Christian community.

Little Jesus got lost, but was found in his Father's house, doing his Father's work. Maybe this is the year we, too, will lose ourselves only to be found in God.

Christmas Eve 2006

2007-01-04T16:19:00.000-08:00

Luke 2:1-20

The Birth of Jesus

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

The Shepherds and the Angels

In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,
‘Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace among those whom he favours!’

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.’ So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

The first time I ever paid attention in church was on Christmas Eve. I was ten or so, and while I liked the warmth and the candlelight of the evening service, I was anxious for the gifts and Christmas cookies that waited on the other side of the chilly trip home. I had no intention of listening to the preacher that night, but he startled me into really hearing the gospel for the first time. Standing behind the Communion table, the Reverend proclaimed in a passionate voice that the birth of Christ was meant for everyone. No matter if you were a thief, an adulterer, an alcoholic, a sexaholic. I remember being shocked, thinking that you weren't supposed to talk about those kinds of things at church. Especially not right there in front of the Holy Family. The words the pastor used seemed out of place amidst the pretty manger scene. They were words that spoke of the sorrow and sin of human life. It just didn't seem right to bring all that uncomfortable stuff up on a night that was supposed to be about God.

And yet this is the night that we celebrate that our God became human. The child we welcome with joyful hearts was born of flesh and blood, as weak and needy as any newborn baby. His blood may have been laced with divinity, but the child born in Bethlehem was as human as any.

The nativity of our Lord is a sight to behold in our faithful imaginations. Angels singing and shepherds praising in a festival of starlit adoration. But it didn't happen in a spiritual vacuum. It happened in a specific time and place, to a particular group of people. Every time we hear the Christmas story in the Gospel of Luke, whether it's read from the sanctuary pulpit or by Linus on the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, we are reminded of the very worldly context of Jesus' birth. We hear about Emperor Augustus and his ridiculous ambition to register the whole world. We hear that this happened when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And we hear of the journey required of Mary and Joseph, the long trip from Galilee to Judea.

The Gospel of Matthew also testifies to another circumstance of Christ's birth, the devastating violence that King Herod unleashed upon the families of Bethlehem in his attempt to defeat the newborn King before he even spoke his first word.

By all accounts, the Advent of our savior was littered with the uncomfortable stuff that goes along with being human. Messy stuff: childbirth, politics, injustice, poverty. The star shined brilliantly against the heavy darkness of Bethlehem. The angels' song was heightened by the anguished cries it displaced. The Lord of Love was born into a world polluted with hate. The miracle of the incarnation is that God poured his spirit into the humblest of creatures in the humblest of situations.

Last year, the worship leaders of a Baptist church not too far from here prayed their way into a serious question. Where would the Christ child be born today? They recognized that the nativity of Jesus emerged from a scene of desolation. And so when they set out to build a nativity scene to inhabit the nave of their sanctuary, they borrowed imagery from the newspaper. They constructed a meager shanty covered with a blue tarp, and surrounded it with rubble: cinderblocks and mortar, an old abandoned shopping cart, empty cans and jars, a couple sleeping bags. Hanging by the scene were spray-painted signs that echoed those that were posted on rooftops during the fatal 2005 hurricanes: Save Us. Need Water. Help. Their Advent wreath was an empty oil drum turned on its head. The candles of hope and peace and joy and love smoldered, the only source of heat for the residents of this haphazard refuge.

That scene was painful, not pretty. It preached a powerful message that our carols have long proclaimed: the Christ child was "born to ransom captive Israel." "With the poor, the scorned, the lowly, lived on earth our Savior holy." The hopes and fears met by the Christ child were on display, a silent witness to the depth of our need for Emmanuel, the God who saves us by being with us.

My friend who serves that congregation confessed that the crèche challenged her to "keep [her] eyes open to God's world, the world God loves." Not all of the members of her church responded that way. The first Sunday, my friend noted a "roaring silence about it all." The roaring silence reached a fever pitch as the Advent season trudged on. Some church members struggled with the contemporary reflection of the manger scene. They didn't want to be confronted by the same pain that was relentlessly broadcast on the news when they gathered to praise God.

I need to tell you that my friend is a really great pastor. She cares deeply about the members of her flock. She would not, could not, ignore that the manger's message had gotten lost in translation for some of her church. The nativity scene was meant to be a testimony to how Christ is born to save a suffering world, not to be a cause of suffering. Yet even as my friend recognized that her people needed comfort, she lamented. "Even if we do clean up the sanctuary, the world remains broken."

The church found a way to rejoice on Christmas Eve. Some of the symbols were taken away, and light of Christ filled the space they left behind. But that challenging nativity scene was deconstructed because women and men couldn't bear it, not because God couldn't bear it. The hope of the original nativity in Bethlehem, and the hope of every other nook and cranny in Creation, is that God can and does bear our suffering.

Tonight we celebrate the birth of God into this world. He showed up when we needed him most, and he has never left since. God is present, God is with us. Whether we are laughing at the church potluck or wringing our hands in the emergency room, the One who loves us most is here. The stuff we think we're supposed to leave at home—our rough edges, our skeletons, our insecurities, our broken-down world, is just the load to carry with us on this holy night. Here we meet the One who is ready to share the burden and show us another way, a way of forgiveness and love and justice. A way of salvation.

A story. The chaplain of a home for troubled children was preparing to lead the Christmas Eve service when one of the staff members informed him that one of the boys was hiding beneath his bed and refused to come out. The chaplain went to see if he might be able to convince the child to come out and join in on the Christmas festivities. He stood there in the dorm room and regaled the boy with the plans for the evening: the food, the gifts, the blinking lights on the tree, and so on. The boy didn't make a peep.

This went on for some time, and the chaplain began to worry that he really needed to ring the bell to gather the rest of the children for the carol service. With the boy looking so fearful, he didn't want to pull him out of his little blanketed cave by sheer force. So he did the only thing he could think to do: he got down on his stomach and wriggled partway under the bed, mussing up his clothes in the process. He kept talking to the boy, going on about the good things that waited if only he came out from under the bed. Finally, he was quiet, hoping that the smell of the fresh-baked gingerbread cookies or the laughter of the other kids would cast the boy's fear aside. Patient silence. And then it happened: the boy took the chaplain's hand crawled out from his safe haven and into the circle of celebration.

The miracle of Christmas, the mystery of incarnation, is right there if we're paying attention. God meets us where we are. If we are hiding under the bed, God will shimmy up alongside us and offer us an invitation to come into the light. Through Christ Jesus, God "came to dwell with us in our loneliness and alienation."

No sorrow is outside of his reach. No shame is beyond his forgiveness.

Tonight the angels are singing on high. The message is this: "Do not be afraid. I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord." Do not let the beauty of the candles and carols overshadow the radical hope that is cradled in that mangy manger. In Christ we are reconciled and redeemed. In Christ the love of God is offered to us not despite of—but because of—our needy broken selves. It is in that divine hope in the midst of human hopelessness that we find the fullness of our Christmas joy. In is in that good news we find the beauty of this night.

May you welcome the Christ with all that you have and all that you are. Hallelujah and amen.

Sunday, December 10: Second Sunday of Advent!

2006-12-11T13:59:00.000-08:00

Luke 3: 1-6; 15-16 (NRSV)

The Proclamation of John the Baptist

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,
‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.
Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth;
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” ’

As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, ‘I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

I was paging through a fashion magazine a couple days ago when a news blurb caught my attention. Apparently, some researchers at a major university recently finished a study that found that taking a hot shower or bath can actually alleviate feelings of regret, guilt, and shame. I chuckled at the news, not because it surprised me, but because it's one of those things Christians have been saying for a long time. Ever since a man called John the Baptist came bounding out of the desert proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. We recognize that something mysterious and beautiful happens when water touches the skin of a believer in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Dispelling feelings of guilt is just the start of it. A completely new person emerges from the waters of baptism. Her identity is settled once and for all: she is a child of God. Beloved by the Father, redeemed by the Son, and saturated with the Holy Spirit. All this, and the only ingredients are faith, grace, and a whole lot of water.

Anne Lamott writes that "Christianity is about water. 'Everyone who thirsteth, come ye to the waters.' It's about baptism… It's about full immersion, about falling into something elemental and wet. Most of what we do in worldly life is geared toward our staying dry, looking good, not going under. But in baptism, in lakes and rains and tanks and fonts, you agree to do something that's a little sloppy because at the same time it's also holy, and absurd. It's about surrender, giving into all those things we can't control: it's a willingness to let go of balance and decorum and get drenched."

Nearly every season of Advent that I can remember has included an appearance by John the Baptist. No matter how intentionally a congregation observes the Advent themes of waiting and preparation, the man who came to prepare the way for our Lord is startling. He seems out of place. His strange face certainly wouldn't make for a good Christmas card picture; it would look more like a mug shot than a cheerful holiday greeting. And yet he's the one who reminds us, year after year, that the child we celebrate is the one who saves us. He reminds us to get ready, challenges us to change, and dares us to get wet.

So a lot of churches, a lot of Christians, struggle to greet John the Baptist. He represents everything about Advent that is different from Christmas. There is a comic strip drawn by a Lutheran pastor—one that I've included in your worship bulletins a few times. In this week's edition, one of the main characters is showing off how well he is preparing the way of the Lord: his tree is up, his cards are in the mail, and he got all of his twinkling lights to work. His friend reminds him of a different kind of Advent preparation: the kind that starts with baptism. The first fellow looks forlorn. He has lights strung around his neck and reindeer antlers hanging from his Santa hat, and says, "I don't think this stuff is supposed to get wet."

We are going to remember and witness the sacrament of baptism today, and nothing could prepare our hearts more thoroughly to receive the Christ child than this. A whole lot of water is involved, and not just for Codyanne and me. Each of you will be invited to come forward and dip your hand in water drawn from the baptistery in memory of your own baptism experience. When we receive the sacrament of Communion, we take and eat a tangible reminder of God's grace. And so it is with baptism. The Holy Spirit will work through the ordinary stuff of water with a mysterious and transforming power. Once a Christian has been reborn into the heart of God, their lives are not the same as they were before. Will you feel holier? Maybe. But probably not. In the movie Tender Mercies, the rough and tough Mack is baptized as an adult. "After his baptismal service, he is driving home in his truck and his girlfriend's son asks him, "Do you feel any different now?" And Mack smiles and says, "Not yet."

And then there's the baptismal story of the highly-respected Methodist bishop, William Willimon. He doesn't literally remember his baptism. Like most Methodists, he was baptized as a baby. What's more, he wasn't even baptized in a church sanctuary, but in his family's living after Sunday Supper. He writes about how his baptism was entirely passive, that he didn't do anything but receive the gift. And yet he testifies that he was no longer just the newest member of his family; he was the newest member of God's great family, the church. He was a gift of God, and heaven was mixed up in who he was. Bishop Willimon acknowledges that his baptism could easily be criticized. After all, baptism is a sacrament of the whole church, not a private family affair. Folks like us Disciples might shake our heads and say he shouldn't have received the watery blessing until he was old enough to make a decision, and that a mere sprinkling doesn't quite get the point across.

To all that, Bishop Willimon says, "You at least must admit that my baptism worked."

I can't tell you how it works. I only trust that it does; in the moment the water rushes from your face and in every living moment that follows. God will meet Codyanne in that water, and will be utterly delighted that she has decided to respond to his call on her life. If you've ever wondered what it's like to receive an enthusiastic bear hug from God, I have a feeling it's something like getting baptized by immersion. Well, assuming the water heater is working.

In baptism, God freely gives us gifts of grace, forgiveness, love, identity, and wholeness. We cannot earn the salvation we are given through our baptism into the Body of Christ. All we can do is respond by obeying the commands that go along with it. They are few, but just as the waters of baptism continue to act within us long after our hair is dry, these commands are ours to live into, each and every day. Repent, and follow.

Repent. Turn away from the things that keep you turned away from the face of God. Turn away from sin. We Disciples aren't always so good at talking about sin; that doesn't make it any less a factor in our lives. The plain truth of the matter is this: human beings sin. We like to tell ourselves that only things like lying and cheating are sins in God's eyes, and that we're okay. But any time we fail to love, any time we put our own desires above the needs of our neighbors or the will of God, we sin. Eugene Peterson, the fellow who translated the Message Bible, believes that sin is so pervasive in our lives that when we repent we should just quit whatever it is we're doing—"no matter how hard we're trying, no matter how well-intentioned"— because it's probably wrong. He compares repentance to saying a "loud, authoritative, non-negotiable "no." No to shame and selfishness and fear. No to sin and death and confusion. No to a life lived without God at the center.

If repentance is a resounding no, then "'follow' is the yes of baptized life." Follow Jesus. Pay attention to what he did and said in the gospels. If he tells you to love your neighbor, obey. If he shows you how to be compassionate, conform. Accept him as your Lord and love him as your brother. Expect him to challenge you and comfort you. If you find that you are neither challenged nor comforted by Jesus, you probably stopped paying attention. There is always more time to repent and follow again.

Repentance and discipleship. Turning and following. This is the life we sign up for when we agree to be immersed into Christ. This is who we are and what we do, and it all begins with baptism.

Whether you encounter the living water again or for the first time today, may the parched places of your souls be refreshed. May you be unafraid to surrender to God's love, even if it means getting wet. And may you respond to this holy mystery with great joy and deep peace. Amen.

Sunday, December 3: First Sunday of Advent!

2006-12-04T10:39:00.000-08:00

Luke 1:5-25

The Birth of John the Baptist Foretold

In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly order of Abijah. His wife was a descendant of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. Both of them were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord. But they had no children, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were getting on in years.

Once when he was serving as priest before God and his section was on duty, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to enter the sanctuary of the Lord and offer incense. Now at the time of the incense-offering, the whole assembly of the people was praying outside. Then there appeared to him an angel of the Lord, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified; and fear overwhelmed him. But the angel said to him, ‘Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He must never drink wine or strong drink; even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit. He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.’ Zechariah said to the angel, ‘How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.’ The angel replied, ‘I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.’

Meanwhile, the people were waiting for Zechariah, and wondered at his delay in the sanctuary. When he did come out, he could not speak to them, and they realized that he had seen a vision in the sanctuary. He kept motioning to them and remained unable to speak. When his time of service was ended, he went to his home.

After those days his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she remained in seclusion. She said, ‘This is what the Lord has done for me when he looked favourably on me and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people.’

Zechariah is one of those biblical characters I can really relate to. Maybe it's the nagging fear many preachers have that when its time to proclaim the good news, we could be as speechless as Zechariah. But all nightmares about being mute in the pulpit aside, celebrating the annunciation of John the Baptist's birth is a wonderful way to enter the season of Advent. This is a story of rational doubt and irrational hope. In good gospel form, no matter how irrational the blessing may seem, the God of Israel is at work silencing doubt and fulfilling hope.

Zechariah was a righteous and faithful priest, yet he certainly blundered his way through his encounter with the angel Gabriel. It's hard not to compare Zechariah to Mary, the other recipient of an angelic visit. Luke describes Mary as "perplexed" by the unexpected guest. There's an old painting of the Annunciation of Christ in which Mary is reading a book when Gabriel shows up; she appears to be holding up her hand as if to say, "wait, let me finish this chapter first…. Now what was it you had to tell me?" But Zechariah was miles away from perplexity. He was terrified. The overwhelming fear that charged his body wasn't the reverent fear-of-the-Lord the prophets of wisdom counseled. He was frozen with anxiety, dreading the message of this heavenly herald. To understand Zechariah's alarm we have to understand the social and spiritual impact of childlessness. Infertility, in New Testament times, was seen as a sign of divine disfavor. To be barren, in that culture, was to be cursed. Even though Zechariah was loyal to his vocation as a priest, and faithfully fulfilled the vows of his ordination, he and Elizabeth were heavy-laden with shame. If you believed yourself to be cursed by God, and you suddenly encountered one of his angels, you probably wouldn't be too enthused, either.

Even as Zechariah's heart was still pounding, Gabriel revealed the new work that God would do through the old priest and his wife. No more would Zechariah and Elizabeth live outside of the good graces of their neighbors. They would conceive the child anointed to prepare the children of God for the Messiah. They would be conscripted into the story of how our very determined God reconciles and redeems Creation. Their son would traverse a difficult path—no prophet escapes the consequences of delivering God's Word to a defiant people —but his birth would be greeted with joy and gladness.

To borrow a phrase, Zechariah was bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. No matter that he was in the presence of an angel. His response was certain: No way. He simply could not believe that this revelation was true. Even when confronted with a greater reality, Zechariah trusted that barren shame was the ultimate truth of his life. He couldn't imagine that God's love could deliver a miracle. It wasn't any lack of faithfulness on his part. He was in the middle of making an offering to the Lord when Gabriel arrived. Yet no amount of prayers and offerings prepared Zechariah for God's startling answer to his intercessions. He did not expect his prayers to be answered. His hope was tarnished by despair so persistent that he greeted an angel with suspicion. You wouldn't know it by looking at him, but Zechariah was a man bereft of hope.

Zechariah makes sense to me in the same way that doubting Thomas makes sense to me: they were faithful men who struggled with doubt. Their belief in God's goodness was all well and good until it was tested by God's goodness. Gabriel locked Zechariah's lips with a celestial zipper, enveloping him in a veil of silence until his tongue could be untied by the cries of his newborn son. When that day came, Zechariah's faith was as full as Mary's womb, and he was ready to bless the boy with a song of divine prophecy: "And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace."

Is Zechariah's story our story? If we peel away the top layer of our faith, will we find a wellspring of hope and trust in God? Or will we discover that skepticism has seeped into our relationship to the Holy?

This is a season of hope, of expectation, of waiting for God to do what God has proclaimed God will do. We rehearse the hope that has already been accomplished through the birth of Jesus so many years ago. We stand in solidarity with folks like Zechariah and Elizabeth, pondering if and when God will send the promised new life. But we also stand in solidarity with all every follower of Christ throughout the centuries who has waited for the Kingdom of God to flourish, who has hoped that the earth might be delivered, once and for all, from the ravages of sin and suffering. Our task is to trust in God's live-giving work even when the headlines cast a shadow on hope. We could easily slip into the rote and ritual of Zechariah's faith, burning the incense even though the flames in our hearts have long since been extinguished. But even the fear and despair of the skeptic can't halt the power of God.

The deepest hope of Advent, the hope that will empower us to dance to Zechariah's joyful song, is the hope that is informed by the past, fearless of the future, and rooted in the here and now. Scott Colglazier, a Disciple pastor, proclaims that "It's not what God will do that is the basis of hope; it's what God is doing that gives rise to hope, and, even more radically, what God is always wanting to do. I don't know what God will do tomorrow, but I know that today God is calling me to open my heart, live life with integrity, move toward my neighbor with compassion and justice, heal the most important relationships within the web of my life. The whole point of the spiritual journey is that God calls people to move forward with trust and courage into the future because God is taking the raw stuff of everyday living and trying to turn it, shape it, create from it something beautiful and good."

Like Zechariah, our hope and trust can easily be misplaced. We can get caught up in fear, in numbness, in doubt. All of that leaves us completely unprepared to welcome the Christchild on Christmas Day. The story of Zechariah is as good a metaphor for the Advent season as any. Today we take our first step into the season of joyous preparation for the Nativity of our Lord. And while we don't do this with Zechariah's silence, our quiet hymns of praise are easily drowned out by the nonstop Christmas extravaganza that surrounds us. We take four weeks, starting today, to steep our hearts in hope and peace and joy and love so that when the angels' song breaks forth, we are ready to join in with profound praise. In this time, we receive a gracious invitation to see and to trust– again or for the first time —how God is transforming this beloved Creation into the Kingdom of God. Not just in the past, not just in the future, but now: God is working for us, with us, and through us, to restore peace to a hurting world.

Nine months of silence was long enough for ecstatic worship to grow within a man who had given up on hope. Gabriel's promise to Zechariah is just as true for us: new life is on the way. God is doing something new, even here, even now. May we learn from his silence and his song, his doubt and his hope, and believe in the good news of Emmanuel, Christ with us. Amen.

Sunday, November 26, 2006

2006-11-27T10:29:00.000-08:00

This is an unusual Sunday. Most years, the First Sunday of Advent falls immediately after Thanksgiving weekend. This time the secular and sacred calendars aligned to give us one Sunday in between—a Sabbath day that is poised in the meantime. I can't help but think of today as a gift—an opportunity to reflect on the changing of the days; another chance to give thanks; a moment to anticipate the season of anticipation. Next week the sanctuary will begin a slow transformation through the weeks of Advent. We'll add more signs of Christmas each Sunday, as the days and our hearts grow closer to the arrival of the Christ child. But this week the sanctuary is still in a state of ordinary beauty. As our brother James proclaimed, every good and perfect gift cascades from the Father of Lights. And so today I thank God for the abundant gift of light that flows through the windows of this sacred space, and celebrate what the brilliance of this room reveals about the gospel.

This sanctuary is filled with light. Many worship spaces are dimly lit—and some wear their shadows well, giving worshipers the benefit of a solemn umbrella under which to pray. I prefer the radiance of sunlight, even if sometimes it means the rays reflecting from the cars in the lot blind me if we forget to close the door. For me, the gift of light is a great visual reminder of God, and God's creative power. The book of Genesis envisions that before God spoke anything else into being, God crafted the gift of light. The tall, transparent windows cut into the walls of this building invite natural beauty to surround us as we gather to worship. God is the Source and Creator of all light, and in this place, we can gather within his abundant and luminous grace.

Like many buildings designated for Christian worship, our space is blessed with beautiful stained glass. The four primary stained glass windows along the north and south walls depict the four gospel accounts from the New Testament. The Gospel of Matthew is symbolized on your right toward the front of the sanctuary; the artwork shows the Law of Moses and its New Testament fulfillment, the Sermon on the Mount. The Gospel of Mark is represented beside it, illustrating the cup of Christ's suffering. Directly across from Mark, on the South Side of the Sanctuary is the window signifying Luke's testimony to the good news. In that window, Jesus is depicted sharing his gifts of teaching and healing. Finally, in the window closest to the pulpit, is the window memorializing the Gospel according to John. It celebrates the victory and eternal life that is made real through the Word made Flesh.

What these four windows do is transform ordinary light into kaleidoscopes of the gospel. The light that streams through these windows is strikingly beautiful, rich with color. And though they shine with the same light that flows through the clear glass, the light that they capture is deeper, more focused. One of my favorite theologians describes Jesus Christ as a pure reflection of God, as if by looking at Jesus we see God in focus. These windows remind me of that lovely interpretation. The light from the stained glass is concentrated, just as the light and love of God is concentrated in Christ. And through these gospel windows, we recall the teaching, preaching, healing, suffering, and victory that God shared with creation through Jesus Christ.

Just as the wealth of clear light reminds me of the Creator and the stained glass gospel windows evoke the Christ, the lightly colored panels of glass along the sides of the sanctuary walls quietly stir the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. These windows are subtle, a far cry from the bold hues of the windows below. Yet they still transform the light into delicate shades of yellow and blue. To me, they proclaim our responsibility to look at the world through the lens of the gospel. They beckon us to celebrate that our lives are colored with grace and shaded by God's redeeming love.

And then there is another font of light in this room, a steady shine that is not refracted through the windows or cultivated in an electric bulb. It is the light that is reflected through those who have heeded the Psalmists' cry to worship the Lord with gladness and thanksgiving. It is the light of Christ that has found a home within the hearts of the faithful. When we gather as a congregation to lift our voices in praise of the Father of lights, our spirits shine like the sun. This image is doctrine in the Christian Quaker tradition, a group that I spent some time with before I found the Disciples of Christ. Quakers believe that there is a light within each child of God, a brilliant glow of spirit within our souls. It is the Spirit of God, harbored safely in our hearts.

I first saw this with the eyes of faith when I was a teenager at church camp. During the closing worship, each camper was given a candle to hold. As I looked around the campfire at each flickering light, I suddenly understood that these candles only mirrored the light that sparkled from within. I trusted that Christ dwelled as a light within the hearts of all who accepted the gift of his love.

As Christians, we are created and called to reflect God's grace with our lives. The faithfulness of one Christian multiplies the light of Christ more fully than all the stained glass windows in all the cathedrals of the world. Without a doubt, the most important reflection of God's light within this space is the one that emanates from the pews.

The philosopher Alexander Papaderos tells a story about how he came to know that he was called to reflect the divine light of God.

"When I was a small child during World War II, I found several broken pieces of mirror on the road where a soldier's motorcycle had been wrecked. I tried to find all the pieces and put them together, but it was not possible, so I kept only the largest piece. This one. And by scratching it on a stone I made it round. I began to play with it as a toy and became fascinated by the fact that I could reflect light into dark places where the sun would never shine -- in deep holes and crevices and dark closets. It became a game for me to get the light into the most inaccessible places I could find.

I kept the little mirror, and as I went about growing up, I would take it out in idle moments and continue the challenge of the game. But, as I became a man, I grew to understand that this was not just a child's game but a metaphor for what I might do with my life. I came to understand that I am not the light or the source of light. But light -- truth, understanding, knowledge -- is there, and it will only shine in dark places if I reflect it."

In the coming days, the daylight will wane. Nights will become longer, and days will shorten into the winter solstice. And yet even as the light fades, we will join with other Christians to celebrate the Advent of a light that does not change with the seasons. May we reflect this light today and always, multiplying it with our praise, our songs of joy, our acts of generosity, and our constant thanksgivings to the source of all goodness and mercy. Amen.

Sunday, November 12, 2006

2006-11-13T12:20:00.001-08:00

John 17: 20-14

‘I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world." (NRSV)

I did a little experiment this week. I ran a word search on my sermon files to find out how many times I talked about community since I've been a member of this community. The word "community" came up in 25 sermons. That is just to say that if your instinct is to roll your eyes and wonder if I haven't already preached about this before, you have good instincts. I have, and I will again. It's not that I don't recognize and value the importance of personal expressions of faith. I simply cannot imagine personal faith that is not lived out within the sacred space of Christian community.

For me, faith is rooted in relationship. Most Christians understand that there is a mysterious and beautiful relationship at the heart of God. We praise a God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a paradox of three in one. The biblical witness continually points to relationships. Both the Hebrew and Christian testaments focus on the relationship between God and his people. And both testaments use a lot of holy ink on human communities— families, tribes, nations, kingdoms, and finally the church.

Our scriptures not only portray communities as they are, but they are also rich with hope as they imagine reconciled relationships between God and the varied creatures of his dominion.

The passage we heard today from the Gospel of John is just a brief piece of a much longer prayer. Jesus has a lot to pray about the night of his betrayal. He enters a deep communication with God, lifting up not only his own fears and faith, but also his concerns for the men and women who believe that he is God's word of salvation.

He prays for his Disciples, and then he prays for us—for we are part of those future Christians who believe in him through the testimonies of our spiritual mothers and fathers. Jesus prays for the church, the community of the faithful who bear the responsibility of proclaiming the gospel. He doesn't pray that the church will be wealthy, or well respected, or theologically orthodox. He prays that the church—that we—may all be one.
If we are to be honest, this is a difficult message to hear. The church is broken. The forefathers of our Disciple tradition were keenly aware of this. They believed that the lack of Christian unity was a great crisis in the Body of Christ. They were appalled that Christians denied one another access to the Table of the Lord's Supper. The Stone-Campbell movement tried earnestly to restore the Church to unity by emphasizing the simple practices and beliefs of the New Testament. It is no small irony that the movement has suffered not one but two fractures on account of differences of religious opinion.

The unity of the church is tested when Christians question the faithfulness of other Christians on account of theological differences. And it is tested when pride is valued more than unity. Most of us have probably heard more than enough about the public fall of the evangelical leader Ted Haggard.

