Bard's Brushstrokes

A Newer World

2009-11-06T14:34:00.003-06:00

Sermon preached November 1, 2009
First United Methodist Church, Duluth

Texts: Revelation 21:1-6a; John 11:32-44

In one episode of the sitcom, Seinfeld, Elaine is ecstatic that John Kennedy Jr. has joined her health club. She lets her excitement lead her to consider the possibility of romance and marriage. She imagines what it would be like to be Elaine Bennis Kennedy Jr.
The later part of this week I was in Asheville, North Carolina for a meeting of The United Methodist Committee on Faith and Order. Just outside of Asheville is Biltmore, the mansion and estate of the Vanderbilt family. I have been to Asheville three times but have never seen Biltmore, only pictures. It looks like quite a place.
Have you ever wondered what it might be like to be a Rockefeller, a Kennedy, a Vanderbilt, a Gates? At times I could imagine it would be a gift of sorts. To be born into such a family would mean access to resources few of us can imagine. It would mean possibilities for professions that would be much more difficult to access otherwise. At the same time that being a Rockefeller or Kennedy or Vanderbilt or Gates might be a gift, it would also be a significant responsibility and task. We would be asked to uphold family traditions of public service and philanthropy. Mistakes would be magnified and so one would want to be especially careful.
Being a Christian carries with it that same sense of gift and task. To be a Christian is to be touched by God’s Spirit so that the Spirit continues to work in our lives to transform us. To be a Christian is to follow Jesus Christ and the Spirit of Jesus into participating in God’s work in the world. In the words of theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Christians stand by God in [God’s] hour of grieving;” they participate “in the powerlessness of God in the world” (Letters and Papers from Prison, 349, 362). We are moved by the Spirit to be a part of God’s work in the world.
What is that work? Our two Scriptures for this morning characterize the essence of God’s work in the world.
God’s work in the world is new life. The story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is an extended parable. It is a story designed to evoke trust in Jesus as one through whom God gives life – not just physical life (though that is the setting of the story) but abundant life, adventurous life, interesting life. The call of God in Jesus to each of us is to come out of the tombs that contain us, to be unwrapped from the grave clothes which imprison us – unhealthy patterns of behavior that get in the way of true life, fears that prevent us from living more fully. When we open our lives up to Jesus, we, too, see the world through new eyes. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a letter to a friend once wrote, “Jesus calls men, not to a new religion, but to life” (Letters and Papers from Prison, 362)
God’s work in the world is transformation, the creation of a new world. Whatever else we find in the wild final book of the Bible, “Revelation,” we find the conviction that God is always at work “making all things new.” The vision in the book’s final chapters is one that inspires joy and awe. “See, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them as their God; they will be God’s peoples, and God will be with them; God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” God is at work to create a new heaven and earth.
As Christians we give our lives to this work of God in the world, and it comes to us both as a gift and as a task.
The work of God in the world is a gift to us. New life is a gift. Sharing in God’s work of new life and a newer world is a gift. What does it mean that something is a gift – here is one definition: “A gift is a thing we do not get by our own efforts. We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will. It is bestowed upon us.” (Lewis Hyde quoted in Jacob Needleman, Money and the Meaning of Life, 228). New life in God is a gift in at least two important senses. New life in Christ is a gift we inherit from others. Think about it – we would not be here were it not for others. We would not have life itself were it not for parents. We would not be here in this church were it not for the work of countless church members through the years – those who began this congregation, those who helped build its buildings, those who shared the Methodist version of the Jesus faith, those who made lunches to raise money to move up the hill. We are surrounded by saints who helped share with us the gift of new life in God. Take a moment and name some of these people in your hearts and minds. Whisper some names quietly. On this All Saints Day, we remember those from whom we received faith as a gift.
New life in God, and God’s newer world is also a gift from God. God's presence in our lives brings with it new life. God weaves our work together synergistically, so that it always adds up to more than we did or might do. I am amazed at the number of times remarkable things happen in worship that none of us participating had planned – a song by the choir or Tapestry strikes a deep chord with the sermon in a way we had not considered, unexpected people arrive and share in communion. These are gifts of life from the grace of God.
New life and a newer world are also tasks. The fourteenth century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart once preached (quoted in Needleman, Money, 233): “that a person should receive God within is good. But that God should become fruitful in a person is better; for the fruitfulness of the gift is the only gratitude for the gift.” New life and a newer world are gift and task. Lazarus by himself in the tomb is not a model for our life of faith. We don't just lie around waiting for God to act - at least not most of our lives.
We have work to do to cultivate new life in our lives. Barbara Brown Taylor writes this of spiritual disciplines, spiritual practices: An Altar in the World, 59: The only promise [spiritual practices] make is to teach those who engage in them what those practitioners need to know – about being human, about being human with other people, about being human in creation, about being human before God. The great religious traditions of the world are so confident of this that they commend dozens of spiritual practices to their followers without telling those practitioners exactly what will happen when they do. New life in God needs tending, cultivation, discipline and practice. John Wesley consistently encouraged Christians to engage in spiritual practices including prayer, worship, Scripture reading, compassionate action to help those in need. We are not always sure how those practices will shape our lives. The promise is that they will, and that God’s new life will blossom within us.
A newer world is also our task, working with God to make God’s dream for the world more of a reality – a dream of justice and peace, compassion and care, beauty and love. God’s invitation to us is to join in this work of creating a newer world, and we don’t have to look far to find ways to join this effort – food shelves, mentoring, visiting the sick or shut-in, working for a fairer sharing of the world’s resources, caring for the planet.
The poet Tennyson, in his poem “Ulysses” penned these words: Come my friends/’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.” It is never too late, my friends to seek new life, a newer world. It comes as a gift, and our response is gratitude – including gratitude for all the saints whose lives have enriched our own. It is our task, for which we pray for courage. Amen.

What 'Good is Faith?

2009-10-25T23:03:00.003-06:00

Sermon preached October 25, 2009

Texts: Mark 10:46-52

What do poetry and quiche have in common? Real men avoid both! I came up a little dry this week on humor, and I thought that was better than, “How does a poet sneeze?” “Haiku!”
I am going to begin this morning with a poem, and yes, it is too late to schedule that Sunday morning root canal. For those present at Wednesday’s UMW meeting, this is a repeat.

"Otherwise" Jane Kenyon
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

Sadly for those of us who appreciate her work, Jane Kenyon’s “otherwise day” came in 1995 when she died of leukemia just shy of her 48th birthday.
When I was twenty-one, I began experiencing medical symptoms that needed further exploration. After undergoing diagnostic testing and a course of medication it was determined that I had chronic ulcerative colitis. The inner lining of my colon acted up from time to time, and the best theory now around is that my immune system attacks that inner lining. For the most part the disease has been well controlled for these past twenty-nine years, with some significant exceptions. The most concerning issue with ulcerative colitis is the increased risk of colon cancer, especially after one has had the disease for twenty years or more. The kind of colon cancer associated with ulcerative colitis tends to be more aggressive than other kinds of colon cancer, so I get my colon scoped every year. This year was in late September, and I spent the next couple of weeks concerned about a new development.
My doctor discovered a polyp, a suspicious looking polyp and he was concerned that it was pre-cancerous. He told Julie and I that he was sending in biopsies and depending on the result I would either need to come in for a follow-up colonoscopy in six months or be referred to Rochester for further testing, likely leading to surgery for the removal of my colon next summer. So we waited – and the end of our waiting was unexpected good news. The polyp over which he was concerned was not related to cancer. I am guessing I am one of the few people in the world looking forward to having his next colonoscopy in a year.
It was good news, very good news, but someday, it will be otherwise. Some day we will all face difficult medical news. For some it will come later in life. In a recent week, I officiated at two funerals and the combined ages of the women whose lives we celebrated was 190. In these past few weeks, though, I have also been touched by more untimely deaths: Gregg Marquardt, age 62; Diane Nickila, age 58; Lynn (Wittich) Bergquist, teacher at Laura MacArthur, age 50 – a high school classmate of mine.
Short of that kind of tragedy, life has more than its share of smaller disappointments, hurts and tragedies – jobs not offered, dates refused, promotions not given, unkind remarks, invitations that never arrive, unexpected home or car repairs. Life’s disappointments, hurts and tragedies are not limited to our personal lives. Our world, too, has many. How can one not be disappointed that the human community fights senseless wars, that we allow so many of our fellow human beings to go hungry, that women are still brutalized, that children get sold into slavery, that skin color or place of birth gets in the way of recognizing the humanity of another? I am disappointed that our country cannot seem to muster the will and intelligence to come up with some way to provide medical insurance for all its citizens. I am often disappointed at the inflammatory rhetoric that passes for political discourse these days. Someone once wrote, “life is full of surprises, most of them bad” (Wilfred Bion, quoted by Michael Eigen in The Psychoanalytic Mystic, 134). That is too stark and strong, but there are days when life feels like that.
So who put lemon juice in my coffee this morning? How do I get from this nice story about the healing of Bartimaeus to this discussion? The story of Bartimaeus is a nice story. Jesus and his disciples are leaving Jericho, heading toward Jerusalem, and they come upon Bartimaeus, a blind beggar sitting by the roadside. He shouts out to Jesus, “Have mercy on me!” Many in the crowd tried to quiet him down, but he cried out even more loudly. Jesus calls Bartimaeus, asks what he would like. “My teacher, let me see again.” Jesus said, “Go; your faith has made you well.” The story has a happy ending.
But here’s the puzzle – we all know that at some point in time healing does not happen. Something gets us all. Faith will not always make us well. Our “otherwise day” will come. So what good is faith? What good is faith when life still disappoints, when we still get hurt, when an otherwise day awaits us all?
Here is where reading this story more closely helps. I would argue that there are multiple dimensions of healing in this story, and that the physical healing is only one, and not even the most significant healing that happens to Bartimaeus. Bartimaeus cannot see, but beyond that, his life if filled with discouragement and lack of direction. He sits by the side of the road hoping for handouts. The minute Jesus invites him, the crowd tells Bartimaeus to “take heart.” That is a healing in itself – the healing of the heart. With a healed heart, Bartimaeus begins to take some action in his life. He springs up, throwing off his cloak. Jesus tells him that his faith has made him well – his faith. Bartimaeus hears Jesus speak words about his strength – “your faith” has made you well. With heart and courage, Bartimaeus is also given sight. He could use his heart and courage any way he would like. He chooses to follow Jesus – another healing.
The most significant kinds of healing in our lives occur when Jesus summons our inner strength and we hear the Spirit speak to us – “take heart.” Faith will not resolve all our difficulties or prevent all our hurt and illness. What good is faith? Faith gives us the capacity to take heart amidst the pain and discouragement of life. Faith gives us the courage to weave all our experiences in life together so that we are stronger, more compassionate, more loving. In a recent interview in Ode, Karen Armstrong says, “Science can give you a diagnosis of cancer. It can even cure your disease. But it cannot touch your grief and disappointment, nor can it help you to die well.” (September/October 2009: 36) Not everything in life will get cured, but the heart can always grow in care, and that is the good of faith.
Faith also gives us eyes to see the good and beautiful that is in the world, alongside the hurtful and tragic. It gives us eyes to see the rich resources of grace and strength that are there for us. Faith plus Jesus equals wellness, wholeness, healing, heart. Faith in Jesus as the embodiment of God’s love opens us to rich resources for life that are just there for us. They are there. Theologian Bernard Meland writes in an essay about the relationships which form our existence, and they do. None of us chose to be born or when or to whom. It just happened. It just is. Meland writes: We do not create these relationships; we experience them, being given with existence. And from [these] come resources of grace that can carry us beyond the meanings of our own making, and alert us to goodness that is not of our own willing or defining…. [There is a] goodness in existence which we do not create, but which creates and save us. (Fallible Forms and Symbols, 151) What faith opens up to us is an experience of One whose very nature is goodness and love and who is always at work to bring the possible good out of any situation, to “One who does understand, accept, and love even when the world seems to have turned completely against us” in the words of theologian John Cobb (Mesle, Process Theology, 141). Faith opens us up to this one we call “God” and we affirm that we know this God best in Jesus Christ, a Jesus who pays attention to the blind beggar on the side of the road, gives him the courage to take heart, recognizes that a healing faith is at work in even this unlikely character, welcomes him to the way.
Wednesday at the UMW gathering I shared a favorite story of mine written by Annie Dillard. She tells of a time when she rounded a corner to watch a mockingbird in free fall, and then watched as it remarkably spread its magnificent wings just before crashing head long into the ground. She reflects: Cruelty is a mystery; and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump up against another mystery: the inrush of power and light…. Unless all ages and races of [humans] have been deluded… there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitious…. Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. (Annie Dillard Reader, 286, 287). Faith helps us be there.
Life is full of surprises, some of them, at least, are bad. Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. These are both truths about life. What good is faith? In faith we have access to resources which give us strength, courage and heart to weave difficulty into our lives and be more compassionate and caring. This is healing. Faith helps us see that we are loved and cared about, deeply. This is healing. Faith helps us see that life’s surprises include beauty and wonder and grace. This is healing. Faith helps us act to create beauty and grace, to follow Jesus along the way, to bring healing to the world. That is the good of faith. Amen.

One Up

2009-10-20T00:10:00.002-05:00

Sermon preached October 18, 2009

Texts: Mark 10:35-45

Play: Jean Knight, "Mr. Big Stuff"

So do you think this might be what the other disciples were saying to James and John – “who do you think you are, Mr. Big Stuff?” They were angry, for James and John had the audacity to ask Jesus to be seated on his right and left in his time of glory.
As is often the case in Mark, there is an underlying irony – sad and tragic and yet, humorous, all at the same time. Jesus time of “glory” is also going to be a time of sorrow. Death on a cross casts a large shadow over the telling of this story. Mark, the gospel writer, already knows what’s coming, but makes it clear that the disciples, James and John did not. They just wanted to be in places of importance, places of prime importance.
The other disciples were angry with James and John. It does not seem as if they are frustrated because James and John have misunderstood where following Jesus is taking them – to Jerusalem and the cross. They are angry because of the audacity of James and John, their presumption. Why should they seek the most important places? What about us? They don’t understand the situation any better than James and John. They just want to make their case for being important, being most important. There are only so many places at the top, and why should James and John be trying to claim them? The Reformation theologian John Calvin remarked that this story displays “the bright mirror of human vanity” (quoted in Feasting on the Word).
Jesus wisely intervenes. Yes, he admits, this is a dog eat dog world. This is a one up world, where everyone strives to be one up on others. Yes, this is a “he who dies with the most toys wins” world. But… BUT “it is not so among you.” What an interesting way of putting the matter. “But it is not so among you.” It isn’t? Of course it is – they have just been arguing about who is one up, who is the biggest dog in the pack. “But it is not so among you.” Jesus reminds them of who they are called to be, reminds them that when they are at their best as followers of Jesus, they will be different from the surrounding culture, the surrounding world.
And those words of Jesus echo through the centuries to our ears – “but it is not so among you.” We are invited to live differently because of who we are in Jesus Christ. Because of Jesus, our relationships in Christian community should not be one up relationships, but rather relationships of mutuality, of caring, of support, of listening. Let me say a few words about what I think this means and doesn’t mean.
I don’t think this means there is no such thing as leadership in Christian community. Rather it means that leadership in Christian community is servant leadership. Servant leadership is well-defined by Robert Greenleaf, AT&T executive and Carleton College graduate in his book Servant Leadership (1977). A servant leader does all she can “to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served.” he asks: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And what it the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, not be further deprived? (13-14) Leaders in Christian community are concerned to remind others that they are important, and less concerned with their own importance. They are listening, learning, loving leaders.
I don’t think the words of Jesus mean there are no teachers in Christian community. Rather, teachers in Christian community share their knowledge aware that, in the words of a master teacher, Parker Palmer, “truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline” (A Hidden Wholeness, 127). We recognize in Christian community that there are those among us who have knowledge to convey, but the kind of teachers we need are good conversationalists. They are listening teachers who learn with and from those they teach.
We need leaders and teachers in Christian community. Jesus’ words don’t rule that out, but they do ask leaders and teachers to be careful. They caution all who would teach and lead that being a leader and/or teacher in Christian community requires deep self-awareness, keen self-analysis. Leaders point a direction, paint pictures of a path ahead. The danger is always that they do that without sufficient dialogue with those they are leading. It is a constant temptation. Teachers share their expertise, the knowledge they have gained in studying something more than others. Expertise is always in danger of becoming a one up game. It, too, is a constant temptation. Leaders and teachers in Christian community need to be deeply self-aware and keenly self-analytic.
Jesus words don’t eliminate the need for leaders and teachers in Christian community. They redefine what it means to teach and to lead. They challenge us, they challenge me, to be a different kind of teacher and leader. But maybe the most profound truth in the words of Jesus is that when it comes to the deepest questions of life, all of us carry insight and if we play one up games we miss the insights we need from each other. Who of us has God all wrapped up? We are going to be talking about that during Soul Kitchen today. Who of us has completely mastered what it means to be young, to grow old, to be a parent, to be a spouse, to seek a better world, to know what it means to love? We each have experiences to share that shed a light on what it means to live as a follower of Jesus, and if we are too caught up in games of our own self-importance, we miss the light in others. It should not be so among us.
A favorite movie of mine is Forrest Gump. I first saw it with a youth group in Corpus Christi, Texas, when I had led a youth mission trip to the area with my youth group from Ridgewood Park UMC in Dallas. It is a wonderful and rich film in so many ways, but one scene that has remained with me since I first saw the movie is the scene where Forrest proposes to Jenny. Forrest Gump is a person who is intellectually slow. Jenny is his life-long friend whose broken home led her to look for love and happiness in countless places and in countless ways – never quite finding it. So Forrest proposes, and when Jenny shakes her head “no,” Forrest replies, “I’m not a smart man, but I know what love is.” And he does.
To be a follower of Jesus is to seek to love, and each of us knows something about what love is, yet none of knows all of what love is or requires. So we need to listen to each other. We need to build a kind of community where we listen to each other’s stories of trying to love in a world that encourages one up living. But one up living, that’s not our way. Our way is the way of listening, of learning, of loving. May we be who we are. Amen.

Forrest Gump, "I Know What Love Is"