This week the Daily Show, a comedy program that revels in lampooning the headlines, ran a clip of one prominent evangelical leader after another denying that they had anything to do with Ted Haggard, despite the fact that many had worked closely with him through the National Association of Evangelicals, the organization that Haggard led until last week. Without comparing Reverend Haggard to Jesus, the denial of his colleagues in ministry certainly echoed the words of Peter.

Instead of demonstrating difficult though honest unity to the world by condemning Haggard's breach of trust while standing by him as a colleague and friend, many Christian leaders simply denied that Ted Haggard had ever really been an important part of the Christian community to begin with.

It's easy to point out when other people are damaging the unity of the church. It isn't so easy to turn that lens on our community and ourselves. When Jesus prayed for those who would believe in him, he longed that unity would prevail not only between communities of faith, but also within each community of faith.

I met a woman studying to become a minister in the Mennonite tradition a few years ago. She spoke of the first time she attended chapel at her non-Mennonite seminary during the first week of classes. She was startled and uncomfortable to realize that part of the worship experience included receiving the bread and cup of communion. She explained that in her community, members celebrated the Lord's Supper together perhaps only once a year, and then only after a long and searching process of reconciliation among the members of the fold. Receiving Communion without that process, let alone with Christians she barely knew, felt like a cheapening of God's grace.

As a Disciple, I used to think that the only way of keeping Communion central and significant is to gather around the Table each week. Yet my Mennonite friend reminded me that Communion is to be celebrated by a unified and reconciled church. Though it was a rare occasion in her tradition, the Lord's supper was as central and significant as could be. It meant that broken relationships had been restored, old hurts forgiven, and open arguments resolved. Though my friend eventually participated in the Eucharist meal at her seminary, I know that she receives the gifts of bread and cup most deeply when she shares them with the fully reconciled community of her home church.

I pray that as individual believers and as a congregation, we can embrace the reconciliation and forgiveness that is recalled at the table of our Lord each week. We are never going to be perfect. Relationships are full of struggle. All communities encounter conflict, but the healthy ones address it with boldness and humility.

For conflict to truly be resolved, and not simply swept under the carpet, we must take responsibility for our own actions. When I was at church camp in high school, our counselors encouraged us to make amends before the camp community celebrated the Lord's Supper. I remember waiting for a fellow camper to come apologize for hurting my feelings earlier in the week. He never did, yet I was so wrapped up in my sense that he owed me an apology that I did not search my own heart to consider if I had any bridges to rebuild.

The unity of the church is not something to consider only when a clear sign of disunity arises. To be a faithful and welcoming community that is in loving union with one another and with God, that polar star of Christian unity must always be held in sight. We must take Jesus' prayer for unity seriously and personally, and continually seek God's help in answering that prayer.

For we do not simply have on our shoulders the well-being of our own beloved community of faith. The unity of the church is the clarion witness to the mysterious and beautiful unity between God and his son Jesus. When we are a united church, a forgiving community, a reconciled people, we give glory to God. And when God is glorified by the citizens of his holy Kingdom, the world will know of his love and his grace. Just as we sing in that great hymn of peace, let it begin with me. Let it begin with us. Let it begin. Amen.

Sunday, October 29, 2006

2006-11-13T12:12:00.000-08:00

Numbers 21: 4-9:
"From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.’ Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, ‘We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.’ So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.’ So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live." (NRSV)

They didn't expect to linger so long in the wilderness. When the Israelites followed Moses out of Egypt, they thought that things were going to get good. Their God had delivered them from the slavery, and they had set off into the sunset with freedom in their blood and prosperity on their minds. But their journey stalled out in the wilderness, year after winnowing year.

The book of Numbers recounts how poorly the Israelites took to their long desert stay. They complained. A lot. They usually leveled their grumbles against Moses, but this time around they spoke against God as well. Their grievance is almost comical. Not only do they not have any food, the food is bad. They murmur that they might have been better off in Egypt, wistfully wishing they could trade their freedom for a more appetizing meal plan.

The Israelites aren't simply whining. Their impatience and frustration is twisted into a complete lack of trust in God. They have no sense of his providence, no faith in his care. Despite the grace they have experienced, they have lost confidence in God.

What God does seems harsh: he sends snakes to infest the Israelite camp, snakes that terrorize the whole tribe and kill everyone who is bitten. This punishment is a pun. The Israelites pine for Egypt, and God offers them a potent reminder of the idolatrous poisons of the land they had left behind. Snakes, in Egypt, were the symbol for a popular goddess. The Israelites want a little taste of Egypt, and God provides.

As soon as the Israelites repent, God's anger gives way to mercy. As a response to Moses' prayer on behalf of his people, God instructs him to make a fiery serpent.

That bronze serpent became a tool for salvation. It literally saved people from dying of their wounds. That's a powerful object. Jesus referred to the bronze serpent when he spoke with Nicodemus in the third chapter of the Gospel of John, saying, "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in me may have eternal life." Though the story in Numbers comes across as foreign, God is doing what God has been doing ever since his beloved Creation turned away from him: making a way for people to be saved from their sin. This is a familiar story, a story we know well.
The people must have rejoiced. Despite all they had gone through, despite the fact that there were probably still snakes roving their encampment, God had heard their expression of repentance and responded with a tangible source of salvation. This installment of the Israelite saga in the wilderness is effectively over; the next verse has them setting out for another leg of their journey.

And now we're going to fast forward a couple of centuries. The descendents of the original wilderness tribe settled in the promised land, fought in many battles, established a kingdom, split into two nations, and experienced the ups and downs of life as God's chosen people. Their story is pretty fascinating; I definitely recommend reading the book. As each generation gave way to the next, the culture and context of the Israelites and Judeans changed. And what do you know—the bronze serpent Moses made in the desert stayed with them. So let's listen to our second scripture reading today, 2 Kings 18:1-6.

"In the third year of Hoshea son of Elah king of Israel, Hezekiah son of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign. He was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem twenty-nine years. His mother's name was Abijah daughter of Zechariah. He did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, just as his father David had done. He removed the high places, smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles.

He broke into pieces the bronze snake Moses had made, for up to that time the Israelites had been burning incense to it. It was called Nehushtan. Hezekiah trusted in the LORD, the God of Israel. There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him. He held fast to the LORD and did not cease to follow him; he kept the commands the LORD had given Moses." (NRSV)

The plot thickens. What was once a source of salvation for their Israelite ancestors had become an object of idolatry for the Judeans. They certainly knew the origin of the bronze serpent. They knew that it had a lot to do with the survival of their tribes, back before the comfort of a stable civilization and Kingdom. And so they celebrated it as an object worthy of worship.

I would imagine that King Hezekiah's decisive action to destroy the national religious treasure was not very popular. Who was he, this young whippersnapper of a king, to crush such a holy relic? Didn't he know that God had worked through that bronze serpent to save the tribe of Israel from death?

King Hezekiah was a faithful leader; the text of 2 Kings tells us as much. He discerned that something had gone very wrong with his kingdom's relationship with the bronze serpent. He did not deny that it had helped his ancestors survive the wilderness. But he recognized that as the context of God's people changed, it no longer served a purpose. They were no longer under siege by poisonous snakes. Not only had the talisman ceased to save the people. Because it had become an idol, it actively did the opposite.

Some of you may know that I attended a conference last winter that was sponsored by Disciple Home Missions. The goal of the gathering was to give pastors and lay leaders an opportunity to learn about congregational transformation and revitalization. We had time to talk about the churches we serve, as well as hear from pastors who have helped congregations that seemed to be on the brink of closure to become vital, growing congregations. The most inspiration speaker I heard was Pablo Jimenez, who preached on these passages we're considering today. Reverend Jimenez is the former head of Disciple Hispanic Ministries, and he's currently serving on the staff of the Christian Board of Publication. He drew surprising connections between the biblical story of the snakes and the state of many contemporary congregations. He understood the bronze serpent as a metaphor for ministry. He reminded us that ministries are supposed to be "instruments for the salvation of people", conduits for the healing spirit of God to reach his children.

"Ministries," he proclaimed, "are supposed to lead people out of sin, leading them to salvation. [They are] supposed to help people change their lives for the better, providing opportunities that most people cannot reach on their own."

Just as the bronze serpent served a very real purpose in a specific time and place, responding to the life-and-death needs of the Israelites when they were in the wilderness, ministries are also bound to a particular context. The church, as Christ's hands and feet on earth, has the responsibility to pay attention to the needs of the people in our community and develop ministries that respond to the joy and pain of the here and now. The preacher sent a jolt through the room when he stated it plainly: "When ministries do not change, they become mere religious relics, just as the bronze serpent became a relic after the Children of Israel reached the promised land, leaving behind the desert and its fiery serpents."

I doubt I could have made that connection myself, which is why I'm so grateful for chances to hear prophets like Reverend Jimenez preach. I do think that many congregations suffer from the bronze serpent syndrome. And one of the most common bronze serpents in many churches is the memory of the glory days, when new buildings were constructed to accommodate the many families that joined up to participate in Christian Endeavor and Sunday School. The cultural climate that encouraged people to participate actively in communities of faith gave congregations a wonderful opportunity to be in ministry with lots of people. Like South Bay Christian Church, most Disciple congregations used to be significantly larger then than they are now. That didn't mean they were any more faithful to the gospel. The context around us has changed. The neighborhood is different, and the world is different. Yet so many Christians believe that the best way to be church is to be big.

Christian communities throughout the centuries have mostly been small. For every magnificent parish cathedral, there have been many more humble house churches. Yet somehow, so many congregations like ours have convinced themselves that just because supersized communities of faith were once engaged in ministries that led people to salvation, that's the only way to do it. Instead of looking around and realizing that they are no longer ministering in 1950s America and learning how to respond to the needs of God's children in 2006, so many congregations have all but stopped participating in life-giving ministries because they are worshipping the bronze serpent of the past.

I'll tell you some areas where I think we, as a community, have joined King Hezekiah in crushing the bronze serpent. This congregation is generous with its resources. You could have locked up the keys to the Fellowship Hall, guarding the wonderful memories of the worship that took place in that building. Instead, this congregation moved to share that space with another congregation that is ministering to Korean-speaking Christians in life-saving ways. The greatest gift that congregation gives us is not a monthly rental fee; they bless this campus with their passionate witness for the gospel. Another movement away from the bronze serpent syndrome is the Come and Be Fed outreach. I've mentioned that ministry in sermons before; it is a powerful illustration of this congregation's commitment to hands-on ministry on behalf of the poor.

But I'll tell you one thing I learned at that conference: congregations that are dying tend to close off their greater communities. They are so intent on keeping up the institution that they completely lose sight of the mission that Christ gave his Church: to serve. Come and Be Fed shows that South Bay Christian Church is paying attention to its community and actively developing ministries that obey God's commandments to love and to serve.

As a congregation, we must resist the temptation to worship the bronze serpents, whatever they are. That isn't to say we shouldn't honor the victories of the past. The oldest church in my hometown of Stow, Ohio, is a Disciple congregation. Last month they celebrated their 175th anniversary. Of course a great deal of attention was given to where the church had been. Yet in the newspaper article about their anniversary festival, the pastor of the congregation emphasized that the point was to know where they'd been so they would know where they were going. He told the press, "We have a rich history here and we want to celebrate and uplift the people who have worked to keep this church in this community. We want to relive some of the past as a way to help deepen our commitment to ministry and outreach."

We must continually evaluate our ministries to be sure that they are still tools for God to work salvation. If we recognize that our ministries have become religious relics, we need to transform them. We need to be the congregation we are now, not apologizing for our smaller size, but finding ways to grow in faithfulness and commitment to serving God's children. We are only less of a congregation if we allow yesterday's serpent to poison today's mission. There is work to do, and God is calling us to move forward on this journey with hope, courage, and trust. Amen.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

2006-10-24T15:36:00.000-07:00

Click here to read 1 Kings 3:16-28.

Our text today is a courtroom drama, and even though it was recorded centuries before the birth of Christ, it's a familiar story. The very same case could be tried today in a court of law—or, just as likely, in the court of public opinion known as the daytime talk show. But more importantly, it's familiar because it is a story about family. No matter our context, no matter where we are situated on the timeline of Creation, we can recognize the compassion of a true mother.

At first I wanted to preach this text because of the powerful story it tells: a wise King suggests an unusual but effective test to determine the rightful mother of a newborn child. But the power in this story is really its characters. So today we're going to spend a little time with each participant in this struggle.

Both of the women involved in the dispute are prostitutes. They probably wouldn't have been in the situation if they did not live in the margins of Israelite culture. So far as we can tell, neither of the women is married. And so there is no one else in the house to see it happen, no husband to awaken and intervene when the first mother rolls over in her sleep and fatally injures her infant son. I do have sympathy for that woman, at least in that devastating moment when she wakes up and realizes what she had done. But whether it is her grief that corrupts her or if she was a cruel woman to begin with, she does the unthinkable. She creeps through the dark and lonesome house and makes a frantic attempt to switch her lifeless baby with the one who still breathes and hungers and hiccups.

She takes what isn't hers. She doesn't simply trespass against the living boy and his mother. She abandons her own flesh and blood. If he wasn't a living boy who could grow into a child and become a man, he was nothing to her, simply a token to exchange for a second chance.

The villain of this story does nothing to redeem herself in the light of day. Standing before the King, she lies. Her testimony is false, her words broken and meaningless. It's no surprise that when the sword is drawn and the life of the kidnapped baby is threatened, she is happy to let him be sacrificed at the altar of her spite.

Let's talk about that King. After all, Solomon is the celebrated hero of the story. When word of his amazing gift for discerning the truth sweeps through his Kingdom, the people are in awe. They recognize that God's wisdom dwells within him. Now, this story is often read as we read it today—taken out of context. This unusual trial and verdict take place soon after King Solomon has awakened from a dream. This is all happening pretty early in Solomon's reign over Israel. He's only been king since chapter two of the book of Kings, when his father, the celebrated King David, went to sleep with his ancestors. (That means he died.) So here we are in chapter three, and King Solomon has the esteemed privilege of encountering God in a dream.

This is a dream many long to have—the Lord shows up and asks Solomon what he should receive. What should I give you? Solomon could have said anything. He could have asked for wealth or beauty or more soldiers for his army. Solomon had an opportunity to receive anything he wanted, and he asked God for wisdom. He said, I'm really small, like a child, actually, and I have a lot of people expecting me to lead them. So give me, your servant, understanding. Give me the ability to discern between good and evil. Give me wisdom, your wisdom. So great a King, and so aware that he was empty and helpless without God's help.

So what's interesting about this story is that Solomon comes across as powerful and wise, but the reader knows that Solomon is only gifted with such confidence and discernment because he had confessed his need to God. He had admitted that he was no better than a little child when it came to knowing what was best for his people. I know why my seminary professor always pestered us to read everything that comes before and after any passage we intended to preach. If we just see Solomon playing the wise judge, we're likely to miss that it's God's wisdom doing the heavy lifting. Solomon was wise enough to know that he knew nothing. In his weakness, he made room for God's understanding.

I have to say, as much as I concur with the awestruck Israelites that Solomon drank deeply from the well of God's wisdom, I think that the true mother in this story is an unsung heroine. Despite the fact that she is a prostitute, vulnerable to the scorn and distrust of good society, she publicly stands up for herself and for her infant son. She will not let her child be stolen from her without a fight, and she fights well. She seeks out the King, and presents her argument as articulately as any lawyer. Yet as passionately as she fights for her right to mother her own child, she is just as quick to sacrifice her experience of motherhood to save her boy.

Solomon may possess the wisdom of discernment, but the victimized mother possesses the wisdom of love. The scriptures testify that compassion for her son burned within her. Her heart is scorched by the fierceness of her love for the child she had conceived, delivered, and nursed. Though pains her, she is willing to give him up if it meant that he could live. That is the wisdom of love. By revealing that she puts the life of the child before her own, the plaintiff proves that she is the true mother, and her son is saved from both the kidnapper and the sword. Solomon returns the child to her arms, unharmed.

There is another character in this drama, and I'm not talking about the crying infant. God's wisdom is at work, and in the Hebrew tradition, the wisdom of God is personified. She speaks in the language of poetry in the book of Proverbs, calling for all people to seek her out and learn her ways. She is, in a way, a literary technique, a metaphor. She gives voice to what could otherwise be a dusty and lifeless theological CONCEPT. Wisdom is not simply a set of rules to obey or disobey. Wisdom takes to the street in the poetry of Proverbs. She is loud, dynamic, bossy, and more precious than diamonds. She is a teacher, a guide, a voice leading us away from evil and toward the will of God. Wisdom calls us into our best selves, and challenges us to live in a way that is in harmony with Creation. She is an active, invisible presence in the story, giving insight and strength to the humble King and the brave mother so that the truth can be discerned.

Lady Wisdom, as she is sometimes called, is an unusual biblical character. She is neither spirit nor angel, but she embodies the mind of God. Her presence is not about burning bushes or even visionary dreams; she is subtle. Even as a literary figure, she testifies to a God who isn't afraid to get mixed up in the world. The argument that God created the world and walked away just doesn't stand when Lady Wisdom shows up at the gates of the town, preaching the way of life. The traditions about Lady Wisdom are so much about the very real presence and activity of God that Christians would later recognize the connection between the Wisdom of God and the Word of God, Christ Jesus his son. God is involved with his people, God has a will for us, God is continually making himself present in our lives, in ways that are seen and unseen. We must seek God as persistently as he seeks us.

I don't want to turn this story from the First book of Kings into a simple morality tale. Of course we know that we should endeavor to have wisdom like Solomon and be compassionate like the true mother. What this story can be for us is a guide for discerning how God works in the world. Here we can practice seeing God’s movement in something as ordinary as a family controversy, and practice recognizing what it looks like when human beings—whether they are prostitutes or kings—follow the will of God. Where we accept our weakness, we make room for the spirit. Where we see compassion burning, we are likely to find the presence of God. Where we find the truth revealed, we have surely encountered Wisdom. May it be so.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

2006-10-24T15:34:00.000-07:00

Today we will consider the point in Israel’s history when an Egyptian slave woman named Hagar experienced God’s grace. Our text for today enters the story partway through the saga, so a little background information is necessary. Back when Abraham was still Abram, God promised that he would be blessed with many descendants. But Abram and his wife, Sarai, were barren. They had no children, and so God’s promise seemed impossible. Sarai was tired of the impossible promise, and tired of the shame her culture heaped upon her for being childless. So she did what women of means could do in such a situation. She volunteered her slave, Hagar, to be a surrogate mother. Once Hagar conceived, Sarai detected contempt in the eyes of her slave. Abram took the hands-off approach to his quarreling wives, and told Sarai that Hagar was hers and she could do whatever she wanted. So Sarai was cruel to Hagar, and before long Hagar fled to the wilderness. There, by a spring of water, Hagar encountered an angel of the Lord. She received some good news and some bad news. She was to return to her unkind mistress and submit to her authority. But she was also informed that the child in her womb would also be the patriarch of many descendants. So Hagar returned to her masters’ house and gave birth to a son, Ishmael.

Soon after, Sarai and Abram become Sarah and Abraham, and despite Sarah’s old age, they also become parents to the long-promised boy, Isaac. At this point we encounter Hagar and her boy in Genesis 21: 8-21.

The child grew, and was weaned; and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, "Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac." The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son. But God said to Abraham, "Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring." So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beersheba.

When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, "Do not let me look on the death of the child." And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. And God heard the voice of the boy; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, "What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him." Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the boy a drink. God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran; and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt. (NRSV)

Her name means “stranger.” And that is what she was to her masters, Abraham and Sarah. They did not know her; even though she lived under their roof and bore Abraham a son, she was nothing more than a stranger among them. We can count what we know about her on one hand: she was an Egyptian, a slave, a mother, an outcast. But she encountered God in the wilderness twice. We do not know her, but she knew God. And so the stranger becomes part of our spiritual history. What does she teach us?
The book of Genesis tells the story of the beginnings of the Israelite people; it is an account of their formation as the chosen ones of God. Abraham and Sarah are the great ancestors of Israel; through their son, Isaac, a nation was born. Yet it would be hard to argue that this story is told from their perspective. If they told the story, surely they would have softened Sarah’s cruelty, and made Hagar out to be more of a troublemaker. There they were, the family chosen to give birth to God’s great nation, and Abraham and Sarah were far from perfect. They were complicated people, neither all good nor all bad… which is to say that they were human.

The Old Testament is composed of stories that bear witness to God through the language and history of the Hebrew people. And as with any account of a nation’s history, we are bound to hear about the nations and peoples they encountered along their journey. We cannot understand Israel without spending some time in Egypt; we cannot know King David without getting acquainted with his enemies the Ammonites. Their stories are intertwined, woven into a shared history. For the most part, we hear the story from the perspective of the Israelites. But this unique family drama from the early archives of Israel’s history seems drawn through the perspective of Hagar, the Egyptian.
We don’t get to stay back with Sarah at the Oaks of Mamre to witness the great feast celebrating Isaac’s birth and the promises it fulfilled. Rather, the narrator invites us to wander into the wilderness with Hagar. We see her hope draining away as her water supply dwindles. We witness her despair as she leaves her child beneath a bush, knowing that he cannot survive the harsh wilderness without water. And we hear her wretched cries resound through the vast and unforgiving desert.

We were not led into the desert to watch Hagar mourn her son. In the wilderness we see a miracle unfold, a spring of water burst forth in a land where no water has any business flowing. We might expect, as the spiritual descendants of Isaac, that God would pour all of his care and blessing into the chosen son, the legitimate child of Abraham and Sarah. Certainly, this is what Sarah expected of her God. Instead, even while the feast for Isaac is being served, God saves the son who was not chosen, the forsaken son of the Egyptian slave-woman. God hears the cries of the boy and sends his angel to comfort and counsel Hagar to pick up her boy and take him to the wellspring. The boy and his mother are delivered.

One of the overarching themes of the Old Testament is God’s habit of rooting for the righteous underdog. Time and time again, the stories and prophecies of the Hebrew Witness proclaim God’s compassion for the oppressed. God will deliver his people from slavery and proclaim a year of Jubilee, a time for all debts to be forgiven. God will send prophets like Isaiah to bring good news to the oppressed and proclaim liberty to the captives. The thing is, the righteous underdog is usually Israel. After all, throughout Israel’s history, enemies constantly threatened the small nation. The former slaves would become exiles, and later, in New Testament times, inhabitants of an occupied land. The Israelites knew through all of those trials that the God of justice stood with them.

And yet way back in the Genesis of Israelite history, here is a story where God’s mercy and justice is extended even to one who is a stranger. God’s desire for justice could not be contained within the chosen people; when Sarah and Abraham cast out an Egyptian, she was not denied God’s mercy.

The boy who cried in the wilderness, Ishmael, was the son of a stranger. But his name bears witness to the God we know: Ishmael means God hears. In the wilderness of Beer-sheba, God heard his cries. And this is what the story of Hagar and her boy teaches us: God hears when his children weep. No matter if the child is celebrated or cast off; God hears.

People are often very keen on determining just how wide God’s mercy really is, just how far his love reaches. Some almost seem to prefer that salvation be limited to the ones they deem worthy of God’s love and forgiveness. Sarah believed that her status as the chosen mother of a chosen son made Hagar and Ishmael unworthy to receive their inheritance of God’s love. She could not imagine a household that had room for both of Abraham’s sons. But our scriptures reveal that God’s compassion reaches beyond even the ones that he has chosen. God chooses, God hears, God saves. Thanks be to God it isn’t up to Sarah; thanks be to God it isn’t up to us. Amen.

Sunday, October 8, 2006

2006-10-10T15:40:00.000-07:00

I decided to go off-lectionary for a bit and spend some time exploring the great stories of the Hebrew Scriptures. So the text for this sermon is Daniel 6.
***

The story of Daniel's adventure in the Lion's Den is standard fare in Sunday School. If you grew up in church, you might have watched the tale reenacted with puppets, or made a lion out of construction paper, or heard one of the many Children's versions read during Story Hour. The story is popular beyond the church, as well. A brief version of it is included in the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, a reference book of American culture. The story of the man who was miraculously protected from hungry lions makes for an exciting lesson about a faithful man's deliverance from death.

But let's go deeper.

I want for us to really understand what's going on here, and so a little refresher on the history of the Israelites is in order. For a short time, the Israelites had one united and sovereign Kingdom, ruled by David and his descendents. But the Northern part of the Kingdom broke away, and the divided house soon collapsed. The Northern Kingdom went first, but the Southern Kingdom of Judea was eventually destroyed by the conquests of the Babylonians. That's when the Babylonian Exile began. Thousands of Judeans were deported to Babylon. Daniel was a member of the Jewish community in exile. The Babylonians were smart; they didn't force able-minded people into positions of manual labor. A man like Daniel, with an excellent spirit, could achieve a measure of success in the foreign land. When we first encountered Daniel, he was not some low-level assistant. He was one of three administrators with a lot of responsibility for the Babylonian Kingdom. His supervisor was none other than King Darius himself, and the King clearly liked and trusted Daniel. A major promotion was in the works for our Israelite hero. He stood to follow in the footsteps of his ancestor Joseph, who held a position of authority in Egypt.

The other administrators didn't like Daniel. They had no reason and every reason to grumble about his leadership. There he was, a foreigner whose homeland had been defeated by Babylonian forces. Exile wasn't supposed to mean a fast track to the top for Daniel, and yet he had distinguished himself so highly that he was about to become their boss. They wanted to take him down on principle. But it turned out he was a little too good for their rotten scheme. His character was honorable, his record immaculate. So they played the religion card. "We will never find any basis for charges against this man Daniel unless it has something to do with the law of his God."

They hammered out the perfect plan of attack: flatter the King by drafting a law prohibiting prayers to any other authority—divine or human—for thirty days. And then camp out under Daniel's window and wait for the evidence to fall into their waiting arms.

One of the most important details of the story comes next. "Now when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before."

Daniel and his people had lost their homeland, their temple, and the basic freedom to live and work where they pleased. But Daniel's faith would not be tethered by any ruler. His soul would not be managed by any edict. The conspiracy against Daniel threatened to enslave his spirit, but Daniel's spirit was as fierce as a lion. The narrator of this story is clear as can be: Daniel knew full well of the new law prohibiting his daily prayers, and he prayed anyway. What's more, he didn't lock his piety away behind the relative safety of a cellar door. Daniel disobeyed the law openly, kneeling before his open window to pray to the God of Israel.

To me, this is every bit as awe-inspiring as the lock-jawed lions.

Prayer, for Daniel, was as natural as breath. Three times a day, without fail, he fell to his knees and offered himself to his Lord. A prayer attributed to Daniel is preserved in the second chapter of the book bearing his name: "Praise be to the name of God for ever and ever; wisdom and power are his. He changes times and seasons; he sets up kings and deposes them. He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the discerning. He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him." Through prayer, Daniel knew God. Prayer connected him to the Living Source of Life. And through prayer, Daniel knew himself. Raising his voice in praise to the God of his Ancestors—the God of our Ancestors— gave him an unwavering sense of identity, even in a foreign land. No matter how high he rose in the ranks of Babylon's leadership, three times a day he turned toward Jerusalem: heart, mind, and body.

With the royal decree limiting prayer only to the King, Daniel's praying took on another shape in his life. Prayer became a form of resistance, a public sign of his obedience to a greater law. Prayer became a form of civil disobedience. Daniel rejected not only the idolatry of the edict, but even the temptation to simply take the truth underground for thirty days.

Daniel's bravery – not in the lion's den, but on his knees before the open window— became a hero to Mahatma Gandhi early in his vocation as a pioneer of nonviolent resistance. Daniel was Gandhi's model of resistance to unjust legislation. When he was working on behalf of the Indians suffering from oppression in South Africa, Gandhi counseled his brethren to "sit with their doors flung wide open and tell those gentlemen that whatever laws they passed were not for them unless those laws were from God."

There are always consequences to civil disobedience. Anyone who publicly breaks a law faces the penalties of the law, even if the law is wrong. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood that when he and his fellow civil rights activists disobeyed the segregation laws, they were inviting imprisonment, hatred, and abuse. They expected to land squarely within the fangs of racist Americans. They used that predictable retaliation, hoping that the sight of innocent suffering would transform the hardened hearts of their oppressors.

Darius didn't even want to follow his foolish edict, but the law was the law. King and Kingdom would lose all integrity if he didn't consistently enforce the laws of the land. And so Daniel was thrust into the lion's den with nothing to protect him but the God to whom he had prayed a million times before.

Which was all he needed.

What happened to Daniel in the lion's den was a joyful triumph for people of faith. God saved his servant. Daniel's deliverance from death is one of the greatest, most vividly imaginable stories in all of our Holy Scriptures. It gives hope to the hopeless and proclaims that God will make a way where there is no way. The blameless hero was nearly killed on account of his devotion, yet his devotion to the Most High God summoned an angel to seal the jaws of his predators.

In the lions' den we learn that the rules and regulations of the world are not the final authority over God's children. Corrupt laws are turned to ash, death itself is left empty-handed, and even the most foolish King makes a wise decree: revere the God of Daniel.

***

I found a book in our church library called Alone with God. It was written in 1917 by a woman named Matilda Erickson. It's the sort of book you could glance at once and immediately dismiss; surely, a volume so old and yellowed doesn't have anything too enlightening within its tattered covers. But listen to what Matilda had to say about Daniel. "When prime minister of Babylon, [Daniel] found it possible to meet God alone three times each day. All that the men asked of Daniel was that he stop praying for thirty days—just thirty days. Many Christians have stopped praying much longer than that, when the only lions in the way were carelessness and spiritual laziness."

Daniel isn't a hero because he was saved from the lions. That was God's doing, God's power revealed. Daniel is a hero because he threw open his window and prayed. His best bravery was spent on his knees. He defied Babylon, and our God stood with him in that defiance to establish life where Babylonian law sentenced death.

***

It has been said that the Bible comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. In the gospels, Jesus teaches that his followers must lose their lives for his sake in order to live. The part about everlasting life is comforting, but the dying for it can be a bit unnerving. We love that Daniel's faith in God saved from death in the lions' lair… but don't linger too much on the fact that his faith in God landed him there in the first place.

Daniel's story teaches us what it means to be truly faithful. God does not challenge us to be privately pious, concealing our devotion from polite company. God dares us to take our faith public, living out the commands of our God – even when that means irritating the culture or breaking the law. God longs for us to choose the lion's den with Him rather than the palace without him [paraphrase from Matilda Erickson].

Ancient Babylon thirsted for a witness like that of Daniel's. And so does our own time and place. Our witness to the goodness of God is a prayer that must be prayed and a window that must be opened. This tired world needs to encounter the God we know through Jesus Christ, and the only ones capable of giving voice to his glory are the ones who know him.

We will face lions, but none more dangerous than a life emptied of God. Like Daniel, we will be delivered. Like Daniel, we will be saved.

Sunday, September 24, 2006

2006-09-25T12:08:00.000-07:00

According to the Message, this is what happened in the house in Capernaum: “He put a child in the middle of the room. Then, cradling the little one in his arms, he said, "Whoever embraces one of these children as I do embraces me, and far more than me—God who sent me.” Now, the New Revised Standard Version is a translation. I trust that Mark’s original text probably says something closer to its language of Jesus taking a child and putting it among the Disciples. Yet Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase captures the tenderness we believe that Jesus would have demonstrated toward a small child. He cradles and embraces the little one. This is the language of love. The first lesson children are taught in Sunday school is that Jesus loves the little children, and this scripture bears witness to that love.

It can be hard to hear the fullness of this gospel text about power and greatness, humility and servanthood, discipleship and childhood, and what it really means to welcome God. Our own culture and context can deafen us to the Bible. We live in a culture that values children. We have an educational system that provides schooling to rich and poor children alike. And though laws are often broken, the mere fact that children are legally protected from abuse, neglect, and labor is significant. In ancient times, children were socially on par with slaves. They were completely powerless. Even today, children are endangered in certain cultures. So while we hear Jesus’ call to welcome children in light of our culture that, as a whole, agrees that children are to be cherished and protected, we might miss how off-key this lesson sounded to the Disciples’ ears. This is yet another example illustrating the upside-down, topsy-turvy Kingdom of God, where a servant is the greatest and one can welcome God by welcoming a child.

So as Disciples, our lesson is that we are to take the risks of servanthood. “Greatness is achieved in Jesus's eyes, not just by the fact that we serve others, not just by the fact that we pour out our time and our talent for the sake of others, greatness in the eyes of Jesus is found in the willingness of his disciples to receive, to accept, and indeed to really welcome those they would normally consider un-receivable, unacceptable, and unwelcome.” Including a child.

As wonderful and necessary that lesson is, it isn’t the one I’m called to preach today. In my study this week, I practiced a prayerful way of reading the Bible that was taught by St. Ignatius, one of the great guides of Christian spirituality. The Ignatian method of bible reading encourages Christians to put one of God’s greatest gifts to use—our imaginations.

“Generally, Ignatian prayer works best with narrative material in which actual characters live a story of faith. The idea is to place yourself into the text as a careful observer -- a fly on the wall. Ignatius commended the use of the five senses in such meditation. You taste, hear, see, smell and feel your way through the passage. Occasionally you become one of the characters, seeing the story unfold from his or her viewpoint. Most of all, the aim is to help you perceive the narrative from the viewpoint of Jesus so that you may more fully participate in his mind, heart, and work.”

While the Ignatian method doesn’t replace traditional bible study, it is a wonderful way to interact with the living word of God.

So I imagined my way into the gospel text. So much to see, so much to relate to. I started by acknowledging how very tired the whole group must have been, walking so many miles to fulfill their mission. I felt the Disciples’ fear and bewilderment when Jesus again preached that he would be killed and after three days rise again. I overheard the bickering about which Disciple would be greatest—and I recognized their shame and heard their silence when Jesus wondered what they were arguing about. It’s easy for me to relate to the Disciples in the Gospel of Mark, for he is the evangelist who is most brutally honest about their many blunders.

But just as I thought my practice of the Ignatian Method would lead me to remain with the disciples and see the whole story through their searching eyes, Jesus draws the child into the circle. And as I contemplated the simple beauty of the Son of God cradling a little child in his arms, I realized that I wanted, and needed, to be the child. I squeezed my eyes shut and summoned every drop of my imagination into becoming the object of Jesus’ lesson, the little one whom he embraced.

Most of the folks who gather for worship are grown-up Christians. We’re supposed to be learning the lessons the Disciples had to learn, because we are part of the communion of saints before us who spent their lives trying to faithfully follow Christ. And so I am not surprised that every commentary and sermon I read about this passage interpreted it in light of what it calls the Disciples to do to do.

Its lesson is important and startling. Welcome a child, serve the powerless, and you welcome and serve not only Christ but the One who sent him. We need to be challenged to understand what this really means. I have a friend who is both a pastor and a mother, and she is using this opportunity to remind her congregation that they can’t just welcome her kids when they are on their best behavior; if they really want to welcome her kids they have to welcome, in her words, “crumbs in the pews and poop and all kids of unwelcoming things.” Jesus isn’t calling his followers to welcome Precious Moments figurines of children; he cradles before them a living and breathing child who needs care.

We are the Disciples learning how to truly welcome, but we are that child, too, hungry for love and acceptance, needing to know that no matter how small we are, we are great in the eyes of God. Our journey with Jesus starts when we realize, with all the simplicity of a child, that Jesus really does love us. Just as Jesus cradled and embraced that little one in Galilee, he welcomes each and every one of us to rest in his arms.

It is all too easy to teach a child the opposite. I remember the burning feeling I had when I was yelled at in my childhood church for running in the sanctuary during the midweek ministry program. I was sternly told that I was in the house of the Lord. The sanctuary no longer felt safe; the Father’s mansion suddenly didn’t seem to have room for me. No one but Jesus could have drawn me out of my shame. No one but Jesus could erase the harsh words that separated me from feeling like I was welcome in the sanctuary. No one but Jesus.

Fred Craddock tells a story. “Used to have a kid down home who’d believe anything you’d tell him. You could say, “The schoolhouse burned down. We’re not having school tomorrow.”

“Oh boy!” He’d believe it.

“They’re giving away free watermelons down at the town hall.”

“Really? Free watermelons?” He’d go running off.

“Did you know the president of the United States is coming to our town tomorrow?”

“He is? Really? Whoopee!” He just believed everything.

I remember once there was an evangelist who came to our town, and he said to that kid, “God loves you and cares for you and comes to you in Jesus Christ.” And do you know, that kid believed it? He actually believed it.”

I hope that you believe it, too.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

2006-09-25T12:04:00.000-07:00

Jesus and his Disciples are making their way to a new territory, a new set of villages in which to teach and heal and bear witness to the goodness of God. And as they journey to Caesarea Philippi, the unfamiliar landscape draws forth a new set of questions. Jesus asks what the people are saying about him. The Disciples certainly would have been keeping up with the public perception of their prophet, and so they are quick to answer what they have heard. That this man from Nazareth is something special goes without saying, and so people have speculated that he might be an incarnation of John the Baptist, or Elijah, or perhaps a prophet sent by God to proclaim a new word for the Israelites.

Jesus' question is more than a straw poll. Knowing what other people say about Jesus can be helpful as we prepare ourselves to answer the second of Jesus' questions. One of my first assignments in seminary was to analyze and compare how the reformers John Calvin and Martin Luther understood who Jesus is and what his life and death means for humanity.

It was an exhausting paper to research, full of nitpicky details and fine distinctions. It felt like calculating how many angels dance on the head of a pin. And yet, when I timidly met my strict German professor for a conference about the paper, we ended up talking at length about my own understanding of who Jesus was and is. I was surprised to realize how much learning about the church's traditional interpretations of Jesus Christ informed my own confession of faith.

On the road to Caesarea Philippi, Jesus pushed the Disciples to answer for themselves just who they thought they were following. Whether he was blessed by unique wisdom or courage, Peter alone responded, and his answer was correct: their rabbi was no ordinary man, but the Messiah.

Peter thought he knew what it meant to stand in the presence of the Messiah. He believed that Israel's hope for a restored earthly kingdom was fulfilled in Jesus. After centuries of slavery and exile, turmoil and oppression, the Israelites would finally emerge from under the iron thumb of their most recent enemies and be sovereign over their promised land again. Jesus would be the victorious King, born from the house of David. All of these expectations swirled in Peter's head as he proudly proclaimed Jesus' true identity.

The Disciples’ high hopes were dashed, as Jesus took Peter's spark of understanding as an invitation to go deeper into the real meaning of Messiah. The Disciples had seen a lot since Jesus called them out of their fishing boats. They had seen Jesus scatter Demons, vanquish leprosy, chill fevers. They had seen loaves and fish split into five thousand servings, and paralysis give way to movement. They had heard the astounding authority in Jesus' words. They had seen more than enough to believe that Jesus was the Christ, worthy of their trust and adoration.

Yet nothing prepared them for this new teaching. What is this about suffering and rejection? What is this about death? I wonder if Peter even heard the part about rising again after three days, so appalled was he at the thought of his beloved master denied by their brethren.

We hear this teaching in much the same way as the Disciples. We did not gather today expecting the doom and drear of Lent. This is the time of the Christian year in which we simply hear the stories about Jesus. We're supposed to be growing in our Discipleship of the risen Lord by rehearsing the gospel accounts of miracles and parables. And yet in the midst of our journey with Jesus, suddenly we find ourselves on another road altogether. We thought we were going to Caesarea Philippi, but it turns out the path leads to Calvary.
Jesus wants his Disciples to understand who he really is.

And if the finger is pointed in our direction, if we take on the boldness of Peter and proclaim that Jesus is the Messiah, do we know what that means? The life and death and life of Jesus will reveal an utterly unexpected Messiah, and an utterly unexpected God. For Jesus is not an exception in the life of God, a momentary lapse of divine power. Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one, the sharpest reflection of the heart of our Creator. The fierce tribal god of battles and retribution turns out to be a falsehood. The cheerful and shiny god of smashing success is just another idol. Jesus reveals that the God who lit the stars and stirred the seas, the true God, is loving and compassionate. His faithfulness to his people renders him completely vulnerable, and so through Christ we learn that the One who created us is the One who suffers with us, and for us. And though we might believe that the opposite of power is vulnerability, the Messiah lives and dies to show us that the greatest expression of power is the vulnerability of sacrificial love.

To claim Jesus as the Messiah demands that we recognize the breadth and the depth, the joy and the sorrow, of who Jesus is and what he brought about. Why did the Disciples bother to leave their nets behind and follow this strange teacher throughout the hills and plains of Galilee? And, for that matter, why do we bother to follow him in this time and in this place?

This week I encountered one pastor’s answer to this question that took my breath away and had me drawing stars in the margins of the page. Why do we follow? “Because Jesus told Nathanael, the Samaritan woman and others the truth about themselves. Because he fulfilled the longing of Israel. Because he brought healing and forgiveness that embodied the new regime of which he spoke. Because he practiced and pictured the character and possibility of all people, and breathed purpose and destiny into all creation.

Because he opened out an everlasting communion with the Father that made the Romans, the conventional powers and authorities, all the destructive and craven impulses of the world, even death itself, seem paltry and pitiful. He formed around himself a community, and gave them the practices and the gifts to be his body through pain and joy. His were the words and deeds of eternal life, and there have been none to match them before or since.”

Peter’s lack of understanding frustrated Jesus, and if we join Peter in denying the fullness of who Jesus is, we will frustrate our Lord just as surely. Jesus spoke harshly to Peter not because he didn’t love this bold yet flawed Disciple. Jesus knew how crucial it was for those closest to him, those who had heard and responded to his call on their lives, to know the truth about their leader and the mission he shared with them. No one can say that Jesus didn’t warn his followers that proclaiming the gospel could result in suffering and death.

Just as Jesus could not evade the cruelty of the cross, neither could his followers. "If any want to become my disciples, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me." This is not a battle cry for martyrdom; this is an honest evaluation of the cost of discipleship.

Peter thought he was on the road to Caesarea Philippi with a man whose reputation echoed that of Elijah and John the Baptist. He found out he was following the Messiah on a path to Calvary, and for the life of him, he could not discern any good news in this detour. Yet what we overhear in this challenging passage is a story about a disciple ever so slowly realizing that he is in the presence of the only one who can lead him home.

In this geography of discipleship, Jesus is the leader. We must either follow or get out of the way. If we cannot accept the God whom Jesus reveals, if we cannot abide that our Savior should be anything other than an untainted idol of success, we will be rebuked and told to get back. The journey will continue without us. But if we look at this incredible map and see the way, the truth, and the life, we will be given the grace and the strength to take up our cross and follow him to the lowest hell and the highest heaven.

At this intersection, who do you say that He is?

Sunday, September 10th, 2006

2006-09-12T11:06:00.000-07:00

Our gospel reading today tells of a healing. Jesus restores sound and speech to a man who had spent his years imprisoned and isolated by silence. Unlike Matthew, who excludes some of the uncomfortable details from this story, Mark describes the strange healing techniques Jesus employed in the healing. He stuck his fingers in the man's ears, and touched the man's tongue with his own saliva. Some biblical commentaries speculate that these actions embarrassed Matthew, for they were the same methods used by a host of ancient sorcerers. Letting on that Jesus used the same procedures as ordinary charlatans opened the early Church to ridicule and scorn.

I was, in a small way, in a similar position as the deaf man this week. I needed healing. I have a slight curve to my spine that acts up every so often. A couple times a year I'm knocked out of commission for three or four days by spasms of pain. Sometimes a visit to the chiropractor grants some relief, and so this week I ended up in the office of a holistic doctor who also practices chiropractic medicine. Unfortunately, this doctor was awful. Instead of the chiropractic adjustments I came in for, I was subjected to a host of alternative healing methods that were questionable at best and an outright sham at worst. The worst of which involved a laser pointer. The good doctor pointed it into my ear and expected my back to suddenly be healed. Needless to say, I left that office in just as much pain as I'd carried in with me.

And so I can imagine how the deaf man might have felt when Jesus started poking around in his ears and mouth. The man quite possibly had already been treated, unsuccessfully, with the same tiresome and useless techniques. I wonder if his eyes rolled with disbelief and disappointment, frustrated that his friends had forced him to face yet another scam artist.

But then something changed. Though Jesus began his treatment with ordinary spit, he diverged from the ordinary practice of faith healers. He groaned, and looked at the Heavens, and with the power of God he spoke a commandment in Aramaic: Ephphtha! Be opened!

Be opened. And the man's ears were opened, his tongue released. He was healed.

The deaf man had no reason to believe he would ever be the man who could hear. He was locked in silence and sealed with a feeling of utter desperation. And maybe he had given in to the fact of his existence. He didn't volunteer to be healed; his friends lead him to

Jesus to receive a healing touch. And then he was taken aside by the Son of God, subjected to a dubious drama of healing, and then-- surprise of all surprises-- healed.

Isaiah had spoken of a day in which the blind would be released from darkness and the deaf set free from silence. And in Jesus, this prophecy is realized. Through his ministry on earth, Jesus shared gifts of healing and wholeness. Jesus set men and women free from spiritual-- and physical-- captivity.

For Jesus, spiritual healing was infinitely more important. He didn't even want the crowd that overheard the healing of the deaf man to share what they had seen. His compassion for those who suffered was so intense that it caused him to groan, and yet he knew that physical relief was only a fragment of his mission.

Though the gospels bear witness to miraculous physical healings, the primary work of Jesus was not to cure ailments but to open eyes and ears, hearts and minds, to the good news of God's redeeming love. Be open, he commanded. Open your eyes to imagine a restored Creation. See what Isaiah saw-- the hope that roses will bloom where now there is only parched dust. Open your ears to hear the Word that transforms cries of mourning into shouts of praise. Be open to the amazing grace of God, and you will be transformed, you will be healed.

The words of Isaiah are echoed and fulfilled in the healing acts of Christ. Isaiah promised that God would save his people and extend healing to his children. Mark’s account of the healing of the deaf man signifies that the age of salvation has arrived. But I think the authors of the lectionary—the pastors and scholars who prayerfully discerned that churches throughout the world would consider these scriptures in tandem—recognized a second connection between these passages from the Old and New testaments. Isaiah charges those with fearful hearts to “Be strong.” Despite his often difficult message to the Israelites, he reminds God’s people that God will come and save them. “Do not fear,” he proclaims.

These two commands— “do not fear” and “be opened” are two sides of the same coin. We cannot be open when we are afraid. When fear holds us in its grip we are anything but open. We lock our doors and shutter our windows. Anything and anyone that is different is perceived as a threat, a danger. And so we live a smaller existence when we fear, an existence that does not leave room for good news, for pure joy, for abiding hope.

Fear is a fist: held tightly closed, defensive, untrusting. Beginning to trust God, to really believe that God is really doing something about the mess of the world, feels to me like slowly unfurling a fist I’ve gripped for far too long. Nothing illustrates trust and hope and openness and faith for me like a hand, held open. Open to share and receive love, open to share and receive healing.

We could easily dismiss the prophecy of Isaiah and the promise of Christ. We could arm ourselves with fearful skepticism, blind and deaf to the healing power of God. We could join the early detractors of the Church in dismissing Jesus as a sorcerer, or we the contemporary detractors of the Church in writing him off as a very wise man that affected people so deeply that they made up stories of miracles and healing. Or, we can trust that the invitation to give up fear and be opened to good news is an invitation worth heeding. We can entrust the most wounded and terrified parts of our bodies and souls to God, not in blind faith but because we see that Christ alone is the source of all healing.

Five years ago tomorrow, we were commanded to fear. Our nation was wounded and many people were killed so that we would be afraid, so that we would live in a prison of terror. And yet the wisdom of our faith instructs us not to fear. Just as Isaiah encouraged the exiles to trust in their God and hope for the restoration of their land, we must fearlessly place our trust in the One who heals our suffering and redeems our souls. We must hope for a transformed world where terror is no longer a weapon, where death no longer holds a sting. This caliber of hope is impossible if we do not heed the groan of Jesus to be courageously open to the gospel.

As the United States commemorates September 11th this week, we will be reminded of the horror and the heroism that emerged from the destruction. For as much evil as we saw that day, we also witnessed the human capacity for compassion and courage.

One of the simple yet profound images from the rescue and recovery operations was that of a rugged steel cross, discovered amidst the bent and twisted ruins of the World Trade Center. That cross was a fierce and glorious reminder that our God transforms suffering and death into hope and resurrection. The rescue operation continued beneath the foot of the cross, a constant reminder that God has given us every reason to hope for new life.

God will come and save us, God will repair what has been broken, God will restore what has been lost. We will be healed.

Sunday, September 3, 2006

2006-09-12T11:03:00.000-07:00

Despite the fact that I’m a huge fan of National Public Radio, I rarely catch Morning Edition, one of their primary news shows. Its title doesn’t lie: it’s on in the Morning, and I am definitely not on in the morning. But the other day on my way to Westwood to spend some time with a few young clergywomen, I caught a brief installment of StoryCorps, their weekly series in which friends and family members interview one another in sound booths set up throughout the United States. Just as Morning Edition airs in the morning, StoryCorps specializes in stories. I heard a third-generation steel worker named Ken Kobus tell a simple yet beautiful story about his father, John, and the labor that they shared. I loved the story enough to buy the transcript, because I knew I couldn’t retell it with the grace of the original. So here’s what Ken said. [Truncated due to copyright.]

...I know that [working in the mill] stuck with my father for all his life. I mean, when he was dying - he had cancer. We had him in a hospice and he was in a lot of pain, so they were giving him lots of morphine.
And I was watching him in the bed once. And the doctor came in and my dad was laying on his back and he, like, had his hands up in the air and he was turning and manipulating. And the doctor saw it - I was looking at my dad - and he says we’re wondering what the heck he’s doing? Because, you know, he did it all the time. He would be laying on his back and he would be doing this stuff and they had no clue as to what he was doing.

And I said, oh, I says, I could tell you. He’s making steel. He was opening furnace doors and he was adjusting the gas on the furnace and the draft. I could see. I could see what he was doing. And the doctor was amazed, you know.

To the day he died, that’s what he lived. He lived steel-making.

Maybe I wouldn’t have heard what I heard in this story if I hadn’t been contemplating the letter of James this week. James is a bit of a rogue character in the canon of Christian scripture. The letter has been the subject of nearly as much controversy as the Book of Revelation. Many early Christian scripture collections did not include it, and the reformer Martin Luther called it a letter of straw compared to the writings of Paul.

Whereas Paul emphasizes that we are saved by grace through faith, not by good works, James proclaims that faith without works is dead. He is, I believe, unfairly accused of not giving grace the credit it deserves. But I think he’s asking an entirely different question. He doesn’t explore how we are saved; he is primarily concerned with how faith forms and shapes our lives. How do we live as Christians?

For James, the Christian faith requires action. He doesn’t claim that our actions save us; indeed, he celebrates the implanted word that has the power to save our souls. I especially like the way Eugene Peterson renders this—“ In simple humility, let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a salvation-garden of your life.” God’s grace is clearly the source of our salvation—but that doesn’t let us of the hook. We are to be more than passive recipients of the word. More than people who let the gospel go in one ear and out the other. We are to be doers of the word. We are to be shaped by the Word. Our lives are to take on a distinct pattern of compassion and service. As Christians, we do not simply believe the gospel. We are called to embody the gospel, to live it.

And that is how the apparently secular story Ken Kobus told about his father landed in the pulpit this Sunday. Ken confessed that his father lived the steel mills. The ordinary habits of his career were so much a part of him that they became a source of comfort and meaning in the delirium of his cancer. So long as he was carefully monitoring the dynamics of the furnace, he was still a strong laborer, not a man lost to the ravages of illness. He knew the movements of his trade by heart, so that as long as his heart was beating, he was a steel maker.

We often think of habits only negatively. We think of bad habits—procrastination, overspending, nailbiting. Even good habits are considered to be sort of mindless. Going to church out of habit doesn’t exactly sound as romantic as being drawn to worship out of joy in the Lord. But Rick Warren, the author of the Purpose Driven Life, teaches that adopting spiritual habits leads to spiritual maturity.

He writes, “Anyone can become physically fit if he or she will regularly do certain exercises and practice good health habits. Likewise, spiritual fitness is no mystery. It is simply a matter of learning certain spiritual exercises and being disciplined to do them until they become habits.” Pastor Warren preaches here the same message as our Brother James: be doers of the word. Live your faith. Embody the gospel. Don’t simply admire Jesus; walk in his footsteps.

John Kobus worked a difficult job for thirty-seven years. His work was tedious at times. Every cent he brought home was earned with sweat and danger. He did the same things over, and over, and over again until they became second nature.

God’s vision for us—the salvation-garden He labors to plant within the soil of each of our lives—is to be just as shaped by the work of discipleship. Our work is prayer, witness, compassion, service. Our work is bible study, communion, love, kindness. Our work is worship, justice, generosity, sacrifice. May our new lives in Christ be consumed by this work, as a faithful response to God’s great works of grace. Amen.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

2006-09-12T11:01:00.000-07:00

When I was in seminary, I could be a bit of a firecracker; if I had an opinion, I was more than happy to make it known. This mode of operation worked out just fine, with a couple exceptions. I couldn’t skip class much, because my absence would be altogether too apparent. Just as thunder strikes after lightening during Midwestern summer storms, it was a safe gamble that I would pipe up when certain theological issues came up. One of those issues was—and is—violence. Violence and the bible, violence and Christian history, violence and video games. And it was on one of those occasions that violence came up in class that my tendency to mouth off bit back. It was History of Christianity, pre-reformation. We had made it as far as the Crusades, the brutal “Holy Wars” that Christians and Muslims waged in Medieval times. Little bewilders and angers me more than killing in the name of the Prince of Peace.

I took one look at the textbook illustration of a soldier dressed in armor adorned with a cross, and my hand shot up. I don’t remember precisely what I said, but it had something to do with dismissing the Crusaders as true followers of Christ. Now, if I was a firecracker, my professor was a cannonball. She hastily put me in my place, lecturing me on the need for respect and historical objectivity.

I learned a few things that day. Though my conviction regarding church-sanctioned violence did not change, I learned that respecting my brothers and sisters in Christ is crucial, even when their beliefs differ from mine, and even when they have been dead for a millennium. And I also learned that I was not cut out to be a historian. I was incapable of putting my core beliefs on the back burner to explore Christian history as an even-handed academic. I cannot study the Crusades without tearing my hair out. I am one of those Christians who are glad that Onward, Christians Soldiers was left out of our hymn book, though I have grown up enough not to dismiss your faith if it is your favorite hymn.

As you can imagine, I struggle with this week’s scripture from the book of Ephesians. In this rousing closure to his letter to the Christians in Ephesus, Paul borrows the language of battle to describe the divine power that strengthens and protects Christians. We are to put on the whole armor of God, to encircle ourselves with God’s might so that we may be kept safe and secure from the powers of evil. This scripture, as with every scripture that reveals the works of our Heavenly Father, bears witness to good news. Yet I confess that it is a challenge to hear the gospel enfolded in the metaphor of tools for battle, when throughout history Christians have drawn swords sharpened not for the Spirit but for the killing of men, women, and children created in the image of God. It is jarring to consider the gospel in metaphorical images of war, when literal images of war are altogether too commonplace.

I read an article this week about a Reformed Rabbi who preached against the war in Iraq in her Orange County congregation. As she condemned the mistreatment of prisoners by members of the US military, she was abruptly interrupted. The commotion in the pews was so pronounced that she assumed there must be a medical emergency. But then a man raised his arms in an X, and shouted, “You have no right to talk about politics in the pulpit. It has no place here!”