Money For Nothing

2009-10-20T00:05:00.002-05:00

Sermon preached October 11, 2009

Texts: Mark 10:17-31; Hebrews 4:12

There is a bit of a Beatles renaissance these days. Late last month the entire Beatles catalog was re-released in a re-mastered version. A video-game version of Beatles songs was also released the same day – and all things Beatles seem to be selling well. A collector’s box set of mono recordings sold out and cannot currently be purchased.
There is a great deal to capture one’s attention with this musical group, and even the topic of money can incorporate Beatles’ music and Beatles lore. How is it that the same group that could sing in a famous song, “I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love” could also sing in a less famous song, “Money, that’s what I want”? And how is it that the group who could poke fun at rich Britain’s – in a concert in England John once invited the audience to participate, the folks in the cheap seats could clap their hands while those in the front rows were invited to rattle their jewelry – would end up breaking up, in part, over financial disputes? These songs and these stories capture something of our ambivalence toward money. We know that there is more to life than the pursuit of money. We would like our lives to be more than our earning statements. We don’t want our net worth and self-worth to be confused. At the same time, most of us would appreciate just a little bit more money than we have. We can imagine life being just a little easier if we earned just a bit more. I think I can imagine that!
And that’s not so bad. I went to the Friend’s of the Library book sale this summer and picked up a couple of books, one by a philosopher whose work I have appreciated over the years, Jacob Needleman. The Needleman book I found was entitled, Money and the Meaning of Life. I have not read the entire book, but perused it preparing for this sermon. Needleman writes: There [are] very few, surprisingly or even shockingly few, problems of life that could not be solved with a finite amount of money, a distinct, specific dollar amount…. Used rightly, money allows us to live, eat, drink, protect ourselves, help our families and friends, maintain our health, accomplish certain aims (112, 116).
But money has its limits, according to Needleman. Money can solve almost any problem, but the solution never lasts…. Used wrongly, money prevents relationship, prevents exchange between certain elements of the whole life…. Money is good at solving problems; it is bad at opening questions. Like technology, money is used wrongly when it converts inner questions that should be lived into problems to be solved (112, 116, 117). While that is a little abstract, Needleman’s basic point is that money is good when kept in proper perspective, but not when it is not. Our lives become skewed when our relationship with money is unbalanced.
That same point is made in our gospel reading for today, a difficult story, about Jesus telling a rich man to sell all that he had, give to the poor, and follow him. He follows this up with these words, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God…. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Somehow, wealth gets in the way of participation in God’s dream for the world, and it is only by the power of God’s grace and love that those who are caught up in wealth can get free.
The story by itself gives money a rather bad name. But then there is this fascinating ending. Peter tells Jesus that they have left everything to follow him, and Jesus assures Peter that they will receive a hundredfold what they gave up. Cryptic, but it provides a sense that Jesus is not against money, against daily needs being met, only against an unbalanced relationship with money, with wealth.
Now we could all just dismiss this story as inapplicable to our lives. Wealthy, who of us is wealthy? We hear stories of people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Oprah Winfrey, and compared to them, who of us is wealthy? We don’t need to worry about being caught up in wealth, do we? Yet compared to most of the rest of the world, we are a wealthy people. Many of us spend for a cup of coffee the daily wages of many workers throughout the world. The danger of an unbalanced relationship with money is very real for us, for all of us.
If we let this story be word of God for us, that is a word used by God’s Spirit to help us examine our lives, this story can be “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword… able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). This story about the rich man shines a light into our lives, if we let it, a light that seeks to illumine our relationship with money, asking whether it is balanced or unbalanced, whether we are using it or it is using us.
Jesus was concerned about an unbalanced relationship with money. John Wesley, founder of Methodism, was also deeply concerned about that issue. You know, this seems to be a perennial human problem. The human relationship with money is always in danger of becoming unbalanced, it seems. Wesley was not one to condemn money. In his sermon on “The Use of Money,” Wesley wrote that money was of “unspeakable service to all civilized nations, in all the common affairs of life.” In that sermon, Wesley laid out his three principles for the appropriate use of money: gain all you can, save all you can, and give all you can. We gain all we can, though not at the expense of our well-being or the well-being of our neighbor, because money “is an excellent gift of God, answering the noblest ends. In the hands of [God’s] children, it is food for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, raiment for the naked.” We save all we can because superfluous spending can become a danger in its own right. We should have a sense of the distinction between needs and wants. Wesley saw this as a spiritual discipline of a kind, a way we stay in touch with God and with ourselves. Finally, Wesley contended we should give all we can. In giving to others, we channel God’s grace and love to others, and experience that grace and love more deeply ourselves. Failure to do that endangers our souls, Wesley believed (Rebekah Miles, “Works of Mercy as Spiritual Formation” in The Wesleyan Tradition, 98).
Throughout his life, Wesley was concerned that we are always in danger of falling into an unbalanced relationship with money. He was particularly concerned about Methodists who were taking his invitation to hard work and thrift seriously. Some who had been poor were now finding themselves better off, and Wesley noticed that while many were earning all they could, and saving well, giving often dropped off. That was of deep concern to him.
Now I could use what I have laid out here to talk about church giving, and our stewardship campaign is just around the corner. I am not going to do that except to say that I agree about the dangers of an unbalanced relationship with money, and that one part of a healthy relationship with money is to give it in ways that make a difference in the world, and that the church is one place where your money can make a difference.
But I want to focus elsewhere this morning, take this message about money in an even more controversial direction. Hold on. This Christian message about money is not just personal, but also social. I think that one place where our unbalanced relationship to money is evidenced is in a prevalent attitude in our society that views almost any form of taxation as some kind of theft. This is simply theologically and biblically unsound. Now I would not argue that all taxes are good, nor would I argue against the idea that some taxes are excessive and should be replaced or gotten rid of. At the same time, I think we would do well to see taxation, at its best, as one opportunity we have to help one another. Taxes can be too high, stifling creativity in the economy, but taxes can also be too low when a slight increase in taxes could bring great benefit to many. If you want to discuss this more, come to Soul Kitchen at 10:45.
One area I think we have really missed the mark in our state is in the elimination of the program General Assistance Medical Care. This program, designed to help the poorest of our citizens, will be completely eliminated March 1, 2010. The people who benefit from this program make less than $7,800 per year and many suffer from chemical dependency or mental illness. Without medical care, some will go without psychotropic drugs. I have written extensively about this issue in the newsletter and don’t want to reiterate what I have already written. In a society as wealthy as ours, the poorest among us should not suffer this way. If a lack of generosity, an unbalanced relationship with money, does damage to the individual soul, as both Jesus and Wesley seem to believe, then maybe a lack of generosity in our common life does damage to the soul of our society.
I am on the board of Life House, an agency that seeks to shelter homeless youth, and provide them resources to stabilize their lives. At the last board meeting I heard a story I want to share in concluding this morning. In September there was an event highlighting the problem of homelessness, a sleep-out at St. Scholastica. A number of church youth groups participate, and some of the youth from Life House were also there. Among the young people from Life House was a young man who earlier in the day found a dollar bill. Most of us would not be delighted by this, but he was, because he rarely had a dollar in his pocket, and if he ever got one, it seemed to get spent quickly. He held on to this dollar though, and some of the Life House staff were lovingly teasing him about that. What was he going to do with that dollar? During the evening, the young man attended a presentation about homelessness among youth and toward the end people were invited to make a donation. The young man who rarely had a dollar decided to donate it, to help someone who might need help.
Maybe that story, too, can be a penetrating word of God for our lives as we struggle to keep our relationship with money balanced. Amen.

Open Marriage

2009-10-04T22:14:00.003-05:00

Sermon preached October 4, 2009

Texts: Mark 10:2-16

This morning we are celebrating World Communion Sunday, that special day once a year when many Christians throughout the world all share communion in their respective worship services. It might be a good day to talk about communion in the church, but we are not going to.
Communion, one term for the celebration of God in Jesus we experience as we share bread and juice, is a relational term. There are other words used for this part of worship – The Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist. When we talk about communion we are saying that this ritual opens us to a deeper relationship with God in Jesus Christ, and opens us up to deeper relationships with one another.
Relationships are vitally important. We are, in many ways, our relationships, that is, the person we become has a lot to do with the quality of the relationships in our lives. We live with all the aspects of our relationships with our parents – with the joys and with the scars of early family life. Our lives are enriched by friends who can support us, who rejoice with us, who tell us the truth. And for many, one of life’s most important relationships is marriage, and that’s what we are going to talk about this morning. We are going to talk about it because it is the focus of part of the gospel reading for this morning.
Marriage is a relationship whose importance we recognize, yet also one that we are fond of making fun of. All men are born free and equal. If they go and get married that’s their own fault. - - - Men are like fine wine. They start out like grapes, and it’s the wife’s job to stomp on them and keep them in the dark until they mature into something you’d like to have dinner with.
A little humor is helpful, because the Scripture we are tackling this morning is a tough one, and here is the toughest part: “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” At face value this seems to say that if you are divorced and remarried you are in an adulterous relationship – pretty harsh.
But I don’t think using this text as a proof for the absolute prohibition of marriage is in keeping with the broader themes of Jesus teaching about love and compassion, nor does it take the first century context into consideration. I will be saying more about this during Soul Kitchen at 10:45. These verses have sometimes been used by the church to denigrate and demean those who have been divorced, turning them into second-class Christians, and that is unacceptable. There is an element of tragedy in divorce, and Jesus’ teaching acknowledges this. His other teachings about compassion lead me to believe that he would not have used his strong feelings about marriage and divorce to denigrate those who had been divorced. The church has not always done the best job of showing compassion to those divorced and that is inconsistent with the overall teaching of Jesus and the Christian faith.
At the same time, this text speaks of the seriousness with which Jesus and the early Christian community treated marriage. We should take marriage no less seriously. These verses are an encouragement to care for marriage, and the entire text, I think, gives us a clue about how to do that. Two notes, here: (1) the definition of marriage I am keeping in the back of my mind is of a life-long, covenantal commitment between two people, regardless of gender; (2) the relational ideas for a good marriage can be used in keeping other relationships alive and vital, too. We can discuss that more during Soul Kitchen, too.
So if we should take marriage seriously, if we should see in divorce an element of tragedy that should be avoided if it can be, what makes for a stronger marriage? I think it is interesting that right after these words about divorce, Mark puts the story of little children being brought to Jesus. The disciples spoke “sternly” to those bringing children – strong word; and Jesus is “indignant” toward them – another strong word. “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs…. Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”
Openness, receiving - - - this is the clue this text gives to how to enrich marriage. Research with babies and small children suggests that “instead of experiencing a single aspect of their world and shutting down everything else they seem to be vividly experiencing everything at once” (The Philosophical Baby, Gopnik, 125). Openness, receptivity. I think Christian tradition advocates open marriage. Now by that I don’t mean the idea of open marriage from the 1970s where couples agreed that because they could not perhaps find all their needs satisfied in one relationship they could seek out intimacy with other persons, including physical intimacy. Christian open marriage is a radical openness to the person to whom you are married – being open to them and opening up to them; accepting them as they are and encouraging their growth, allowing oneself to be accepted and invited to grow. This kind of open marriage is hard work. It is terrifying. It is joy. It is adventure. I want to say a brief word about these two aspect of Christian open marriage – acceptance and growth.
We in the United States have a culture of high expectation, for good and for ill. One of the ways this manifests itself is in an attitude toward marriage. We expect Prince Charming, Cinderella, happy ever after, and we expect that if our wedding service is appropriately magical, the happy ever after will take care of itself. In the months before his death in 1970, the psychologist Abraham Maslow expressed concern for unrealistic expectations in relationships, even marriage (unquoted supporting data from Maslow’s journal: “a good marriage is impossible unless you are willing to take sh** from the other”). He believed that “the breakdown of traditional families… as well as of intimate friendships, [comes] partly from the inability of many to live with human imperfection” (Hoffman, The Right To Be Human, 313). His thoughts are echoed more recently by United Methodist theologian and ethicist, Rebekah Miles. I believe that we are irresponsible about marriage and sexuality not because we think too little of them, but because we expect too much…. We expect perfect mates, perfect bodies, {perfect orgasms}, perfect children, perfect moods, perfect families…. Is it any accident that the culture with the highest expectations for marriage has produced the highest rates of divorce, the lowest rates of marriage, and a growing number of people afraid to make any commitments at all? (The Pastor as Moral Guide, 89-90). Christian open marriage means openness to our partners as they are. The longer we live with another, the more we find their imperfections, and our homes are the places where our imperfections are most often expressed. We need to find ways to live together with these. A cautionary word, there is a difference between an imperfection and abusive behavior. Hitting your partner is more than an imperfection.
Christian open marriage is openness to the other as an imperfect, but growing and developing human being, one loved by God just as they are. It is also openness to growth, which can be terrifying and painful. If marriages are places where our imperfections come out, we need to be open to our own imperfections, and some of them can be worked on. Julie did not marry a bald man, and there is little I can do about that imperfection. Over time, other imperfections in my life have been moderated, have changed because of our relationship. I have often been impatient with myself and let that impatience spill over into my family. My marriage has helped me deal with that. I am a rather driven person, and my marriage has helped me deal with that on some levels.
The great tragedy of divorce is in the missed opportunities for growth in both partners. Sometimes people divorce to run away from their own imperfections, as well as the imperfections of others. Even knowing that, the church which tries to represent God’s love in Jesus Christ, though it does so imperfectly (but that’s another sermon) should never denigrate any who have actually experienced the pain of divorce – and I have seen that up close and personal in my own family. All are welcome here, including to the communion table. The church needs to walk the tightrope of welcoming all, of offering compassion to all, while recognizing that perhaps divorce has become too easy an alternative in our culture and we need to do what we can to strengthen Christian open marriage.
Julie and I have been married now for over twenty-seven years. Before our marriage we took a form of the pre-marriage inventory I still use. One statement in that inventory has always stuck with me. “In loving my partner, I feel that I am beginning to better understand the concept that God is love.” I strongly agreed with that statement, and still do. It is the promise of marriage. It is part of what makes working at marriage worth it – openness to our partner, openness to ourselves even when it is challenging. God loves us as imperfect as we are. Our love for one another in marriage begins there too. Amen.

Road Salt

2009-09-27T23:19:00.002-05:00

Sermon preached September 27, 2009

Text: Mark 9:38-50

The internet is an amazing thing. Scouring for sermon illustrations or ideas, especially when one was struggling a bit with some part of the sermon used to involve hours of paging through books. I still do some of that, but I also use this new technology. Like this week, I was struggling to find something to begin this morning’s sermon so I used an internet search engine.
I typed in “salty stories” and was given a number of sites with stories about the sea. I typed in “salty jokes” and was asked, “do you mean nasty jokes?” I thought I better stop there. I typed in ‘salty sayings” and one site I was directed to was full of sayings from Canada. Here are a couple: “the gene pool around here could use a little chlorine;” “What’s the difference between Calgary and yogurt? Yogurt has active culture.” I am guessing the Calgary Chamber of Commerce did not come up with that one.
What we have in Mark 9:38-50 are some salty sayings of Jesus. It might help us understand these verses better if we recall that the gospels are literary works not newspaper reports. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were constructed by authors who used material that had circulated primarily in oral form for many years – stories and sayings of Jesus. Mark is the earliest of the four gospels and it was written about 70 CE, almost forty years after the death of Jesus. Mark wanted to tell the story of Jesus in a way that helped his own Jesus community, his own faith community. The sayings found in the verses we read may not have been spoken together by Jesus, but Mark finds a common thread, and our understanding of these verses will be enhanced as we find a common thread.
By the way, this entire discussion of the gospel and the gospels will be part of our discussion in Soul Kitchen following worship at 10:45. Faith Forum will be discussing our newest forms of communication – the internet, and Soul Kitchen will discuss older forms – how stories told by word of mouth became our gospels and why we expect these old texts to speak to our lives. I hope you will find your way to one or the other.
What Mark has presents us is a series of sayings of Jesus, the first couched in a brief story and the final sayings all about salt. In between water and salt we have some disturbing words about cutting off body parts and unquenchable fire. So what’s the frequency Kenneth, or how might these verses speak to our lives?
I think we might focus on that final image of salt as a good way to hear these words and consider how they might speak to our lives. Salt, at that time, was a precious good, sometimes even used for wages. Salt helped preserve food. Salt flavored food. Salt was a purifying agent. Salt was used often in ritual, sacrifices were salted before being burned. If Jesus was a northern Minnesotan instead of a northern Palestinian in the Roman Empire, I think he would have included the use of salt on slippery roads as a part of his imagery! The bottom line in this thread of verses is the encouragement to followers of Jesus, then and now, to stay salty. Be the kind of people who preserve the good, who add flavor and zest to life, who make life a little purer, who help people draw closer to God, who help keep the road safe for others. Be salt, flavorful and preserving. Be road salt, helping others when the streets of life are dangerous and the way is easily lost.
So what kind of people are salty people? Believe it or not, I think these verses tell us, in their own uniquely wonderful way.
Salty people have a generous spirit. The very first story is fascinating. The disciples are getting bent out of shape because someone who was not a part of their group was casting out demons in Jesus’ name, doing good, bringing healing in Jesus’ name. They tried to stop this person in fact, and Jesus tells them, “whoever is not against us is for us.” Salty people, people of generous spirit, delight when healing happens even when they have not been a part of it. They are pleased when some program succeeds, even if it was someone else’s idea. They pitch in on activities even when their favorite idea was not chosen. They celebrate the good wherever it may be found, even if the Lutherans are doing it. They are able to forgive. Sounds like every church you have ever been a part of, doesn’t it? Maybe we are not as salty, sometimes, as we are invited to be.
Salty people are compassionate people. “Whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.” With those few words, Jesus offers a striking image of the kind of people we are called to be – people who cultivate compassion and care, people who offer small acts of kindness and care – a cup of water, a listening ear, a friendly smile.
Salty people stay connected with others, value the relationships that enhance faith and life. One crucial message of all those difficult words in the middle of these sayings of Jesus is an encouragement to care for others, it is to be road salt along the streets of life for others – helping them keep the faith in the midst of the difficulties and challenges of life. When followers of Jesus are together in community, they ought to be of help to each other.
The other crucial message of these difficult words is an invitation to greater inner awareness. The metaphors are sharp and jarring. If your hand or foot or eye causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better to be missing these parts than to end up in the unquenchable fire. Is Jesus being literal here? I hardly think so, not about cutting off body parts and not about the image of hell. It is all metaphor, disturbing and challenging – and maybe necessary. The inner journey can be difficult. We don’t easily admit that we have those places inside that cause us to lose our saltiness – our flavor, our helpfulness. We sometimes fear what we will find by examining our hearts, minds, souls. In an interview, psychoanalyst Michael Eigen said, “I do think we are more afraid of ourselves than of death” (Conversations, 62). Salty people take the challenge of looking inside, of increasing awareness, and of making changes to keep their saltiness, making changes that keep life from being burned up uselessly.
The invitations to generosity of spirit, to celebrating the good wherever it may be found, to cultivating compassion and caring, to caring for relationships, to inner awareness are challenging invitations. We know that we have refused them sometimes, that we have let the saltiness of our lives lose flavor. But these invitations come to our lives in the context of the grace and love of God. They come from Jesus who is God’s love embodied. The God who invites in us a generous spirit is a God of the generous Spirit – of care, of compassion, of the cold cup of water for our parched lives. We might say that we have a salty God.
That’s the bottom line here – be salt. Let your life add flavor to others and to the world. Let your life be road salt for others, helping them gain traction when they are sliding away.
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) struggled against deep-seated white prejudice and racism to found and establish the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a college for African-Americans. One day walking the streets of Tuskegee, Washington passed the mansion of a wealthy woman to whom he was just another black man. She called out to him, “Come here, boy, I need some wood chopped.” Without a word, Washington took off his jacket, picked up an ax and went to work chopping wood. He not only cut a pile of wood but carried it into the house for the woman. He had scarcely left when a servant told the woman, “That was Professor Washington, Ma’am.” Embarrassed, the woman went to the Institute to apologize. Washington replied, “There’s no need for apology, madam. I’m delighted to do favors for my friends.” The woman became one of Tuskegee’s warmest and most generous supporters. (Covey, Everyday Greatness, 345)
That story speaks to me of being a salty person, of staying salty, of being road salt in the world. Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another. Amen.

Everybody is a Star

2009-09-27T23:14:00.003-05:00

Sermon preached September 20, 2009

Text: Mark 9:30-37

I loved getting the Scholastic Book Club orders when I was in elementary school. Here is a favorite book of mine from the club from probably the fifth grade: The Greatest in Baseball. Here is another book from that same year, Baseball Stars, though this was not a Scholastic book, it was a promotion through a grocery store, I think, where each week you were able to obtain pictures for each American League team. You might say that in addition to being attracted to baseball, I was also attracted to greatness, to being a star. I am sure I imagined what that would be like to excel in the game of baseball, to have my picture in a book like that, to have a baseball card with my name and picture. The dream didn’t last very long. I wasn’t all that good at the game.
Baseball or not, there may be something in us that desires greatness, that wants to be great, that wants to be important, that wants to stand out, that wants to be a person of distinction. Martin Luther King, Jr. argued that we all have this desire and he called it the drum major instinct in one of his famous sermons.
We see such a desire evident in the Gospel of Mark, chapter nine. The disciples are arguing about who was the greatest. They sensed that in following Jesus they were part of a movement that was going to shake things up, change the world, and they wanted to be front and center, and even to stand out among Jesus’s closest followers. The tragic-comic irony in these verses is that Jesus keeps telling them that things are going to get rough, brutal, painful. World-shaping change would come, but only on the other side of sorrow and tragedy. They just didn’t get that.
They also didn’t get the meaning of “greatness,” at least Jesus’ meaning of greatness. “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Greatness, Jesus says, comes through compassion, service, caring - - - especially for the least, the move vulnerable, those without status, those unable to return the favor. That’s what children were at that time, vulnerable, without status – and we will discuss that more during Soul Kitchen at 10:45.
If greatness comes through service, through compassion, caring and love, then everyone can be great. Everyone is a star whose light can shine. We kind of like that – and we don’t. If everybody can be great, if everybody is a star, then is anybody really great, really a star? In our human capacity to turn things inside out, and not always for the better, we can even make this definition of greatness competitive. The really great are those who really serve well, who really humble themselves.
On an Ash Wednesday service, a pastor, moved by all that has happened, overwhelmed by a religious feeling, toward the end of the service kneels at the altar rail and prays, “God, before you I am nothing.” Moved by this display, and not to be outdone, the associate pastor goes to the altar rail and prays, “God, before you I am nothing.” Moved by their humility, a man a few rows back from the front of the church gets up and goes to the altar rail. “Before you God, I am nothing.” The pastor, noting this, elbows the associate pastor, and says, “Look who thinks he is nothing!”
When Jesus redefines greatness as service, I don’t think he intends to start off a new kind of competition – who can think the least about themselves most often. Now it might be nice if there were in the world a competition for compassion rather than say, for armaments, but I think Jesus’s words cut even deeper. In a culture deeply concerned for competing for power, prestige, and wealth, which was the culture of the Roman Empire, Jesus offers a profound critique. The deepest measure of our lives, the most thorough-going measure of our greatness has nothing to do with comparing ourselves to others. If caring, compassion, service and love define greatness, then the only comparison worth making is an internal comparison. Am I better today than who I was yesterday? Am I more compassionate, caring, loving, giving, than I was before? That’s the greatness question, and it takes the whole of our lives to answer it.
A long time ago, I knew I would never be great like Babe Ruth. Over the years, I have also discovered that I will not be great in the way a Martin Luther King, Jr, or a Mother Teresa are great. The greatness question for me is not whether I can be more compassionate than the Dalai Lama, but whether I can be a more compassionate David Bard today than I was yesterday, last week, last month, last year – and I don’t mean comparing myself with my son, David.
And that’s the question for you, too. You want to be great? Love, serve, care, be compassionate. Does your greatness need a little competition? Love and serve and care and be compassionate a little more today than you were yesterday. Will anyone see this and call you great? Will anyone else know about your greatness? Maybe not, but God will know, and your heart will know and grow.
A really good sermon might conclude here with a moving story about, humble, gentle quiet service. The stories are worth telling, but this week I am going to let you finish the sermon. This week, be your own sermon illustration by the greatness of your love and compassion and care. Be a star and let your light shine, even if nobody but you and God know. Amen.

Into the Great Wide Open

2009-09-15T00:24:00.001-05:00

Sermon preached September 13, 2009

Do you ever read “Dilbert”? Friday’s was a good one. Dilbert’s boss, the blad guy with the pointy hair on the sides, introduces Dilbert to a new employee named Gabe. “Gabe was downsized when his last employer had financial troubles. I was lucky to hire him.” Dilbert responds, “Because they always downsize their best employees first?” Gabe and the boss both look frustrated and Dilbert continues, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to put it in context.”
Putting it in context. That is important, especially when reading the Bible. If we really want to get at some of the meaning of a text, and the meaning of a text for our lives, context matters. Jumping from one text to another in rapid succession, which some “biblical preachers” do, often misses the context of any one of the passages cited.
This morning I want to focus on the words of Jesus in Mark 8, where he says, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” In particular I want to focus on the line about taking up the cross.
It has become commonplace for people to refer to their cross in life as some individual burden, or something for which they suffer. Someone in a dead-end unpleasant job they cannot leave because they need the income to support their family might say that that job is “their cross to bear.” Someone who has a physical ailment might refer to it as their cross to bear. Taking up a cross, then, is seen as an unpleasant reality that one just has to live with, suffer silently with. Is that what Jesus means here? I don’t think so. I don’t think that fits the context.
In Mark 8, Peter has just confessed that Jesus is the Messiah. Right away, Jesus begins to tell the disciples that his work could end badly – in suffering and death, but that he trusts in resurrection. Now remember the gospels were put together years after Jesus died, and how the stories get told in the gospels is related to the concerns of the emerging Christian community. That Jesus was indeed killed affects how this story is told. Anyway, Mark’s Jesus is making clear to the disciples that this Messiah business may be rough going. Then he goes on to tell them, and to tell the crowd that if any want to follow him, they must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow. Jesus put the work of discipleship in the context of his own mission, symbolized by the cross.
So what was the cross for Jesus? It was the instrument of his death, yes, but symbolically it is more than that. The cross is a symbol for Jesus’ openness to God and to the world. It is a symbol for his way of living out God’s love in his unique life. Jesus was executed because of what he taught and the healing that came into people’s lives through his teaching and touch. The authorities were afraid that his teaching might lead to rebellion. Jesus’ teaching and healing came out of his openness to God and his desire to let God’s love and grace touch the world through his life.
In this context, I would argue that the invitation to take up one’s cross is an invitation to open life to God and to the world, and an invitation to live out God’s love in our own unique way, which means developing our best selves. The second century Christian theologian Ireneaus wrote, “the glory of God is a human being fully alive” (Gerald May, Dark Night of the Soul, 181). To take up our cross is to move toward becoming more open, more alive. It is an invitation into the great wide open.
To take up our cross and follow Jesus is to follow Jesus into the great wide open. A number of Christian writers through the years have testified that this is what discipleship is all about – openness, adventure, possibility, joy, aliveness. The Nineteenth-century Danish philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard, in a really fun-sounding book The Sickness Unto Death, writes, “For God is that all things are possible, and that all things are possible is God” (in Auden, The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard, 155). The twentieth-century German theologian and Nazi death camp victim Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing about discipleship penned these words: And if we answer the call to discipleship, where will it lead us? What decisions and partings will it demand? Only Jesus Christ, who bids us follow him, knows the journey’s end. But we do know that it will be a road of boundless mercy. Discipleship means joy. (The Cost of Discipleship, 41/40). The last phrase can also be translated, “discipleship is joy.” More recently, in his book The Ironic Christian’s Companion, Patrick Henry writes, Once upon a time the term “Christian” meant wider horizons, a larger heart, minds set free, room to move around. But these days “Christian” sounds pinched, squeezed, narrow…. Curiosity, imagination, exploration, adventure are not preliminary to Christian identity; a kind of booster rocket to be jettisoned when spiritual orbit is achieved. They are part of the payload. (8-9)
To take up your cross is to follow Jesus into the great wide open – into joy, adventure, possibility, imagination, deeper openness to God and world.
But the context of the invitation to take up the cross speaks of denying oneself, of losing life, what about these aspects of taking up a cross? If I am going to talk about context I cannot ignore this. First, please note that the bottom line here is life – finding life, saving life. There is an important and deep truth in these words. Our self is complex. We carry within us all the marks of our experiences from birth, and a bit before birth, to this very moment. Our self is the complex interaction of our genetic inheritance, our family life, our relationships, our memories, our experiences, our desires, our hopes, our fears, our unique capacities and talents, our capacities for growth. Part of being who we are is how we continue to weave and re-weave our past into our present, e.g. when we forgive, we often lessen the hurtful impact of a past event, re-weaving that event into our sense of self. Have I painted a complicated enough picture? Our self is complex, plurality in unity. In Colossians in the New Testament we read, “your life is hidden with Christ in God” (3:3), and in that phrase you get another sense of the complexity of the self.
We are complex, parts of ourselves work against our growth, work against our becoming more fully alive. As a recently published book on kindness states, “the ways we protect ourselves tend also to be the ways we imprison ourselves” (On Kindness, Phillips and Taylor, 62-63). When we deny ourselves in taking up our cross it is denying those parts of ourselves that imprison us - - - old hurts held onto too long, old patterns of behavior that no longer serve us as we seek to grow and as we seek deeper more loving relationships. We know from experience that we are capable of sabotaging our own well-being. We know we can be our own worst enemies. To take up our cross and follow Jesus into the great wide open means being willing to leave behind that which closes us off instead of opening us up, that which imprisons instead of frees, that which poisons love rather than fostering it.
One last note about taking up our cross. We have often associated taking up our cross with suffering of some kind. Certainly the cross was painful for Jesus. While I have argued that suffering is not the primary characteristic of taking up our cross, I think it is a part of it. Greater openness to life means greater openness to the hurt and pain of the world, means greater openness to suffering. A man named Michael Eigen has written, “one cannot experience without suffering” (Feeling Matters, 2) and I think he is on to something. When we love, we open ourselves to the hurt of others, and to the possibility of being hurt by others. When we become parents we open ourselves to the suffering that comes from disappointing our children and being disappointed by them. While we want to deny those parts of ourselves that are less-than life-giving, there can be suffering in such self-denial, even if it is a long-run benefit. On a wider scale, openness to life is willing to be open to the suffering of the world which is enormous – hunger, injustice, brutality, oppression, terror all affect us at some level when we open ourselves more radically to God, to others, to the world and we seek to live God’s love in our own unique way.
The way of the cross is not always easy then. The great wide open can be a scary place, but it is the way of life. It is the way to enhance life. Jesus, in inviting us to take up our cross, invites us to adventure, joy, possibility, compassion, caring, imagination. Often people think of the image of taking up our cross as if we were blowing up a balloon into an enclosed space (demonstrate). I believe taking up our cross is allowing our lives to be filled with the breath of God so we can float into the great wide open.
Michael Eigen writes, “there are so many ways to light up the world” (The Electrified Tightrope, 276). God in Jesus Christ invites you to take up your cross, invites you into the great wide open to know life and to light up the world as only you can. Will you say “yes”? Amen.

Offensive Words

2009-09-07T14:17:00.002-05:00

Sermon preached September 6, 2009

Texts: Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; James 2:1-7; Mark 7:24-30

Memory is fascinating. Why is it we remember some things and not others? Why do we remember so many seemingly odd details from years ago?
When I was a kid, my family owned one of those cabinet stereos, and my dad had someone wire speakers into our basement. I am sure he did not do that himself, given his own shortcomings as a handyman. But my parents liked to entertain and when they did they would sometimes put a stack of records on that stereo – I think it held up to ten records – and let them play through. One group my parents liked to listen to was a folk group from the early 1960s called The Kingston Trio. They had a lot of good songs, among them a song called “Greenback Dollar,” which had a rather daring chorus. And I don’t give a damn about a greenback dollar/Spend it fast as I can/For a wailing song and a good guitar/The only things that I understand, oh boy, the only things I understand. I guess that’s memorable enough, but I also remember listening to KDAL radio one afternoon, at a time when KDAL still played music, and there it was – The Kingston Trio “Greenback Dollar.” Except when the chorus came on, there was a guitar strumming over one word – and I don’t give a strum bout a greenback dollar. Radio stations apparently wouldn’t play the song in its original form. The word strummed over was considered offensive.
Last week, with the death of Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, another memory came back to me, again from something I heard on the radio. There was a time in my life when I tuned into Jimmy Swaggart and I remember listening to a broadcast where he was talking about liquor and its evils. It had never touched his lips, he said, but if it tasted anything like it smelled, he thought it must be awful. Then he began to talk about the Kennedy family, and how they made their money on alcohol and he speculated that maybe there was some kind of curse on that family because of their link to liquor, a curse that included the deaths of John and Bobby, and the reckless behavior of Ted at Chappaquiddick. I think it was the last time I listened to Jimmy Swaggart. I found that theory offensive.
As long as I am recounting memories having to do with offensive words, I retain the foggiest memory of George Carlin’s comedy routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” – but I retain enough of a memory to know that I cannot share any of those words here.
Offensive words. The poet Carl Sandburg was once asked what the most offensive word in the English language was. He said, “exclusive.” What an odd thing to say. Don’t you like getting things in the mail that tell you you are the recipient of an “exclusive offer”? When a baseball player hits over 500 home runs, he is said to be part of an “exclusive club.” Sounds kind of nice to me. Why would someone say that exclusive is the most offensive word in the English language? An exclusive club when one refers to an achievement seems honorable, but try thinking of belonging to an exclusive club when that means no Jewish people, no Catholic people, no black people, no American Indian people, no women (and it is not so long ago in our history that such clubs existed widely) – and try imagining the feeling of being one excluded. However foggy our memories, my guess is that we can all remember times when we were excluded from something, and it felt pretty bad. Maybe Sandburg was on to something.
If our Scripture texts are any indication, the God of the Bible might agree with Sandburg. Three texts, taken from three very different parts of the Bible, all move in the direction of greater inclusion and away from exclusion. In Proverbs we are reminded that rich or poor, God is our Creator. Because of our common humanity in God, we are to treat the poor with generosity, we are to be careful not to crush or afflict those in poverty.
James, too, is concerned with the way the poor might be treated, and with favoritism toward the well-off. Partiality and favoritism have no place in God’s ordering of things. James is writing to the early Christian community, warning them of this tendency in their common life.
We then have the story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman, a disturbing and wonderful story, a wonderfully disturbing story. Jesus is on the road and is getting quite far from his home base. He travels to the region of Tyre, a predominantly Gentile area extending to the Mediterranean Sea. He is tired, weary, in need of rest – ever been there? He would like to remain anonymous, but that doesn’t last long. A woman, a “clever and determined foreign woman” (New Interpreter’s Study Bible) - Syrophoenecian, a non-Jew – comes to Jesus and asks for help for her daughter. Calling her a “dog” would have been quite derogatory, a slam against her religion, culture and ethnic background. Jesus’ response is troubling. Is he that tired? Is he trying to be clever? We don’t know. What we do know is that the woman is very clever - she takes Jesus’ own words and turns them in a different direction, opening up the possibility of healing – and healing happens. Is Jesus surprised by, amazed at the breadth of God’s inclusivity? The story should leave us amazed at God’s inclusivity.
The God of the Bible, the God of Jesus Christ, is a God who seems always interested in expanding the circle of inclusivity, expanding the circle of people who we should care about, even if sometimes our caring can be little more than sympathetic awareness of their plight. God is ever inspiring us to include in our circle of caring the poor, those whose backgrounds differ from our – whether that difference be race or class or religion. God is ever inspiring us to welcome the stranger, to extend healing beyond our familiar and comfortable categories. All are a part of God’s dream for the world. All have a place in the beloved community.
My guess is that few struggle with this notion in the abstract. We understand that the God of Jesus Christ is a God who invites us, challenges us to reach across boundaries, who invites us, challenges us to break down barriers, who invites us, challenges us to work toward more inclusive communities in our world and to see the human community, at some level, as itself an inclusive community.
Where things get more difficult is when we begin to ask questions about specific barriers in our world, and perhaps one of the more puzzling barriers we confront is that barrier dealing with human sexuality, with sexual orientation and gender identity. Why are so many churches struggling with these issues when they are often difficult and uncomfortable to discuss – GLBT issues? Can’t we just sort of welcome folks and be quiet about it all - - - keep talking about the beloved and inclusive community without getting so specific?
Part of the reason we discuss GLBT inclusion issues is that our understandings of human identity have grown, developed, changed. Abraham Maslow is one of my favorite writers, and a familiar figure to many who took psychology courses in high school or college. Maslow died in 1970 at the age of 62. In 1959 he wrote an essay on the shortcomings of perceiving the world in only an appreciative way, and in that essay said one shortcoming was that people who excelled at perceiving everything appreciatively and seeing the beauty in most everything might, inadvertently, seem to approve of behavior that really out not to be approved, for example, Maslow writes, “homosexuality or crime or irresponsibility” (Toward a Psychology of Being, 123). Sexual orientation is lumped together with criminality and irresponsibility. Yet as we have come to know GLBT people we know they are no more criminal than the rest of the population, nor more irresponsible. Science no longer lumps homosexuality with criminality and irresponsibility. Our understandings have developed. With that comes the responsibility of the church to grapple in new ways with the meaning of faith. When science discovered that the earth was not the center of the universe, Christian faith had to think about itself anew. When science discovered that the earth is more than 6,000 years old, Christian faith had to think about itself anew. So now we need to ask what inclusion means as our understandings of orientation and identity are developing.
More importantly, much more importantly, the church needs to grapple with GLBT issues and inclusivity because there are some who, in the name of Christian faith are willing to speak the most offensive things about GLBT persons. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination recently changed its policy on who could be clergy, allowing for persons in committed, monogomous same-gendered relationships to be pastors in good standing, allowing, then, congregations to call them. Wednesday’s Duluth NewsTribune had editorials by the ELCA bishop of the Northeast Minnesota Synod and by the pastor of the local Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. The former made the case that the ELCA also committed itself to “bear one another’s burdens, love the neighbor, and respect the bound conscience of all.” The WELS pastor declared that “ELCA leaders lack the ability to defend and back their stance with God’s word because they have discarded the belief that it is truthful and authoritative.” Furthermore, he says, “Satan has won yet another battle with false doctrine in a very visible church.” So some in the church tell us that if we believe God’s inclusive community includes GLBT people as GLBT people we have abandoned the Bible and have given in to Satan.
Pretty harsh, but that is nothing compared to the words of the pastor at Faith Word Baptist Church in Phoenix, Steven Anderson. The same God who instituted the death penalty for murderers is the same God who instituted the death penalty for rapists and for homosexuals, sodomites and queers! That’s what it was instituted for. That’s God, he hasn’t changed…. His only solution to the problem of homosexuality was to pour out literal Hellfire and destroy the city as an example of what he thinks about sodomy…. We need a revival of old-fashioned righteous indignation and hatred for sin and perverts.
Now those are offensive words, and maybe Sandburg was right, they are deeply offensive because they represent the ultimate in exclusion, excluding people from the human community. That these words are spoken in the name of Jesus Christ pains me deeply and gives me reason to say we need to struggle with what it means to be inclusive.
As a congregation we have taken a stand. We have said that all means all, that God’s love is extended to all persons and that this love breaks down barriers – of race, of origin, of economic circumstance, of background, and yes, of sexual orientation. We proclaim that God’s inclusive community includes GLBT people. Do we condone everything that happens in the name of GLBT freedom – no. Nor do we condone everything that heterosexuals do. We welcome and accept people as we believe God made them. We believe all people have room for growth in faith, hope and love and we desire to be the kind of inclusive community that offers such help to all. We also welcome and accept people whose opinion on this issue is still in question, who are engaged in honest struggle with these issues.
I remember Carl Sandburg from high school, not the quote about exclusion, but some of his poetry. Chicago: Hog Butcher for the World,/Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,/Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;/Stormy, husky, brawling,/City of the Big Shoulders:. Another poet I learned about at the same time was Robert Frost, and one of his poems begins: Something there is that doesn't love a wall. Maybe that something is God’s Spirit, that is, when that wall is in our human hearts. Amen

Life on the Strip

2009-09-04T22:49:00.003-05:00

Sermon preached August 30, 2009

Texts: James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

There were two old bills having a conversation. One was a $100 dollar bill and the other was a $1 dollar bill. The $100 dollar bill said, "I've lived a good life. I've been to the amusement park, the theater, the zoo and baseball games."
"Wow," said the $1 dollar bill. "You sure have had a good life."
"Where have you been?" asked the $100 dollar bill.
"Oh, I've been to a Baptist church, a Methodist church, a Lutheran church and an Episcopal church."
The $100 bill said, "What's a church?"
What’s a Christian? What does it mean to be a Christian? Here is one definition. A Christian is one for whom Jesus Christ plays the definitive role in life. In one way or another the man of Nazareth determines one’s identity, helps to define what it means to be human, and offers the assurance of a source of eternal love available to each human being. (George Ricker, What You Don’t Have To Believe to Be a Christian, ix). For this person, being Christian seems to have a lot to do with what goes on inside a person, especially inside her head. But then I read the story of Douglas John Hall, a Canadian theologian who shares some of his story of growing up. He grew up in a small town of about 300, entirely Protestant, where almost everyone went to church – they were “Anglo-Saxon Christians” (5). But Hall does not think the Christian faith he encountered there would have carried him through to his adult life. “The truth is, the leading lights of my Christian village were, with exceptions, not very admirable people…. Too many of our village saints were moralistic, self-righteous, unforgiving human beings. It was not pleasant to be with them.” (Why Christian?, 6) Hall had to discover a different kind of Christianity, one that made a difference to how one lived. For him, Christian faith has something to do with how we act, has something to do with acting to change behavior and change our world.
So which is it? Is being Christian something about what we think, or maybe feel? Is it a change of heart and mind? Or is being Christian about acting in certain ways, including acting in ways that change the world? The great religious teacher, Huston Smith, thinks that somehow it is both. What is the minimum requirement to be a Christian? If you think Jesus Christ is special, in his own category of specialness, and you feel and affinity to him, and you do not harm others consciously, you can consider yourself a Christian. (Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder, 109)
Is being Christian about an on-going change of heart, mind and soul? Is being Christian about changing our actions and changing the world? Yes, to both. That’s the message of our Scriptures taken together this morning. In Mark, Jesus takes some of the religious people of his day and time to task for focusing on the outward behavior of their faith – washing hands, washing dishes, not eating certain things. What matters, Jesus says, is the human heart, what is within that then comes out of us in our action. The writer of James looks at things from a different angle. “Be doers of the word,” he writes, “quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.” “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” What matters is changing our behavior, and changing the world so that it cares for the least fortunate, those in distress.
To be Christian is not to decide between focusing on inner change or changing the world - - - there is no decision to be made. To be Christian is both. Unfortunately, in the history of Christianity, churches have tended to focus only on one or the other. Some group of churches tended to focus on salvation of the soul, being born again, having a new heart, while others focused on doing justice, acting kindly, feeding the hungry, clothing and sheltering those in need. But being Christian is not one or the other. It is both/and. The theologian and Biblical scholar Marcus Borg puts it simply and succinctly when he says that there are “two transformations at the heart of the Christian life” (103), that the Christian life “is about being born again and the Kingdom of God (The Heart of Christianity, 126). To be Christian is to be open to the Spirit of God in Jesus so that the Spirit transforms us within and moves us to transform the world.
There is an image that captures this inner/outer transformation well – the mobius strip. Parker Palmer calls this a Quaker PowerPoint! It is an interesting image and model. Geometrically, the mobius strip has some fascinating properties, but this is not geometry so I will skip over most of those. Here is a property of not - if an ant were to crawl along the length of this strip, it would return to its starting point having traversed both sides of the strip, yet never crossing an edge. The mobius strip unites inner and outer. Parker Palmer writes: The mechanics of the Mobius strip are mysterious, but its message is clear: whatever is inside us continually flows outward to help form, or deform, the world – and whatever is outside us continually flows inward to help form, or deform, our lives. (A Hidden Wholeness, 47). Being a Christian is to live life on the strip. It is to deepen the connection between the inner (heart, mind, soul) and the outer (work to change the world) and to open the whole of our lives – our attitudes, affections and actions to the transforming work of the Spirit of God we know in Jesus.
Both our inner lives and our outer actions need transforming. The case that the world needs changing is easy to make – there is poverty, there is violence, there is hunger, there is injustice and oppression, there are places in the world where expressing an opinion can get you jailed, there is torture, there is war. Every night the evening news makes the case for the need to transform the world, and as Christians we believe God care about those in distress. We read it in James. We see it in Jesus.
The case for transforming the world can be so compelling that we may find any discussion of inner transformation narcissistic, unnecessary navel-gazing, inappropriate self-preoccupation. But there is wisdom in the Mobius strip which sees the deep connection between inner and outer. Abraham Maslow, a psychologist many of us encountered along the way in our education, argues consistently for the interrelationship of the inner and outer, the psyche and the social. Ultimately the best “helper” is the “good person.” So often the sick or inadequate person trying to help, does harm instead. (Toward a Psychology of Being, iii) Psychoanalyst Michael Eigen takes the point even further, “social reform is not enough without working with the human psyche that informs the ways we govern ourselves” (Feeling Matters, 154). So if the person whose heart, mind, soul are bent out of shape often does harm, has the balance tipped the other way, to focusing first and foremost on our inner life? No. Maslow himself notes: the best way to become a better “helper” is to become a better person. But one necessary aspect of becoming a better person is via helping other people. (Religion, Values and Peak-Experiences, xii) We focus on the human heart. We focus on being doers of the word. Being a Christian is to live life on the strip. It is to deepen the connection between the inner (heart, mind, soul) and the outer (work to change the world) and to open the whole of our lives – our attitudes, affections and actions to the transforming work of the Spirit of God we know in Jesus.
Transformation happens along the Mobius strip from outside in, and from inside out - - - both/and. The traditional soul-shaping disciplines of Christian faith: common worship, shared and individual Scripture reading, prayer – with others and by oneself, contemplation, holy conversation, compassionate action were intended to shape persons from outside in. They are ways God’s Spirit works on us and in us. But there is no single formula for combining these practices, and if the practices are not shaping our lives in the way we are currently engaging them, we should change our practices. Augustine, in On Christian Doctrine, argues that a person “supported by faith, hope, and love, with an unshaken hold upon them, does not need the Scriptures except for the instruction of others” (Book One, 39.43 – p. 32). That’s a remarkable statement! If our practices are not changing us, creating in us faith, hope and love, or joy, genuineness, gentleness, generosity and justice, then we should consider changing our practice.
On the other hand, if our perceived inner transformation is not demonstrating itself in action to care for others and to create justice, then we need to ask how deep that transformation is. A contemporary theologian has written that “Christianity first and foremost is about being kind” (Robert Neville, Symbols of Jesus, xviii). That sounds like inner work, but he goes on to say that we know something of the minimum requirements of kindness - - - being generous, sympathetic, willing to help those in immediate need, and ready to play roles for people on occasions of suffering, trouble, joy, and celebration that might more naturally be played by family or close friends who are absent. What this writer is saying is that we cannot authentically claim to be kind inside unless this kindness is transforming the world in some of these ways.
This transformative journey, this life on the strip is what Christian faith is about. It is what the church is about. Transformation is our bottom line. In The United Methodist Church we say that the mission of the church, the very reason the church exists is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Life on the strip – inner and outer change, both/and! We have some changes coming this fall. We will worship at 9:30. We are adding something called “Soul Kitchen” to our adult education opportunities. Some are pleased that we will have one worship service. Some are not. Some like one service, but don’t like the time. While your views matter, these changes were made not to please or displease, but in hopes that the transformative work of God’s Spirit would be more powerful here. There is risk involved. I ask for your courage as we make these changes. I ask for patience. I ask for humility. I pray for all these for my own life. And if these changes don’t help us in our work of making disciples, which includes inviting new people to the adventure of Christian faith, and transforming the world, we will make more changes. We are out to see the human heart, mind and soul reshaped. We seek to be doers of the word.
Two stories – like our Scriptures, both needed.
Two brothers, one married and one unmarried shared a farm whose fertile soil produced and abundance of grain. Half the grain went to each brother. It was a good life for each. Yet every now and again the married brother would wake in the night and think to himself, “This isn’t fair. My brother isn’t married, he’s all alone, yet he gets only half the produce of the farm. Here I am with a lovely wife and five children, so I have companionship and security for my old age. Who will care for my brother when he gets old? He needs to save more than me. His need is greater than mine.” When such nights came, the married brother would get up in the dark of night, sneak over to his brother’s granary, and pour in a sack full or two of grain.
The bachelor brother, though, would also have nights when he would awaken. “This isn’t fair. My brother has a wife and five children to care for, and he gets only half the produce. I have only myself to support. Is it just that my brother, whose need is obviously greater than mine, should receive no more than me?” When these nights came the unmarried brother would get up in the dark of night, sneak over to his brother’s granary, and pour in a sack full or two of grain.
One night, the brothers met each other crossing the field with grain for the other. They laughed. They embraced. Many years later, after both brothers had died, the story leaked out. When the nearby townsfolk wanted to build a new church, they could think of no better spot in all the world on which to build it, no spot holier. (de Millo, Taking Flight, 60-61)
Dov Ber was an uncommon man. When people came into his presence, they trembled. He was a Talmudic scholar of repute, inflexible, uncompromising in his doctrine. He took life seriously, never laughed. He believe firmly in the spiritual value of austere disciplines, even when they were painful. Unfortunately, his ascetic ways got the better of him. He fell seriously ill and there was nothing the doctors could do to cure him. Someone suggested he seek the help of the Hasidic rabbi, Baal Shem Tov.
Dov Ber agreed, though reluctantly. He disapproved of Baal Shem, considering him something of a heretic. And while Dov Ber believed life was only made meaningful by discipline and suffering, Baal Shem sought to alleviate pain and openly preached that it was the spirit of rejoicing that gave meaning to life.
It was after midnight when Baal Shem arrived. He walked into Dov Ber’s room and handed him the Book of Splendor, which Dov Ber opened and began to read aloud. He had barely begun reading when Baal Shem Tov interrupted. “Something is missing. Something is lacking in your faith?” “What is that?” the sick man asked. “Soul.” (de Millo, Taking Flight, 57-58)
That’s Christian life and faith, life on the strip, kindness in action, life with heart and soul. May it be our lives. Amen.