I don’t know if I agree with that man. I don’t know if I agree with that Rabbi, either. I do know that it is neither responsible to ignore what is going on in the world around us, nor to paint the pulpit Republican-red or Democrat-blue. Today I heed Paul’s teaching to proclaim the Gospel of Peace. It is impossible to wear the shoes of peace during a time of war without treading in a complex current that includes politics.

Know that I do not intend to stand behind a bully pulpit. You are welcome to disagree with me. I do not intend to draw a line and invite each of you to stand on one side or the other. My prayer for us is that we become ever more shaped by that bold supplication we raise every time we worship: that God’s will would be done on earth as it is in Heaven.

Paul talks about a present darkness, about spiritual forces of evil, about powers and principalities. And sure enough, God’s earth is cloaked by evil. We live in a world corrupted by disaster and plagued by illness. Though the soil and water of Creation produce an abundance of food, some starve while others count a surplus. Nations battle for access to resources. The intoxicating lure of power, privilege, and prestige infects human hearts. Dictators scramble for control. People inflict harm and terror upon other people, and whether it is on the scale of genocide between warring nations or domestic abuse between a husband and wife, God weeps for the evil power clutching his children.

As followers of the Risen Lord, we are invited to involve ourselves in a force more powerful than hatred, than violence, than evil. We are given tools: truth, righteousness, faith, salvation, the Word of God. Through that Holy Word, we receive Christ’s teachings about a peaceable Kingdom where God lives and reigns forever. No matter our convictions about war in general or any war in particular, as Christians we share a vision of a world no longer marred by violence and conflict, a fully redeemed Creation in which justice replaces inequality, mourning gives way to dancing, and the nations gather for worship, not war. The present darkness may seem dense, but our God has already begun the work of redemption through the radical love of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The forces of evil have no chance against the power of God’s gentle and Holy Spirit.

That we are a nation at war troubles me deeply. My heart broke anew this week as I saw a photograph of a young mother preparing to leave her five-month-old child to return to active duty in Iraq. Her sacrifice is too great for me to fathom. And yet as a Christian, my compassion cannot stop with her. I know that God’s love and grace flow just as freely in other lands and languages.

Paul ends this passage with a reminder to pray in the Spirit at all times. It would seem that this is what our shiny armor prepares us for: the simple act of communicating with our Creator. And pray we must. In a time when it seems the world, and even our own nation, is divided into enemy camps, we must remind one another that Jesus taught us to pray for God’s will, not ours, to be done. We must share the gift of prayer generously, praying not only for the men and women proudly recognized in the Narthex, but that all persons might know the peace and protection of God.

The Christian struggle is not against enemies of flesh and blood, but spiritual powers. As persons entrusted with the whole armor of God, not only our nation but every nation desperately needs our continual prayer for peace, witness for peace, and work for peace. We are clad in spiritual armor so that all of Creation may be released from the force of evil and ushered in to God’s just and peaceful Kingdom. This is a battle that cannot be lost, for in this battle, we are all on the side of God. May it be so.

Sunday, August 20, 2006

2006-08-21T11:55:00.000-07:00

Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil. So do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 5:15-20)

This past week I was asked a difficult question. If I were packing my bags for a shipwreck on a desert island, what one book would I bring along to keep me company? I assume that the distributors of the Gideon Bibles already have desert islands stocked with King James versions of the Holy Scriptures, so I racked my brain for a second-most important book to bring along on my hypothetical marooning. After briefly considering my complete Shakespeare anthology that would take me a good decade to get through, I realized that the one book I couldn’t do without is also tucked into each of your pews: The Chalice Hymnal. Hundreds of faithful melodies rest between the red covers of that weighty volume. As much as I love literature, there isn’t a single book that contains as much depth and breadth as a collection of songs for Christian worship.

As the years circle by, we return again and again to the summer songs of seed and grain, the Christmas carols of love and peace, the Lenten lamentations for the pain of the cross. The songs that carry us through the Christian year bear witness to the glory and the agony of God’s beloved world. Hymns connect us to our spiritual forebears, as we learn the same tunes our ancestors sang to praise the Lord. They teach us the language of our faith. As we worship God in congregational song, we do not only learn profound truths; we learn profound truths that can be hummed. And just as we can get these canticles stuck in our heads, they also have a way of getting lodged within our hearts.

In the New Testament passage that we consider this morning, Paul continues to teach the Ephesians what it means to be a Christian. When we commit ourselves to Christ, our lives take on a distinct shape. We no longer live for ourselves, but for the One who has redeemed us with his love. We are, as Paul says, to be careful how we live. Our lives are to be filled with care, in light of the grace we experience through Jesus Christ.

And we are to live in this hopeful and purposeful way not only when all is well. Paul encourages us to make the most of our time because the days are evil. We generally use that turn of phrase—“to make the most of our time”—to manage our time well enough to fit a lot of business into the hours. According to the wisdom of the world, we make the most of our time when we resist our Sabbath rest to knock every item off our to-do lists.

But I don’t think this is what Paul is getting at. “Making the most of our time” can also be translated to mean that we should transform our time, so that even when the days are evil, our lives bear witness to the goodness of God. Transforming our time is an act of resistance. When we transform our time in light of Christ’s love, we are open to the presence of the Holy Spirit in God’s beloved world.

And to make the most of our time— to live in transformed time—is to be engaged in the foundational Christian practice of worship. Time and space alike are transformed when we worship. The dingiest storefront church becomes a cathedral when the men and women within gather their voices together to praise the Heavenly Father.

I used to sing in the gospel choir at Kent State University. Even though we followed all the appropriate legal guidelines to separate church and state, when we started singing, it didn’t matter if we were in the student center or a candle-lit sanctuary. The Holy Spirit could not be disinvited to the gospel festival. With the electric bass thrumming, the soloist trilling, and all our hands raised in adoration, the air around us was transformed into a tabernacle of praise.

Time is transformed, and used for the best, when we pray, offer thanksgivings, and use our breath for worshipping God in song.

Time is transformed even when the days seem so evil that we can hardly bear to sing.

The days are evil, says Paul. And try as I might to find a way to disagree, I cannot. The days really do seem to be infused with altogether too much fear, too much pain, too much grief. It’s nothing new, really; our days are no more or less evil than Paul’s days. Creation is still broken, still breaking.

A friend of mine wrote recently about her experience of planning a worshipful response to the foiled terrorist plot that would have sent shockwaves of suffering throughout this country and the world. “I truly believe that gathering in worship is one of the most faithful responses we can have to events such as we faced last week. Opening ourselves to the healing presence of God at times of our greatest vulnerability can truly transform this world. God longs for our reconciliation, for the whole cosmos, for the end of strife and terror and abuse.”

We have to do something to endure suffering. All too often we settle for a temporary respite. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul is concerned with those who use alcohol to escape their pain. Their abuse of the drug gives them a momentary flash of happiness, but it is a fleeting and foolish diversion. Paul’s judgment here is less about alcohol and more about the fruitlessness of spiritual substitutes. We’ll have no better luck if we seek redemption and relief in mindless television or excessive shopping sprees. I might enjoy the minutes I spend laughing at the antics of a comedian, but those moments are not transformed time.

We need this humble hour, set aside for such a strange and wonderful purpose. At ten-thirty on the dot, this place becomes a church, for we file in and center our hearts on God. Here, we engage in the Christian art of making the most of our time through prayer and praise. We rehearse the postures and practices that make time sacred. We learn to pray, trusting that the compassionate presence of God is embracing us in our weeping and our rejoicing.

And here, as a congregation, we sing. We convert the breath rumbling around in our chests into melody, rhythm, and song. We remake our lungs into instruments of praise. We merge our individual voices into a chorus of thanksgiving. And in the power of the Holy Spirit, we transform every second of every minute of every hour into a vessel of God’s grace.

We worship, and God is glorified. We sing, and God hears. We hope, and God prevails. May it be so.

Sunday, August 13

2006-08-16T11:36:00.000-07:00

The bible isn’t always the most practical book around. For instance, I have never known how to incorporate certain passages from the book of Leviticus into my spiritual journey. While it is historically fascinating to know that God required the Israelites to sacrifice an unblemished female goat to atone for unintentional sins, I don’t rush home to open up the book of Leviticus when I’m experiencing remorse. On the other hand, the book’s detailed instructions for detecting leprosy were of the utmost practicality for the Israelite tribes. But other biblical passages were never intended to offer practical advice; they were written to help us understand our collective identity as children of God. The stories of the bible, full of heroes and anti-heroes, illuminate what it means to be human, what it means to be created in the image of God, what it means to be alienated from our Creator. We don’t read the book of Jonah to get trained for mission work; we read the book of Jonah to ponder the awesome call of God, to recall that we may as well be swallowed up by a great fish if we disregard God’s intentions for our lives.

All of this is to say that the passage from Ephesians which we’re contemplating this morning strikes me as one of the most beautifully practical nuggets of scripture in the diverse collection of writings that make up our holy scriptures. If you’re looking for a passage to memorize, might I suggest a few lines from the fourth section of Paul’s letter to the Christians in Ephesus. Here we encounter a lesson on human relationships, a little “do’s” and “don’ts” list for the Christian community. There isn’t a whole lot of theology in this passage. We are reminded that we are forgiven by God through Christ, and that means we are charged to imitate the sacrificial love and forgiveness of source of our salvation. But the crux of this text is the matter of how we treat our brothers and sisters, and so, along with a small reminder of Christ’s large sacrifice, we are instructed not to go to bed angry.

This very useful passage is included in the scriptures because our relationships with one another should be informed by our faith. Our confession of faith in Christ Jesus should have bearing on the way we think, speak, and act.

The fact of the matter is that just because we are Christians, doesn’t mean we are any nicer to one another than any other group of human beings. And this is sad. Many people have walked away from the Christian faith because they have witnessed shameful behavior among the members of Christian congregations. We want to believe that they will know we are Christians by our love, but that isn’t always the case. The Ephesian Christians received this letter because they were clearly struggling in the human relationships department. They knew that they had been clothed with new life in Christ, but they hadn’t yet figured out that this new life came with new expectations, new responsibilities. They hadn’t yet discerned how to translate the love and forgiveness they experienced through Jesus Christ into their daily lives and interactions. Their struggle is the struggle of every Christian person throughout the centuries—the struggle to embody the sacrificial love of our Lord and Savior, not only in theory, but in practice.

And so today I want to take this scripture very, very seriously, and consider how we can be ever more faithful and loving in our interactions with our sisters and brothers, our husbands and wives, our friends, our parents, our children. Know that if I sound preachy, I’m preaching to myself first. I stand before you as a person who wants to be kinder, more tenderhearted, and more forgiving of the people I love.

The author of this letter is clear about what behaviors are befitting the Kingdom community, and which behaviors should be edited from new life in Christ. Lying is definitely out. Giving into rage and anger is another sinful action. We are to reject stealing and undue temptation. Paul further coaches the Christians to eradicate bitterness, wrath, shouting, cursing, and malice from their relationships.

Isn’t this all easier said than done? Even if our closets are free of the most egregious skeletons, we all have our moral clutter: leftover grudges, quick tempers, tendencies toward gossip, or a dependence on the little white lies that pacify the ones to whom we are accountable. Even if the little things we do and say that do not align with the Kingdom of God cause us remorse, turning away from them still requires emotional and spiritual effort.

I do not think many of us would roll our eyes at Paul’s list of vices to avoid and see simply a moralistic code that serves only to illuminate our guilt. Paul is, after all, one of the greatest proponents of the amazing grace of God. This is not a man who believed that we can save ourselves by our own virtue. Yet Paul clearly sees practicing virtuous behavior as essential to the Body of Christ, the necessary and natural response to new life.

John Calvin, one of the theological minds behind the Protestant reformation, was notoriously strict on moral matters. He not only kept a close watch on his own behavior, but he set forth Ordinances for the supervision of church members and seminarians. For instance, he mandated that “If anyone sings songs that are unworthy, dissolute or outrageous, or spin wildly round in the dance, or the like, he is to be imprisoned for three days, and then sent on to the consistory.” Even though his theology stuck, his moral legislation did not, as he and his severe punishments were thrown out of Geneva.

The problem with Calvin’s moral program was that it misunderstood the relationship between freedom and virtue. As heirs of new life in Christ, we inherit a profound freedom. We are no longer saddled by sin and shame. I’ve heard about a sermon that Pastor Alan preached about the delete button. God’s forgiveness deletes our sin. Christ’s love cuts away the guilt of our vices. The last thing we need is to gain a new set of shackles in the form of moral codes we can never fully obey. Yes, we are called to be tenderhearted, but failing to do so cannot catapult us back to a prison of guilt and shame.

Dan Clendenin, a pastor whose biblical commentary offers genuine spiritual sustenance, puts it this way: “Instead of reading Paul's exhortations as legalistic commands that restrict my freedom, I think of them as promises that will transform my life, or as gifts to receive instead of goals to achieve. Imagine a politician who "put off" predictable rhetoric and "put on" truth-telling (4:25), a parent who moved from compulsive anger to gentleness (4:26), a corporate criminal who made restitution and shared generously with others (4:28), or a musician who realized how badly raunchy lyrics degrade our communities (4:29). Who would not long to live in a society where "bitterness, rage, anger, slander and every form of malice" were rare exceptions, and where "kindness, compassion, and forgiveness" ruled the day (4:31–32)? On the journey with Jesus such dreams can become reality, at least in part. I dare say you can find examples in your local church.”

“Gifts to receive instead of goals to achieve.” This is a language of virtue, an approach to faithful Christian living, that takes seriously that we are free in Christ, that we are recipients of forgiveness and grace, not simply slaves to a new master.

Paul ends this particular exhortation with a seemingly impossible command: be imitators of God. If we take this literally, John Calvin would send us all to jail and throw away the key. Yet if we understand Paul’s passionate call for virtue as a gift to receive, we can rest in God’s grace.

St. Irenaeus wrote that the glory of God is “human being fully alive.” And so to be imitators of God is not to attempt an impossible project; it is to accept the joy and responsibility that we are created in the very image of God. To imitate God is not to become intolerable perfectionists or sanctimonious slaves to the law. To imitate God is to become more authentically human, free enough to live in Christ’s love.

I don’t know if I have succeeded in my attempt to be practical; tossing John Calvin into the fray isn’t always a good indicator of practicality. But I do know that as much as we need guidelines for how to love and live well, Christian morality is much more than a behavioral code. We are Kingdom people, a living witness to God’s glory and love.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sunday, July 30, 2006

2006-08-02T12:04:00.000-07:00

I love bread—any kind. I’m happy with a loaf of enriched white Wonderbread, although I love bakery bread even more: cibatta, pumpernickel, and especially foccacia. Bread is a hearty and comforting food, worthy of its reputation as the staff of life. It is made of ingredients that come from the earth, and by eating it, we are nourished and strengthened to live another day. Bread is also one of the most significant and lasting symbols in the Christian church. Although we are identified most clearly with the cross, it is bread that shapes our communal life. Every time we gather for worship, a loaf of bread is blessed and broken to be shared with all those present. The ordinary bread that we consume together is just that—ordinary. The product of flour and eggs and yeast. What makes this bread the Bread of Heaven? What is the difference between a basket of bread passed around the table at a soup kitchen, and the bread we will share together today?

In the gospel reading today, a crowd of people are hard at work trying to sort out the message that Jesus and his disciples are preaching. Earlier in the chapter, John gives his account of Jesus feeding five-thousand people with only five loaves of bread and two fish. This is one of the great miracle stories of the bible. It is both heartwarming and inspiring to think about Jesus simply feeding people, especially in our current context of widespread hunger and malnutrition throughout the world. Yet Jesus was deeply troubled by the episode. The people who had been fed began to believe in him immediately. After all, Jesus had performed a miracle that directly affected their lives: he had met one of their most basic physical needs. It is no wonder their hunger was transposed to faith.

Yet, John tells us, “When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew to the mountain by himself.” Jesus did not want to buy their faith with food. When he returns from the mountain, Jesus tells them that they aren’t seeking him out because they understand who he is, but because they “ate their fill of the loaves.” He tells them that perishable bread is secondary, and that they should seek out bread from Heaven. “I am the bread of Life,” Jesus says. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

The message is clear, relatively speaking. Jesus fed them with ordinary bread—albeit ordinary bread that he cooked up in a miracle, not an oven. The point is that the people were hungry, and Jesus fed them, and they believed. But Jesus wanted them to go further with their faith—to crave that other kind of bread, the Bread of Life.

Jesus knew the weakness of humankind; he knew that the belief people developed after being fed might have been rich with gratitude, but it was not rich with genuine faith. He wanted people to believe in him because what he said was true, not because he had the ability to multiply loaves. It is challenging to desire Heavenly Bread when there is no earthly bread to be found. But it can also be challenging to desire Heavenly Bread when our cupboards are so full we forget to be grateful.

During my freshman year of college, I was assigned to read The Brothers Karamazov, a really, really, really long novel written by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Even though I loved reading, I was not enthused at the prospect of getting through that enormous Russian novel, let alone figuring out what it meant enough to write a thesis about it. At first I carried it around like a paperback cross, but as I read I became completely immersed in the story.

Through the character of Ivan in the Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky explores the paradox of the two breads. Ivan is a brooding character, full of equal parts faith and doubt. Ivan tells a story that takes place in the sixteenth century, during the Inquisition. In the tale, Jesus returns—though not with the fanfare of the second coming. Even though he is quiet and unassuming, the people recognize him immediately; Ivan recounts, “The sun of love burns in his heart, light and power shine from his eyes, and their radiance, shed on the people, stirs their hearts with responsive love.” Just as you might expect, within hours of appearing on earth again, Jesus raises a young girl from the dead. The crowd is delighted; but the local cardinal, who is affectionately called the Grand Inquisitor, is furious. He orders that Jesus be arrested and thrown into prison.

The Grand Inquisitor then visits Jesus’ cell and explains at length why Jesus and the message he brings must be suppressed. In the mind of the Grand Inquisitor, who literally represents the church, Jesus made things too hard for humanity. It all comes down to bread. Jesus had the ability to turn stones into bread, and feed the throngs of hungry people. But he did not give into that temptation; instead of giving the people the bread of earth, he gave them freedom to choose a life of faith, and the promise of the Bread of Heaven. According to the Grand Inquisitor, the Bread of Heaven could not compete with earthly bread in the eyes of weak and hungry humanity. Maybe a few strong-willed folks could withstand earthly hunger for the promise of eternal life, but what about the hapless weak ones? In other words, the Grand Inquisitor thought that Jesus’ refusal to buy faith with offerings of bread was a mistake.

Furthermore, the Grand Inquisitor states, because the church loves its people, the church would work to “CORRECT” Jesus’ teachings. The church would continue to feed people and quell their earthly suffering, all the while keeping that other kind of bread, the Bread of Life, a secret.

Dostoevsky offers a pretty searing critique of the church in this fable. He likens a respected religious leader to a intentional heretic. When I was eighteen and saw the church as a hypocritical institution, I thought it was so cool that Dostoevsky was pointing out how far from Jesus’ message the church had strayed. But now I understand something I missed: Dostoevsky was a faithful member of the church. His satirical treatment of the church’s inability to embody the teachings of Christ was an attempt to remind the church that we are most deeply sustained by the Bread of Heaven.

In the scriptures, Jesus struggles to balance the need for both the bread of heaven and the breath of earth. The world needs both kinds of bread: the bread that fills our bodies, and the bread that fills our souls. Earthly bread is a matter of justice. Today in the reading from the Psalms, we were reminded to Praise God because God is a God who executes justice for the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. Every time we eat a piece of bread, we are to thank God for providing us with this most basic need. Likewise, as responsible Christians, we are charged with the task of providing food for the hungry. Literally. If we do not feed our hungry brothers and sisters, we do not feed Christ.

But we need that other bread, too. Desperately. The Bread of Heaven is the symbol of our salvation as a people. I know how important receiving communion is to each one of you. The broken bread is a sign of forgiveness, love, hope. It reminds us that God is ever present in our lives: even through something so ordinary as a piece of bread. We are given life through this simple ritual. Our voices join the voices of the crowd in saying to Jesus, “GIVE US THIS BREAD ALWAYS.”

The God who created us understands our needs. May our bodies be filled with the Bread of Earth. May our souls be filled with the Bread of Heaven. And may our hearts be filled with gratitude and the desire to share this message of Justice and Salvation so that all the world might taste such goodness.

Sunday, July 16

2006-08-02T11:54:00.000-07:00

Children are often asked a question on their birthdays, after the presents are open and the candles extinguished. —“so do you feel older?” It always seemed like a silly inquiry. Even on those big birthdays—crossing over to double-digits, or becoming a teenager, or hitting any number ending in zero—you don’t usually wake up on the morning of your birthday feeling any different than the day before. Well, given the content of the past seven days, I did wake up my birthday feeling as though I had aged at least a year. What a week it has been. On Friday, many members and friends of this congregation gathered to remember with thanksgiving the life of Laura Lee. Yesterday, I officiated at my first wedding. The preparations that went into those events were significant. I’m not always the most organized and detail-oriented person, and these qualities are needed in exponential quantities for weddings.

This has been a big week for the world, too. I’m sure many of you have been following the headlines regarding the surge of violence in Israel and Lebanon. The conflict in that region usually hovers just below the boiling point, but once again an episode of mutual retaliation has broken the relative quiet. The global community is still on edge from the North Korean missile testing that occurred a short time ago. The unrest in Iraq and Sudan continues on. The G8 summit gathered for their annual meeting, and the globally popular World Cup finished up in Germany. My favorite headline of the week was by far a story that came out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A Christian minister has started a successful program to reduce the number of guns in the country. People have been lining up to trade weapons for bicycles and roofing material.

Sometimes weeks like this come and go, and I absorb all the headlines, and all the joys and sorrows of ministry, without having the presence of mind to reflect on where God is in all this. But every so often in the midst of these weeks of life and death, violence and love, I am reminded of the one thing I need to know to be able to handle all this, as a pastor and as a person: “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.”

We belong to God. This beautiful and broken Creation belongs to God. And keeping mindful of this profoundly changes the way we live and move and have our being. We are delivered from fear and anxiety when we trust that all things, seen and unseen, are resting within the arms of a loving and merciful God. God embraces us, and the life of faith means mustering the courage and the confidence to return his embrace, to hold onto what saves us.

A little over a year ago, when Ben and I were spending some time in Ohio before we returned to California to move into the Parsonage and begin our new life here, we went Whitewater rafting with a friend. As it turned out, we did not have an experienced raft guide. He seemed confident as he went over the basics on land, but soon after leaving for our expedition, we learned that he was leading his very first rafting trip. On the very first series of rapids, he panicked. Our raft spun out of control as we passed through a narrow channel between rocks. Even though my head was literally spinning, I can remember clear as day that he kept repeating hold on, hold on. And I remember thinking, dude, I’m holding onto an oar. How is that going to help?

Sure enough, I flew out of that raft and into the river, still holding onto my oar with a death grip. And I’d like to believe that one sign of my calling as a preacher is this: even as I was at the mercy of a quickly moving current, drifting away from my raft and toward a very large rock, I thought: boy, is this ever a sermon illustration.

I did what the apprentice raft guide said; I held on. But I was holding onto something that couldn’t keep me safe. I was holding onto something that was as unmoored as I was. It was a tool to steer us away from danger, but it could not be trusted for anything more. The guide had failed to remind me that to stay in a raft, you have to wedge your feet tightly into the side of the boat. Only then are you safely lodged in the only thing between you and the chaotic waters. Holding onto the oar doesn’t work, a lesson the raft guide learned when he himself was thrown from the craft—along with Ben— on the next major rapid.

We have to be sure that we are grasping on to what grasps us, that what we hold in times of celebration and hardship— and everything in between— is what holds us.

It is all too easy to forget that we belong to God, and that our best move in any situation is to reach for our Heavenly Father. Whether our lives are in a state of humdrum or hubbub, peace or strife, the words of that Psalm are true as ever. The earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it. We are God’s, God holds us, God is intimately involved in every breath we take. This is true for each one of us, and this is true for all the nations.

I hope you’ll understand that today I will close with borrowed words. I have run out of words this week, and am content to rest in God’s gracious arms, and to simply entreat you to do the same. I found a poem that speaks to me in weeks like this, a poem that rehearses the faithfulness of the Psalms in contemporary language. The author is Bruce Prewer, a Christian pastor who lives and ministers in Australia.

THIS I DARE BELIEVE

This is God’s world, and it is not aimless.

Time has a purpose and God is its steward.

Loving God, I believe, scatter my unbelief.

It is not possible that greed and injustice are forever.

It is not possible that the meek will stay dispossessed.

It is not possible that peacemakers must inevitably fail.

It is not possible that nations will always make war.

It is not possible that the merciful will be always be scorned.

It is not possible that forgiveness will at last dry up.

It is not possible that the weak are doomed to be down trodden.

It is not possible that the hungry will always go unsatisfied.

It is not possible that sincere hearts will always be exploited.

It is not possible that laughter shall finally be stilled.

It is not possible that fear will always outwit love.

It is not possible that the cynics will always be right.

It is not possible that goodness will have flowered in vain.

It is not possible that death will render all things futile.

It is not possible that Jesus will ever be forgotten.

It is not possible that faith will die out on earth.

Christ holds God’s secret in open, wounded hands,

Christ is our future and all will be redeemed.

Loving God I believe, scatter my unbelief.

“The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.” Thanks be to God!

Sunday, July 9, 2006

2006-07-10T09:41:00.000-07:00

Click here to read Mark 6:7-13.

A book called the Material World came out a few years ago. It is a collection of photographs taken all over the world. In each picture, a families stand before the place where they live. Some of the homes are shining mansions, some are huts and shacks that are clearly unstable and substandard living quarters. And lined up in front of the homes, alongside the families that inhabit them, is all of the stuff they own. Every single television, shoe lace, couch, and clock. Some families are so surrounded by treadmills, extensive wardrobes, furniture, and video games that you can barely detect the human beings amidst all the material goods. Other families pose amidst meager resources: a mixing bowl, a blanket, a comb, a single pair of men’s shoes that are worn threadbare. The book doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know. Some people have far too much stuff, and some people don’t have enough. To actually see a visual illustration of this fact is humbling, though.

Most Americans, even the ones that are well below the US poverty line, have way more material goods than foreign households. Some folks see this as a point of pride—that one of the bonuses of living in the United States of America is the entitlement to have a television in every room of the house. I have a great deal of ambivalence about stuff, though. I am thankful for my sewing machine and my electric guitar. But the fact that I have these items and more when other people are struggling to get by troubles me. Yet even as the Holy Spirit stirs my conscience, the commercials for the new IPod music player stir my greed.

I don’t have an answer for the disparity that separates the haves from the have-nots. I do try to pay attention to the struggle, to ask myself if I really need something, and to consider how my decisions affect all the peoples of the world. I try to support efforts to make trade fair, and to avoid companies that have a bad track record of human rights abuses.

Having stuff isn’t a sin, but valuing our material comforts more than we value our neighbors is clearly a problem. I may never have met the Vietnamese workers who stitched together the shirt I wore while I wrote this paragraph, but I am still challenged to match God’s compassion and love for them.

In the gospel lesson today, Jesus confers a mission to the twelve faithful Disciples. They are to go out into the villages fortified by an authority over unclean spirits. They are to bring the good news of the amazing deeds of God by bringing divine gifts of wholeness and liberation to the villagers. The people will no longer be under the cruel dominion of demons; they will be free. No longer will the ravages of illness diminish their bodies and perplex their minds. Through the power of Jesus Christ, God will cleanse humankind of pain, of sin, of isolation.

Let’s see. We’d need lots of stuff to make that happen, right? We’d need medical supplies, and plenty of food to last a fortnight, and bug spray… oh, and better get an oil check before head out. Let’s be practical, folks. Successful ministry takes materials.

Only that’s not what Jesus is saying in this gospel. The Disciples are sent off little more than the clothes on their back. The list of prohibited items is longer than the list of what’s permitted. No bread, no bag, no money, not even an extra tunic. All they get is a staff and a pair of sandals. And let’s be clear, the staff that Jesus is talking about is a walking stick, not a paid staff of assistants. This is one of those passages of the Bible that very, very few contemporary Christians apply literally to their own lives. We know what we need to get the word out, and it includes more than a pair of shoes and a cane. And yet this is how Jesus sends his Disciples out to spread the liberating and healing power of God.

The Disciples may have been sent out all but empty handed, but they did have the one accessory that trumps any tool or object for ministry. They had each other. They were not sent out to face the demons alone. They were not expected to knock on the doors of potentially inhospitable visitors without a friend to share the brunt of the rejection. They were paired off like the animals in Noah’s ark, bereft of physical comfort and stripped of material resources, but they had the one thing that is absolutely necessary to become a witness for the gospel: a relationship.

This passage is about faith. The Disciples had to trust Jesus. They had to believe in the authority he had given them to spread the seed of the kingdom, and they had to trust that they would be given all that they needed to respond to the mission Jesus had given them. But this scripture is also a sharp reminder that what matters in ministry is people.

Jesus’ entire life and ministry demonstrates the significance of his relationships with his sisters and brothers. When he was ready to begin proclaiming the good news of God’s Kingdom, the first item on his agenda was to gather a group of Disciples to help bear the burden of his mission. No matter that the men in his inner circle were constantly misunderstanding the nature of Christ and his message. No matter that they occasionally succumbed to the all-too human tendency to jostle for power and prestige within the movement. The men and women Jesus called into the life of Discipleship were his companions, his confidants, his friends.

The good news here is that we have what we need to take part in God’s reconciling, liberating, and healing work. We have each other. We are a small congregation, but so were the twosomes that scattered throughout the hillsides at Jesus’ bidding. We are Christians in a time when it is standard for congregations to own property that accommodates worship, fellowship, and educational events.

The inventory of SBCC includes all sorts of helpful tools to enable us to do meaningful ministry. We have a collection of wheel chairs, just in case one of our members or friends needs assistance. We have a beautiful pipe organ that creates deep winds of sound to accompany our praises. But all these things are merely taking up space without the children of God that gather here to discern and respond to our Father’s will. The grill in the parking lot shed is useless until the early morning crew comes to fire it up for the pancake breakfast.

Many of our sisters and brothers throughout the world respond to God’s call on their lives in a context of poverty and hunger. They are challenged to trust God and take part in the unfolding of his Kingdom even though they live on less than a dollar a day. Our challenge is different; we live in a culture that is rich in material goods and often all too poor in love. We must learn to trust God despite all the things that distract our attention from his Holy Kingdom.

Our challenge is to rid ourselves from the belief that the stuff is what gives us joy and spreads the gospel song, and to resist the temptation to let material goods destroy our relationships and obscure the will of God from our hearts. How many families, how many congregations, have been torn apart by arguments over objects? I once heard a story about a congregation that ultimately split over the matter of a painting—whether or not it should be in the sanctuary or the fellowship hall.

Nothing is as valuable as the bond of communion between one another and with our Creator, yet people become estranged every day over things.

Jesus sent his Disciples out with everything they needed: a good pair of walking shoes and a friend. Their companions for the gospel journey are not simply “human resources,” that strange phrase that turns men and women into commodities. As companions they offered one another accountability, trust, encouragement, relief, the “stuff” of friendship that cannot be purchased at the market.

Jesus still sends his Disciples out with everything we need. The fact that each of us here has been called into this place, to be a part of this community of faith, is the work of God’s hand. Here, we are blessed with sisters and brothers in Christ. As a congregation we have a covenant to care for one another – and we can trust that our care will be returned. And as a congregation, we also have a covenant with God to take the gifts we receive in this place and transform them into gifts for the world. We are empowered by the Holy Spirit to invite people into relationship—relationship with the people of this congregation, and relationship with our Redeemer.

Jesus wants us out in the world, hand in hand, bringing the good news from our doorstep to the ends of the earth. We can be grateful for our creature comforts, but we must remember, again and again, that Spirit and friendship and faith are what gladden our hearts and multiply the holy harvest. May it be so.

Sunday, June 18th

2006-07-05T19:31:00.000-07:00

This week the new Poet Laureate of the United States was chosen, and so on my drive home on Wednesday, the NPR afternoon show broke away from talk of Guantanamo Bay and the ongoing violence in Iraq to interview the new national poet, Stephen Dunn.

As Dunn read a few poems for the radio audience, I marveled at how deeply poets seem to pay attention to the world around them. They see past the surface of things. You might look at chestnut and see just that—a chestnut. But a poet has the ability to see a poem in that chestnut, to paint a whole world within the space of that little nut.

One of my favorite poets, Pablo Neruda, made a practice of writing odes to ordinary things. He composed odes to artichokes and onions, tomatoes and books. He even wrote an ode to laziness— one of my favorite poems to read on my day off. One of his most beautiful poems glorified the lowly chestnut. He mused, “Out of the bristling foliage you fell complete: polished wood, glistening mahogany, perfect as a violin that has just been born in the treetops and falls offering the gifts locked inside it, its hidden sweetness, finished in secret among birds and leaves… oval instrument that holds in its structure unblemished delight and edible rose.” Through metaphor and imagination, Neruda turned a chestnut into a violin—and a poem. Instead of tossing the fallen chestnut aside, he paid attention and discovered its amazing potential.

A chestnut transformed into a poem, a mustard seed transfigured into a shrub large enough to host a flock of birds. The scripture today is about the Kingdom of God. In true form, Jesus doesn’t direct us to consider the big and bombastic; he presses our attention to the tiny and humble. Seeds are small, but not insignificant. Within a seed a whole life is contained, and what’s more, generations of life to come. Jesus calls out the sacred potential of a seed, finding within it a kingdom’s worth of possibility.

Jesus encountered all kinds of low-life characters during his public ministry. Despite the fact that the church has had two millennia to get used to the idea, the church is still shocked and offended by the boundary-breaking behavior of our Lord and Savior.

He hung out with the dregs of society. He broke bread with tax collectors and conversed with promiscuous women—and probably a few promiscuous men, too, though the scriptures don’t point out that particular sin among the menfolk of the bible.

Jesus didn’t hang out with those people because he pitied them. He didn’t call out their sinfulness and run back to the safety of the respectable Pharisees. He spent time with them, delighting in their unique company. Jesus reached out to ordinary, broken people because he saw beyond their sinfulness, beyond their role as outcasts and outlaws. He perceived their potential, the faithful men and women they could become when they experienced the liberating power of his Heavenly Father.

He looked at roughed up fishermen and recognized them as Disciples. He encountered women of ill repute and trusted that the Holy Spirit would transform them into faithful bearers of the good news.

And so the Kingdom of God grows. God’s creative force coaxes forests teeming with life out of brittle seeds, and God’s redeeming love releases men and women from sin, and recasts them as co-builders of his emerging realm of peace and justice. When we keep our eyes open for the seeds of the Kingdom, the ridiculously small beginnings to the great things our God will accomplish are everywhere, just waiting to be nurtured by the breath of the Holy Spirit and tended by the acts of the faithful.

One sign of the Kingdom I have become acquainted with over the last few years is called the One Campaign. One is a small number, an insignificant number. If you found a penny on the ground, you may or may not decide its worth stooping down to add one cent to your piggy bank. But the One Campaign proclaims that one is as mighty as a mustard seed. The organization is lobbying the governments of the richest nations of the world to commit to setting aside one percent of their budgets to accomplish their Kingdom-sized goal: to make poverty history. The One Declaration for the United States campaign is

The hopeful tone of this declaration moves me. One of the last classes I took in school was about the contemporary crisis of poverty. Though one of the instructors was a theologian, I was the only seminarian on the class roster. My classmates were students of politics, psychology, and education. Each week, we gathered to address another dimension of the global poverty crisis. And even though there were so many brilliant people in the room, the crisis seemed to become more and more unsolvable. Our idealistic hope that somehow our thoughtful consideration of poverty would have an impact on the world deflated. We had lost all sense that a mustard seed can be cultivated into the greatest of all shrubs.

By focusing on the simple work of planting seeds that can grow into a global movement genuinely capable of making a difference, the One Campaign guards against hopelessness. Instead, the campaign has a humble confidence that one person, one voice, one vote, and one percent can make poverty history. The Kingdom of God is something like that.

If we are going to trust that seeds can become great trees, that sinners can become faithful saints, that one voice make a difference, well, we have to have a whole lot of hope. Optimism, particularly false optimism, will not help us. False optimism cannot face the fact that the seed is small. The false optimist pretends that the seed is already a tree, that sin isn’t really all that bad, that signing a declaration that calls for the eradication of poverty means that the work is done.

What we need is hope, the hard-earned trust that God will take our small and humble offerings and transform them into pillars of his Kingdom. Hope isn’t about denying the truth. Hope recognizes the weakness of the seed. Hope admits that there is work to be done—soil to till, tender roots to protect. But hope gratefully acknowledges that God is at work, guiding, redeeming, and cajoling his beloved Creation into a place that is fit for the Prince of Peace.

Mother Theresa began her orphanage in Calcutta with a parable vision. She told her superiors, “I have three pennies and a dream from God to build an orphanage.”

Her superiors told her, “You can’t build an orphanage with three pennies… with three pennies you can’t do anything.

“I know.” She said. “But with God and three pennies I can do anything.”

Amen.

Sunday, June 11

2006-07-05T19:24:00.000-07:00

Isaiah 6:1-8

Why does it matter if you go to church? There are plenty of other things you could do on Sunday mornings. I can tell you what I’d be doing if I wasn’t here. I’d sleep until at least nine o’clock, take Deacon on an extra-long walk, brew a perfect pot of coffee, and curl up on the couch with the Sunday Los Angeles Times. At eleven, I’d listen to This American Life, my favorite radio show.

That version of a lazy Sunday morning sounds delightful. And I’m sure many of you can conjure up what you could be doing if you weren’t here. Maybe you’d play golf, or walk on the beach, go out for a nice long breakfast with friends. Maybe you’d do the same things you do every day, and Sunday would come and go without even the slightest sense of Sabbath.

But you didn’t sleep in or play bridge or make a run to the grocery store. You woke up today and did what you needed to do to be present with this congregation. You chose to spend an hour or so in this sacred space, worshipping God. Perhaps you are here out of habit. That’s okay— we all know how powerful bad habits are—and good habits have just as profound effect on our lives. Perhaps you woke up this morning and felt like you absolutely had to go to church, that the decision to gather with other Christians to hear the words of the gospel and to join in the sacrament of communion was literally a matter of life or death. One way or another, God called you here.

It matters that you are here, and not somewhere else. Because those other things we could be doing might be fun or relaxing, might help us check a few more items off our to-do lists, but they do not have the power to change our hearts and transform our minds.

You can certainly experience the presence of Christ on the beach or in the grocery store. But the intentional time we set aside on the Lord’s Day to gather as the Body of Christ, worshipping the Living God with our brothers and sisters, forms and transforms us. Here, as we offer sacrifices of praise and offering, as we greet one another with the Passing of Christ’s peace, as we pray with reverence and sing with joy, we are in the presence of God. And if we learn one thing from the Old and New Testaments alike, it’s that you cannot encounter the Triune God without being changed.

Our reading this morning from the Hebrew Scriptures tells us the story of Isaiah’s call to the difficult life of a prophet. Call stories come in many stripes. Moses was tending flocks, Mary was biding her time awaiting her marriage to a man named Joseph. But Isaiah encounters God and receives his life-altering call in the context of a divine worship service. He describes his experience in sharp detail. The hem of the Lord’s cloak fills the temple. Seraphs attend him, as in a heavenly court. They sing praises, proclaiming that God is Holy, Holy, Holy. Their worship cannot be contained. It is such a profound expression of praise the house fills with smoke.

Isaiah is encountering the full glory of God, a glory that we can hardly imagine, for even the most beautiful sights reveal only a sliver of God’s grace, a fraction of God’s love. His reaction to the experience is riveting. Seeing the Lord on his throne, and witnessing the jubilant worship of the angels, stirs something in Isaiah. By coming face to face with God’s holiness, Isaiah is overcome with his own brokenness. He recognizes the sinfulness of his people. He recognizes his own sinfulness. He doesn’t need anyone to call out his wrongs; the dark corners of his soul are simply reeling in the light of God’s glory.

Isaiah is so beleaguered by guilt that he does not even begin to ask for pardon. And so what happens next comes as a surprise. A Seraph takes a hot coal and presses it against Isaiah’s mouth, burning his lips but also imparting the gift of forgiveness upon him. Isaiah’s sin and guilt are taken away. He is cleansed, saved from the paralyzing effect of his transgressions.

This passage reveals something about the relationship between worship and guilt, the relationship between encountering the awesome presence of God and sin. There is a relationship. William Willimon, one of the great modern preachers, puts it this way: this scripture “demonstrates that sin is a byproduct of our being confronted by God.” He points out that “When we say “sin” we’re not talking about the result of natural human anxiety about the limits of being human, or occasional foibles and slip-ups. We are saying that face-to-face with the awesome righteousness of God, the holiness of Jesus, we fall to our knees. We have our noses rubbed in the great gap between who we are and who God is.”

Isaiah witnessed the glory of the Lord. He heard the excruciating truth that God is Holy, Holy, Holy. He could have responded with pride, arguing that he was just fine, that his lips were spotless and that his people had simply made some mistakes. But instead felt lost. He acknowledged his guilt, recognized his sin. And with the rustle of a Seraph’s wings, his shame was cast out.

I wonder how many people experience a rush of guilt and sense of sinfulness when they enter the Lord’s house. Even without the thrill of smoke and Seraphs, entering a sanctuary set aside for worshipping God can be frighteningly powerful. And that strong reaction, sometimes mixed in with a flood of grief and loneliness, confuses people. They don’t like the feeling, and can’t figure out why they have it. And while the church has a not-entirely-undeserved reputation for laying guilt trips on the faithful, I think the source of that powerful reaction goes far above and beyond the institutional church. Like Isaiah, when we face the Holiness of God, we are challenged to a deeper level of honesty about who we are. We are exposed. But God does not desire to reveal our brokenness so that we can sink into shame. Isaiah didn’t even have to ask to receive the gift of forgiveness. Isaiah may have stumbled out of awe for God’s great mercy, but that mercy also became the source of his redemption.

Isaiah met God in worship, and the experience changed him. When God asked that daring question—“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us,” Isaiah was ready to respond to the call. “Here am I, send me!” This man who one moment had proclaimed himself unworthy of seeing the King had been rescued from shame and transformed into a willing servant.

Anne Lamott, the author of Traveling Mercies, the book that some of us will be reading this summer, writes about her winding journey back to the heart of God. She recalls that she was first drawn into the sanctuary of her home church by the music. She would hear those songs of praise and need to be present to hear them. But she would always leave before the sermon. She kept the community at an arms length, and continued to privately struggle with the demons of addiction. But as time went on, God continued to work on her, even in the short snags of time she would hover in the back of the sanctuary.

Pretty soon she was experiencing the draw to stay, to let herself be known by the fellow worshippers, and to open herself up to the amazing presence of God. She is now a servant of Christ, ministering through humor and honesty to both her beloved congregation and to the countless people who have read her books. Her life is marked by grace.

Showing up isn’t everything. As the bumper sticker says, going to church doesn’t make you a Christian anymore than sitting in the garage makes you an automobile. But showing up is something. Making that decision to be here gives God the opportunity to shape you through the rhythms of worship.

God has a purpose for all of our lives. More than anything, God wants us to respond to his call with the courageous spirit of Isaiah—“Here I am Lord.” God wants us to witness his glory and be delivered from our shame. God wants us to be his children so much that he sent his Son Jesus to be our brother and our redeemer. God cares about us so deeply that he continues to send his Holy Spirit to bear witness with our spirits that we are sons and daughters of God.

Today, after worship, we will gather in the Church lounge for a potluck. The cause for our shared meal is simple—to celebrate our new members. Church membership is a funny concept. It isn’t part of the New Testament, but it is nevertheless an important concept for the contemporary church. To be a member of a congregation is to be in covenant, to be in relationship. By placing membership in this congregation, we commit to supporting the ministries of this church with our time, our energy, our gifts. But we also commit to gathering for worship, hopefully more often than not. We decide that we will join our voices with those of the Christians in this place to sing praises of our God. We link our lives up with the lives of the brethren gathered here, through prayer, through fellowship. And together, we approach the throne of the Lord of Hosts. Together, we open ourselves to the ways God is moving in our lives, offering us the mercy of forgiveness and calling us into deeper discipleship. Strengthened by our community, we can say boldly: Here we are, Lord. Send us out to do your work.”

Amen.

On Vacation

2006-06-29T08:20:00.000-07:00

Pastor Katherine is out of town. Check back around July 5th for updates to the website. Meanwhile, students from Fuller Seminary are filling the pulpit at SBCC. All are welcome, as always!

Peace be with you.

Ascension Sunday

2006-06-01T12:28:00.000-07:00

Click here to read Acts 1:1-11, and here to read Luke 24: 44-53.

The weeks after Easter always seem a little anti-climactic. How do you follow something as awe-inspiring as the Resurrection? Up from the grave he arose!… and then… he ate… some fish. The lectionary leads us back to some of the most treasured of Jesus’ teachings as a reminder of our relationship with the Risen Lord—he is the vine, and we are the branches. He is the shepherd, and we are the sheep. He is our Savior, but he is also our friend. As the weeks pass along, we begin are in danger of treating Easter less like a way of life, and more like a holiday to remember. But before we can become placid again, we are faced with the wild and wonderful take of the Ascension.

I love this story. I love the image it paints, like the one on our bulletins today, of Jesus floating away on a cloud. I love that it cannot, will not be tamed into a version that fits our skeptical modern minds. Through the ages there have been many well-meaning biblical interpreters who go out of their way to read the bible in a rational, reasonable manner. But the story of how Christ ascended to Heaven dangles like a pearl at the end of the Gospel of Luke, settling once and for all that the story of our faith doesn’t play by the rules of physics. And thank God for that. Here we have a story full of power and wisdom, promise and glory. Here we have the only story strong enough to be a bridge between the brilliance of Easter and the energy of Pentecost. For here, in the epilogue to Luke and the introduction to Acts, we encounter our Risen Lord rising even higher yet, to be in the realm of his Heavenly Father.

In the story of the Ascension, the hazy fog of misunderstanding burns away to reveal one solitary cloud of God’s presence, the same divine cloud that appeared when Moses received the law, the same billowing presence that hovered nearby as Jesus was transfigured on the mountain. And in this drama, the fullness of Christ’s identity is finally uncovered. God did not raise his son from the tomb only to allow him to die again; the new life he breathed into him would be eternal. He had been lifted to the cross, lifted from the grave, and now, after 40 days of final words to his Disciples, he is lifted up to Heaven. God raised him to reign forever over the Kingdom at the center of his divine agenda. The humble, confounding prophet of parables and miracles is crowned King. To say that Christ is Lord is to proclaim that the final authority of our lives is Christ. Not ourselves, not our fears, not even our earthly leaders. Christ’s ascension to the throne of God’s Kingdom calls into question any other allegiance, for as witnesses to the gospel our allegiance is owed to God.

If God embraced Christ as King of his heavenly realm, that makes the disciples, that makes us, citizens of that peaceable Kingdom. And in both the gospel and the book of Acts, Luke recalls that Jesus’ last words have everything to do with commissioning the early Church on how to be Kingdom people, to bear witness to what their Lord has done for them.

“Thus it is written,” Jesus says, “that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”

In the book of Acts, the Disciples still don’t quite get it. They want to know when and how their Lord will restore the Israelite Kingdom. After all, that had been the focus of Jewish hope for centuries—for God to send a Messiah to drive out the foreign occupiers and reestablish Jerusalem as the Holy City of God’s chosen people.

But it turns out that God’s plan was different. It turns out that the Messiah wouldn’t assume the throne of Jerusalem, but would die and assume the throne of all Creation. It turns out that God wouldn’t just redeem Israel, but that Jerusalem would be only the beginning, the well from which a spiritual movement of global proportions would spring. It turns out that the redemption of God’s beloved world would not take place within a generation, but over two millennia and counting. And perhaps most surprisingly of all, it turns out that Jesus wasn’t going to build the Kingdom all by himself, but that the disciples he gathered around him had been conscripted into the holy work of proclaiming the story of Jesus.

What happens in the moments before the ascension is this: the disciples find out that they will have a new identity, and though the word is not used, the disciples learn that they will be the church. With Christ at their head and Peter as their rock, the men and women gathered at the foot of Christ’s ascension learned that they would be baptized with the Holy Spirit for the purpose of continuing the redemptive work started by their Lord and Savior. Despite their blundering, despite their misunderstanding, their moments of utter faithlessness, the little circle of believers gathered that day were given the big news that God was doing a new thing through them. They were being raised up as ministers of the gospel, entrusted with a congregation much larger than they had realized, a congregation that included all the corners of the earth, peoples in lands yet undiscovered. Those men and women who would become the early church were Christ’s only mouthpiece, God’s chosen way for the good news of his redeeming love to reach the nations.

Their friend and shepherd would not be physically present. They could no longer embrace him anymore than they could hitchhike to heaven by grasping the hem of his robes. The cloud would change everything, spiriting their Risen Savior off to a realm beyond human perception. But God does not leave his children alone. On Ascension day, the word is out that a Holy Spirit is on its way, a Spirit so real and so mysterious that it can only be described in paradox— a Spirit like water, like fire, like wind. Jesus promises that the disciples, the church, will receive power in the form of that most Holy Spirit.

They will be clothed with power from on High. That is such a turn of phrase. Nothing expresses the nature of the Holy Spirit better than that lovely metaphor. “You will be clothed with Power from on High.” Power like a cardigan sweater, power like a winter jacket. Jesus speaks of a Power that tangibly embraces us, warms us, reassures us that God will strengthen us to heed his call.

Suddenly the disciples were alone again, their savior having caught his taxi-cloud and disappeared once more. But it was not like the eve of the crucifixion. Mourning and lamentation were not in order. In the book of Acts, they stand there, staring at the empty spot in the sky where Jesus had been. It takes a pair of angels to snap them out of their bewildered heavenward gaze. They reassure the Disciples that Jesus is going to return, but imply that the appropriate thing to do is not simply stand around looking for clues of his advent. Don’t focus your heart on the Kingdom in Heaven, roll up your sleeves and get busy participating in the foundation of God’s Kingdom on earth.

Those disciples had a choice. They could run away in fear the way they had done the last time their Savior eclipsed their sight, or they could trust. They could give up on Jesus and his refusal to establish the new Jerusalem according to their limited human agenda, or they could pour their hopes into the promise of a Holy Spirit to guide and empower them to become the Body of Christ on Earth. They chose the later. They chose to worship, to return to the place God had called them with great joy, to continually bless God in the temple.

Despite their brokenness and infidelity, their unbelief and anxiety, Christ’s promises found a home in his circle of disciples. I have often marveled in the fact that we got from Judas’s betrayal, Peter’s rejection, and Thomas’s disbelief to the church. It seems the most unlikely of all the miracles of the Holy Scriptures. It is a testament to the power of the Holy Spirit and a testament to the power of the gospel story. Never once has the church been a perfect, sinless institution. But never once has the spirit-empowered church allowed the flame of the Kingdom of God to be extinguished completely. That flame still flickers and burns, an ember of hope and promise for all of Creation.

We are heirs to that power, successors of that promise. We have the same choice as the Disciples. Do we let our worries and agendas damage our trust – or do we move forward with joyful anticipation for the powerful cloak of the Holy Spirit? Do we stare at the sky and long for a tangible savior—or do we lift our voices in jubilant praise for the Christ who reins over the heavens and the earth? Do we drown the Body of Christ in fear, or do we celebrate his ascension in love?

May we choose well, for God has already chosen us. Amen.

Sunday, May 21st

2006-05-22T18:24:00.000-07:00

Click here to read John 15:9-17.

On Friday I did something I should really do more often: I drove up to Claremont to visit some old friends. First I met Paula, my friend who just recently returned from Washington DC, where she studied the relationship between faith and public policy. Paula always amazes me; she is affable and authentic, and responds passionately and creatively to God’s desire for a just world. She’s learned to speak Spanish and Korean fluently in order to minister with immigrant communities. After we finished our lunch together, she pulled an empty water bottle out of a trash can so she could recycle it later. Paula’s conviction and enthusiasm are contagious.

After we said our goodbyes, I met up with Ellen, one of my seminary professors. Ellen began teaching at Claremont School of Theology the year I started my studies. I took more classes with Ellen than any other professor, and through the years we became good friends. She is a brilliant thinker, an engaging teacher, and a gentle person. Much of her life’s work is dedicated to discerning how Christians should live – how the scriptures, tradition, and experience of the Christian community inform our decisions and actions. I cannot hear the beatitude “Blessed are the peacemakers” without thinking of Ellen, because so much of her work directs Christians into a deeper vocation as makers of peace in a violent world.

My last meeting of the day was with my dear friend and mentor, Julie. Julie is a pastor at First Christian Church of Pomona, the congregation that embraced me during my seminary studies. It’s hard to express how much she means to me. We have laughed together, cried together, and prayed together. I learned a lot in school, but she’s the one who taught and continues to teach me how to be a pastor. We only had an hour to spend together, but we filled the time with ice cream and a great talk.

One day, three friends. I may have emptied my gas tank on the excursion, but as I drove home, singing along with the radio at the top of my lungs, I felt as though my soul tank had been filled to the brim. I’d had a chance to delight in the fruits of their Christian discipleship— Paula’s fire for justice, Ellen’s hope for peace, Julie’s heart for ministry. But more importantly, I’d had an opportunity to simply enjoy their presence. In the hours we spent together, my friends and I freely shared our love and care for one another.

Friendship is truly one of God’s greatest gifts to humankind. We are created to be in relationship with one another. In a world where so many relationships are broken, the experience of genuine friendship is a witness to the transformative power of love. Through friendship, we learn to be trustworthy and forgiving, dependable and vulnerable. We learn that we can make mistakes, and that good friends will be there to love and support us anyway. The best friendships help us navigate the joys and sorrows of life, and enable us to laugh along the way.

Today we rehearse the scripture in which Jesus calls the disciples his friends, chosen and loved into a profound relationship with God. The challenge to become friends of Christ is extended to us as well, for we are people who endeavor to be his disciples in this time and in this place. We are called friends of Jesus if only we respond to his commandment to love our sisters and brothers as Christ first loved us.

The mere invitation to friendship with Jesus is a tremendous expression of God’s grace. Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, desires to befriend us. Despite our brokenness, our bad habits, our imperfections, Jesus loves us enough to lay his life down for us, the ultimate expression of love. When that love breaks through our defenses and into our hearts and minds, the only reasonable response is to love back, to entrust ourselves and our lives to the wellspring of that love. As our most Holy Friend, Christ is a source of strength and comfort. His arms are extended, inviting us to find respite and peace in his merciful embrace.

Just as we share our time with our dear friends, growing our relationship with Christ calls for time and effort. But that time and effort is no more burdensome than spending an afternoon with a friend. Through worship, prayer, and the sacrament of the bread and cup, we deepen our communion with a God who utterly delights in our presence. These practices may require our humble reverence, but given the jubilance with which God welcomes us into his Kingdom, we may also approach our spiritual journey with joy and thanksgiving.

Andrei Rublev, an Eastern Orthodox painter who lived at the turn of the fifteenth century, created an icon that masterfully illustrates Christ’s desire to befriend his disciples. It is a brightly colored depiction of three men who represent the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They are seated around a table, their heads bowed to one another in veneration. They are clearly connected by a relationship marked by abiding love. They are friends. As you gaze at this icon, you quietly realize that the circle extends beyond the boundaries of the paint. An invitation to the table of fellowship is extended to each disciple of Christ. The circle is open, completed only when God’s beloved creation responds to the radical invitation to commune with our Creator.