Escher, Mobius Strip

Forty Years Ago Today

2009-08-28T15:40:00.003-05:00

Sermon preached August 23, 2009

Text: Psalm 84

Today’s Psalm is a very happy psalm, a joyous song. It evokes sunshine and paying attention to beauty. We will get back to that, but first a detour, a difficult detour.
Not all the psalms are so sunny, as indicated in the prayer for today. Take these words from Psalm 38 for instance: I am utterly spent and crushed; I groan because of the tumult of my heart…. My heart throbs, my strength fails me; as for the light of my eyes – it has gone from me. My friends and companions stand aloof from my affliction, and my neighbors stand far off. This psalm reminds me of the words of Scott Peck. Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. (The Road Less Traveled, 15). It reminds me of similar words of D. W. Winnicott, British psychoanalyst. Life is difficult, inherently difficult for every human being, for every one from the very beginning. (quoted in Winnicott, Adam Phillips, 51).
We will get back to Psalm 84, but not just yet. When did the truth about life being difficult become clear to me, because it is now? I think it came to me over time. Maybe some of it was watching the struggles in my parent’s relationship. They divorced when I was in my early 20s. There is adolescence with all of its heartbreaks – not being the athlete one would like to have been, hearing “no” when it had taken all the courage you could muster to ask that girl for a dance or a date. Life certainly became more difficult for me when, at age 21 I was diagnosed with chronic ulcerative colitis. There were countless times since that I have wished this would just disappear, but it never did, and because of it I am at an increased risk for colon cancer, and because of that risk I get my colon scoped every year and have for the last eight or so years. A couple of years after that diagnosis, one of my best friends from high school and college was diagnosed with leukemia and died. When you confront death so closely, you become aware that life is difficult – and in the last year my father died, and in the last month a friend and colleague in ministry, a woman probably in her late fifties, died in an accident on her farm.
I feel the truth that life is difficult deep in my bones, and the truth of it has been confirmed not just in my personal life, but as I have grown more aware of the wider world. A woman named Rebecca Kamate (not her real name) works with women in the Congo who have suffered rape. Here is part of her story as reported in the New York Review (August 13, 2009, 18). “What pushed me into this work,” says Kamate… “is that I am also one who was raped.” This happened a decade ago; the rapists were from the now-defunct militia of a local warlord backed by Uganda. “Their main purpose was to kill my husband. They took everything. They cut up his body like you would cut up meat, with knives. He was alive. They began cutting off his fingers. Then they cut off his sex. They opened his stomach and took out his intestines. When they poked his heart, he died. They were holding a gun to my head…. They ordered me to collect all his body parts and to lie on top of them and there they raped me – twelve soldiers. I lost consciousness. Then I heard someone cry out in the next room and I realized they were raping my daughters [ages 12 and 15].
Difficult seems much too tame a word for such horror. Life can be horrific, terrifying, cruel, as well as difficult.
Not only can life be difficult, but goodness can be fleeting. Forty years ago this year – yes, there was Woodstock – but forty years ago this year The Beatles played music together for the last time. Music so many enjoyed was to be made no more, and it remains a significant event. The most recent issue of Rolling Stone (September 3, 2009) has as its cover story; “Why the Beatles Broke Up.” In my teenage years in the 1970s there was this persistent rumor that The Beatles were going to get back together for a concert, an album, but it never happened. In 1980, John Lennon was shot and killed by a deranged man. In 2001 George Harrison died of cancer.
Ready to get back to Psalm 84? Just last year, Paul McCartney released a CD of new music, Memory Almost Full, and on it was this song. {Play about a minute of “Gratitude” link at the end of the sermon!}
Gratitude. That’s the spirit of Psalm 84 – gratitude, gratitude, gratitude. How lovely – sparrows nesting, swallows laying eggs and hatching young. Happy are those who sing God’s praise. Happy are those whose heart is a highway to the place of God. God does not withhold any good thing from those who walk that highway in their heart to God.
Here’s the deal, we have an absolute need in our lives for gratitude, to cultivate gratitude, to feel gratitude, to have grateful hearts. We need to see beauty and goodness in the world, even when we see pain and harm and ugliness. They are both there, and if we neglect either we miss life. We need to notice the sparrows and swallows and sunshine and feel joy, but it is not a shallow joy that forgets that there is real horror in our world. We need to feel the goodness of life and know that this goodness is just there, that there is a quality of gift about it for which we can be grateful. We are to be those who sing, “I’m so grateful for everything.” This, too, I feel deep in my bones. Life is difficult, yes. Life is filled with beauty and goodness and wonder, some of which I help to create, and much of which I am simply the beneficiary. Gratitude and joy are knit deep within, too.
Maybe like me, you feel both these things deep inside, and have days when you forget one or the other – the pain and difficulty of the world, the joy of the world for which we can be grateful. Today, in the spirit of the Psalm I invite us: Remember the joy. Cultivate gratitude. Trust in the goodness of God.
Maybe like me, you do that best when you take time to really think about what you have to have to be grateful for. The Psalmist is doing a little of that in Psalm 84 – making a gratitude list. I want to share some of mine with you.
I am grateful to God, the God I know in Jesus Christ. And that’s how I know God, through Jesus and the tradition in which he lived and the tradition which he inspired and inspires. The God I know in Jesus is the source of life and beauty. This God’s very nature is creativity and love. God loves all who live, persons and creatures and world. God inspires goodness, creativity, justice and love. I am grateful for God’s love in my life, for God’s constant invitation in my life to be all that I can be and to do the good I can do with my life. That loving invitation comes again and again and again, even when I have ignored God, and that constant connection is grace.
I am grateful for the relationships which sustain my life – especially for my family. I am deeply grateful for Julie who has shared my life now for close to thirty years, twenty-seven as my wife. We have had the joy of bringing three children into the world and while we have experienced the twists and turns of parenting, we could not be prouder or more filled with joy when we think of David, Beth and Sarah. I have been blessed with friends who care about my life and give me the opportunity to care about them.
I am grateful for my body. Okay, that may seem a strange thing to say. It is not as tall as I might have liked. I wouldn’t mind if my hair had not abandoned ship a few years ago. I have already told you about some of my inward parts and we don’t need to go there again. Still, this is me. These are the eyes through which I have seen the world, though they now need glasses. These are the eyes through which I have read the Bible and theology and philosophy and poetry. These are the hands that have touched the world, that have held my own children, that have held the children of others to be baptized, that have done some good in the world. These are the ears that have heard the music of The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck. This is the face by which people know me.
I am grateful for this church. Being a pastor here has its challenges. I am sometimes frustrated by our building. I wish I could please everybody all the time, but that is not possible. We have changes coming and maybe more changes that need to be made so that we can be all God calls us to be. Still, I am grateful for you all and for this place. You help keep me on my toes. You challenge me to keep growing in my faith and we all walk the journey of faith together. I think we have a good thing going here and I want to see us share it with others.
I am grateful for meaningful work. This is my job, and there are times when it is important for me to see it as my job, lest I be consumed by it. Pastors are not the only ones who can get consumed by their jobs. I wrote about that very thing on my blog about a month and a half ago. It is o.k. to remember that even if my job involves ultimate meanings, the job itself does not contain all ultimate meaning. God has called me to be a pastor, but first God called me to be a Christian, a full human being who finds what that means in Jesus. It is o.k., then, to have times when I don’t have to like all that I do, just do it. Sometimes being a pastor is just a job. I am deeply grateful that it is also often so much more. And I am grateful.
I am grateful to be a citizen of the United States of America. I am aware of our failings and foibles. I am also aware of how much our country still symbolizes freedom and opportunity and the bringing together of diverse people. I will talk about how we can do better, but I do so because I care about this country.
My list would not be complete with a word about my gratitude for music and movies and books – art and thought which engages my mind and enlarges my heart.
I began with a couple of quotes, let me wrap up with a couple more. Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast: Gratefulness is the measure of our aliveness (Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer, 12). Without gratitude we are not alive to much of the world. We don’t see the world as it is. E.B. White: I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. Life is difficult, sometimes even horrific and terrifying. It needs saving and that is the work of God and the work God invites us to join in. Life is also filled with goodness and beauty and delight, things to be savored and enjoyed, things for which the appropriate heart-response is gratitude. But I would add, this, without savoring the world, enjoying the world with deep gratitude, we have little energy to work on improving the world. The woman whose horrific story from the Congo we heard works to help others because she believes she can make a difference, because she sees a goodness that is possible.
Savor the world, enjoy the world with gratitude, and use the energy of joy and gratitude to improve the world. Trust that this is possible, and be among those whose very hearts are a highway to the place of God, among those who trust in the goodness God inspires, even in a difficult world. Amen.

Paul McCartney "Gratitude"

Everyday People

2009-08-10T22:51:00.003-05:00

Sermon preached August 9, 2009

Texts: John 6:35, 41-51; Ephesians 4:25-5:2

Sly and the Family Stone, "Everyday People

Play Everyday People Sly and the Family Stone, about half the song (to second chorus – “I love everyday people”).
I love everyday people, and we got to live together.
We are everyday people – younger and older, shorter or taller, working and retired, partnered and single, parents and grandparents and childless, with different backgrounds, different affectional orientations, different countries of ancestry. I love everyday people.
We are also followers of Jesus Christ. To use the image given in John’s Gospel, we are those for whom Jesus is the bread of life. Our deepest hungers are fed through this bread. That image is a little mysterious. John’s Gospel is often that way. How can a person be bread? And some of the language used is just hard to grab hold of. It reminds me of some of the theology I have read. In all its concrete details the biblical picture of Jesus as the Christ confirms his character as the bearer of New Being or as the one in whom the conflict between the essential unity of God and persons and human existential estrangement is overcome…. Christology is a function of soteriology. The problem of soteriology creates the christological question and gives direction to the christological answer. For it is the Christ who brings the New Being, who saves persons from the old being, that is, from existential estrangement and its self-destructive consequences. (Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, II (125, 150). That’s really just a long way of saying that Jesus is the bread of life!!
So the bread of life imagery is a little mysterious, but it is also striking in it ordinariness. In John’s Gospel there is no discussion of existential estrangement and New Being, but of bread, something common, ordinary. In fact, one of the complaints lodged against Jesus in the text is this – how can he be any kind of bread for humankind when he is so ordinary, one of the everyday people, the son of Joseph whose mother is known. How can this ordinary person be bread come from heaven, be the New Being in his everyday life? That’s the remarkable paradox of incarnation, of God making Godself know in everyday life.
And God is concerned about everyday life. We are everyday people who are also followers of Jesus Christ. We are everyday people who proclaim that Jesus is the bread of our lives. We are to live as followers of Jesus in our everyday lives. To be a Christian is to live just a little differently because Jesus “feeds” our lives. To be a follower of Jesus is to be an everyday person who lives his or her everyday life differently.
Being a follower of Jesus affects how we spend our time. We are here. We make time in our week to remember that we are followers of Jesus. We gather to support each other, to pray for each other, to sing together, to hear God’s Spirit speak to us in the midst of our everyday lives. Being a follower of Jesus affects how we use our money. We support the work of the church with our regular gifts. We give to special outreach efforts to heal a hurting humanity. We give to causes outside the church. We try to shop more wisely and support businesses that value human labor, human social bonds, and the earth. Being a follower of Jesus affects our relationships. We are willing to struggle with the hard work of forgiveness and reconciliation when bonds are broken, knowing that this is always a process. We value life-long partnerships and work together to strengthen families of all kinds. We value children and youth, wanting to see them grow and develop the gifts God has given each of them. They are not just a marketing segment to us.
Being everyday people and followers of Jesus means we seek to live a little differently in our everyday lives. The passage from Ephesians is a wonderful companion to John’s Gospel because it makes real what it means to say that Jesus is the bread of life. Speak the truth. Be angry but do not sin. Let your words give peace to those who hear. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another. Powerful stuff intended for our everyday lives. To say Jesus is the bread of life is to seek to live differently in these ways.
One of the struggles we all have in living this new way of life is that we all carry in us old tapes about how the world is and how we should react to it, and these old tapes often lead more toward bitterness, wrangling, anger that gets away from us, than toward tenderhearted love. To be a follower of Jesus, to proclaim that Jesus is the bread of life, is to struggle against these old tapes inside of us – and they are there.
The news over the past couple of weeks has been filled with the story of the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates – so filled, in fact, that some of you may be groaning inwardly knowing that I am going to say something about this. It is a complex story, and one old tape we all need to struggle against is that tape in us which crams everything into simple categories, not letting the complexity of human life emerge so we can respond more fully to it, rather than react to our simple story lines.
The basic outline of the story is that Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, returning from a trip, was having trouble getting into his home. He ended up “breaking into it” and this was witnessed by a neighbor who called the police thinking that a break-in might be occurring. The police arrived, a Sgt. James Crowley. He asked Gates for some identification. Professor Gates apparently took offense at this and became angry. Crowley became angry as well, handcuffed Gates and took him in. Gates is 5’8”, 150 pounds, walks with a cane, and is African-American. Crowley is white.
Race had a role in this incident. Many of us, probably all of us, carry around tapes inside that tell us things about people different from us. Recent research done by neuroscientists and cognitive scientists suggests that some attitudes about people who are different get wired into our nervous system. The amygdala area of the brain, which gets more active when we feel threatened or afraid, has been shown to be more active in Americans of all races when they view black male faces (Greater Good). Our culture, it seems, has conditioned us to see black male faces as a threat – an old tape that I am guessing had an impact on Sgt. Crowley. I would also guess that Henry Louis Gates had some tapes playing – tapes that reflected the mistreatment of African-Americans over the years and which may have led him to respond petulantly to the request for identification. There was probably a class tape playing too, a Harvard professor telling a police officer, “Don’t you know who I am, I teach at Harvard.” All these old tapes playing, and the old tapes play more loudly when we are under stress – like doing police work, like having a police officer asking us questions in our own home.
But if that story from Harvard seems just too distant, the news in Duluth this week contained its own old tapes. Thursday’s newspaper carried a story about t-shirts being sold in town at the “I Love Duluth” store. The t-shirts read: “My Indian Name is Crawling Drunk” and “My Indian Name is Drinks Like a Fish.” Old tapes playing, and one of the saddest parts of the story to me was that somewhere a t-shirt manufacturer thought this would be harmless humor, not considering the horrendous dehumanization involved.
To be a follower of Jesus in our everyday lives is to struggle against these old tapes that produce bitterness and malice and speech that tears at the social fabric rather than producing peace. It is to struggle against them so we can be kind and tenderhearted.
As long as I am on a roll with social issues, one more old tape I hope we struggle against as everyday followers of Jesus is an old tape that many of us carry that says that any attempt to look at health care as something other than a commodity subject to market forces is a direct road to socialism or communism. 47 to 50 million Americans are without health insurance. I know some percentage of this group of people are healthy people who could afford health insurance, but no one argues it is an enormous percentage. We find ourselves once again in the midst of a great debate about how to provide more care to more people. It is a difficult and complex issue and I offer no simple solutions. But some of the terms of the debate need to change, and I think we everyday followers of Jesus have a role to play. Can we begin to talk together about what it means to care for each other as Americans and how health care plays a role in that? Can we talk about how basic health care might be a social good and not simply a market good? I was particularly spurred on to think about this in reading commentary from the British press on our current debate. I found commentary from the London Daily Telegraph, London Observer, London Sunday Telegraph and London Independent summarized in The Week (August 7, 2009). The United States spends more on health care than any other country yet we are unhealthier on many measures – infant mortality is higher and life expectancy is lower than in Europe. “Why does the richest country on earth have an immunization rate worse than Botswana’s?” To Britons, it is baffling that Americans refuse to consider a system that would require a few people to wait for the most expensive operations, yet they tolerate their current system, which is “fiendishly complex and full of loopholes, so even those with coverage can have it withdrawn.” By the way, the practice of denying coverage for a previously approved claim is called “recission” and on June 16, testifying before Congress, executives from WellPoint, UnitedHealth Group and Assurant refused to end the practice. (New York Review, August 13, 2009, 70). The strongest language about our health care debate coming from Britain argued that Americans really don’t care about the poor, that we view have-nots as “failed Americans.” “Sure, America’s got talent, but it’s also got some of the most unpleasant, uncompassionate, unerringly ruthless people on the face of this planet.”
Of course one old tape we all have is one that says “We are Americans and we don’t need to listen to anyone else.” So we can ignore how the rest of the world looks at our health care debate, but what if some of what they say makes sense. What if we don’t care for each other as well as we might? What if there are more compassionate ways to be Americans? Who might raise such questions in the midst of debates about health care? Might it be followers of Jesus Christ who, in their everyday lives are citizens of the United States? Might it be those who feed on Jesus as the bread of life?
The Ephesians passage ends simply. Be imitators of God… and live in love, as Christ loved us. That’s what it means to be everyday followers of Jesus Christ. Imitate God. Love as Christ loved. Struggle against any old tapes you carry that lead away from love and kindness. God’s gracious love empowers us in this effort. God’s gracious love forgives us when we fall short, when the old tapes get played out again.
As everyday people be imitators of God and live in love as Christ loved. Amen.