The other dimension of Rublev’s icon is that the three characters also represent the men that appeared to Abraham and Sarah by the Oaks of Mamre, early in the history of the Israelite people. According to the book of Genesis, even though Abraham and Sarah did not know the men were angels of the Lord, they extended great hospitality to them. They treated the strangers as friends, offering them a feast despite their meager resources.

Abraham and Sarah, faithful to God centuries before the incarnation of his Son, honored the commandment to love God and to love one another. The loving hospitality and friendship they shared with the three strangers enabled them to encounter and to love God.

After all, this whole business of friendship with Christ rests on a word that seems very conditional. If. “If” looms large in Jesus’ message to the disciples. “You are my friends IF you do what I command you.” This commandment to love one another is clearly high on Christ’s list of priorities to teach his disciples. The matter of love comes up again and again in the gospel, and there is a lot riding on our ability to abide in love for one another. If we fail to love our friends and our enemies, we fail to love God. As Dorothy Day put it, “I really only love God as much as the person I love the least.” I don’t know about you, but to me that is a frighteningly honest declaration.

Yet our ability to love at all has nothing to do with our own goodness or our own will. We are empowered to love because Christ first loved us. We only know and share love because God is love. And the gospel yesterday, today, and tomorrow is that God can and does transform us through the magnificent and eternal love embodied in his Son. If we abide in Christ’s love, God will find a way to cultivate an abundance of spiritual fruit in this community of believers. Shaped by our joyful friendship with one another and with our Redeemer, we will be an Easter people of hope, of peace, of justice, and, by the grace of God, we will be a people of love. Amen.

Sunday, May 14th - Happy Mothers Day!

2006-05-22T18:20:00.000-07:00

Click here to read 1 John 4:7-21, and here to read John 15:1-8.

When I was a little girl, I always wanted to give my mother the perfect gift. No matter what the occasion, I wanted to make sure my offering would be just right. I’d ransack department stores for the perfect sweater, earrings, or perfume, wanting to present her with a suitable token of my love. And it was always a guessing game. It was no help to ask her what she wanted, for she always gave the same answer: for my sisters and me to be nice to one another, to refrain from arguing for one day. I don’t know why I didn’t take that request very seriously at the time. It seemed like a non-answer, just something nice to say instead of revealing what she really wanted. But as I’ve grown up, I realized that my mother’s perennial request was what she wanted more than anything in the world. For many years, my sisters and I couldn’t quite make it through the day without bickering. There was just enough difference and just enough similarity between us that squabbles and quarrels were a given. It wasn’t that we didn’t love each other, but we didn’t always show it.

Now that we are adults, and my sisters have children of their own, we get along so well I nearly have to have the telephone surgically removed from my ear. I could talk to Elizabeth and Marie every day for hours, if time and circumstances allowed. I desperately want to be a part of their lives, and the lives of their daughters. We love each other fiercely, and even though the gift is made bittersweet by the many miles between us, we have been able to give my mother her heart’s desire for Mother’s day for years now.

“Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”

The first letter of John has a lot to say about love. It is this passage that gives us the transcendent doctrines that proclaim God is the source of all love, that we can love only because God has loved us, that God is love. We are reminded that God’s love is so profound that he sent Christ into the world that we might live through him. This love is wondrous, and, like God, much more vast than we can grasp, yet even if we comprehend a sliver of this great mystery, we are filled with the confidence of salvation. Fear is cast out by this perfect love. This is heady stuff. And even though John’s letter rivals the brainiest works of Greek philosophy, his head is far from the clouds. He knows that genuinely loving God includes the hard work of loving God’s creation, loving our sisters and brothers, our neighbors, even our enemies.

Just as I couldn’t fully love and honor my mother without loving and honoring my sisters, we cannot believe for a second that loving our brethren here on earth is not just as important as loving our Heavenly Father. Love of neighbor goes hand in hand with love of God. You just can’t cultivate one without the other.

And so we have a steep endeavor before us: abide in love. This is the path to the heart of God: to love one another, to live in love. Abiding is a tough word, and an even tougher action. Sometimes it is interpreted simply as waiting, resting. But that is only one dimension of the life we are called to live. Abide is related to the word abode, or dwelling. To abide in God is to make a home in God. This is a cozy enough image, but anyone who has spent anytime as a homemaker knows that it’s a lot of hard work. Floors must be swept, bathrooms scoured, meals cooked. Without daily upkeep, a home becomes unlivable. Abiding in love, abiding in God, requires the same daily work as maintaining a household, though the chores are more along the lines of prayer, scripture reading, fellowship, and service.

Living in love is something we cannot accomplish on our own; we can never pray or read or serve enough to earn our keep. We cannot earn our home in God by good works. We can, however, respond to the invitation to live in God by faithfully following the loving example of his Son. And that brings us full circle to this insurmountable yet indispensable responsibility to love our sisters and brothers, for no one loved more powerfully than the one who laid down his life.

There is yet another meaning to the word “abide”: to put up with. “I cannot abide by this,” someone will say in angry indignation. This makes for a slightly off-color interpretation of our beautiful text for the day, but it also reveals bit of truth we might miss otherwise, so hear me out. “God is love, and those who put up with love put up with God, and God puts up with them.” Maybe I’m just a cynic for appreciating this reading so very much. But isn’t there something to it? Love isn’t an easy thing.

When couples marry, they enter a covenant to love one another even through the turbulent times. They are reminded, even amid the glorious happiness of their wedding day, that a marriage binds them together in sickness and in health. There are times in every relationship in which loving someone means putting up with them for a spell. Mothers certainly know this. For every day they spend receiving roses and affirmations, they spend many more putting up with the various antics of their kids—whether their kids are two or fifty-two. My mother certainly put up with a lot, and I never doubted her love for my sisters and me.

Sometimes the people we are called to love – and, if we remember correctly, God expects us to make a good faith effort at loving anyone and everyone – aren’t terribly lovable. So we put up with them, even when they are unpleasant, unkempt, ungrateful. We abide in love for them.

We even have to put up with God, and I apologize if that sounds irreverent. Even the most faithful Christians tire sometimes of the hard work of Christian discipleship. God calls us into places and practices that stretch us and transform us. Sometimes we grumble even as we try to obey, wondering if it wouldn’t be easier if God didn’t love us quite so much as to challenge us to change.

We put up with one another, we abide in love for one another, for the sake of a God who manages to put up with the whole lot of us. God’s love for us is unconditional. As the Gospel of John proclaims, he is a vinegrower, pruning away our branches that cannot bear fruit. But every flash of his blade works for our benefit and for the building of God’s peaceable Kingdom. God’s grace continues to shape us, and his love continues to recreate us, as he makes his home in us. For we are God’s abode, the ones in whom God desires to live. And if it’s hard work to abide in God, just imagine what hard work it is to make a home in you and me. I think we have the better end of the deal.

We often follow the example of Jesus, calling God our Heavenly father. But God certainly loves us with the love of a mother, that love we celebrate today. Just as my mother wanted her household to be marked by peace and kindness, our scripture today reveals that one of God’s ultimate concern is that we live in love for one another. This is the acceptable sacrifice for our God: not simply tangible treasures, but patient, abiding love. Amen.

Sunday, May 7th

2006-05-22T18:13:00.000-07:00

Click here to read John 10:11-18.

Progress is a strange concept. Sometimes we recognize progress, and see only the good it brings. Take a sheep, for instance. Sheep have a reputation for getting lost. How do they do it? By making progress. Now, everything I know about sheep I learned from sermons, so don’t argue this one with a biologist until you’ve checked the encyclopedia. But the great contemporary preacher, Jeremiah Wright, explains that “Their eyesight is so poor… that they can see no farther than six feet in front of them. They graze in the grass and see something greener up ahead, six feet. They see something greener yet, six feet. See another green patch, six feet. Six feet by six feet by six feet, the sheep get lost, straying from the flock and the shepherd.” Those first couple yards felt like progress. The poor little lamb is six feet closer to feeling full – and six feet further from the one who will protect him from predators and lead him to still waters. Soon the sheep is missing, helpless, and entirely unable to find his way back to the flock. All for a little progress.

The last century is full of cautionary tales about the siren call of progress. Exciting scientific discoveries were quickly transformed into tools of war. The earth’s resources continue to be plundered to keep up with the constant progression of civilization. We may like to believe we have more foresight than sheep, but the human race has created problems that cannot be undone. I read recently about a life-and-death crisis that began in the 20^th century and will not conclude until ten thousand years from now. Scientists are frantically trying to develop ways to warn future generations about the massive quantities of radioactive materials buried deep beneath the soil of New Mexico. The article outlined the laundry list of factors that must be taken into consideration. The one that struck me was the very real probability that none of the countless languages spoken today will be relevant in 10,000 years. The world will be so different that the simple “danger” sign it would take today could have all the effect of a smiley face. It sounds like the plot of a science fiction novel, but it is just another consequence of 20^th century progress.

We are living in an anxious age. Consequences are catching up to us, and in ways more profound than the price of gas. And for all the so-called progress humankind has made in the last few hundred years, our world is still plagued by wars and rumors of wars. The fall of the Berlin Wall may have warmed relations between some nations, but new hostilities quickly took their place. The horrors that unfolded on September 11^th rattled us to the bone, and the years since, so replete with violence and disasters, have only continued to hammer our wounded hearts and nerves.

This sanctuary is supposed to be just that—a sanctuary. A safe place, set apart from all that pain. As I prepared to preach this morning, I wondered whether we would really have the energy to face the valley of the shadow of death this morning. We could easily leave the anxiety in the parking lot, pretending for a precious hour that the world beyond these walls resembles the Kingdom of God. But then I looked at the pile of half-written sermons I’d attempted this week, and recognized the difference between this message and the ones I abandoned in frustration. The sermons that are in the trash bin rushed ahead to the good part, the part where we all gather in the House of the Lord, with our souls restored, our fears quieted, and our hearts comforted by the Good Shepherd. To rush ahead to the good part is to celebrate cheap grace, to engage in a superficial pretense that our lives are not rutted with dark valleys, and that wolves do not lurk in our blindspots.

Most of us are anxious. Anxious for the world, for the church, for our own families. For ourselves. And there is no better place than the safety of the sanctuary to admit that we are afraid.

The promises we encounter in the scriptures today are easily tamed, and taming scripture is always a dangerous habit. The image of the Shepherd is pleasant. If we read carelessly, we are likely to ignore that in both the beloved words of the 23^rd Psalm and the gospel according to John, the metaphor of the Lord as our shepherd emerges from a context of very real danger. Even as the Psalmist claims his place in the House of the Lord, he points out the hazards he encounters on his journey. He is in the presence of his enemies. And it is when he is face to face with evil that he marvels at the wellspring of God’s goodness and mercy. Despite the evidence pressuring him to collapse with fear, the Psalmist entrusts himself to a God he knows will restore his soul.

Christ is the good shepherd who lays down his life for us. He becomes our salvation from all that seeks to harm God’s creation. And he does not accomplish the work of our salvation by whisking us away from the wolves and depositing us in a safe space. He lays his life down, absorbing the evil and the pain until it is time to take it up again. He lived, and died, and lived again in the same frightening, painful world in which we live.

The scriptures today present a way of life, a Christian spirituality that is deeply relevant, even if the language of sheep and wolves seems removed from our modern lives. The Psalm and the gospel invite us to trust in a time when nothing seems trustworthy. They challenge us to lean on God’s eternal shoulders in a world that cannot seem to hold our weight. They dare us to move beyond the fear that Christ is merely a hired hand.

With all due respect to the hired hands of this world, this is a crucial point. Just as Christ’s flock is not left under the care of someone who may or may not opt to take his responsibility seriously, neither is God’s creation left to make do without our Creator. Despite the evil that appears to maintain a firm grasp on humankind, we belong to God. We are such beloved members of his flock that Christ would give his life over for a chance to guide us back to the House of the Lord.

As Christian people, we cannot afford to act as though our lives are in the hands of hired help any more than we can afford to pretend that evil does not exist. We have to take that narrow, difficult way. Even if we can see only six feet ahead of us – especially if we can see only six feet ahead of us – we must listen for the call of Christ’s voice, and trust. Nothing could be harder, and yet nothing else will save us. When we recognize that we belong to God—that everything we have and everything we are rests within God’s loving care – then we are freed from fear. Then we are freed to bind ourselves to God and to one another, and to live in the abundance of God’s Kingdom.

If we have learned anything from the last century, we have learned that the wolves are ferocious. We have learned that the valleys are not only dark, but the land itself quakes and floods. We have learned that single-mindedly seeking greener pastures rarely works in our benefit. We have learned that one day the culture will celebrate church-going as an essential part of life, and the next day will pull the narthex rug out from under us. And by the grace of God, perhaps we have learned that no matter if we are in the valley or on the mountain, the voice of Christ still resounds, calling us into lives of compassion, generosity, and trust. The world changes, the voice persists. Follow the voice.

Sunday, April 30

2006-05-02T08:55:00.000-07:00

Click here to read Luke 23:13-35.

I started reading a library book this week about churches. In my line of work, there’s a lot of reading about God, but there’s also a lot of reading about the Body of Christ, God’s beloved church. This book is about so-called “turn-around” churches. The author studies congregations that have on the brink of shutting their doors. Many were, at one time, large churches with extensive programming. But like many Protestant churches, the last thirty years or so were tough on these churches. People left. Children and grandchildren decided church wasn’t for them, or maybe joined another congregation down the street. The churches found themselves stuck in a rut of grief and bewilderment. They had no momentum for change, and very little comprehension of God’s movement within their bare bones congregations.

A woman named Muriel was a member of one of these congregations. I wonder if she still is, or if she finally gave up on her floundering community of faith. This is what Muriel said to the author of the book. “Sometimes I wake up on Sunday mornings and just lay there thinking I must be crazy to keep attending that church… why am I sticking with it? I don’t even know what hit us, or what happened to all the people. It just seemed like one day we were happy, singing, praying together, and the next day it was like a funeral parlor.”

I’ve been turning these words around in my head, looking for even a little bit of hope beneath all that despair. And I have to tell you, I can’t find even a little bit of gospel in her words. If the Body of Christ is in a funeral parlor, no sign of resurrection in any direction, well, those folks might as well turn the keys over and go home.

That’s where the two men who were on the road to Emmaus are. Dejected. They had hoped that Jesus was the one to redeem Israel. They had cultivated so much trust, so much joy, so much anticipation for God’s glory in the person of Jesus Christ. But now it was all past tense. Their hope had been crucified on a cross, and now all they could do was walk and talk, sadly pondering the tragic turn of events. Yes, there were those strange rumors that the body of their supposed Lord was gone. Their sheer disappointment didn’t even begin to consider the possibility of the resurrection. I imagine that Cleopas and his friend are something like poor Muriel, wondering why they’d been crazy enough to stick it out with Jesus. They are walking away from the funeral of the one who was supposed to redeem them.

And then Jesus shows up. I love stories like this. We know all along that the stranger on the road is Jesus. We watch through Luke’s careful eye as the men make little fools of themselves, going on and on about the death of the Nazarene prophet, and the strange rumors of empty tombs and angels, when it is the living and breathing Christ Jesus who is listening and nodding at all the appropriate places to their heartfelt and heartbroken eulogy. Jesus manages to teach a whole Bible study as they walk, illuminating the heart of the scriptures to the men, and still they don’t recognize their fellow sojourner.

Once in Emmaus, the men convince the stranger to stay with them. Perhaps they take a liking to his unusually perceptive biblical interpretation. Perhaps they just don’t want to be alone. But Luke tells us that the men beg the man to let them host him in the village Emmaus.

But the men will not play host for the meal in Emmaus, for Jesus is always the host at every table. He takes their evening bread, and blesses it, and breaks it…and doesn’t this sound familiar?

And that’s when the men finally realize that they have been in the presence of Christ all along. They did not expect him. They expected a funeral, and instead they were blessed with an encounter with the One who redeems not only Israel, but the whole of God’s Creation.

Christ was made known to them through the breaking of the bread. Their blindness gave way to the beautiful sight of the Messiah, who had been beside them all along. Unlike Muriel’s eulogy for her dying congregation, there is a whole lot of gospel in the story that unfolded on the journey to Emmaus. Christ Jesus, the son of the Living God and the Lord and Savior of all, was made known to them through the breaking of the bread. They raced back to Jerusalem to proclaim the good news of their amazing encounter with God’s beloved son, who is risen indeed.

The book I’m reading about churches is pretty depressing. And I think it’s because I haven’t gotten to the part where the churches start turning around. All I’ve encountered in this book so far are the funeral stories, tales of congregations that are unconvinced of God’s glory, suspicious of the Holy Spirit, stuck with a Christ who hasn’t quite left the grave. These congregations are still trudging away from the City of God, joylessly recounting how their vitality had collapsed.

I wonder if Muriel’s church regained its recognition that Christ is risen, and among them in the breaking of the bread, or if their sight is still obscured by sorrow and grief. I’m willing to bet my library card that the only way for congregations to turn around is to turn to Christ, to allow their eyes to be opened to his steadfast presence.

Our purpose, as a congregation, is to worship God. Everything else— mission, evangelism, spiritual growth— emerges from that one radical purpose. We gather in this place because God has called us here, to revel in his presence, to delight in his glory, to offer praise and thanksgiving for his unconditional love. We gather around a table to share the communion meal because Jesus himself is made known to us through the breaking up the bread. And we sure do need to know him. Our joy, our hope, our lives depend upon the ability to recognize and celebrate Christ’s presence in our congregation and in our world.

Lately, people have made some comments that have led me to believe that some hearts are burning as we worship God in this place. The Spirit of the Living God is at work here, coaxing us into deeper prayer and more joyous song. We are being shaped as individuals and as a congregation into more faithful followers of the one who walks beside us.

We are not heading to Emmaus, but we are on an exciting journey. As we discern the direction of God’s call for this congregation, we must keep on turning toward the table of Communion, where Christ is made known to us week after week in the breaking of the bread. And like Cleopas and his friend, who ran back to Jerusalem by night, we must keep sharing the great news with our friends and neighbors, that here, in this place, we gather under the gentle shadow of the Holy Spirit.

We walk through the doors of this sanctuary expecting to encounter and to worship God, and despite our racing minds and tired bodies, we do. The Lord is risen, indeed.

Amen.

Sunday, April 23

2006-04-24T13:08:00.000-07:00

Click here to read John 20:19-31.

The Disciples locked themselves away in a room, imprisoned by fear. How can this be? Last we heard, Mary Magdalene ran off to proclaim the Good News that she had encountered the Risen Christ. Now, whether or not the Disciples really believed Mary or simply thought her grief had kidnapped her sanity, we can’t know for sure. We do know that Easter had not yet reached the men in Jesus’ inner circle. John tells us that the Disciples cloistered themselves behind a locked door on account of their fear of the Jews. Every biblical commentary I’ve ever read about this text scoffs at such a simple explanation for their terror. There was no evidence they would be the target of Jewish retaliation, or Roman violence for that matter. The man who’d been the problem—the one whom we call Savior—had been taken care of. The story was over, according to the authorities, and it seems that the Disciples agreed.

There they are, cowering behind locked doors. And while John doesn’t spell it out for us, the fear the Disciples felt was spiked with shame. They had failed their prophet, their teacher, their leader, their friend. If it was true that the tomb was empty and Jesus was walking the streets of Jerusalem again, were they really up for facing him? They had been cowards in the hour of his death, and now their fear and shame make cowards of them in the wake of his resurrection.

And then Jesus shows up. Even though the doors were locked, bolted shut with whatever sort of security device you’d find in an ancient Israelite home during the Roman occupation, Jesus is suddenly standing among them.

Isn’t this the stuff of ghost stories? Don’t only intangible haunts pass through doors? Aren’t we supposed to be focusing on the very real and tangible body of Christ, present and fully alive? Back when I was a skeptic, I used roll my eyes at this kind of biblical detail. Come on, now, John, I’d think. Dump the theatrics and stick to the story. But through the eyes of faith, Jesus’ sudden appearance in a locked door is much more than a special effect thrown in for pizzazz. Yes, it’s a sign of God’s impressive power made manifest in the Resurrected Christ. But God doesn’t waste his power on empty miracles.

Jesus, our Risen Lord and Savior, is shown here breaking and entering, and not just into a house. Jesus breaks the chains that bind God’s children to fear and shame, and enters our hearts. You might say he is like a thief in the night, only instead of stealing away with our treasures, he freely gives us the priceless treasure of salvation.

“Peace be with you.” This is what he says to the Disciples gathered there. Not, “How could you deny me, Peter.” Not “Why did you not go looking for me when Mary told you she had seen me?” Just, “Peace be with you.” The Disciples expected anger and disappointment, and instead Jesus greeted them with the ultimate sign of forgiveness and reconciliation – his peace.

With the passing of Christ’s peace, the Disciples are released from their cage of fear. They are released from the bond of shame. After showing the Disciples the traces of his wounds, Jesus reveals that he will still depend on the bumbling, fair-weather Disciples to continue his mission. He breathes on them, commissioning them with a ministry of reconciliation and forgiveness. Can you imagine the thrill of feeling God’s very breath on your cheek? What I wouldn’t do to have been a fly on the wall of that room. Just think what it would do for your faith, your trust, your sheer believe in the living, breathing, forgiving, loving Son of God. To have seen the wounds of Jesus, to have seen life where death had taken hold, to experience the jubilation of receiving the Holy Spirit from Jesus himself.

I had a friend who struggled with the notion of the resurrection. He got stuck, locked up in a prison of doubt and disbelief. He liked Jesus, perhaps even loved him. But he didn’t want to follow a Jesus who was evicted from the tomb. He didn’t want to associate with a Christ who mystically appears in locked rooms. He wanted a tidy faith that didn’t defy the laws of nature. But my friend has changed. He began to consider the reality that something happened after the death of Jesus. Something happened. That phrase became a mantra for him. For when you look at the Disciples before the business of Holy Week, you have a motley crew of men who only rarely understand the words of their Rabbi. It’s as if they take two steps back for every one step forward. As for Jesus, well, he was just one of thousands of men crucified by the brutal Roman government. He should have been forgotten, like the countless other criminals and rebels that met the same fate. Only he wasn’t. He became the central figure in a strange new religion that soon spread like wildfire throughout the known world. Something happened.

This is that something, friends. The encounter with the Risen Lord. Just as Mary Magdalene was transformed in the fleeting moments she spent in the physical presence of the gardener, the Disciples were changed by their joyful reunion with Christ.

No wonder Thomas was ticked. No wonder he stubbornly announced that he wasn’t going to believe a word the Disciples said unless he could see and touch Christ’s wounds for himself. He had missed the boat. Wherever he was on that evening, he wasn’t in the right place. Thomas has often gotten a bum rap throughout Christian history. How many Sunday School teachers have chided questioning kids to not be a “doubting Thomas?” But how can we blame him? He was the first person who was pressured to affirm the living presence of Christ without having laid eyes on his scars.

So Jesus does it again. He breaks and enters, though the closed doors of the house. He offers the same greeting of Peace, and addresses Thomas personally, offering to provide for Thomas what he needed to believe. Again, there is no condemnation. Even as he concedes that there is a special blessing in having faith without the benefit of proof, Jesus gently gives Thomas what he needs— the chance to touch the hand of his Lord.

Often, the entire focus of this text is on Thomas. Certainly, his struggle with belief and unbelief is a significant story. But I think it is wise to always return our attention to the One who returns from the grave. Here we have a story that reveals the depth of Jesus’ heart, a heart that still beats with compassion for creation. Here we encounter a Lord who doesn’t bother to knock, a God who shows up whether we are ready to face him or not. Here we are surprised by a Savior who forgives, again and again, releasing us from the bonds of sin and fear and shame.

Here we witness a Resurrected Christ who would let a man touch his tender wounds just to give him a chance to believe in God’s glory. Here we see that God’s idea of an Easter celebration is to kick down the door and give the gifts of Spirit and mission to a raggedy group of men who were, for better or worse, the church. We may not have seen, but we believe. The breath of his peace is still resting upon us.

Something happened. That something is Christ, and he is still happening, even here, even now.

Amen.

Christ is Risen!

2006-04-20T08:07:00.000-07:00

Click here to read John 20:1-18. And Happy Easter!

One of my favorite things about living in the South Bay is driving down the Esplanade on a clear morning. I love seeing the impossibly blue ocean and the pure white spray of the breakers. I marvel at the curve of the land, how the Santa Monica Mountains and the Palos Verdes Peninsula stretch to embrace across the bay.

But I think what I love most of all is the chance to observe the people who stand on the Esplanade sidewalk, taking in the grand seascape. As I keep one eye on the road and one eye on the coast, I catch fleeting glimpses of people who are utterly transfixed by the ocean. Something about being in the presence of something so deep, so mysterious, so big, just grasps people. I’ve heard it said that gazing at the ocean actually causes one’s soul to expand. The soul simply grows in response to what it sees.

The gospel lesson for this Easter Sunday is the most gospel of all gospel readings. It is the best of all good news, delivered out of the mouth of a very tear-stained Mary: “I have seen the Lord!” We gather on this Easter Morning because we, too, want to encounter the living Christ. We, too want a holy gardener to transform our tears into joy. We want to see the Lord.

But for the moment, our part in this story is as witnesses to the witnesses. The focus of this story, so to speak, is on the ocean, but also on the people whose souls are expanding in response to its beauty. We stand by as Mary and the Disciples discern the miraculous event that is at the core of the Christian faith: the resurrection of God’s beloved Son.

John’s account of the first Easter morning begins and ends with Mary Magdalene. She alone makes the mournful journey to the grave of her Lord. In the other gospels, other women accompany Mary to the tomb. But in the gospel according to John, she is alone. She has no hand to grasp or shoulder to lean on as she discovers, in horror, that the stone has been rolled from the tomb. Now she doesn’t even have a grave to tend. She can only assume that the body has been stolen by the same people who stole the breath from Jesus. At this point in the text, there is a lot of running around; and it is no surprise, for this is what always happens when Jesus is missing. Mary turns and runs back to the Disciples to proclaim the bad news. They all run back, one outrunning the other, to try to make sense of the strange turn of events. All that is left in the tomb are the linen wrappings that had bound the lifeless body of Jesus. They take in the sight—the utter emptiness of the tomb—and turn to go home, mired in confusion.

Mary remains. All that she knows is that her Lord is dead, and that someone has added salt to the wound by robbing his grave. She stands vigil in front of that empty tomb, weeping the tears of one who has lost more than everything. Her grief is soon interrupted by a pair of angels. “Why are you weeping?” They say. And then the gardener asks the same question. “Why are you weeping?” Mary is so desperate to retrieve the body of her crucified savior that she does not recognize that it is her Risen Savior who stands before her, as alive as anything else in the garden. And then he speaks one word that reveals everything to Mary. One word is all it takes for her to believe and understand: her very own name.

We can only imagine that Mary runs to embrace her teacher at this point, because Jesus has to gently remind her that he cannot be grasped. No matter that Mary wants more than anything else to embrace the body she had been weeping for so mightily; Jesus tells her that she cannot continue to hold on to him. The power of the resurrection is not the thrill of touching flesh that was once dead. The power of the resurrection is the encounter with the living Christ, the savior you might mistake for a humble gardener if not for the fact that he knows you by name.

And so Mary runs off to preach the first Easter sermon: Christ arose, and will keep rising until he is restored to the full presence of God. She knows this not only because of an empty tomb and a cast-off shroud. She knows this because she has experienced the resurrected Jesus, who is on the move even now.

The last hundred years or so have seen a flurry of attention afforded to what happened in the tomb. One of the five doctrines of fundamentalist Christianity is the matter of the bodily resurrection of Christ. While the gospels do certainly testify that Jesus was seen eating and drinking after he had been killed by Roman authorities, the fascination with what happened in the tomb still bewilders me. Standing in opposition to the fundamentalists are the scholars intent on offering believable alternatives to the unbelievable story of the resurrection. Death is death, they say. They prefer grave robbers to the miracle of the Risen Christ.

The gospels do not even begin to imagine the goings-on before the stone was rolled away. Barbara Brown Taylor notes that “the resurrection is the one and only event in Jesus’ life that was entirely between him and God.”

And I have to tell you, I think we might be better off keeping it that way. I recently watched a video marketed to churches for use in Easter worship. It imagined the moment of the resurrection. A man wrapped in linens lay on a table. As an orchestra played dramatically in the background, the man slowly began to stir. The music billowed to a climax as the man sat up. It just didn’t work for me. It reduced a miracle into a cartoon, a holy mystery into a crude farce. And worst of all, it forced the Easter celebration back into the tomb.

Easter does not begin in the tomb; it begins with the encounter of the living Christ. When Mary’s tears of sorrow are wiped away, when the mere sound of her name shakes the grief right out of her, when her very soul trembles and swells in the presence of Jesus— that’s when Easter begins. That’s when the resurrection becomes real.

The gospels bear witness to a handful of appearances of the Risen Lord. They let us watch on as these encounters utterly transform people. And the gospels whisper a promise: the holy gardener is still on the move. He cannot be contained, not by the hateful grip of death, and not even by the loving embrace of a follower. Christ is on the loose, waiting for us to turn our tear-stained faces to his presence. We don’t need the paltry evidence of a cast-off shroud to know that our Redeemer lives, for the one whose Spirit outgrew those linens is present, even now.

Experiencing Easter isn’t about clenching your fists, closing your eyes, and forcing yourself to believe in an event that happened within the intimate circle of the Holy Trinity. Easter begins and the resurrection becomes real when you open yourself to the spirit of the Living God. Encountering the Risen Christ expands your soul and transforms your life so completely that even death cannot claim you. First the encounter— then the belief, the trust, the sheer joy of being in relationship with Jesus.

So have enough courage to show up at the tomb. Have enough tenacity to weather the moments—the days—the years—when it seems like someone has taken your Lord away. And like Mary, have just enough faith to keep weeping until you hear your name.

Amen.

Holy Week at South Bay Christian Church of Redondo Beach

2006-04-12T16:03:00.000-07:00

Maundy Thursday: 7:30 p.m.

Easter Sunrise Service: 6:30 a.m.

Breakfast

Easter Celebration: 10:30 a.m.

All are welcome!

Sunday, April 9: Palm Sunday, Passion Sunday

2006-04-10T08:41:00.000-07:00

Click here to read John 12:12-16.

This is the day that the Lord has made. This is the day the solemnity of Lent gives way to shouts of Hosanna. This is the day that Jesus enters Jerusalem through a gate of jubilant worshippers, crouching on his donkey beneath a canopy of tender palm branches.

And this is the day that we can neither deny nor ignore that the man celebrated as King of Israel is processing to his death. Today is Palm Sunday, but it is also Passion Sunday. The hosannas we proclaim today cannot be separated from the tears of mourning we will shed in the coming week.

We do not share the perspective of the crowd in this text. We do not hope against hope that this triumphant entry means that God has finally sent a King to shoo out the Romans and reestablish an Israelite Kingdom. We remember this joyful entry from the weathered perspective of the Disciples, who themselves only understood these events after the death and resurrection of Christ. Which is to say that we know where this is going.

We know that the good favor of this crowd will abruptly shift direction, and that within the week, the Son of God incarnate will be beaten and nailed to a cross.

One of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott, made a confession a few years ago. “I don’t have the right personality for Good Friday, for the crucifixion. I’d like to skip ahead to the resurrection vision of one of the kids in our Sunday School who drew a picture of the Easter Bunny outside an open tomb: everlasting life and a box of chocolates.” I think Lamott speaks here for a lot of mainline Protestants. We don’t do well with bloodied crucifixes. We gather on Maundy Thursday, for sure, to commemorate the meal that is the marrow of our spiritual journey. But Good Friday— we’d rather stay home. Many years I’ve let Holy Week come and go without actually reading the texts that recount Jesus’ suffering and death.

I still haven’t seen Mel Gibson’s movie about the Passion of the Christ—in part because I disagree with his decision to explore Jesus’ death outside of the context of his life, but in part because I just plain can’t bear to see a man torn to shreds, even if the wounds are cinematic. Last week when the Los Angeles Times featured photographs of injured soldiers in an article about military medical care, I had to bury the front page under the classified section just so I could eat my breakfast. I don’t like blood, I don’t like violence, I don’t like death.

And yet, as the esteemed theologian Jurgen Moltmann proclaims, “Good Friday is the center of the world.” I don’t want to believe this. I don’t want to believe that the crucifixion of an innocent man is the nucleus of human life, that pain and more pain is at the core of existence.

But if we’re going to be honest, we cannot deny that suffering is persistent. We cannot pretend that every heart that beats will not eventually decelerate to one final cadence. We cannot make believe that people don’t abuse and exploit one another. We cannot pretend that life is all Hosannas when there is so much evidence to the contrary.

Last week, my sister’s friends lost their 9-month old son to a rare genetic disease. He became sick about a month ago, and despite all the best medical care, there simply wasn’t anything that could be done to save his life. In the midst of little Ethan’s brief and tragic bout with the illness, his two-year-old brother Andy fell ill with the same symptoms and diagnosis. The parents cannot simply return home in grief; they must stay on at the hospital to sit vigil with another sick child. What they have discovered, though, is that Ethan’s struggle with the disease taught the doctors a great deal about how to treat Andy.

In a message to concerned family and friends, the boys’ father wrote that they “have started to wonder if Ethan's purpose in his short life was to give us joy and Andy the gift of life.”

My heart has been heavy for this family. I cannot fathom the intensity of their grief. And yet I know who can. We know that Jesus suffered and died at Calvary. We know that his mother wept for his pain and sorrow. And I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that the One who released Christ into this world wept alongside her. The One who created the moon and stars lamented the death of his beloved Son with the same heart-wrenching and powerless grief that every parent who loses a child experiences.

But currents of hope are coursing beneath the surface of even the most senseless tragedies. The promise of a newly sung Hosanna survives even the darkest hour of Good Friday. The agonizing question of “Why did this happen” finally comes to rest on one muscular word: love.

Just as Ethan lived and died to give joy and the gift of life to his family, Jesus Christ lived and died to give joy and the gift of life to the whole world.

The paradox of this Holy Week is that the depth of God’s sorrow revealed the depth of God’s love. Suffering and death were at the center of the world long before that Roman cross was planted at Golgatha for our Savior to die. What changed on Good Friday is that God entered the heart of pain and infused it with pure and holy love.

I am afraid that this appeal to love has all the effect of a Hallmark greeting card. I am afraid that this word has been bankrupted once and for all. I am afraid that we are so jaded that we might dare roll our eyes at the wondrous love of Christ.

But if a grieving father can locate his dead son’s purpose in the gift of life he bestowed upon his brother – if God himself can stand in solidarity with humans by bearing the cross of ultimate pain and humiliation – perhaps we can trust that a profound and transformative love is darting around the periphery of even the most unbearable circumstances.

We cannot erase the cross from Holy Week. We cannot ride the sea of Hosannas to the shores of Easter morning. We cannot avert our eyes from the crown of thorns. The Palms become Passion, and there isn’t a thing we can do to stop it.

But in light of this wrecked humankind, I don’t know if we would give up the cross after all. What good is a God who stays on his heavenly throne when the world he created is overrun with evil? What good is a God who keeps a safe distance from death? What good is a God who doesn’t love us enough to share the burden?

Hosannas alone are not enough to redeem humankind. And in Christ Jesus, we have a King who will ride a donkey to his death to save even the ones who will betray him. We have a God who exchanges hospitality and Hosannas for suffering, sacrifice, and solidarity.

I pray that this week we will have the courage to face the cross. No one has a Good Friday personality. No one longs to sit vigil as death suffocates life. But the vigil we keep this week will not end in the grave. Easter is just around the corner. The resurrection is on the horizon, carrying with it the promise of new life for all Creation. So face the cross, sisters and brothers. Face it and witness God’s love.

Amen.

Sunday, April 2: The Hour Has Come

2006-04-10T08:35:00.000-07:00

Click here to read Psalm 51, and here to read John 12: 20-33.

The hour has come.

The Jesus we encounter in today’s gospel reading is finally standing in the shadow of the cross. The unavoidable culmination of his life and ministry is mere hours away. Never in his life had so many people celebrated him. Next week we will recall the blitz of Hosannas that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem. Even the Greeks longed to see the Holy Man from Nazareth. According to the wisdom of the world, Jesus was at the top of his game.

Yet just as the loaves of bread had to be torn into pieces to feed the multitude, so too did the Son of Man have to be broken to draw all people to him. Again and again in this Lenten season we are reminded that the wisdom of God turns our common sense into dust. This talk of losing one’s life to save it just doesn’t mass muster with human logic.

The analogy of the seed should alleviate our bewilderment. The seed must be buried in the soil before it can produce new growth. The simple miracle of germination transforms tiny seeds into fields of wheat. But there isn’t a very clean comparison, biologically speaking, between a grain of wheat and a human being. For wheat, the ground is a fertile source of new life. For a man, the ground is the dwelling place of death, the realm of the grave. Yet Jesus would have us believe that falling into the earth and dying has the same fruitful effect as planting the year’s crop. Only the life that will emerge from this spiritual harvest will be eternal.

Eternal life in the presence of God. This is quite a harvest. And an invitation to this feast is issued to every last one of God’s beloved children. The cameo appearance of the curious Greeks is a testament to the scope of God’s intentions. The elect—those chosen to receive God’s full mercies—turns out include a whole lot more people than suspected. Indeed, it is in this scripture from the gospel of John that we catch a glimpse of the radical inclusivity at the heart of the gospel.

Jesus will be lifted up. He will be lifted up onto the cross in a humiliating scene of suffering and shame. He will be buried in a tomb for three days. But then he will be lifted up again to the great glory of God. And when he is lifted from the earth, first to die and ultimately to live, he will draw all people to himself.

I’m not making this up. St. John isn’t making this up. Jesus publicly proclaims this unexpected revelation to the crowd: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

All people—all people!—will be embraced by the outstretched arms of the Son of God. All people will find themselves in the awkward position of being loved by him, regardless of whether they ignored him, rejected him, or loved him back.

There will be a judgment. In fact, that judgment has occurred already, when Jesus was lifted up to his death. The depth of human sinfulness was displayed in all its gory colors the day that the Son of God was crucified. “Now is the judgment of this world,” Jesus says. “Now the ruler of this world will be driven out.” The whole of Creation was torn asunder by disobedience and corruption, and the whole of Creation is to blame.

But remember the good news— the Son of God was sent not to condemn the world but to save it. All people are drawn to Christ—all people face him as the rightful judge of a broken world. And all people will discover that this judge cannot bear to condemn a single soul. This judge surrendered his life to plant the seeds of the Kingdom of God in the temperamental soil of the human heart. Nothing we do can convince him to withhold his abundant, life-giving grace from us. There is no way to escape God’s insatiable love.

If we recognize the full depth of God’s love, if we experience the dizzying height of his mercy, we cannot help but respond. The life and death of Jesus Christ has to inform our own lives. An honest response to the wondrous love of Christ is to recognize that our lives are no longer our own. We cannot love our lives so much that we protect our energies for ourselves and those within our intimate circles. Our lives must be turned over to Christ. Whoever serves me must follow me, he warns.

There is perhaps nothing more terrifying than surrendering one’s life to God. The instinct toward self-preservation and self-service is deeper than any cultural habit. Here we are asked to do what seems impossible—to voluntarily assume the posture of servants. Here we realize that the new commandment to love, love, and love some more is drastic. We are supposed to love the way Jesus loves. And Jesus’ love for Creation didn’t win him an automatic pass to the Right Hand of the Father. His love pressed him down into the earth like a lowly grain of wheat.

There are so many reflections of Christ’s love among the Saints of the church, so many people who allowed God’s grace to transform them into servants molded in the path of Christ. Father Henri Nouwen was one of the most celebrated Christian writers of the 20th century. He wrote extensively about Christian spirituality, yet shocked his students by giving up his comfortable job teaching at Yale University to become a caregiver for persons with severe disabilities. He spent the final years of his life feeding and bathing mentally retarded men who couldn’t read a word he had written. Yet those men experienced the Christian love Nouwen had written about so profoundly.

Just yesterday, the Los Angeles Times featured the obituary of a woman who became famous for the humblest of vocations: she taught Sunday School for 80 years, retiring soon after her 108th birthday. In this day and age in which self-promotion and fame-seeking has reached a fever pitch, it is no small miracle that a simple church woman whose joy was to share the gospel with 2nd-graders made it into the big city newspaper. Even the world marvels at men and women who faithfully surrender their lives to the glory of God.

The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. And the hour has come for us to decide if we want to be a part of this journey through death into life. Can we die to selfishness so we can live in Christ? Can we echo David’s impassioned cry for God to do for him what he cannot do for himself? “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.” All people are invited on this journey from cross to grave and from grave to sky. Are we up for the severe mercy of God’s compassion? Are we prepared to become as seeds, hidden in the fertile ground of God’s love? The hour to decide has come.

Sunday, March 26, 2006

2006-03-29T09:36:00.000-08:00

We’ve been undertaking a strange practice during worship this Lenten Season—the ancient act of public confession. We are all sinners. But I doubt many of us really want to stand in front of the congregation and confess publicly the many ways we have missed the mark. And so this awkward practice of shared confession emerged in the early church. It is awkward because it is actually quite difficult to create a prayer of confession that all members present can recite honestly. The confession has to be generic to the point of blandness. After all, you shouldn’t be pressured to confess you have lied and cheated if you haven’t, in fact, lied and cheated. So we make do with generalities. We beat around the bush. We say in unison that we are sorry for what we have done, and for what we have left undone. It is up to us to silently fill in the details of our brokenness.

But the practice is awkward in a much deeper way than mere logistics. Even as Christian people, we don’t particularly care to air out our dirty laundry. We live in a culture that requires us to say that we are fine even when we are not. Public admission of brokenness doesn’t jive with the American spirit. We’re supposed to be strong, independent, and capable.

The practice of public confession threatens the lie that we are all fine. It gathers us all under one umbrella of repentance as we collectively confess the truth of our condition, which is often so very far from fine. We might think that since we’re not thieves and murderers we’re in the clear. But as human beings living in a ruptured Creation, we are given to sinfulness. In large and small ways alike, we turn from the ways of Jesus. We fail to love the way that God loves.

There has been a movement away from this talk of sin in the Christian Church. After all, we’re supposed to be developing healthy self-esteem, and having your preacher point out your sinfulness doesn’t exactly nourish the ego. But given that we follow a Christ who suffered death to bring new life, perhaps we should reconsider the inverted wisdom of the Christian faith.

The need for confession is confirmed by a strange little book that is currently a bestseller. It’s called PostSecret. Frank Warren, the organizer of the project, simply provides an address and the invitation to submit anonymous postcards revealing secrets. The postcards rush in by the hundreds each week as people pounce on this opportunity to confess their secrets.

Some of them are joyful, some of them are silly, but many more are devastating. People plead guilty to the pain that they have caused others. People bear witness to the pain that others have inflicted on them. The response to the book has been astounding. One reader who struggles with a compulsion to injure herself commented, “I have tons of secrets and i cant get them out. i have turned the pages of this book day in and day out, looking for a way to escape the fears inside me. when i reached the page about cutting, i bawled my eyes out. i knew i wasnt the only one who did it, but i wanted to know someone who knew how it felt. to know that someone had the courage to confess it to the world. i still cant escape my fears and hurt inside. i'm trying but your book has helped me tremendously, for i almost killed myself.”

I see a culture that is paralyzed by its need to present a good face to the world. I see too many people who are convinced that their mistakes make them unworthy of love, unworthy of life. I see men and women who are so blinded by their shame that they wrongly believe that they are alone in their brokenness. I see a world that is, to paraphrase the apostle Paul, deadened by trespasses and sins.

We talk about sinfulness in the Christian church because we recognize that when we are caged by shame, we are separated by God. We refuse to believe that God loves us, because we believe we are unlovable. As Jesus explains to Nicodemus in the gospel of John, “all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.” When a man is flooded with feelings of guilt and remorse, he no longer simply believes that his actions were evil. He believes that he himself is evil, and he is so ashamed that he hides himself from the light that would expose him for who he truly is. He is terrified that a wrathful God will condemn him for his sinfulness, and so he simply burrows himself into a deeper darkness, ever further from the truth-bearing light of God.

The heart of our gospel lesson today is that this isn’t how it is supposed to be. Sinners need not go on the lam to avoid the punishment of an angry God. As it so happens, the One who knows how many hairs you have on your head isn’t actually out to condemn you for your failure to be a perfect replica of Christ.

Jesus explains his mission to Nicodemus not as a strict judge, denouncing humanity for its brokenness. Rather, he is the Savior, the liberator of a humankind that is trapped in a dreary cycle of sin and shame. “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

And this salvation from sin and shame we experience in Christ Jesus cannot be earned. No matter if you are a gossip or a felon, you are saved from that deadening cycle of sin and shame by grace through faith. John 3:16 is wildly famous for a good reason: it reminds us how ferociously God loves the world. God didn’t send his Holy Spirit to rest on Jesus on account of our good behavior. The world that God so-loved that he gave his only Son isn’t a perfect world. It isn’t the Kingdom of God. It is our messy, broken, sinful world that God loved enough to intervene in a radical way to draw us back into his eternal embrace.

It takes a force beyond ourselves to unlock the cage of sin and shame. It takes the grace to entrust ourselves to our loving Creator, who seeks not to condemn us but to release us from that dark and lifeless prison. Confession is not a guilt trip. Confession of sin allows us to be cleansed and made whole by our gracious and merciful God.

Some of you know that I rejected the Christian faith for a few years. Like many of my peers, once I became of age, I intended to never darken the doors of a sanctuary again. Even when my heart began to give into the quiet calls of the Holy Spirit to return to Christian community, I avoided traditional worship. I was afraid that one superficial hymn or one theologically sour sermon would turn me off for good. So I spent a year worshipping in a silent Quaker meeting. When I was called to be a youth minister in an Episcopal Church, I knew that meant I had to come to terms with traditional Christian liturgy.

I went to worship that first Sunday bracing myself. I was particularly nervous about the prayer of confession. Some of my beef with the Christian Church was its reputation for inspiring guilt, and the act of public confession seemed like an unnecessary tool for humiliation. What surprised me was that joining my voice with the voices around me in a shared confession of sin felt great. I realized that my heart had been tightly clenched with guilt, and confessing my sin didn’t add to the guilt but released me from it. I experienced forgiveness. I experienced the grace and mercy of our compassionate and passionate God, who meets us not with condemnation but with love.

The Disciples of Christ pastor, Marianne Scott, tells a story of the power of confession—and forgiveness—in her Indianapolis congregation, Eastgate Christian Church. Their building is situated in a wooded area, adjacent to a park and residential areas, and its location makes it especially vulnerable to vandalism. Sixteen years ago, the building was in fact broken into.

Many people believe—or prefer to believe—that robbers would shy away from sacred objects. But as the culprit ransacked the offices and sanctuary, he snatched the Chalice from the communion table. Of all the hurt and anger that ensued from that fiasco, nothing stung the congregation more than the loss of that beloved symbol of their connection with the living God.

Fifteen years later—last spring—a man in his 30s showed up for ten o’ clock worship. Midway through the service, he stood up and asked to share something with the congregation. And then he stood before them to confess that he had broken into their building those many years ago. He explained that he was deeply sorry for his actions, and repeatedly apologized. As he confessed, he produced the long-lost Chalice and returned it to the table. It was tarnished, but more worthy than ever to be transformed into the cup of salvation. That day, Reverend Scott blessed and poured the consecrated juice into that beat-up old Chalice instead of the shiny, well-kept replacement. After the closing hymn, the members of the congregation greeted the Judas who had betrayed them with open arms. They embraced him, and shook his hand, and marveled at the grace of his repentance.

Not every story of confession engenders such a beautiful expression of forgiveness and healing. The light burns our eyes after spending an afternoon in a movie theater; imagine how much more the light scalds the hearts of those who have cowered in the dark, away from light, away from truth, away from God. But no matter the depth and gravity of the confession, God greets us with the open arms of reconciliation.

By no merit of our own we are made alive together with Christ, re-created in Christ to be a gift to God’s beloved world. We cannot earn God’s love, not by the strength of our good deeds, and not even by the vulnerable confession of our bad deeds. All we can do is accept the liberating grace of the one who loves us so much he cannot bear to let us remain dead in our shame. All we can do is trust that our God is a God of love, not condemnation. All we can do, sisters and brothers, is believe.

Amen.

Sunday, March 19, 2006

2006-03-23T12:59:00.000-08:00

Last week in Valyermo, the other first-call pastors and I had the opportunity to hear a word from Tamara Nichols Rodenberg, the new dean of the Disciples Seminary Foundation. In addition to years of pastoral experience in the US, Tamara and her husband also spent about six years in Southern Africa as missionaries. I understand why mission nights at churches used to draw huge crowds: missionaries have stories to tell, stories that are infinitely more compelling than anything you could see on television. Missionaries tell stories of God’s creative and redeeming work in cultures drastically different than our own.

One of Tamara’s toughest barriers in South Africa and Swaziland was the matter of her gender. I get looks here in Southern California for being a female pastor; the communities in Southern Africa simply didn’t know what to do with her. European colonial customs and indigenous African customs were combined in ways that keep women vulnerable. According to the women’s movement Imbokodo, “In modern day South Africa, women are faced with a wide range of issues such as domestic violence, child abuse, HIV/AIDS, unemployment gender discrimination as well as poverty.” In addition to the gender issue, Tamara, who is white, worked in South Africa just a few years after the fall of apartheid. Tamara’s entire Southern African ministry was undertaken in the context of danger.

But the Spirit of God was upon her.

One day, Tamara and her husband attended a funeral of a man who had been active in a rural congregation. He was survived by his elderly wife. And in many poor, indigenous cultures, the widow of the deceased is considered dead as well. She has no right to property, and is likely to be mistreated by her in-laws and children.[1] The rituals of the community emphasize this. During the funeral of her husband, a woman cannot be seen. She is covered in heavy, black blankets, even during the heat of the day. She is shrouded and alone in her grief during the whole funeral.

Tamara watched as the blanketed woman moved to the body of her husband. She watched as a hand emerged from the covers to drop a fistful of dirt onto the coffin. She watched the heap of blankets shuffle back to her solitary seat.

And that’s when the Spirit of God intervened. Tamara knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that God was sending her under that blanket to share the pain of the woman underneath it.

She got up and dove under the heavy cloth before anyone could stop her. Her husband was astonished. After all, part of being a good missionary is honoring the culture and customs of the people. She was breaking a rule that no one ever thought to break.

The widow under the blanket seized Tamara’s hand and clenched it so tightly Tamara couldn’t even feel her fingers. The woman held on for the rest of the funeral. When she finally let go, Tamara ducked back out to face the consequences of her action.

Her spontaneous response to the Spirit had not gone unnoticed. The whole congregation was silent. The Bishop of the church came and stood before her. She was the center of attention and scrutiny. The foolishness of her split-second decision was clear. Would this cause their whole ministry to collapse? Would she loose the fragile respect of the people?

The Bishop stared at Tamara.

And then he spoke. “Thank you for entering the grave.”

Sisters and brothers, this story takes the cruciform shape of the gospel. Tamara Nichols Rodenberg boldly entered the grave of a living widow in a rural African village. She risked her reputation and her ministry by trespassing the rules and rituals of the culture. To the untrained eye, she was a fool. But her action revealed the abundant, life-giving, and foolish love of God. “For God’s foolishness,” Paul reminds us, “is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

In this Lenten season, we keep our hearts affixed to the cross. No matter how desperately we would rather avert our eyes from that horror, the scriptures keep pointing us back to the ultimate image of weakness and suffering: the crucified Christ, the glory of God nailed to a cross. In the words of the hymnist Brian Wren,

Here hangs a man discarded,
A scarecrow hoisted high,
A nonsense pointing nowhere
To all who hurry by.
Can such a clown of sorrows
Still bring a useful word
Where faith and love seem phantoms
And every hope absurd?

The Word of God—discarded. The Messiah—a scarecrow. The beloved Son of God—a nonsense pointing nowhere. The view at Calvary makes our Savior look like nothing more than a clown of sorrows. And yet through the cross, Jesus enters the grave. He extends his hand to us in our darkest hour, bringing the Spirit of the Living God into the lair of death.

Through the utter weakness of the crucified Christ, the power of God’s love resounds. The wisdom of the wise is destroyed. The discernment of the discerning is thwarted. Those who see the cross for what it is will never again believe the lie that death is more powerful than life, never again predict that violence and domination will triumph over sacrificial love.

We who follow the crucified Christ are bound to look like fools to the wider world. We are called to do unreasonable things to share God’s love with creation. And sometimes, by the grace of God, we live out our ridiculous vocation. Tamara Nichols Rodenberg offered God’s presence in a place thought to be godforsaken. Tom Fox lost his life doing the blessed work of peacemaking in a land wracked by war. And countless more Christians quietly answer the call to enter the grave as fools for Christ.

With your consent, I’d like to with a story of my own. I pray that if I boast, I boast in the Lord. As you know, I am in my first year of pastoral ministry. With the prayers and support of a legion of faithful Christians, I discerned and responded to the call God placed on my life. And I tell you what: I believe that God called me to this place. But even with that confidence, the first year of ministry can be daunting. One of the persistent issues has been my age and gender. The members and friends of this congregation got over the fact of my young age just as I was about to start making old age jokes. But the people I meet beyond the walls of this congregation still react. Many people respond with disbelief, but their shock soon warms into appreciation. On a few occasions, though, I have been hurt. I am hurt by the claim that my ordination was invalid because I am a woman. I am hurt when people assume that I am incapable of offering a pastoral presence to people in crisis. And I was hurt when a woman laughed at me, long and hard, when she learned that I am a pastor.

My instinct is to go on the defensive. I want to stand up for the Holy Spirit, who calls both men and women into spiritual leadership. I want to point out my Master of Divinity degree and my Certificate of Ordination, bragging about the education I received in seminary and the blessing I received from the Church.

But instead of those things, I must accept that by responding to my vocation as a minister of the gospel, I am a fool for Christ. I am no Tamara or Tom. I do not risk my life for the gospel the way these missionaries risked theirs. But I proclaim the crucified Christ in a land that is thirsty for the gospel.

We proclaim the crucified Christ in a land that is thirsty for the gospel. This is all we can do; if the power of God’s love revealed on the cross does not attract people, nothing will. The Kingdom of God will always look like a fool’s paradise to some. It is an upside-down place where the weak are strong, where the dumb are brilliant, where a discarded scarecrow hanging from a Roman cross is our salvation. It is divine madness, and it is the power of God. Amen.

[1] Social Fragmentation, http://rrojasdatabank.org/voices/voices6.pdf.

Sunday, March 12 2006

2006-03-12T12:14:00.000-08:00

Click here to read Mark 8:27-38.

His teacher was the Messiah. Not just another run of the mill holy man, passing magic tricks off as miracles. Jesus was the anointed One, the Beloved Son of God, the Christ. This peasant from Nazareth was the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, the answer to centuries of hope. God finally walked the earth, and soon his full glory would be made manifest. The Roman government would flee from the Israelites’ land, and once again the people of God would have a mighty Kingdom on Earth. Peter was delirious with joy, and spoke the truth on his heart: You are the Messiah.