You Da Man

2009-08-10T22:44:00.002-05:00

Sermon preached August 2, 2009

Text: II Samuel 11:26-12:13a

Men are interesting creatures. On the Prairie Home Companion, the following story was shared (108). Eve, in the Garden of Eden, said to God, “I have a problem. It’s a beautiful garden, but I’m lonely and I’m sick of eating apples.” “Okay,” said God, I’ll create a man for you.” Eve said, “What’s a man.” “He’s a creature with aggressive tendencies and an enormous ego who doesn’t listen and gets lost a lot, but he’s big and strong, he can open jars and hunt animals and is physically fun.” “Sounds great,” said Eve. “There’s only one thing. He’s going to want to believe I made him first.” Many jokes about men carry a modicum of truth. How are men and mascara alike? They both run at the sight of emotion.
But men can be intelligent and sensitive, though they may express it in unique ways. Watch a baseball or football game sometime, and you will see men, often reticent to be too touchy-feely, swat each other on the backside to congratulate the player who performed well.
More recently, we have invented a phrase to praise and admire another man. “You da man.” It is said best at a rather loud decibel level. When you analyze the phrase, it seems rather silly – to call a man a man. But as early as the first part of the twentieth century, the phrase, “the man” came in slang to mean someone in authority and control, and the phrase was used both positively and negatively. In jazz circles in the 1950s the phrase “you’re the man” became a term not to denote authority, but a term of admiration and praise. You’re the man. In our world of increasing clipped language, “you’re the man” has become “you da man” – still used in praise and admiration.
This morning’s Scripture reading is a sort of “you da man” story, but with some surprising twists. David is the man – he is the king. He has power and authority and control. Nathan, well Nathan is an advisor to David, and advisors to kings often find it helpful to tell the man that he is the man. “You da man, David, you da man.” Human history testifies to the need of those in power to be given praise and admiration.
But Nathan’s visit this time has a different purpose. Nathan has gotten wind of a troubling story – heard it from God, in fact. David, at home with not much to do while his troops were out fighting, has slept with another man’s wife, a woman named Bathsheba. He impregnated her in fact, but wanted to hide it. He brought Bathsheba’s husband Uriah back from the war, hoping he would sleep with Bathsheba and the illicit pregnancy would go undiscovered. Uriah refuses to sleep with his wife while his men are in battle. David, desperate to hide his action, sends Uriah to the place in the battle where the fighting is most fierce, and Uriah is killed. David marries Bathsheba so he can hide his actions. In fact, David might come off looking noble – marrying a widow who everyone will know was pregnant when she got married. You da man, David, you da man. This is better than “The Bachelorette.”
So Nathan, sent by God, tells David a story. Imagine two men in a city, a rich man and a poor man. The rich man had flocks of animals, herds of animals. The poor man had but one lamb. He bought the lamb young and it became like a part of the family, growing up with the man’s children, sharing their meager food stuffs. Now a traveler came to visit the rich man and he needed to serve him dinner. He looked at all he had, but was reluctant to use one of his own animals to feed this man. Instead he took the only lamb of the poor man and fixed it for the traveler.
David is angered, enraged. How morally obtuse of the rich man, how utterly wrong he was to take the single lamb of the poor man. “Such a man deserves to die, or at the very least re-pay the poor man four times over for the lamb he took.” David has some moral sensitivity to him. He can see wrong-doing when it happens.
Then it comes. To this point Nathan has taken the advice of Carlos Casteneda’s Don Juan, “the worst thing you can do is confront human beings bluntly” (quoted in Michael Eigen, The Electrified Tightrope, 147). Nathan has simply told David a story which engages David’s moral sensibilities. David is angered, outraged. Now it comes. “David, you da man.” And Nathan isn’t telling David he is powerful, and he is not telling him he should be admired. David is the rich man in the story who has taken the wife of Uriah for his own. Worse than that, his actions led directly to the death of Uriah, just so he could cover up his misdeeds. But the cover-up has failed. Nathan knows. God knows.
Intriguing story, but to the best of my knowledge no one here has acted anywhere near this horrifically. You can all breathe a sigh of relief. But I want to tell you another story.
A pastor asked children during a children’s sermon: “If all the good people were red and all the bad people were white, what color would you be?” Little Mary Jane replied, “Pastor, I’d be streaky like a candy cane.” (Anthony DeMillo, The Song of the Bird, 129). Another version of the story Nathan tells David, but only more general. Streaky people, anyone you know? Do you also hear a voice saying, “You da one!”
In some ways that whole Bible tells a Nathan story about humanity, about us – that we fall short sometimes, that we miss the mark, that our lives get off kilter. The Bible tends to use a rather ugly word to describe this being off the mark, off kilter. It calls it “sin.” David says, “I have sinned against the Lord” – and that’s not to mention Uriah!
But sin is an ugly word, and primarily because the church and church people have made it so. When we think of sin we think of people wagging their fingers at others taking them to task for their sins. We think of people making huge moral issues out of rather innocent activities like going to a movie or playing cribbage. Sin has been abused in so many ways that the word is almost unusable, but the idea behind it matters.
The purpose of the Bible’s idea of sin is not so others can tell us how awful we are, or come up with lists of sins and keep count. The purpose of the Bible’s idea of sin is asking us to be honest about our lives – and it says that when we are honest about our lives we admit that we are streaky people, people who miss the mark sometimes, people who are out of kilter sometimes. Have you ever been frustrated with your child over a legitimate issue, but let your frustration and anger get the best of you when you sought to correct that child? Have you ever let your anger get the best of you? Have you ever turned away when helping someone would have been quick and easy? Have you ever held a grudge too long? Have you ever been too proud to say you were sorry? Have you ever felt kind of good when someone who usually does better than you on something falls flat? To make matters worse, have you ever denied a mistake, and error, a wrong, and then had to keep constructing elaborate schemes to keep the truth hidden? Maybe you never sent a Uriah into battle, but the pattern is familiar. Missing the mark. Off kilter. Out of line. Streaky people. We da ones!
The God of the Bible wants to meet us where we are, but if we are not honest about our live, we don’t know where that is. The God of the Bible loves us as we are, but we aren’t sure who that is if we are not honest about our streakiness. Now God may want us to change and grow, but we always begin from where we are. We can be honest with ourselves and we will not melt.
And here is the utterly remarkable thing, God uses streaky people just like us to do good in the world. Listen to these words from Ezekial, written well after David’s time as king. It is written as a promise of God to the Israelites. “I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them…. And I the Lord will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them.” Pretty high praise for a letch, don’t you think? If God can work with a person like that, think what God might do in the lives of us whose streakiness never included sleeping with another’s spouse and then sending the spouse into battle to be killed.
There is also another kind of streaky people, and I was among them last weekend. A few of us traveled to Cedar Rapids to help with flood relief. By the end of the day, we were streaky people, people streaked with sweat and dirt and sun – all trying to make the world a little kinder, gentler, better, in the name and spirit of Jesus Christ. I won’t speak for anyone else on the trip, but I am a streaky person in the first sense – a person who misses the mark, who can be off kilter, who needs forgiveness sometimes. I am glad that God can work in me to make me a streaky person in the second sense – streaked with sweat and dirt and sun trying to do some good in the name and spirit of Jesus.
You see the bottom line of the whole David saga is that God uses streaky people to do good, to be streaky people in that Cedar Rapids sense. Ironically, God uses us best when we give up our pretensions, when we are honest with ourselves. It’s only when we know where we are that we can get some place better. You da one to do just that. Amen.

Heel or Heal

2009-07-29T21:35:00.002-05:00

Sermon preached July 19, 2009

Text: Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

Thoughts about God vary widely. Here are a couple of notes to God penned by children. Thank you for the baby brother but what I wanted was a puppy. Joyce. Dear God, If you give me a genie lamp like Alladin I will give you anything you want except my money or my chess set. Raphael. Here we have images of God as a cosmic waiter taking requests and filling them as best as God can - - - and sometimes missing the mark.
Not all our images for God, not all the images for God in our minds or in our culture are so gentle or benign. Some of the images used for God are more terrifying than funny.
The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the Fire. Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (July 8, 1741)
Okay, so that sermon is two hundred sixty some years old, but the image of God used there remains current in many strands of the Christian Church. The National Association of Evangelicals includes in their statement of faith a phrase about the “resurrection of damnation” that occurs in the future. The statement of faith of the Vineyard Church includes a belief about “eternal conscious punishment” for the wicked. Behind those phrases one sees Edwards image of an angry God, a God whose wrath and anger burn hot against those who do not fall in line. Their fate is fire, the resurrection of damnation, eternal conscious punishment.
When I encounter such doctrines I am reminded of the words of the third century Christian theologian Origen, who wrote that there were people in the church who, “while believing indeed that there is none greater than the Creator, in which they are right, yet believe such things about him as would not be believed of the most savage and unjust of men” (On First Principles, 184-5/253; p. 271). The God portrayed by Edwards seems a God most interested in us groveling, engaging in fearful obedience, clipping along at God’s heel. The image of God as master and humans as obedient puppies being taught to heel is not far from Edwards imagery, nor necessarily from those who would find Edwards imagery congenial today.
I believe some of these images haunt us. If they were ever a part of our experience of Christian faith, they often remain deeply embedded in our souls and we continue to struggle with them. These images of God sometimes also afflict our national life as some persons somehow take on the role as executors of God’s wrath and vengeance - setting off suicide bombs, flying planes into buildings, shooting physicians whose practices they oppose. Certainly the vast majority of people whose image of God fits in with this angry, wrathful judge do not engage in violent behavior, but the images are not simply benign.
While the Bible has a great deal to say about judgment, an excessive focus on that, on God as judge, is unbalanced and in many ways unbiblical. It certainly does not comport well with the central aspects of Jesus' teaching. Marcus Borg, in his book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time contends that “Jesus invited his hearers to see god not as the judge… but as gracious and compassionate” (82). Jesus himself, in Borg’s words is, for Christians, “the face of God… the side of God turned toward us” (137).
If we take Jesus as our definitive clue into the nature of God, as the side of God turned toward us, as the face of God, what does that tell us? As Jesus went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things…. And wherever Jesus went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.
The God of Jesus Christ, the God whose face shines in the face of Jesus, whose hands reach out in the hands of Jesus, who speaks in some remarkable way through the words of Jesus, this God is a God of care, of compassion, of healing. Healing of broken lives is what this God desires more, not groveling and heeling like some fearful pet. Does this God judge? Yes, but I would argue God’s judgment is not for the sake of punishment but for the sake of diagnosis – here are the broken places in your heart, mind, soul, world and they need healing and repair. Judgment is a function of compassion, not anger. God’s judgment might be something like these words from a psychoanalyst. “The ways we protect ourselves tend also to be the ways we imprison ourselves” (Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, On Kindness, 62-63). Hearing that, we know where to look to see our prisons and know something more about how to be more free, more whole, how to be healed and well.
God is a God of healing and well-being wholeness and God will use a variety of means to bring that healing and well-being and wholeness into our lives. The church exists to bring God’s healing into the lives of those who are a part of it and to share that healing with all the world. We are here for each other, and for our community and world. We celebrate the good news of God’s love here, help each other see those broken places, and help each other heal. We encourage each other to reach out into the world with hope and healing.
I believe Lake Superior is something God uses to bring healing into people’s lives. In some ways that is remarkable, because the lake’s effects can be cruel. Fifty degrees in July has a certain cruelty to it. More profoundly, we know that the Lake has taken its toll. Some of us remember the Edmund Fitzgerald. All of us know about the chapel in our church commemorating four lives lost in the Lake. Still this powerful, cold, mysterious presence is often a source of healing. Its fresh waters sustain our lives. Its navigable waters provide recreation and an economic resource. Its wonder and beauty nurtures our souls, our imaginations. When I was in college, I spent a number of thoughtful moments listening to the waters of the Lake lap up against the shore as I thought about my life. It is a discipline I should renew. I am often taken by the beauty of the Lake, on a sunny day the purity of its blue waters, on a full-moon night, its ability to reflect the bright orange glow. For me, and for many, Lake Superior is a healing presence, one of the ways God’s healing touches our lives.
God is a God of compassion, care, healing. Today, I invite you to know that, to experience that. See the broken places in your life and let God touch them. See those places in your life where self-protection has become self-imprisonment, and let God’s love free you.
Experiencing God’s love, compassion and care, reflect it in your life. Care for others. Tend all that heals, including caring for places like Lake Superior. Work with God to bring more healing to the world’s broken places.
Alexie Torres-Fleming is the founder and executive director of Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice in the South Bronx. She was raised in a housing project in the South Bronx by parents who were Puerto Rican immigrants. By the time she was in her twenties, she has escaped the poverty of her neighborhood, living in a nice apartment in midtown Manhattan. But she sensed that God wanted something from her. She sensed God was calling her back to her neighborhood to be a force for healing, to see the healing power of the people that were still there. She returned to her old church and worked with it to organize against drugs in the neighborhood. She worked with others to organize a march through the neighborhood and about two hundred people showed up. Two weeks later, drug dealers, in retaliation, torched her church. She worked with others again to organize another march, even in the face of death threats – this time 1,200 people showed up to march – God’s healing power at work. Alexie saw God’s healing power working through one person in particular.
I learned what power was that day… from a man who was homeless as a teenager, who was an alcoholic, who raised four children in the South Bronx, who was a deli man. A man who talked about how they used to make him work in the back of the deli. If he needed something, they had a little hole in the wall where he could ask, because they didn’t want to see the brown people in the front of the deli. A man who, when I was a little girl, washed urine off the elevator walls…. On that day, this man, my father, taught me the greatest lesson about the poor and about power, because when I looked out at the crowd gathered to march, he was there. (Sojourners, July 2009, 34).
There are places in our lives that need healing. Open to God’s compassionate healing. There are places in the world that need healing. Let the power of God’s compassionate healing touch the world through you.
One final story. One evening a child had been watching the news before supper. When he was asked to say the table grace he added a little to it. “Dear God, take care of Mommy and Daddy, and my little sister, and Grandma, and please, God, take care of yourself, because if anything happens to you, we’re all sunk.” (Dick Van Dyke, Faith, Hope and Hilarity, 39). We all need the healing power of God’s compassion in our lives to help mend those broken places within. It comes to us in many ways, a friend, a church community, a book, a lake. The healing power of God’s compassionate love can touch the world through you, too. Amen.

Dance, Dance, Dance

2009-07-17T14:26:00.002-05:00

Sermon preached July 12, 2009

Text: II Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19

Warning – the following story is rated PG-13. Now that I have your attention… You heard about the fundamental Christian preacher who spoke often against the evils of premarital sex - - - he was concerned it might lead to dancing.
The church deals with serious matters. What we do here is serious business. A couple of weeks ago I quoted psychotherapist Michael Eigen to describe the ministry of the church: “in this business we deal with broken lives and heartbreak, and we do so with our own broken hearts” (The Electrified Tightrope, 277). That is serious stuff.
In a couple of weeks I will be in Chicago teaching a ten-day class in Christian ethics for persons licensed for pastoral ministry in The United Methodist Church. Unlike ordained pastors, those licensed are not required to complete seminary, but have to do summer course work along the lines of a seminary curriculum, and I was asked to teach the class in Christian ethics. One of the texts for the course is The Pastor as Moral Guide. I recently finished reading it and heard powerful stories within it about the kind of serious issues the church confronts in its ministry: a family with two hard-working parents seeking help with their fourteen year-old who has violated the towns curfew and is probably smoking marijuana; a couple married nineteen years with two adolescent daughters on the verge of a divorce because the woman is seeing someone else who she says makes her free and happy and loved; another marriage where the wife is being physically abused by her husband; a church staff situation where the senior pastor is made aware that the associate pastor, who is married with young children, is having an affair with a parishioner who is also married with young children. It is easier to use stories from the book, but from my own experience I can tell you that they are not out of the ordinary for the ministry of the church. There is heartbreak in the world and the church is about the serious business of bringing healing. We need to be a place where we see the heartbreak in our own lives, where we see the heartbreak in the world, and where we offer each other and the world the healing power of God’s love in Jesus Christ.
But if we are not also teaching you how to dance, if we are not teaching each other how to dance with all our might, we are not being the church. We are not doing our job. The church deals with serious issues, but we should never be dour. Those churches that through history condemned anything that looked joyous, raucous, that smacked of laughter and pleasure, somehow must have missed this part of the Bible. David and all the house of Israel were dancing before the Lord with all their might, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals. Truth be told, most of us probably grew up in churches that while they did not condemn dancing, also didn’t think it was very “proper” for church – which was always to be quiet and pious and somber. We deal with serious issues in the church, and silence has its place in worship, but the church should also be a “Hoorah!” place, a place of laughter and not just tears, a place that is serious without being somber and dour, a place that is realistic and hopeful at the same time, a place of joy and dancing even as we take seriously the sorrow, pain, tragedy, hurt, and injustices of the world. David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet.
Frederick Buechner, minister and author has written some of the wisest words about vocation I have ever read, vocation meaning “the work a person is called to by God” (Wishful Thinking, 118-119). Buechner argues that we all hear all kinds of voices in our lives, and so distinguishing the voice of God takes careful listening. How do we figure out what God might be calling us to do in our lives? By and large, a good rule for finding out is this: The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you most need to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing cigarette ads, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you’ve probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you’ve not only bypassed (a), but probably aren’t helping your patients much either. Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
Deep gladness, joy, dancing. If we are not learning how to dance together with all our might, if we are not schooling each other in joy, we are not being the church.
I need to add a small caveat to Buechner’s words. The job to which God calls us will not always be delightful in every moment or in every respect. The Minnesota Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church is asking all of its congregations and pastors to think more broadly, more deeply, more intentionally and more systematically about their ministry - - - and a part of doing that will be to document these conversations in goal statements and ministry plans. The thought of all the additional paperwork being asked does not bring me deep gladness, even though I think what is being asked can be used to help us in our ministry as a church. Not every moment is a high point, no matter the job to which we are called, but being in ministry with you here often gladdens my heart.
We as the church of Jesus Christ are invited to be a place of great joy, a place of dancing and music, a hallelujah place. I don’t think we are fully where we want to be yet, but I see times when we are just such a place. The past Thursday the Duluth-area United Methodist Men held their annual golf tournament and thanks go to Irv St. John, Jim Terry, Kent Giese for planning this event. It is a nice way to get United Methodist men from the area together, and those who work together to plan the event seem to enjoy that. We also had our fourth annual Coppertop Drive-In. Because of the golf tournament I arrived late, but when I got here, I could not help but feel the sense of joy among those who were here to be a part of the drive-in. It is a lot of work, but coming together to accomplish a shared task brings joy and for me to contribute to the day a little by cleaning up some trash, by helping a little boy who had spilled his milk shake and was crying, by picking up a mop, really felt good. Thanks to Lisa Blade for being the lead coordinator of this event and for each and every one of you who were part of the day.
I think we need to build on these kind of experiences here – not to do big Coppertop Drive-In events more often, but to find ways we can come together in groups to share tasks – serving a meal together at the Damiano Center or Union Gospel Mission or CHUM, getting a few families together for a picnic and conversation to discuss family life in our hectic world, bringing people together to discuss a book, painting a room here at the church. Some of this happens. More can, and our joy will be enhanced.
Two final, and quick remarks about the dancing joy of the Christian life. Our dancing joy should always seek to enlarge the circle of dancers. I am struck in the passage we read just how often we hear the word “all”: David and all the people, David and all the house of Israel, with all their might, David and all the house of Israel (again), all the people, all the people (yes, twice). The community of dancing joy that God creates in our life together is meant to be an inclusive community. David’s wife, Michal, who is herself the daughter of a king, despises David for his dancing, and at least a part of the reason for this is that she thought his behavior unbecoming, vulgar, too common. He, the king, danced with all the people. He was inclusive when some thought the role of the king was to be more exclusive. In the dancing joy of God, there is always room for more dancers, singers, musicians.
The dancing joy of God should always seek to enlarge the circle of dancers. The dancing joy of God also gives us energy to reach out to the world in love and care. The joy we know here is not meant to be hoarded, but move us to care for the world. At the end of the story, food is distributed among all the people – bread and meat and raisin cakes. One function of the joyous celebrations in the life of Israel was to distribute food, to make sure no one went hungry. Joy and care for the world. At his best, the recently deceased Michael Jackson combined those well. When he was teaching the world to dance to Billie Jean he was also organizing world hunger relief through We Are the World. Whatever the other more tragic dimensions of his life, and there were many and we need not consider his whole life exemplary, still in some small way he taught us how to dance and care.
The dancing joy of God in Christian community always moves us out of our doors to invite others to the dance and to meet the needs of the world. Our deep gladness, the deep needs of the world - - - Dance, Dance Dance! Amen.

Motown Sandwich

2009-06-29T14:49:00.002-05:00

Sermon preached June 28, 2009

Text: Mark 5:21-43

One of the joys of life for me is the discovery of writings that move me – that stir my heart, my mind, my soul, my imagination. Last summer I read Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death and found it an incredibly rich work on human life. Becker drew on the tradition of psychoanalysis for some of his incredible insights, and in the year since I read Becker, I have found myself coming across certain psychoanalytic thinkers from time to time, and this has led me to Michael Eigen. I came across his name in a few places and one day in a used book store I came across one of his books, The Electrified Tightrope. It bursts with insightful remarks about human life. Eigen is a therapist, and he writes well about his work. I have experienced many miracles of growth. Mangled areas of torment and stagnation have opened gardens of subjective delight. Out of Egypt, through the wilderness, to the Promised Land: repeatedly. How does this happen? What is IT that does it?... One cannot predict when or how one will find the spot or particular point of entry that will do the trick. (277, 275) I love the way Eigen describes the kind of healing that happens in therapy, and the mystery of that process.
We encounter the mysteries of healing in the gospel reading for today. Crowds surround Jesus. Jairus asks for help for his daughter. Jesus responds by going with him. Suddenly a woman fights her way through the throng to touch Jesus, and she is healed. Jesus makes his way to Jairus’ home only to be told he is too late. Is he? Apparently not, for Jairus’ daughter is brought from seeming death to life, from sleep to wakefulness. The stories are jammed together in a way that heightens their drama and our amazement. We are left wondering, at least a bit – how does this happen? What is IT that does this?
Without taking away all the mystery in these stories, we can learn from them something about how healing happens, about what healing is like. While the stories focus on physical restoration, their meaning penetrates more deeply. Salvation, healing, wholeness are related words in the New Testament, and I think these stories speak powerfully about being made more whole in the broadest sense. I think they speak of aliveness and deadness as described by the teacher and writer Ann Belford Ulanov in her work The Unshuttered Heart. Deadness is living in such a way that it is as if “some part of us has been driven into exile and we cannot get it back” (ix). Deadness feels like no zest, crippling anxiety, a hole in us from something done to us that should not have been done, or from something not done with us that should have been done - - - living at half strength, feeling tepid, dull (9). Ulanov argues that “we all know something of this deadness and we all struggle to be alive and remain alive with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength” (15). To deadness, she contrasts aliveness. Aliveness comes down to one thing – consenting to rise, to be dented, impressed, pressed in upon, to rejoin, to open, to ponder, to be where we are in this moment and see what happens…. Aliveness springs from our making something of what we experience and receiving what experience makes of us. (15)
These stories are about healing, wholeness, aliveness, coming out of deadness. There is a certain mystery here, yet the stories reveal something of what it means to be healed, to be made more whole.
To be healed, to be made whole, to become more alive is to know that we matter, that we are not just taking up space, that God knows us by name. The scene for these stories is a crowd scene. Jesus is being followed, surrounded, pressed in upon. There is a great crowd, a large crowd, a commotion of people. Sometimes we feel lost in the crowd, less than alive in a sea of humanity. Even in church we can come and feel unnoticed, just part of the worship furniture. Healing happens when we are noticed, when we discover that we matter, when our names are identified – Jairus, when we feel the power of another and know that they feel our power.
This week I was at a denominational meeting in Nashville and one morning I was having breakfast with a couple of United Methodist seminary leaders – a dean and a president. The Dean at Drew Theological Seminary shared a story about classes the seminary was offering in prison. Seminarians were half the class and prisoners the other half. It was a powerful educational experience for the seminarians, in part, because they could begin to see these people in prison as persons, as individuals, as singular. When we see others in that way we are changed, made more whole. When we are seen, we are healed and made more whole – the daughter of Jairus, the woman who had been bleeding for years.
Healing happens, aliveness is encouraged when barriers are broken down and boundaries that separate person from person are crossed. The woman in the story who touches Jesus is a remarkable character, and the story is remarkable for all the social conventions violated. A woman should not have been touching a man. The woman’s bleeding made her unclean. She should have stayed away, isolated from all those surrounding Jesus. Instead, she crosses the boundary, she breaks down a wall, and Jesus calls this faith, faith that heals. Jesus goes in to a girl who may be dead – her body, too, would have been considered unclean, religiously impure. Jesus crosses a boundary, and healing happens.
Earlier this week, the youth of our church went to package meals for Feed My Starving Children in the Twin Cities, and you will hear more about that during our sharing time. All together we packaged enough meals to feed twenty-eight children a meal a day for a year. But before and after we watched videos about the children we would be packing meals for – children a half a world a way, children who could not be more different from our youth in so many ways. When we were done, we were headed to Valley Fair, and later ate at Famous Daves. The children we packed food for might not see the kind of money spent for a day at Valley Fair in a month. Boundaries were crossed, walls broken down, children fed – healed, youth made more aware – more alive.
Then there is the Motown sandwich part of the story. I know you have been puzzled by this – well here it is. The top slice of the sandwich is the way these stories tell us healing happens when we reach out – Reach Out, like the Four Tops. The Jesus of these stories encourages people to reach out with the assurance – I’ll be there. For our own healing, we need to be willing to reach out, to acknowledge our need for healing, wholeness, our need to be made more alive, our need to be resurrected from deadness. The insidious thing about deadness in life is that it can become our way of living. We get told often enough we have nothing to offer the world, and we come to believe it and melt into the crowd. We hear often enough that we cannot make a difference in the world, and we bury our gifts in the sand. AA has taught us that the first step in making change in our lives is to admit we need changing – but long before Bill Wilson there was the bleeding woman who had had enough and reached her hand to touch Jesus, and he touched back.
The other half of the Motown sandwich, the bottom slice is another reach out song – Diana Ross - - - reach out and touch, somebody’s hand, make this a better world if you can. In Christ, we can be healed, made more alive, resurrected from deadness – but these are gifts always to be shared. Healing is our ministry in a broken world. Michael Eigen says of therapy “in this business we deal with broken lives and heartbreak, and we do so with our own broken hearts” (277). That is a pretty good description of the ministry of the church. As our broken hearts are healed, we in turn offer others healing. We, in turn, offer healing to a broken world.
There is a certain mysteriousness in healing – how mangled areas of life are made more whole, but these stories give us some idea of what healing is like and how it happens. In these stories we are invited to reach out when we are hurting and when our lives feel dead, to hear our names called and know that we matter, to reach out beyond boundaries that separate. In these stories we are called to bring Christ’s healing to the world. We are called to create safe space here for others to reach out for healing. We are called to be a place where people are known and where they know they matter. We are called to be a place that breaks down barriers – barriers that get in the way of healing, well-being, wholeness - - - barriers such as race, class, gender, sexual orientation, background, education.
If you feel that you can’t go on, cause all your hope is gone, and your life is filled with much confusion, and happiness seems just an illusion – reach out, Jesus will be there reminding you that you matter, that your life matters, that your life is to be lived fully. As God’s lively people, reach out and touch somebody’s hand, make this world a better place, if you can - - - and you can! Amen.

Early Rock n Roll

2009-06-29T14:45:00.003-05:00

Sermon preached June 21, 2009
Text: I Samuel 17:1a, 4-11, 19-23, 32-49

Do you ever find that things you once really liked don’t have the same appeal to you they once did, or that things you once dismissed in some way now are objects of greater appreciation? When I was a kid, I loved watching old movies on television – the early movie after school when I did not have too much homework and the weather outside was not too nice, or, in the summer, the late movie after the 10 o’clock news. This was a time before cable movie channels, a time when network television was all there was. Among the movies I enjoyed as a kid were the Abbot and Costello comedies – among my favorites was Abbot and Costello Meet the Invisible Man – high art, I know! Not long ago I watched an old Abbot and Costello movie and while it was mildly enjoyable, it did not have the same spark I remembered.
Just this week, a new collection of George Harrison music was released – George Harrison of John, Paul, George and Ringo. I read a review of the CD on-line and the particular reviewer, while mildly pleased with the collection, also expressed disappointment that it lacked the song “Crackerbox Palace.” “Crackerbox Palace,” I had not heard that song in years. It came out when I was in high school and I did not remember thinking all that much of it then. Curiosity led me to i tunes, and for a mere $.99 I could download the song. I enjoyed it much more than I remember.
The story of David and Goliath, early rock n roll - - - when David rocked, Goliath rolled - - - is another case of something that has changed for me over time. My early impressions of the story are all very favorable. Who wouldn’t love a story like this? When you are young, to have a hero who shares your name is always kind of cool. The story is told in epic form and plays on classic themes of the triumph of the underdog, the overconfidence of the strong just before they fall, the unlikely hero. You just have to love it!
But at some point, I don’t know when, elements of the story began to disturb me. “This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head; and I will give the dead bodies of the Philistine army this very day to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the earth.” “David put his hand in his bag, took out a stone, slung it, and struck the Philistine on his forehead; the stone sank into his forehead, and he fell face down on the ground.” This is all a little gruesome, a little violent, and what’s most disturbing is that it seems God is pleased with the violence. A story like this could be used to justify “sacred violence” and in our world we don’t need any encouragement to be more violent, let alone justify our violence in the name of God.
So what shall we do with the story? Ignore it? We could have done that. The gospel reading for today was a very nice story about Jesus stilling a storm. But I don’t think ignoring stories from the Bible we find disturbing is a good response to them. Sometimes our lives need a little disturbing and to ignore every story that disturbs robs us of the growth opportunity such stories might provide. When Jesus’ mother and brothers come to see him in Mark 3, and he says to the crowd, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” and then sweeps his arms around and says, “Here are my mother and my brothers.” That is disturbing, especially on a day like Father’s Day. But if we simply cast aside such stories, we miss the opportunity to learn and grow.
Sometimes stories with disturbing elements, like the David and Goliath story, need to be read at a different level. The earliest Christian readers of the Scriptures argued that they are multivocal, polysemous, multidimensional. Origen (184-254) wrote about what he called the body, the soul and the spirit of Scripture and argued that Christians often needed to dig deeper than the literal story (the body) of a text, to get at its soul and spirit to enrich their own spiritual lives (First Principles, Book IV, Ch. 2, #4 – p. 276). Augustine in On Christian Doctrine (3.27.38 – p. 102) writes: “For what could God have more generously and abundantly provided in the divine writings than that the same words might be understood in various ways.”
Digging deeper, reading the story of David and Goliath more metaphorically to get at its soul and spirit, leads me to ask about the giants that cause us fear and trouble. Are there such giants? Where do we find them? Do we struggle against difficult odds sometimes? If so, maybe this story speaks more deeply to us than we might first imagine.
I think we struggle with internal giants – parts of our inner life that work against our well-being and can come out of us sideways to hurt others. In the book we are reading in the First and Ten men’s group, Parker Palmer’s A Hidden Wholeness, Palmer writes: The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope and love. (82-83) Palmer is right about our needing to hold things like hope and despair in some paradox, but what if the despair becomes a giant threatening to crush hope?
I struggle with that giant sometimes, that inner Goliath that is comprised of knots I am good at tying up inside myself. When I arrived here as your pastor four years ago this month I was leaving a position as a district superintendent, a position in which I worked with churches and pastors trying to help them be their very best. I came here with the same hope, and part of what I envisioned as our very best as First UMC was a church that was attracting new people and growing, especially in our worship attendance. It has not happened that way. New people have come, and I am grateful that we continue to attract new people, but some former members have left. Last year we struggled in a few ways with worship, and we muddled through quite a few awful weather Sundays, and the result was an average worship attendance slightly below 200 – not the direction I hope to see. I put a lot of pressure on myself as a former district superintendent, maybe I don’t have what it takes to lead a congregation well? Maybe I have risen to the level of my incompetence? But helping a congregation grow is not about me – why would I even think in such terms, that doesn’t say much for me does it? Did I miss God’s call somewhere along the way? The knots of despair grow into a 9’9” Goliath, well-armed and well-armored. Maybe some of you are good at tying inner knots, too.
Giants lurk not only inside of us, but in church life itself. How often do we hear about the decline of mainline churches, churches that have been around awhile? We are old hat, taken for granted. Some argue that a church like First UMC declines because it is not socially relevant enough, not out there enough on the pressing social issues of the day. Others tell me that a church like First UMC declines because it is not “biblical” enough, and for them that means a more conservative interpretation of the Bible. Maybe the issue is that we are sometimes not deep enough, that is, we are content to let our faith ride at the surface or sidelines of our lives rather than permeate all our questions about life and the world – how to love, how to be a better partner, how to parent, our vocational life, our inner life, our relationship to the great issues of our world. To go deeper in our faith requires our time and attention, and then we confront the enormous giant of our fragmented, frenzied lives. Who has more time for reading the Bible, for praying, for gathering with other people of faith to ask what it means to live as a Christian today? We confront, as well, the giant of old cultural patterns. In a culture that was once predominantly Christian we assumed that the lessons taught in church would be reinforced in many ways – so faith could be church an hour a week. Our culture has changed, and that is not a bad thing, but it means we need to be more intentional about faith formation in our lives, and that cuts against old patterns that tell us we need not be so intentional, and tell us we can learn everything we need to about our faith by the time confirmation ends. Giants.
Giants also walk the wider world. Global health concerns loom large as AIDS and malaria ravage Africa. Children outside the industrial world die for lack of relatively inexpensive vaccines we take for granted. Yesterdays Duluth newspaper reported a story – world hunger has now reached the one billion person mark. In the United States, millions go without health insurance and lack adequate access to the wonderful quality medical care others enjoy. Recent debates in Congress and the media are reminding us of how big a giant this is. And when we think about global health, what of the health of the planet itself? The human community continues to engage in practices that portend harm to the very environment that sustains our lives, and changing our habits is a gigantic endeavor. Giants roam the earth.
Giants are very real – inside our lives, in our faith communities, in our world – massive giants - - - 9’9” Goliaths, well armed and well-armored. Suddenly this feel-good underdog story with its disturbing elements speaks more powerfully than I imagined. It doesn’t try to convince me that the giants are not real, that would make the story untrue to life. The giants are real – the despair I feel is real, the social forces that create challenges for long-standing churches making it feel like we are finding our way in the dark are real, the challenges of global health and hunger, and the health of the planet are real. The giants are real, yet we are told “let no one’s heart fail” (v. 32) because of them. Doubt, despair, and pain are real, but so, too, are faith, hope and love. Don’t let your heart fail, have courage. It takes courage to confront the giants in our world. It takes courage to listen to the difficult voices within and learn what we need to from them yet not let them overwhelm us.
If courage is required in the face of giants, so is creativity. Some of our old methods for getting rid of giants may not work. David could not walk in Saul’s armor because it did not work for him (v. 39). One can almost picture a young David clanging around in armor too big for him before asking it to be removed. Sometimes we deal with our inner giants by trying to ignore them, but that way doesn’t work very well. The church will have to be its creative best to confront the giants of our contemporary world, be creative and trust the chaos that is a part of creativity. When we are creative, some of our creative endeavors will fail. Some of the problems confronting the human community are not very amenable to technological fixes, our preferred mode of solving problems, but may need a creativity of spirit to be solved – a more generous spirit among the diverse people of the world.
But aren’t courage and creativity simply ways of whistling in the dark against the massive giants we confront in ourselves and in our world. How do courage and creativity make sense when the giants are so big and we are so small? They make sense because of God. To offer another Parker Palmer quote, “above all, God wants us to be alive: life, after all, is God’s original gift to us” (The Promise of Paradox, xxviii). God is with us as we struggle against giants, and God is that in us and among us that which fosters courage and enhances creativity. God is with us, to shrink the doubt, despair and pain we feel from gigantic proportions into their proper role as a part of the paradox of being human. God is with us to help us navigate the historical current we find ourselves in as a mainline church with an important mission, to touch people’s lives with faith, hope and love – to make a difference in people’s lives in the Spirit of Jesus and to make a difference in the world. God is with us as we seek to tackle the challenges of global health and hunger and the health of the planet, for the God of the Bible is most consistently a God of healing and of new creation.
Life’s giants are real, but with God we can confront them with courage and creativity. What a story! Amen.

Dust in the Wind

2009-06-19T12:38:00.003-05:00

Sermon preached June 14, 2009

Text: Mark 4:26-34

It has been awhile since I have attended the Tuesday morning Men’s Group here at church. During the school year I drive Sarah to school on my way to the church, and the group meets earlier than I am able to attend. School is out, so I came this last week. The group is reading through a book called This I Believe which includes brief statements of the personal philosophies of “remarkable men and women.” This week’s essay was by the poet Carl Sandburg, and in it were these words: I can remember many years ago, a beautiful woman in Santa Fe saying, “I don’t see how anybody can study astronomy and have ambition enough to get up in the morning.” She was putting a comic twist on what an insignificant speck of animate stardust each of us is amid cotillions of billion-year constellations. (207-208) Insignificant speck of animate stardust – all we are is dust in the wind, to use the language of a 1970s song - - - sure glad I got up early to come!
But then I think of other events, stories, moments.
It was 1995 at the Minnesota Annual Conference in St. Cloud. A year earlier I had returned to Minnesota from completing my Ph.D. at Southern Methodist University. At the 1994 Annual Conference, my name had been drawn to be the conference preacher in 1995 – an entire year to work on one sermon, and a sermon to be preached in front of all one’s colleagues in ministry. So the moment came - 1995, and I preached, and the sermon seemed well-received. I sat down next to then Minnesota bishop Sharon Brown Christopher. She turned to me and said simply – “God works through you, David Bard.” Six simple words taking only moments to speak, coming from a woman who had spoken countless words to all kinds of clergy – but those words touched me deeply and I have never forgotten them.
There is a verse in the Buddhist text, The Dhammapada (122, 9:7): Do not underestimate good, thinking it will not affect you. Dripping water can even fill a pitcher, drop by drop; one who is wise is filled with good, even if one accumulates it little by little.
In early May I was the main speaker for a Minnesota United Methodist Women’s spirituality retreat. During the retreat I was part of a small group and in that group was a woman named Jill. I thought I had seen Jill before somewhere, but I could not remember when or where. During one of our small group sessions Jill mentioned that she had been at the United Methodist Women’s School of Christian Mission in 1996 where I was the keynote speaker. The topic was “Shalom Salaam, Peace” so we talked about war and peace that summer. Then she told me how helpful I had been to her in a conversation we had had. Her son was in Iraq at the time and she was understandably anxious and I had said some things that comforted her. I then remembered where I had met Jill, but I could only recall the conversation in the vaguest terms – that is, I remembered it happened but little else. I was left marveling at the power of a few words, a few moments.
Bemidji writer Kent Nerburn tells the story of a neighbor and a friend (Small Graces). The neighbor is a woman named Myra – ornery and hard to like. Raised on the plains of North Dakota, she asks no quarter and gives none…. Our relationship has been an uneasy truce. Though we are neighbors, we have never become close. “She’s had a hard life. She’s got a good heart,” I tell myself. “Treat her with kindness.” But it is not so easy. She turns every conversation to herself, berates people I know to be gentle and generous, and shoots at our cats with buckshot. Nerburn would simply dismiss her were it not for something he had learned years earlier from his friend Craig.
Craig had been in Nerburn’s life only briefly, but in that time, he taught Nerburn something important about human relationships, a lesson the author expresses succinctly: I was coming to all my encounters with a fear that others were judging me, when in fact, they were worrying about how I would judge them. We were all living in fear of each other’s judgment, while the empty space between us was waiting to be filled by a simple gesture of honest caring.
So one day Kent Nerburn finds his neighbor Myra “standing in her front yard, glowering. She is jabbing at a patch of offending leaves with a rake.” She cusses at the leaves as she piles them in a corner of the yard, and Nerburn responds: “A conspiracy between God and gravity.” He pauses, then continues. “That’s a pretty sweater,” I say. She snorts. “If I didn’t have a wife,” I continue, “we’d go out dancing.” She snorts again. I continue on my way. But as I pass, I see her push an errant strand of hair back into place and adjust the collar on her sweater. She looks around to make sure no one was watching, then returns to her raking.
Insignificant animate dust speaking a few words in a world awash with words, offering a small gesture of kindness in a world filled with gestures, many cruel and hateful – a war-torn world, a world where a person can nurture hate into his late eighties and take a gun into a place meant to mark inhumanity, and with violence perpetuate inhumanity.
With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs…. The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.
How is it that a few moments, a few words, can make such a difference? I don’t know, but they do. The promise is that God uses our small acts of kindness, our brief gestures of compassion, our few words of care, to build up God’s dream for the world.
We may, in some ways, be dust in the wind, but when the wind is the Spirit of God, great things are possible. Amen.