And then the object of Peter’s hope dashed his hopes with a new teaching, that he would “undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.”

Peter rebuked Jesus. We don’t know quite what he said, but he led the Son of God away from the Disciples like a misbehaving child, and attempted to put Jesus in his place. I can imagine his alarm as he desperately struggled to convince Jesus that the Messiah isn’t supposed to suffer and die. I can imagine this because I would have had the same reaction.

Many of us have heard the story of Jesus Christ so many times that we forget how radical it is. God doesn’t merely walk the dusty roads of Galilee; God walks to his death with a cross on his back.

One of the best novels I’ve read in recent years is called The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. The protagonist, Pi, is unusually precocious when it comes to faith. Although he was born a Hindu, the young Indian boy is equally captivated by Islam and Christianity. There is a great scene in which his three religious teachers discover he has been moonlighting in other religions.

But what Pi has to say about the strange new story of Jesus Christ echoes Peter’s bafflement. He reflects,

“That a god should put up with adversity, I could understand. The gods of Hinduism face their fair share of thieves, bullies, kidnappers and usurpers … But humiliation? Death? I couldn’t imagine Lord Krishna consenting to be stripped naked, whipped, mocked, dragged through the streets and, to top it off, crucified -- and at the hands of mere humans, to boot. I’d never heard of a Hindu god dying… divinity should not be blighted by death. It’s wrong. The world soul cannot die, even in one contained part of it. It was wrong of this Christian God to let His avatar (His Son) die. That is tantamount to letting a part of Himself die. For if the Son is to die, it cannot be fake. If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me that it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste of death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. That was Father Martin’s answer.”

What Pi is encountering here is the scandal of the Christian Faith. We have, in the person of Jesus Christ, the unique, offensive, and saving story of a God who suffers and dies on account of his compassionate, insatiable love for Creation.

Pi was familiar with many gods, and they were all invincible and immortal. Peter wanted a powerful God who saves his people from suffering, not a weak and broken God who bears the burden of suffering and death himself. Jesus rebukes Peter because Peter is wrong, but the fire behind his rebuke is pure fear. Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, and instead of the mighty Superhero we long for, he is a vulnerable, breakable human being.

Jesus Christ reveals a God who suffers. And though we might think that suffering and death spoils what is perfect, the crucifixion of Jesus on the Cross reveals an utterly different sort of perfection—a perfect love. And this love is more powerful than pain, more powerful than sin, more powerful than death itself. It is a love that saves and reconciles, and it is a love that understands, profoundly, the breadth and depth of human experience.

The vulnerable God of Jesus Christ suffers alongside humanity, making himself known among the poorest and weakest of his children. A painting by W. Maxwell Lawton offers a powerful illustration of this (you can see the painting here). Lawton is a Christian painter who is living with AIDS. His experience of the Christ who bears the burden of human experience led him to paint a portrait called Man of Sorrows. At first glance, the painting seems very similar to the many portrayals of the Passion of Christ. But gazing at the painting, you soon recognize the gaunt features and skin lesions of a person dying of AIDS.

Along with the relentless blight of violence throughout Creation, the global AIDS crisis is one of the most painful contemporary expressions of human suffering. Forty million people are infected throughout the world; that many people standing in a line could stretch from Los Angeles to New York not once or twice, but three times.

In the United States and Europe, people who are HIV positive are treated with expensive drugs that increase their quality of life. But seventy percent of those who are HIV positive live in Sub-Saharan Africa, where AIDS drugs are scarce. Without treatment, these people suffer from a terrible wasting illness and repeated bouts of pneumonia. Eleven million African children have been left orphaned by the pandemic, and many of these children carry the virus themselves.

The Crucified Christ doesn’t avert his eyes from the pain and injustice of HIV/AIDS. He doesn’t wash his holy hands of the isolation and shame the virus brings about. He bears the cross of ultimate compassion, experiencing the utter brokenness of humankind.

He becomes the Christ with AIDS. He becomes the Christ with depression. He becomes the Christ with hunger pains and alcohol addiction and intense loneliness. Through the cross, God identifies himself once and for all as a God who loves us enough to share our pain.

But the story doesn’t stall out on Calvary. By accepting our vulnerability and bearing our sorrow, “God has claimed our weakness as a resource for divine power. God has claimed our wounds as a potential means of healing.” (Bishop Kenneth Carder) The love of God in Christ Jesus transforms suffering and death into joy and new life. Even as Jesus discloses the frightening, difficult path ahead, he reveals God’s staggering promise of resurrection. After three days, he will be made whole again. The power of his vulnerability and the force of his love will shatter the suffering, brokenness, and sin that hold God’s people in thrall. Even the taste of death will be vanquished.

I have heard two great lies that relate to this text, both of which are incredibly popular among Christians. The first is the lie of Peter. Somehow the very real crucifixion of Christ and the obligation to carry one’s own cross is thrown out entirely. The Christian faith is seen as little more than comforting life insurance. At its worst, this lie turns God into a pawn at the beck and call of believers, doling out fancy cars and job promotions to those who “name and claim” what they want.

Not only is this lie an affront to the sacrificial love of Christ, it is also thin ice for Christians. If you believe that your problems will vanish when you become a Christian, your faith is bound to crash. We are assured that when the work of Christ is fulfilled, “death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” But in the meantime, we must rest in the assurance that through Christ, God has intimate understanding of our suffering, and bears it with us.

The second lie is even more dangerous. This lie exploits the call to carry one’s cross to condone unjust suffering. Are you a slave? Endure your humiliation as Jesus did. Are you abused? Accept the beatings as Jesus accepted his. This lie corrupts the meaning of the cross. It turns the sacrificial love of Christ into a tool for cruelty.

By challenging us to take up our cross, Christ “calls us to live the life he has made possible for us through his death and resurrection- a life where we speak his name without shame, and do his will, knowing that there may be a cost to our discipleship, but that we've already gained life with the divine.” (Lori A. Cornell)

Like Peter, we do not like to hear about rejection and crucifixion. We would prefer to skip ahead to the resurrection. But God chose to transform weakness into power through Christ’s sacrificial love. We are called to follow Christ, even to the point of death. The divine logic of losing your life to save it certainly isn’t rational. But if we are blessed with enough wisdom to know our weakness, we will put our trust in the wisdom of a vulnerable God.

May we each live the new life we are given through the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus, who is the Messiah, the Son of God who lives, and dies, and lives again.

First Sunday of Lent: March 5, 2006

2006-03-09T12:06:00.000-08:00

Click here to read Mark 1: 9-15.

Boundaries are a fact of life, and for the most part, a fact we appreciate. Boundaries preserve and protect us. When you close and lock the front door of your house, you create a boundary that prevents unwanted guests from entering your home. When you drive down Pacific Coast Highway, you depend on the other drivers to mind the double yellow lines that separate the north and southbound lanes. The boundary between sound and silence is part of what makes music so beautiful. Even the foundation of the universe was accomplished by means of boundary-making; God separates light from darkness and water from dry land.

Sometimes the breaking of boundaries is tragic. Paint on the road cannot stop a drunk driver from drifting into oncoming traffic. We have seen images of the wreckage that happens when raging waters transgress the boundaries between land and sea. Violence breaks a multitude of boundaries—the boundaries of skin and trust and safety. We mourn when these boundaries are broken.

But then there are boundaries that are unjust, limitations that prevent Creation from embodying the will of God. The racist segregation laws in the American South were rules meant to be broken. The Disciples of Christ emerged as boundary-breakers on the frontier. The movement was fired by a Holy Spirit of protest. Thomas Campbell, one of the founders of the Restoration Movement, could not reconcile the practice of excluding people from the communion table if they didn’t accept the church’s creeds. If it is the Lord’s Supper, who are we to determine who gets an invitation?

The starkness of Mark’s narrative brings boundaries into sharp focus. The gospel of Mark is not like the coastline, with jagged edges and shifting tides and a wide expanse of sand that is sometimes land and sometimes sea. The gospel of Mark is like a map of the coast: “land here, boundary, water there.” (Breaking the Boundaries). Green land meets blue ocean, and there is no doubt as to which belongs where. Mark doesn’t give us a genealogy. Mark doesn’t give us a story of an unmarried mother and a census and a host of angels. There is no infant Jesus in the gospel of Mark. Here we have the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and he is all grown up and ready to dive in.

And dive in he does. Jesus comes from Nazareth of Galilee and is promptly baptized in the River Jordan by John the Baptist. The force of his baptism punctures the boundary separating the heavens from the earth, and a voice addresses Jesus: “You are my Son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased.” And Jesus is immediately pushed out into the desert, where he remains for forty days, withstanding temptation in the company of beasts and angels. At the close of the 40 days, Jesus passes his test and John loses his freedom, and the time has come for Jesus to proclaim, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

Here we have a story full of contrasts and boundaries. The one who will prepare the way, and the one who is the way. River and desert, heaven and earth, Satan and angels. Some of these boundaries are emphasized. Over the course of those 40 days in the desert, Jesus triumphs over Satan by resisting every temptation set before him. When he comes out of that desert, there is no question that he is indeed the beloved Son of God, strong and Spirit-filled enough to rebuff the corrupt persuasions of the evil one.

But other boundaries are blurred, and some are fully broken.

Jesus is the Son of God. His deep communion with the Spirit of God means that he is holy—so full of love and light and compassion that there is no room left over for sin. John the Baptist is a magnet for sinners—men and women with heavy burdens of guilt. People flock to John the Baptist because they recognize their brokenness, and the last thing they do before John dunks them in the Jordan River is confess their sins and repent. The waters of baptism wash away their sins, and they ascend from the river with the assurance that they are forgiven.

So why on earth would the beloved one of God allow himself to be submerged in the river alongside sinners? Shouldn’t the Son of God protect his image? If he is supposed to be sinless, shouldn’t he be on the riverbank, acting as a sort of holy cheerleader? Certainly it makes more sense for Jesus to stay dry and comfortable on the sidelines, there to simply welcome the repentant sinners into the new life of baptism.

But this isn’t how Jesus works. The boundary separating the sinless Son of God from sinful humanity is torn to shreds when Jesus wades into the water and leans into the arms of John the Baptist. God doesn’t simply peer through the veil of heaven and wonder what it is like to be a man. Through Christ Jesus, God stands in the midst of the human experience, stands in the middle of a river surrounded by sinners, and loves.

And before we have a chance to catch our breath from Jesus’ startling baptism, God pushes Jesus out into the desert, and Mark takes us along for the ride. From the river to the desert, and we are still in the presence of the beloved Son of God. Jesus walks away from the voice of benediction, away from the river that teems with life, and crosses the boundary into the dangerous, unlivable wilderness of the desert.

This scripture shifted into focus for me a few years ago when I went on a camping trip to Anza Borrego, the State desert park in San Diego County. Growing up in green Ohio, I had never been to the desert. And I have to be honest with you, I didn’t particularly like it. The desert was vast, unbearably dry, too hot during the day and too cold and night. The badlands were parched and brown, and the vegetation looked like it was more dead than alive. The desert wilderness feels like an empty and abandoned place—abandoned by life, and perhaps even abandoned by God.

It is no mistake that in the letter of Revelation, John imagines the fulfillment of Christ’s reconciling work as a great gathering by a river. Water is a powerful, sacramental image. God’s abundant grace is as vital as rain and as boundless as the ocean. The moisture of baptism is a tangible reminder of the life-giving Holy Spirit.

And the desert, with its lack of water, symbolizes the absence of Spirit. One of my preaching colleagues noted that “the dryness of the desert matches the dryness of life separated from God.”

The gospel surprises us again. Why would Jesus spend forty days in the most godforsaken of landscapes? The beloved Son of God, with whom God was well-pleased, spent forty days in the presence of evil. Forty days resisting temptations that Mark didn’t dare attempt to imagine.

The Spirit wasn’t supposed to be in the desert. But once again, Jesus demonstrates that God will not be contained, that no place is too barren for the angels of the Lord. In the wilderness, surrounded by wild beasts and tempted by the enemy of God, a team of angels ministers to Jesus, sustaining him with gifts of water even in a physical and spiritual wasteland.

Just as Jesus refused to stand on the riverbank and coolly observe God’s broken children seek healing, neither could Jesus stay in the safe places where we expect to encounter the Holy Spirit. We encounter God in this sanctuary when we open our hearts for worship. But the God whose praises we sing is present even in the least sacred places, the places where the threat of death is fierce and persistent.

Through Christ, we learn that the Holy Spirit is present in the wilderness. The desert of the cancer ward? The Spirit is there. The desert of the AIDS clinic? The Spirit is there. The desert of Skid Row? The Spirit is there. The desert of Iraq? The Spirit is there.

Jesus comes out of the desert, and instead of a warm reunion with his spiritual brother, he finds that John has been arrested. In other words, this is a really bad time to follow the way that John the Baptist prepared for him. The same Public Relations guru who would have directed Jesus to refuse the waters of baptism and resist the Spirit that drove him into the desert would recommend that Jesus should go underground for awhile until the buzz about John tapered off. It was just a bad time for good news. But the Kingdom of God does not operate according to our time frame. The time is fulfilled, so in the shadow of John’s arrest, Jesus finally begins giving voice to his mission: to reveal the forgiving and ever-present character of God.

This is the good news: in this messy world, full of sin and death and a million different reasons to feel pain, God loves us so much that he sent his beloved Son to bear witness and share the burden. This Son will not observe the regulations that separate holy and unholy. He will not respect conventions that segregate God from his people. Jesus will heal on the Sabbath, touch lepers with his bare hands, and eat with a reviled tax collector. On this Lenten journey, we remember again the Christ who breaks boundaries and suffers the consequences, all because of a love that cannot be contained. May own hearts be broken and filled with such love. Amen.

February 26th: Feast of the Transfiguration

2006-03-01T13:56:00.000-08:00

Click here to read Mark 9:2-9.

Last Wednesday evening, I preached at the Disciples worship service at Chapman University. The new chapel is a sight to behold. It is architecturally, aesthetically, and spiritually breathtaking. My favorite part was the set of stained glass windows. These windows don’t have the exquisitely detailed designs of our sanctuary windows. They are plainly colored with the shades of the lectionary—red, green, purple, and white. And supposedly, they are placed in such a way that the appropriate liturgical color will be dominant during each extended liturgical season. How the designers managed to calculate this is a mystery, but during the long months of Ordinary time, the sanctuary is filled with light filtered through the green glass. It is a beautiful reminder of the deep connection between the seasons of the Church and the seasons of the earth. Today is the last Sunday of Epiphany—the last reminder, for the time being, that God’s light blazes even in the darkness of winter. Beginning this Ash Wednesday, we take a sharp turn into a very different season— a season of journeys, shadows, and sorrow.

Even though I trust the logic and spirit of the liturgical year and the weekly lectionary scriptures, this week I was caught off guard. This being my first year of preaching on a weekly basis, all the curves in the road are still unfamiliar. I had gotten pretty used to working through the first and second chapters of the Gospel of Mark in a tidy, sequential way. Studying Mark’s purposeful narrative offers such a clear portrait of the amazing beginnings of Jesus’ ministry. I was all ready to dive deeper into the second chapter of Mark, all ready to tag along as Jesus eats dinner with Levi the tax collector.

But the lectionary points us to a very different time and place in the Gospel according to Mark. We skip past teachings and parables, healings and miracles, and we land at the foot of a mountain. Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, and on this last Sunday of the season of Light, we join Christians the world over to gather with Peter and James and watch as a supernatural event unfolds.

Weeks ago, on Epiphany Sunday, we recalled the brilliant star that led the Magi to the newborn Christ child. That light revealed that Christ would be the light of the world. Today we celebrate the fulfillment of that light, the Christchild grown up into a man in dazzling white clothes, conversing with the great figures of the faith. These stories are seasonal bookends of light and life—the first the light of incarnation, and the last the light of resurrection. Here we are given the gift of a foretaste of what is to come, and just in the nick of time. The 40 days of Lent can be exhausting. Even though we need to grapple honestly with the journey toward the cross, we also cannot afford to lose hope. So today we are given a supersized dose of hope—a supernatural sized dose of hope.

The story of the transfiguration is big and marvelous, and if we’re going to be completely honest, it’s a little weird. Peter and James certainly experienced the event as terrifying and strange. Peter offers the feeble suggestion that they build a dwelling—a tabernacle to commemorate the transfigured Jesus in communion with Elijah and Moses. This is a silly suggestion, and Peter knows it right away. For all of the miracles that Peter and James have seen in their travels with Jesus, nothing prepares them to see the Son of Man in full glory. They are terrified. It doesn’t help that this event transpires immediately after Jesus foretells his death and resurrection. These two disciples are startled by the realization that their fraternity with this holy man is even bigger, even more cosmic than they could have imagined.

On that mountain we witness such a medley of glory and confusion. Jesus has taken on a transfigured shine, Elijah and Moses have stopped by for a midnight chat, and Peter and James are trembling with terror. And in the midst of this mountaintop experience, a cloud overshadows the whole mountain, and the thunderous sweet voice of God proclaims, “This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him!”

Let’s stay here a minute, tarry for awhile in this moment and on this mountain. In our fast-paced world of constant entertainment and amusement, we’re in danger of missing the terrific depth of the transfiguration. Glory is a difficult concept for us to wrap our minds around, for it isn’t a concept at all. The glorified Jesus emanates the presence of the divine source of all light and life and love. This isn’t some second-rate special effects show. This is God, dramatically and purposefully breaking into the orderly brokenness of Creation. God can and does show up— and nothing is ever the same. This moment in time was transfigured, and so too will God continue to burst into history, transfiguring and redeeming the whole of Creation through the glorious light of Christ.

Of course, the moment doesn’t last. Peter’s suggestion to build a tabernacle to memorialize the transfiguration of Christ was a desperate attempt to capture the moment and make it last forever. But God’s glory cannot be contained any more than God’s voice can be recorded and marketed at the Christian bookstores. The moment ends, but the commandment that descended from the Heavens remains: “This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him!”

Listen to him. We might not have been on that mountain, seeing what Peter and James saw, but they preserved the most important piece of the whole story—God’s commandment to listen to what his Son actually had to say. This commandment is intimately related to the transfiguration, inextricably bound to the revelation of God’s glory.

How so? By listening to the beloved Son of God, we glorify him.

And this is how one of the most supernatural stories in the whole gospel gets very, very practical. In the course of foreshadowing the glorious resurrection of Christ, we are reminded once again that there is a purpose behind the scandalous incarnation. There is a reason for the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. Jesus did not walk the dusty roads of Galilee only to die that violent death on Calvary. If that were the case, the evangelists wouldn’t have bothered to document the parables and miracles that Jesus shared with his people. The gospel story would be completely alien without the gentle, ordinary, glorious voice of Jesus speaking a new word to Creation.

Listen to him. Listen to him through the call to compassionate giving on this Week of Compassion Sunday. Listen to him throughout the contemplative season of Lent, calling you toward a life more closely aligned with his shining love. Listen to him as you pray, listen to him as you share meals around the holy table of communion. Listen to him through the relationships you nurture with friends and family. Listen to him through the scriptures. And by the grace of God, let what you hear empower you to glorify Christ Jesus, the light of the world. Amen.

Interfaith Council Statement

2006-02-23T10:47:00.000-08:00

I just received this press release regarding from the South Coast Interfaith Council, of which South Bay Christian Church is a participating member. The statement responds to the ongoing violence related to the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper. May God's spirit of peace and reconciliation overcome the powers of hatred, intolerance, and violence.

* * *

Now that we have had time to reflect on the tragic misunderstandings and violence that erupted after a Danish newspaper published caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad, it has become clear that this chain of events could have been resolved nonviolently at the local level. Danish Muslims protested peacefully in Copenhagen, petitioned for an apology, and were rebuffed. The Danish Government refused to take their concern seriously, even when foreign diplomats from Muslim countries requested a meeting with the Danish prime minister.

This incident underscores how important it is for local interfaith groups to work together to help resolve these misunderstandings before they become international incidents.

The South Coast Interfaith Council, with a constituency of 250 congregations in the Long Beach-Peninsula-South Bay area of Los Angeles County, as well as in West Orange County, is such a local group committed to fostering interfaith understanding and respect as a path to peaceful coexistence in a diverse society and a global community. We strongly defend the right of free speech while we are nonetheless concerned when such freedom is irresponsibly abused to incite hatred, fear, bigotry or disrespect for any of the world's religions, scriptures, places of worship, races or cultures.

At the same time, we repudiate violence as a response to such insult. Violence, even that borne of frustration or oppression, impedes accomplishing these goals.

We are encouraged, however, that we represent a large, and growing, constituency which includes Muslims, Jews, Christians, Unitarians, Baha’is, Buddhists, Hindus and other people of faith who agree with these values, pray daily for peace, and witness to tolerance in their communities.

Celebrate Life!

Rev. Ginny Wagener, Executive Director, South Coast Interfaith Council

Rabbi Howard Laibson, Temple Israel, President

John Ishvaradas Abdallah, South Bay Sufi, President-Elect

Sunday, February 19th

2006-02-21T08:40:00.000-08:00

The gospel story for this morning holds a special place in my heart. This scripture was the centerpiece of the first time I spoke in front of a congregation. I was eleven, and I had been selected to play the owner of the house in the children’s musical. It was a great part to play. I got to narrate the destruction of my own roof.

The scene is Capernaum once again, and the crowd is even bigger than ever. People are drawn to Jesus as if by an invisible magnetic force. Even though Jesus operates beyond the borders of the cultural and religious institutions, the Galileans recognize his powerful spirit. His reputation for teaching and healing has revealed his spiritual authority, and people want to hear and see more from this Nazarene carpenter.

Throughout the first few scrolls of Mark, Jesus has been transgressing boundaries and bending rules—casting out a demon on the Sabbath, for instance, and cleansing a leper by touching him. But Jesus pushes the envelope a little further in the second chapter of Mark. By proclaiming that the paralytic’s sins are forgiven, he’s practically inviting the scribes to be offended.

Jesus responds to their murmurs of blasphemy by backing up his bold proclamation of forgiveness with another impressive healing. The man whose limbs had been frozen with weakness walks away, healed of body and spirit. He is given new life by the Son of Man—with, of course, a little help from his faithful friends.

We like to think of ourselves as the spiritual brothers and sisters of the paralytic’s friends. Their unyielding commitment to bringing their hopeless friend into the healing presence of Jesus is just the sort of passionate dedication to the gospel that the church is supposed to demonstrate. And sometimes we do tear through the roof to make way for the Holy Spirit. Sharing our resources with South Bay Korean Christian Church and Redondo Beach Community Church is a-tear-down-the-roof kind of ministry. Establishing and sustaining the pancake breakfast is a tear-down-the-roof kind of ministry. Supporting Dean Cornwell’s mission in the Congo through prayer and assistance is another tear-down-the-roof kind of ministry.

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) tore through the glass roof when we elected Sharon Watkins as our General Minister and President, especially when so many Christian churches struggle to affirm women in ministry.

The Church can and does dig through the roof, and our faithfulness never fails to draw us closer to the forgiving and healing spirit of Christ.

Sometimes, though, the Church resists. Who wants a hole in the roof, anyway? It’s all very cute of the paralytic’s friends to dig their way to Jesus, but someone’s going to have to get up on a ladder and patch up their handiwork.

And sometimes the Church plays the part of the scribes, doubting the power of Jesus and substituting his including love for our excluding rules.

And then sometimes, the Church is more like the paralytic.

Paralysis is a devastating condition, especially for those who once experienced life with use of their muscles and joints. The memory of that former life, full of movement and motion, full of jumping jacks and dancing, can paralyze the mind as surely as an accident can paralyze the spine.

Back in 1956, very few Protestant preachers would have likened the church to the paralytic. The church was anything but immobile. Mainline congregations were bursting at the seams. The nurseries were full of babies and the Sunday School classrooms were abuzz with off-key renditions of “Jesus loves me.”

Fast forward 50 years. Countless mainline congregations are struggling. While the decline in membership and participation is more pronounced in the west, it is a nationwide phenomenon. While congregations like Saddleback Church and Hope Chapel have thrived, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Disciple congregations have misplaced entire generations.

South Bay Christian Church is not alone in this. When I went to Texas last month for a conference on congregational transformation, I sat in a room full of people who told painful stories of dwindling congregations. A sharp majority of baby boomers that had been raised in church nurseries left for good in their early twenties. Some found a home in other traditions, but many spend their Sundays mornings over coffee and newspapers instead of communion and scripture.

Like so many congregations, we are in danger of allowing ourselves to be paralyzed by the memory of a time that is no longer. We could easily get stuck in the recollection of yesteryears. But the world is different. Stores are open on Sundays. Little league games are scheduled for Sunday mornings. The television and internet have trained people to be constantly entertained. And in this post-Vietnam and post-9/11 era, many people prefer to attend churches that offer clear-cut answers to human struggles. The strong tradition of diversity and free thinking in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) does not appeal to many people in younger generations.

We cannot turn back time. Because the world beyond the church is vastly different than it was 50 years ago, life within the church is never going to look quite the same. Besides, we might not want to turn back time even if we could. It’s easy to be sentimental about the past, and make believe that it was perfect. The 1950s were great for many reasons, but we can’t ignore the fact that women were barred from serving as Deacons, Elders, and Pastors, even while some congregations had Klu Klux Klan members serving in those same positions.

So what now? Recognizing that we do, in some ways, resemble the paralytic is not a tragedy. Mark’s story of the paralytic who was forgiven and healed by Jesus is anything but a sorrowful tale. It is a story of hope for the hopeless. It is a story full of good news—especially for the paralytic.

I want us to consider another paralytic. In the 43rd chapter of the prophetic writings attributed to Isaiah, the Israelites were as paralyzed as can be. The Israelites had been exiled in Babylon. Spiritually and metaphorically, paralysis and exile are one in the same. A paralytic is exiled from movement, caged from her own body. And an exile is stuck in a foreign land, bound by memory alone to a time and place that is no longer. Isaiah had the difficult job of helping the Israelites prepare to leave Babylon and be a part of the restoration of Jerusalem. But Isaiah knew that even when the Emperor Cyrus released the Israelites from exile, they might still be exiled in spirit. They might still be paralyzed by the devastating experience of losing their homeland, the center of their cultural and religious life together.

Isaiah relayed this message from God to the people of Israel: “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”

The Israelites were in danger of binding themselves so tightly to their complex memories that they were incapable of continuing their journey. They remembered the amazing things that God had done for them. They remembered the many ways they betrayed the same God who offered them salvation. The sum of these memories made them heavy with the despair of exiles and paralytics.

And the prophetic word for them is to forget about the past. “Do not remember,” Isaiah said. It wasn’t that the past didn’t have its fair share of wonderment. But if remembering how fantastic it was when God made the sea as dry as a bone meant giving up in Babylon, then the Israelites needed to forget. They were promised that God had forgotten their own sins, even though they had not made full penance for their wrongdoings.

And God made another promise: “I am about to do a new thing.”

God released the Israelites from the prison of their past, and led them out of exile.

Jesus released the paralytic from the sins of his past, and commanded him to walk home.

Do you not perceive it? God is about to do a new thing. It is not a repeat performance of the things of old. It is not a reestablishment of how things used to be. It is a wholly new thing.

A way will be cleared in the wilderness. A river will burst through the desert. A hole will be dug in a roof.

And the way will be a way of love. The river will be a river of mercy. And the hole in the roof will allow the forgiving and healing presence of Christ to reign free again.

Do we believe this, sisters and brothers? Do we believe that in this place, in this congregation, God is about to do a new thing? Are we willing to let the past be past, and open ourselves to the miracle at hand?

Some exiles make a home in Babylon, some paralytics are afraid to take up that mat and walk. And some congregations would rather die than let the Holy Spirit change their old ways. Let us pray we are not such a congregation.

God is extending new spirit and new life to this beloved congregation. The transformation is already happening.

Do you not perceive it?