The New Late Show With

2009-06-07T20:33:00.004-05:00

Sermon preached June 7, 2009

Texts: Isaiah 6:1-8; John 3:1-17

Late night television is changing. This week, in its fifty-fifth year on the air, The Tonight Show, changed hosts. Only five men have been the regular hosts of this program in its long history: Steve Allen, Jack Parr, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, and now - - - Conan O’Brien. I was watching the news Monday night and suddenly I remembered that this would be the first night for The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien. I thought it would be fun to watch a little history in the making, so I tuned in for the first part of the show – watched Conan O’Brien run across the United States only to discover that he left his studio keys on the window sill in New York. Max Weinberg’s band is now The Tonight Show Band, marking the first time, I think, that a rock and roll musician will lead the Tonight Show music. Change happens.
Change is the topic of another late night talk show, this one from a much earlier era – before podcasts, before television, before radio, before widely disseminated print medium. Roving reporter Nick O’Demus – do you suppose he is Irish like Conan O’Brien? – seeks a late night interview with the religious teacher Jesus of Nazareth, who is creating quite a splash. No doubt Nick wants to get the scoop. He gets more than he bargained for.
Nick tries to set the stage for the interview. “We know you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” You expect that he will follow with a question in good late night talk show fashion. Jesus doesn’t wait for the question. “Here’s the truth of things, no one can really get what I am up to, no one can really see God’s dream for the world without being born again, born from above.” The interview was quickly getting away from Nick, but he manages a question. “What!? How is this possible? How, after a person has grown old, can they be born? You can’t go back into your mother’s womb and come out again.” The conversation moves on from there, with Jesus trying to make it clear that he is not talking about being born like you were the first time, but of a different kind of birth , one that comes from the wild Spirit of God. When this Spirit of God blows into and through your life there will be change, there will be life re-orientation. You might see the world and live life in such a new way that it will be like being born for the first time.
From this passage in John 3, there has arisen a tradition within Christian faith that makes the language of being born again the central language of Christian faith. Many of us have had concerned persons come up and ask us if we have been born again. It is helpful to remember that this is but one image used in the New Testament to try and describe what life in Christ and in the God’s Spirit is like. It is not the only image. Many who focus on this image for Christian faith and life also seem to assume that being born again is a one-time experience. “Have you been born again?” seems to ask for a simple “yes” or “no” answer, and the experience should be one that you can locate in time. If being born again is not the only image for what it means to open your life to God’s love in Jesus Christ and to God’s Spirit, I also want to challenge the idea that the image of being born again should be used for a single experience. What if there are multiple possibilities for being born again? What if God’s Spirit in our lives is always inviting us to new life, to see differently, to live differently? This is not to deny the possibility and reality of dramatic change in people’s lives, of “radical transformation of personality through Christ” to use the words of one commentator on John’s Gospel (John Sanford, Mystical Christianity, 82). Nor is it to deny that all the small choices we make daily contribute to some larger change project in our lives – in fact, I think that is the case. However, each of these small, daily choices are part of being born again, and are, in some ways, new birth.
If we can think to the possibility that new birth happens frequently, the same might be said for the idea of God’s call in our lives. Isaiah 6 uses different language to describe an experience of new birth, and his story adds important dimensions to that experience. Rather than use the term “born again,” however, Isaiah’s story is considered a story of God’s call. The prophet has a powerful experience of the presence of God during a time of national mourning. The experience of God leaves him feeling that his own life lacks, but the encounter with God offers forgiveness and transformation – new birth. And God calls for someone to go to care for God’s work, and Isaiah responds “Here I am; send me!”
Again, the language of the call of God is often used singularly. Are you following your calling? Clergy are often asked to tell the story of their call into ordained ministry – a single call. But what if God’s call might be something that happens daily, moment to moment? This is not to deny that there are also dramatic life-altering calls like a call to ordained ministry or a call to another vocation, but it rather suggests that God is always present, always inviting us to know God, know ourselves more deeply, and to be about God’s work in the world.
Every day, every moment, God speaks our name – {speak some names}. God knows us completely and calls to us.
God always invites us to new life, to new birth. Sometimes we experience that invitation as an invitation to be more of who we really are, to center our lives in our Real Self (John Sanford, 82), or to express our soul (Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness). Sometimes we experience the invitation to new life as a sense of lack, a sense that we have been on the wrong track and need to change, a sense that we have done wrong and need forgiveness and a new beginning. Sometimes when we hear God’s call to new life it causes us to recognize where we have hurt others or hurt ourselves. Isaiah experienced God and felt himself to be a person of unclean lips. Sometimes God’s invitation to new life is to a more genuine life and sometimes it is an invitation to a very different life because we have not been living well.
God calls us by name. God invites us to new life. God also always calls us to meaningful work in the world, to make a difference in the world, to touch others in positive ways. The voice of God saying to Isaiah, “Whom shall I send?” is no different from the voice of God to each of us – whom shall I send to love the world with my love, to do justice, to feed the hungry, to offer compassion, to help others hear my call to new life and new birth?
Today God calls to each of us, by name. God’ Spirit invites us to new life, just as Jesus invited Nicodemus to new life on that late show long ago. God’s Spirit invites us to new work in the world, just as Isaiah was invited so many years ago.
There are two songs, both country songs, that tell this story well. Both speak of life in terms of dancing. Garth Brooks has a song simply entitled “The Dance.” The story line is remembering a wonderful dance with a woman from whom he later separated, and the line that I find particularly memorable is “I could have missed the pain but I’d have had to miss the dance.” The video tells a more expansive story, showing pictures of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. I could have missed the pain, but I’d have had to miss the dance. Somehow I hear the voice of God calling my name in that, the Spirit of God inviting me to new life, to new birth to dance.
Lee Ann Womack also sings a wonderful song with the simple title, “I Hope You Dance.” I hope you never lose your sense of wonder/You get your fill to eat but always keep that hunger/May you never take one single breath for granted/God forbid love ever leave you empty-handed/I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean/Whenever one door closes I hope one more opens/Promise me that you’ll give faith a fighting chance/And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance… I hope you dance. I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance/Never settle for the path of least resistance/Livin’ might mean takin’ chances but they’re worth takin’/Lovin’ might be a mistake but it’s worth makin’/Don’t let some hell bent heart leave you bitter/When you come close to sellin’ out reconsider/Give the heavens above more than just a passing glance/And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance… I hope you dance.
Somehow I hear the voice of God calling my name in that, the Spirit of God inviting me to new life, to new birth, to dance. I hope you hear God calling your name this morning inviting you to new life, new birth, and I hope you dance! Amen.

Garth Brooks, "The Dance

Lee Ann Womack, "I Hope You Dance

Winged and Wild Wind

2009-06-01T23:45:00.002-05:00

Sermon preached Pentecost Sunday May 31, 2009

Text: Acts 2:1-21

Today is Pentecost Sunday, and I want to talk about Spirit, about wind, but I don’t intend to be long-winded.
Let’s begin with an experiment. As you are able fold your hands together. Notice which thumb is closest to you. Now fold them the other way. It feels uncomfortable, doesn’t it? It gets harder. Fold your arms if you can. Which arm is on top, which hand tucked. Try to do it the opposite way. It is not easy, is it?
Once upon a time there was a group of people, a group that had been through a difficult time. But they were together when suddenly all heaven broke loose. A sound like a strong, driving wind is heard. Visions of flames appear. People begin to speak out, not in any orderly manner, but all at once, and in different languages. As chaotic as this sounds, a gathering crowd hears it and hears something remarkable – their own language. The crowd is amazed and bewildered. Was there a party going on here? Had this gathered group broken out wine so early in the day? The group makes another claim, this is God’s doing, this is what happens when God’s Spirit shows up – it is like having a winged and wild wind blow through the neighborhood and you can never be sure of all the effects.
How utterly, amazingly strange that the church whose story of origin is found in this text (Pentecost is considered the “birthday of the church”) has come more often to be seen as a place of folded hands rather than of a winged and wild wind, of a raucous party where wine is being shared. Folded hands are more comfortable the way they have always been folded. The church of Jesus Christ and of the Spirit has often been a staid, comfortable place where change is at best tolerated, but only when absolutely necessary. We need to be more a place of the winged and wild wind.
Let me share with you one of my favorite observations about Christian faith. It is offered by Patrick Henry, who, when he wrote this, was executive director of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St. John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota. Once upon a time the term “Christian” meant wider horizons, a larger heart, minds set free, room to move around. But these days “Christian” sounds pinched, squeezed, narrow. Many people who identify themselves as Christians seemed to have leapfrogged over life, short-circuited the adventure…. Curiosity, imagination, exploration, adventure are not preliminary to Christian identity, a kind of booster rocket to be jettisoned when spiritual orbit is achieved. They are part of the payload. (The Ironic Christian’s Companion, 8-9) Exploration, imagination, curiosity, larger heart, wider horizons, minds set free, adventure – these are words more in tune with a Spirit that is a winged and wild wind.
When God’s Spirit is present there is love as comfort, healing, tender care. Psychoanalyst Michael Eigen has said: There is no trauma-free world, no trauma-free space in real life…. Life is traumatizing. Trauma hits and keeps on hitting. It is part of who we are. Our very personalities have self-traumatizing aspects. (Conversations with Michael Eigen, 116, 131) I am in a privileged position to hear about some of pain people experience in their lives – their own deteriorating health, the deteriorating health of a loved one, loss of a job, relationship turmoil and dissolution, struggles with meaning and purpose, struggles with addictive behavior. I believe God cares deeply about people in pain and experiencing trauma and that the Spirit of God is often a gentle, healing presence.
God’s Spirit is also a winged and wild wind and where the Spirit of God is present there is creativity, change, and things are shaken up. Hear the story. The Spirit arrives and diverse people who may never before have been together are now together. People who have only heard faintly about God’s deeds of power are now hearing clearly in a language they can understand about this God whose Spirit is a winged and wild wind. A man like Peter whose life vacillated between foolish bravado and cowardly denial becomes a courageous spokesperson for the Jesus community.
The Spirit who is like a winged and wild wind shakes things up and we need to be open to that Spirit.
We need to be open to that Spirit in our individual lives. Yes, we need God’s gentle caring and healing presence, but we also need to be shaken up, moved, changed. Eigen says that there are no trauma-free spaces in life, but he also says that parts of our own personalities are self-traumatizing. We do things that hurt ourselves and hurt others. We can get caught in patterns of behavior that are harmful to ourselves and others. Part of our healing can be and often needs to be change, being shaken up a bit. Beyond that, God invites us to an adventure, to exploration, a larger heart, a more open mind, a wider horizon, and if we are going to follow it will require change.
This week I attended the Minnesota Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. Twenty-five years ago I attended my first annual conference where I was ordained a deacon in The United Methodist Church, became a probationary member of the conference and was appointed pastor of The United Methodist Church in Roseau. Being there this year I couldn’t help but think about my life, and how following the winged and wild wind of God’s Spirit has taken me to unimagined places – this shy, quiet kid from a family that was not steeped in church now the pastor of a large congregation getting up in front of people week after week and at Annual Conference spending time at the microphone explaining legislation that was voted on at General Conference last year. It is amazing to me.
We need to be open to that Spirit in our life together as First United Methodist Church. We will be a place that folds its hands in prayer, but just as much we need to be a place of the Spirit that is a winged and wild wind. We will share hope and healing from the skyline, but we will know that to do that well requires shaking things up sometimes, requires creativity, asks of us imagination and an adventuresome spirit.
We have made some changes in worship and in the coming weeks, following months of discussion and consultation I will be sharing with you our plan for a new fall worship and education format. The change we have introduced in worship to date helps us understand the shape of worship and the shape of our lives. We welcome the Spirit and each other – knowing that God, in grace, has already welcomed us. We focus our attention to listen more deeply to the Spirit in our lives. We respond to God’s Spirit with our lives. That is the pattern not only for worship, but for living as Christians. This will be the basic pattern for worship here, with some wonderful variation within that pattern.
Beyond changes in our worship life I want to begin asking us to reframe how we talk about ministry together using one question – Whose lives are we touching? I’ve made no secret that I would like to see our church grow, but growth in and of itself is not the point – making a difference in people’s lives is. To ask how we are touching lives is a question that shapes our ministry with those already a part of our congregation. Are we helping our members and friends connect more deeply with God and with others? Are we helping them grow in faith so that their faith is a resource for them as they navigate the sometimes difficult and troubling waters of life? Are we helping them connect with God’s work in the world?
But I believe that God’s call for our church is also to reach out and touch other lives – the lives of the poor, the hungry, the lonely, the defeated, the discouraged, the despairing. That happens when a child is mentored. That happens when a meal is served to the hungry. That happens when gifts of music are shared in a nursing home. That happens when a cancer walk is organized. That happens when someone is greeted at a hospital. That happens when someone is invited to worship or another church group. It might happen if we were to hold a community meal in our parking lot some summer day just to help people celebrate life a little. Some of the lives we touch in some of these ways may become a part of our congregation. Many won’t, but a life will be touched, a positive difference will be made, and that’s what matters. How is it that the winged and wild wind of God’s Spirit wants to blow us out of this building to touch the lives of others?
We are a people on an adventuresome journey, inspired by God’s Spirit which is a winged and wild wind. YES!

Only the Lonely

2009-05-25T17:39:00.003-05:00

Sermon preached May 24, 2009

Texts: Psalm 88 (The Message); I Kings 19:1-13a; Mark 1:35-39

There is a red box in the atrium in which you can place suggestions for sermons. One of the suggestions in the box asks about what we might read that could be helpful, and while I am preaching today on a question drawn from the box, it is not that one. I will use that one some other time this summer.
While the question for today is not about reading, I want to begin by sharing with you a short passage from a book I just finished reading this week – Jon Hassler, North of Hope. Hassler was a Minnesota writer and North of Hope is set in Minnesota. It is the story of a young man who becomes a priest and of the young woman he loved in high school who has come back into his life now that they are both in their mid 40s. Libby is the woman’s name, and Libby has had a difficult life. You need to understand a little about this for the passage I want to share to make sense. Libby has been divorced twice, and her third husband is a doctor who has been sleeping with Libby’s daughter. It began when she was 16 and now the daughter is twenty-six and has been hospitalized for mental health reasons. The doctor has also been supplying drugs to a local tavern owner who has been selling them. Because she had discovered that this man had been sleeping with her daughter, Libby has left him. Just before the scene I am about to read Libby has just found out that her husband has died and she has asked her friend the priest to sleep with her, but he wouldn’t. This is just the kind of book you would expect your pastor to be reading – I know.
Rising from the bed, she had gone into the front room and looked out at Noonan’s Car Wash and the Buena Vista Apartments and was struck by the absurdity of living alone at age forty-four on a grimy street in a frigid city of strangers. She was unable to afford a used car. She was unable to get along with her daughter. She’d had a dolt and two perverts for husbands. She was so unbearably lonely that she’d frightened off the only good man she’d ever known by stripping like a whore in front of him. It was a relief to recognize after forty-four years of mistakes that they could all be gathered together and thought of as one overriding mistake. The mistake of having been born. (411)
Know what? I recommend this book.
The question that I pulled from the box was this: How can we experience loneliness in satisfying ways? How can we find God when alone? It is a good question for this weekend - the weekend of gratitude and remembrance. My earliest memories of Memorial Day are going with my mom and dad to her parents graves at Park Hill cemetery. Her parents died about a year apart when my mom was in her twenties – and I was only about 4 or 5. Loneliness is often a part of the experience of grief. This week I lost a great aunt, a woman who was like a third grandmother to me, and grief has again visited my door – and loneliness often comes calling as well.
Loneliness. The passage I read from North of Hope, set in the context of the story, may seem dramatic. But the experience of loneliness is real and sometimes deep and dramatic. It has always been so. Why God do you turn a deaf ear? Why do you make yourself scarce? For as long as I remember I’ve been hurting…. You made lover and neighbor alike dump me; the only friend I have left is Darkness. (Psalm 88) Can we experience loneliness in satisfying ways? Where is God in the midst of loneliness and can we connect with God there? What might our faith have to say about loneliness – about those times in our lives when we sing “only the lonely know the way I feel tonight”? I want to offer four succinct points.
The first point is that we will all know loneliness in our lives. I sometimes marvel at the paradox. We live in a crowded world. I believe that we are relational beings at our core, created for relationship and constituted by our relationships. Yet in this busy, crowded, relational world we experience loneliness – sometimes fleetingly and not too deeply, and at other times very deeply and profoundly. What makes Hassler’s novel work in the passage I read is that we can imagine unbearable loneliness because we have brushed up against it. The Psalmists words make sense because we may know at least something of what it is like to have darkness as our only friend. Henri Nouwen in his book Reaching Out, writes perceptively about loneliness. “Loneliness is one of the most universal human experiences…. It is an experience that enters into everyone’s life at some point” (14). Ironically, you don’t even need to be alone to feel lonely. Some of us know what it is like to feel quite alone in a room full of people. Teenage years, when we are often with people almost constantly can yet produce times of crushing loneliness, when we are afraid to share some important facet of ourselves for fear of being ridiculed or ostracized.
We will all know loneliness. Can there be some positive responses? What might our faith have to say to us?
My second point about loneliness is the first of three responses I think our faith suggests. Sometimes we should seek to work our way out of loneliness by finding friends. Okay, so this is not necessarily the most profound advice ever given, but still it is true. Maybe that begins by admitting our loneliness. One of the beauties of the Psalms is the range of human emotion they capture and Psalm 88, by expressing a deep loneliness invites us to admit to ourselves that we can be lonely. We don’t need to hide that. Some days we are going to have lousy days, and a part of that could be feeling terribly alone. One response, then, is to reach out to make friends. I didn’t quote a Scripture text for this point today, focusing readings on other parts of loneliness, but there are plenty of places in the New Testament where Christians are encouraged to embrace others, to love and care for others, to make friends. When we are lonely, we can seek out friends, and one irony in all this is that after admitting our loneliness, we often need to bracket it to be a good friend to others. It is my experience that beginning a conversation with “I am desperately lonely, will you be my friend,” is not often the best first move in a friendship. It may be what we are feeling, but we would do well to open ourselves to the other, to make friends by being a good friend and asking how others are doing.
But loneliness is not that easily avoided. We have friends, and still will have times of loneliness. Can it ever be satisfying? Where is God in the midst of this? Knowing that loneliness cannot always be avoided through friendship, we also need times when we embrace loneliness. I appreciate the way Henri Nouwen puts it: Instead of running away from our loneliness and trying to forget or deny it, we have to protect it and turn it into a fruitful solitude. To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude (22). The Scriptures have many examples of people turning loneliness into solitude, some even seeking solitude. Elijah, lonely and despondent, has the desert of loneliness turned into solitude as God speaks to him in “a sound of sheer silence.” Jesus takes time away to go to a deserted place to pray.
What do we discover when we embrace our loneliness, stay with it awhile, and let it become solitude? I think we discover something of ourselves in that process. Jazz critic Stanley Crouch wrote a review of a new book about Duke Ellington in the most recent issue of Harper’s. I read it in-between chapters of Hassler’s book. In his article, Crouch makes this profound observation. People are uncomfortable in silence because it can breed needless contemplation and may engender a floating into the deeper world of the self (June 2009, 73). In silence and solitude, we can plumb depths within that remain hidden in a busy and noisy world. Not everything we discover within will be to our liking, but it is there and needs to be acknowledged and woven more or less helpfully into our lives. When those deeper dimensions of ourselves are woven into our lives unconsciously it is usually less helpful than if we can do this consciously. Solitude allows for that.
But this plunge into the deeper self is not narrowly self-absorbed. Knowing ourselves more deeply makes us better able to enter into relationships, friendships, love. Thomas Merton, a writer and Trappist monk once wrote: It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them. It is pure affection and filled with reverence for the solitude of others. (in Nouwen, 28). The poet Rilke, whose Letters to a Young Poet seem to be finding their way into recent sermons, wrote in one of those letters about the relationship between love and solitude. Solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person… it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself…. Love consists in this: the two solitudes protect and border and greet each other. (Seventh letter).
When we embrace our loneliness, stay with it awhile, and let it become solitude, I think we also discover something more of God. Next week we will celebrate Pentecost and the encounter of a crowd of people with God’s Spirit. But if the history of Christian spirituality is any indication, God is often encountered in quiet, in solitude. So strong is this tradition that a person like the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead could write in his book Religion in the Making: Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness…. Religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious. (Religion in the Making in Anthology, 472). In solitude we discover the truth proclaimed in a statement of faith used by the United Church of Canada: “In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us. We are not alone.” Elijah, lonely, despairing, wondering if his ministry is over and if his life should be, discovers solitude in the desert and hears the voice of God in the sound of sheer silence. Jesus, in the morning, while it was still dark, got up and went out to a deserted place to pray. The techniques to seeking God in solitude are many – verbal prayer, meditative prayer, silent prayer, focusing on the Scriptures – but God can be found when we are alone. In fact, God is often found when we are alone, when loneliness becomes solitude.
I cannot leave a discussion of loneliness and Christian faith without making a final point. Loneliness is a part of the human experience. We will all know it, and sometimes we will know its deep pain. If we sometimes know that, we need then to remember that others are lonely. Ah, look at all the lonely people, and these lonely people are people loved by God, people who God might want to reach through us. Psychologist Anthony Storr writes in one of his books: “to be able to be totally disregarded as a person is a kind of death in life against which we are compelled to fight with all of our strength” (quoted in Leo Buscaglia, Living, Loving, and Learning, 144). There are people in the world who feel totally disregarded as persons, people whose experiences of loneliness are long and painful and whose experiences of loneliness tend only toward isolation and not toward solitude. As Christians we need to reach out to such people in love and care. One wonderful part of the wedding liturgy in The United Methodist Church is the charge given all those at the wedding to “bear witness to the love of God in this world, so that those to whom love is a stranger will find in you generous friends.”
When a song comes on the radio that sings: “only the lonely” we know we are included, or when we hear “this is for all the lonely people” we know we are among them. Yet the truth of our faith is that God is with us always, so that our loneliness might be a solitude in which we learn more deeply about ourselves, a solitude in which we hear the voice of God in the sound of sheer silence. Out of that solitude we are to love, to seek friends and to be good friends, especially to the most desperately lonely people in the world, those who feel completely disregarded. May we so bear witness to the love of God in this world so that those to whom love is a stranger will find in us generous friends. Amen.

Uno Dos Tres

2009-05-22T16:23:00.002-05:00

Sermon preached May 17, 2009

Text: John 15:9-17

I want to begin this morning with a confession. I sometimes search the internet for humor to incorporate into my sermons. Searching the internet has its associated risks. For instance searching the internet for information about pasties might lead you to recipes for Cornish meat pastries or to sites about burlesque costumes.
So I was searching for humor about the complexity of life the other day and I came across a site with over thirty pages of math humor – it is almost as if the number of math jokes is infinite! One of the humor lines goes like this: Math is like love; a simple idea, but it can get complicated.
Life is like that – simple and complex. When our thinking about life gets too simple, we probably need to be reminded of its complexity – and when it gets too complex, some simplicity might be a good thing. The jazz artist Charles Mingus is quoted as saying: “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
So in our complex world, where can we look for creative simplicity, for a simplicity that does justice to the complicated beauty and mystery of the world yet helps guide us to a better life, for a simplicity that is not simplistic?
As Christians, we look to Jesus for that kind of creative simplicity, and we find it. Remember that Jesus’ faith tradition was a faith tradition that understood the purpose of God to be embodied in over 600 commandments. Now that is not a bad thing – boiling life down to 600 plus commandments – at least it is a finite number. But Jesus seemed dissatisfied with the way some understood these rules, these commandments. It is not that he necessarily objected to any of the commandments themselves, only to their misuse and misinterpretation. He seemed to think that there was a core to these commandments that some of the religious teachers of his time were neglecting, and he sought to make that core clear. He argued that one’s relationship to God and to others could be simplified. “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you abide in my love…. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you…. You are my friends if you do what I command you…. Go and bear fruit, fruit that will last…. Love one another.”
In the midst of this complex and complicated world, how do we find our way, how do we make sense of our lives, what does God ask of us, how should we treat each other? Jesus, with creative simplicity says, “Love.” He asks us to imagine our lives as fruit bearing plants – grow, take in nourishment from the sun and the earth and grow, spread, and bear fruit – and the fruit is love.
Love is certainly not simple in what it asks of us sometimes. The poet Rilke, in another place in his Letters to a Young Poet, writes (Seventh letter): Love is a high inducement for individuals to ripen, to strive to mature in the inner self, to manifest maturity in the outer world…. This is a great, demanding task, it calls one to expand one’s horizons. Maturing, expanding – these are not easy tasks and often not simple tasks. Another writer I have recently read argues that “the more honest we are with ourselves, the better our chances for living a satisfying and useful life” - - - something like Rilke’s love inviting us to maturing the inner self and manifesting maturity in the outer world. She goes on to say, however, “honesty about our own motives does not come easily to us” (Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 1). What love asks of us is often not simple, especially in our complicated world.
Yet when we see in love our life’s work, the fruit we should bear, the way we should reflect God in our lives, there is a creative simplicity in that. We know something of the way forward, something of who God is and what God asks of us.
But perhaps just a little more elaboration would be helpful, and for that we might look to the person whose interpretation of the Jesus tradition, of Christian faith, started the movement which became The United Methodist Church – John Wesley. John Wesley believed that love was our life’s work, the fruit our lives should bear, that love was the nature and name of God and that when we loved we best reflected God in our own lives. Wesley also thought we might need just a bit more direction than the single encouragement to love provides – so he came up with a simple plan for loving – as simple as one, two three - - - or in our global world as simple as: uno, dos , tres; an, der twas; eins, zwei, drei; or (especially for my friend Armas) yksi, kaksi, kolme.
John Wesley, as he was providing some structure for spiritual renewal groups, offered three rules that became known as “The General Rules of The Methodist Church” and have appeared in The Book of Discipline of our church since 1808. Here they are, the three simple rules Wesley used to elaborate on what it meant to live love: Do no harm, do good, attend to all the ordinances of God (things like worship, Scripture reading, prayer, communion).
Like love, these three simple rules can get complicated pretty quickly, and Wesley was not always good about keeping the simple rules simple. He often elaborated with lengthier lists about what each of these rules meant – and sometimes those elaborations were more helpful than others. When Wesley thought about do no harm he included things like wearing gold and costly apparel, but he also included “the giving or taking things on usury – unlawful interest” – perhaps a more applicable concept in our time. On doing good, Wesley is most often quoted as saying: Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can. Wonderful and inspiring, but maybe tiring, too. Wesley was not always a model of self-care.
But even if these rules can get complicated sometimes, they remain helpful sign posts for living a life of love. They seem a fine example of creative simplicity, and part of the testimony to that is their recent updating by retired United Methodist bishop Rueben Job. Job has recently published a wonderful brief book entitled Three Simple Rules: a Wesleyan way of living. And how does Bishop Job update Wesley’s rules – as follows: Do no harm, do good, stay in love with God. Bishop Job’s words about these three simple rules are moving, and I share some of them with you.
There are three simple rules that have the power to change the world. While they are ancient, they have seldom been put fully to the test. But when and where practiced, the world of things as they were was shaken until a new formation, a new world was formed.
We live in such a fast-paced, frenzied, and complicated world that it is easy to believe we are all trapped into being someone we do not wish to be and living a life we do not desire to live. We long for some way to cut through the complexities and turbulence of everyday life. We search for a way to overcome the divisiveness that separates, disparages, disrespects, diminishes, and leaves us wounded and incomplete….
I believe we have reached a place where, as a people of faith, we are ready to give serious consideration to another way, a more faithful way of living as disciples of Jesus Christ. This way must be so clear that it can be taught and practiced by everyone. It must be accessible and inviting to young and old, rich and poor, powerful and weak, and those of every theological persuasion. It is a large order, but we already have in our hands the blueprint for this way of living. And with God’s help and our willingness, it can change our world….
Do no harm. Do good. Stay in love with God.
These rules are simple, but the way is not easy. Only those with great courage will attempt it, and only those with great faith will be able to walk this exciting and demanding way. There are many other options for us to choose, but they are all lesser options and lead to lesser results that range from poor to disastrous. [7, 9, 10, 62]
Life is complicated and complex and I have little interest in searching for a simplicity that simplifies by ignoring the richness of life. I yearn for a creative simplicity, though, that gives direction and shape to life. I hear that in the invitation of Jesus to love, to let my life bear the fruit of love. I hear it in the Wesleyan elaboration on the Jesus tradition to love – do no harm, do good, stay in love with God. Of course these three simple rules might themselves be complicated sometimes. There will be times when I am unsure of what they ask of me, but in a creative way they can shape my life, our lives. They point a direction. They invite forward movement.
I believe that as we seek to follow Jesus command to love by following these three simple rules – do no harm, do good, stay in love with God – our lives will change as we mature and ripen within and expand our horizons, our church will change as we grow in our ability to be a transformative place, our world will change as we manifest love and maturity in it.
The way is always open, and we can always begin again – one, two, three; uno dos, tres; an, der, twas; eins, zwei drei; yksi, kaksi, kolme. Go! Amen.

Choosey People

2009-05-11T10:12:00.002-05:00

Sermon preached May 10, 2009 (Confirmation, Mother’s Day)

Texts: I John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8

A Mom asks her son who has just rushed in from school, “Do you want dinner?” “What are my choices?” he asks. “Yes or no,” replies his mother. The comedian Buddy Hackett used to say that his family menu when he was growing up had two items – take it or leave it.
As human beings we make choices. It is an important part of what it means to be human – making choices. We are a “choosey people.” But just because we are a choosey people in that sense does not mean we are a choosey people in the other sense – people who tend to make good choices. The fact is in all our choosing, we will make some good and some not so good decisions. I recently came across this list of signs that tell you you made a poor hotel choice:
• The complimentary news paper tells you that President Nixon just resigned
• The mint on the pillow starts moving when you come close to it
• Behind the picture on the wall are holes left by previous guests
• You have to wait until the guy next door is done with the towel so you can use it
• There’s a chalk outline on the bed when you pull back the covers
• The continental breakfast comes from the day old bakery next door

Unfortunately, we have all probably stayed at a place like that at least once in our lives. I remember the year I was appointed a district superintendent and had a training meeting in North Carolina. Our family decided to take a few vacation days and travel to Florida. We made an on-line hotel reservation in Orlando. When we arrived at our hotel we discovered that the room we had had a door to the outside and that door had a big enough gap on the bottom to accommodate small animals. We left that hotel.
Hopefully, the poor choices we make in life are about little things like hotels, or meals, or clothes (you know, the shirt you buy that looks great in the store but when you get it home somehow the trip transformed it into something hideous). We can probably not avoid every poor choice we will make in life, but one thing is certain, we cannot not choose - we are a choosey people.
The Scriptures that members of last year’s confirmation class, read, affirm that about human beings – that we have to make choices. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells the disciples over and over again, “abide in me.” They have a choice. They can abide in Jesus or not. They can continue down the road of faith, they can choose to endure, or not. Eugene Peterson translates “abide” as “make you home with.” Jesus is telling the disciples that they will need to choose again and again to make their home in Jesus and let him live in them.
In I John, early Christians are also asked to choose. They are asked to choose love – “let us love one another.” The writer makes his point strongly. You cannot claim to love God while not loving others – your sisters and brothers in the community of faith, your sisters and brothers in the world around you.
God created us as choosey people, as people with the power to choose.
Confirmation is about choices, about informed choices. This year’s confirmation class has been together and Julie and I have been their teachers for the past two years. It has been our pleasure to work with you. Before saying more about the content of confirmation, I want to say a few words about the class members.
Edited for privacy purposes

And so we have all been together for these past two years learning about being choosey people, learning about making informed choices.
Confirmation is about informed choices. At the end of confirmation you get to choose – will I celebrate the completion of confirmation, will I also affirm Christian faith, will I also join the church? Confirmation is about making adult choices about life and faith and church, but making such choices requires some information. How do you make choices when you don’t really know what the choices are? So we have talked together about Christian faith. Last year we focused on different passages from the Bible to talk about faith and life: the creation story to talk about God’s creativity and our responsibility for the environment, the story of Moses to talk about what it might mean to be a reluctant leader, the story of David to see how God uses even very flawed people to accomplish wonderful things, the prophets demand for justice, Jesus as teacher and healer, his death teaching us that God never leaves us even in the bleakest moments, and his resurrection which tells us that we are never without hope. We looked at New Testament letters to discover what living together in faith and grace is about. This year we spent time focused again on Jesus, God and the Bible. Then we talked about the church and The United Methodist Church. We talked about prayer and prayed. We talked about living Christian faith through compassion, justice, care for creation and breaking down barriers, and we concluded by discussing making choices as Christians.
Making choices – God created us to be a choosey people, people who need to choose. Now you in this year’s confirmation class know more about what choosing to be a Christian is all about, and the choice is yours. But the choice to live as a disciple of Jesus, to live Christian faith is not a once and for all choice. It is a part of the choices we make every day – not so much the choices of what to wear or what to eat, but the choices of who we will be, of what kind of person we want to be, of how we will treat others, of how we will live in relationship to others and to the world and to God.
In a few moments I am going to ask you – “Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world and repent of your sin?” Evil and wickedness will not disappear because you say “I do.” We watched part of the movie “To Kill a Mockingbird” to help us understand the strange language of “spiritual forces of wickedness” – and we saw them. Spiritual forces of wickedness are those attitudes and structures that dehumanize others. Tom Robinson, an African-American man is routinely called “boy.” It is a spiritual force of wickedness which entrapped many. The prosecuting attorney is shocked that Tom feels pity for a white woman, as if an African-American is incapable of this human emotion. While the film is set in the south during the depression, such dehumanizing attitudes have not gone from the planet, and you will choose whether or not to continue to reject them. We see spiritual forces of wickedness when we hear the story of a man whose entire life was torn apart by drug use, and he ended up shooting himself in a police stand-off – not in New York or Los Angeles or Chicago, but up the North Shore (Quincy Pederson). We see spiritual forces of wickedness when we see stories about human trafficking, as on Frontline this past Tuesday night. There I was at home thinking about confirmation and how best to explain the strange language of spiritual forces of wickedness, and there they were.
Then you will be asked, “Will you use the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?” And we watched as Atticus Finch used his freedom, his intellect, his integrity to defend Tom Robinson, and we can look to Nelson Mandela, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and countless others to teach us what this means. But we will have to choose again and again and again to use our freedom and power wisely and well.
Then I will ask you, “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Savior, put your whole trust in his grace and promise to serve him as Lord in union with the church which Christ has opened to all people.” As I think about this question I am reminded of the words author David Foster Wallace used at the commencement address for Kenyon College in 2005, now published as This is Water: Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship… is that pretty much anything else you worship eats you alive. If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life –then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough…. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you…. Worship power – you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. You don’t get to choose whether or not to worship, but you do get to choose what to worship, and you have to make that choice again and again.
Such choices, even when informed choices may seem like a lot to ask of fourteen and fifteen year olds, but you are making all kinds of choices about your lives right now, and the choice of how you will use your freedom, your power, your gifts, the choice of what you will worship happens now. But this choice is not just made once, now. All of us need to keep making choices about how we will use our freedom and power. All of us need to keep making choices about who or what we will worship. All of us need to make choices about renouncing the spiritual forces of wickedness, about resisting evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.
So today as you are making choices about abiding with Jesus, about living with integrity and love, about renouncing the spiritual forces of wickedness, about resisting evil, injustice and oppression, about who you will worship and who you will follow, we make these choices again. Today you make choices and I invite you to build on these choices in the years to come. We are here as a church to help you do that and you join us to help us do that too.
The writer Ernest Becker once wrote: religion is an experience and not merely a set of intellectual concepts to meditate upon, it has to be lived (Denial of Death, 272). Christian faith is not a single choice, but continuing choices about life. It is not simply what you learn in confirmation, it is how you live your life from here on out. Continue to look to Jesus. Continue to struggle against all that dehumanizes. Continue to use your freedom and power to love. We are with you. God is with us all. We can love because we were first loved by God. It is up to us to respond to that love as we choose, day in and day out. Amen.

The Gospel According to Elton John

2009-05-04T22:34:00.003-05:00

Sermon preached May 3, 2009

Texts: Acts 4:5-12; I John 3:16-24

Last week I asked you about a singer, Susan Boyle, and many of you knew who she was – the woman who has gained fame from the YouTube broadcast of her appearance on Britain’s Got Talent. So this week I am going to begin with another question about a singer – Elton John. How many of you have heard of him? Shout out some of the songs you know sung by Elton John.
I don’t remember the first Elton John song I ever heard. I would guess that it might have been “Rocket Man” or “Crocodile Rock,” but I do remember one of the most memorable songs of his I have heard – and I want to play it for you. I hope you will be patient and listening for the next three plus minutes. [see end of the post for a link to YouTube and this song)
It is a simple song simply titled “Love Song.” But the first time I heard it was not in the Elton John version. I first heard “Love Song” at a place called the Solid Rock in Superior – a Christian coffee house. Among those in the band playing the song were Mark, who is now an Episcopal bishop in Canada; John, who is a physician here in Duluth; and Larry, a hippie turned Christian whose family lived across the street from mine when I was growing up. They played the song along with others in order to share and celebrate Christian faith, and I think they were right to do so. The gospel is here in this Elton John song.

The words I have to say, may well be simple but they’re true
Until you give your love, there’s nothing more that we can do.

Love is the opening door
Love is what we came here for
No one could offer you more
Do you know what I mean?
Have your eyes really seen?

Love is the key we must turn
Truth is the flame we must burn
Freedom the lesson we must learn
Do you know what I mean?
Have your eyes really seen?

This is what we hear in our Scriptures for today. “Let it be known to all of you, and to all… that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth” (Acts 4:10). There is certainly more to this story from Acts than this, but it is certainly one important part of the story – Jesus Christ heals and frees, and Peter and John have done a good deed for someone sick out of love for that person and out of love for Jesus.
“Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action…. And this is God’s commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another.” (I John 3:18, 23) Love is the opening door, love is what we came here for, no one could offer you more. Do you know what I mean? Have your eyes really seen? The man healed by Peter and John had been healed and freed by God’s love known in Jesus Christ. That’s the good news – God’s love is powerful to heal our broken places. That’s the good news, we are invited to know that love and to share that love in truth and action.
This past week I received an invitation to speak next fall at the College of St. Scholastica. I was asked if I would be a part of a series, “What Do Protestants Think About…” The topic for Methodists is “what do Methodists think about perfection.” In some ways it is a daunting task, though I have already said “yes.” It is daunting in part because it is hazardous business to try and say what United Methodists might say about anything. When you get two United Methodists in a room, you probably have three opinions! (I might use that!) One place I will turn is to John Wesley, and especially to his brief definition of Christian perfection. By perfection I mean the humble, gentle, patient love of God and our neighbor, ruling our habits, attitudes, words, and actions. (“Brief Thoughts on Christian Perfection” January 27, 1767). These words remind me of the words of another British subject: Love is the opening door, love is what we came here for, no one could offer you more. Do you know what I mean? Have your eyes really seen?
Last week I also said we, as Christians are flawed but called people. We are called by God to know we are loved. We are called by God to nurture love in our innermost beings. We are called by God to let love flow through us to touch the world for its healing, its well-being - - - good health in the name of Jesus Christ.
The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who I also quoted last week on loving and living the questions, wrote in the same Letters to a Young Poet: Love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. (Letter 7, p. 68)
Love is difficult. We may be flawed people, but God calls us to the difficult task of love – the difficult tasks of love, for love is encompassing. Love is the opening door - Love is what we came here for - No one could offer you more - Love is the key we must turn - Truth is the flame we must burn - Freedom the lesson we must learn. Somehow all that is encompassed in love – truth, freedom - - - to which we would add justice and peace and reconciliation and beauty. Love is difficult in many ways, but it is difficult in one way because of how much it asks: concern for the hungry, justice for the poor, inclusion of the excluded, care of the earth, peace-making, healthy interpersonal relationships – including marriage and parenting, love of self, and maybe hardest of all – love of enemies. Even as we strive diligently in love to reduce the number of enemies anyone may have, we realistically know that there will be enemies, and we are to love them. It is difficult – as difficult as discerning whether or not harsh interrogation techniques are consistent with love of enemies.
Good songs and good poems share similarities. They seek to move us with their words, they seek to open the world up to us just a little more. “Love Song” does that, and does it in part because of the way it communicates the gospel. Here is a poem that also does that.

Late Fragment Raymond Carver (All of Us, 294)

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Do you know yourself beloved on the earth? Do you feel that? Love is what we come here for and if we as a church are not communicating our belovedness before God, then we need to make some changes. Do you know what I mean? Have your eyes really seen?
We are beloved by the God of Jesus Christ who wishes us well, desires our well-being in community with others and the world. As beloved of God we are to share that love lavishly, difficult as that task can be.

Sabbath Poem I, 1998, Wendell Berry, Given, 55

Whatever happens,
those who have learned
to love one another
have made their way
to the lasting world
and will not leave,
whatever happens.

Love is the bottom line of Christian faith, of the good news in Jesus Christ, of the gospel. Love is the opening door, love is what we came here for, no one could offer you more.
This week I attended a workshop on worship and one of the speakers was hymn writer Marty Haugen. Marty shared a story told him by a friend, a pastor. In Albuquerque a single mother had two children, the oldest of whom was five. One day the five year old ran out into the street and was struck and killed by a police officer. During the time following the death, while the pastor was visiting the mother, the chief of police paid a call. When he arrived the first thing the mother said to him was I forgive the police officer, the police department, the city. It was not your fault. The chief of police was stunned to tears. On the day of the funeral the pastor noticed a quiet Latino man at the back of the church, and soon determined that he was the officer whose car had struck the dead child. After the service, during the dinner that followed, the pastor noticed the single mother sitting with the officer, and the pastor told Marty Haugen, looking in that young man’s eyes, I saw salvation.
That pastor could see salvation because that mother had given love to someone who desperately needed to know he was beloved on the earth. He was now standing before others in good health, better health, in the name of Jesus Christ. A young mother, grieving the loss of her child, loved in truth and in action. Love is the opening door, love is what we came here for, no one could offer you more. Do you know what I mean? So whatever happens, love and be loved, whatever happens. When economic downturns happen, love. When the flu threatens our world, love. When terrorism strikes fear, love. When you hurt and grieve, love. Whatever happens love. Know yourself loved, call yourself beloved. Do you know what I mean?

Elton John, "Love Song"

A Truck, A Bar, A Church

2009-04-26T22:08:00.002-05:00

Sermon preached April 26, 2009

Text: Luke 24:36b-48

In the congregation of a small town church was a woman named Mildred. Mildred considered herself an outstanding member of the church and community. She also was the self-appointed monitor of the church’s morals and was good at sharing her concerns about others moral failings. Many members of the church did not approve of Mildred’s vigilance or her gossip. However, they feared her enough to maintain their silence.
Then came George. George was new to town and new to the church, when Mildred accused him of having a drinking problem. She told him she had seen his old pickup parked in front of the town’s only bar one afternoon. She emphatically told George, and then several others, that everyone who saw his truck parked there would know exactly what he was doing.
George, a man of few words, stared at Mildred for a moment and then just turned and walked away. He didn’t explain his actions, defend himself, or deny anything. He said nothing.
Later that evening, George quietly parked his pickup in front of Mildred’s house and walked home. He left the truck there all night. A truck, a bar, a church.
What words might we use to describe church people? I hope we would include kind, compassionate, caring, loving, joyful, fair, open-minded, generous, big-hearted. That is often true. But we are also painfully aware from our own experience, and from the experience of others that church people have been known to be narrow, rigid, judgmental, self-righteous. Somewhere along the line some of picked up the idea that to be a Christian, to be a church person is to be that kind of person – a Mildred sure of her own virtue and policing the virtue of others, self-righteous, priggishly perfect, seeing no need of growth in her own life she finds areas for growth in others.
How different a picture we get in Luke of Christians, of church people. Listen again to some of the adjectives used to describe the disciples in this story – startled, terrified, frightened, disbelieving, wondering. These are not people who have it all together all the time, who have no room for growth or improvement. At the same time, these are the exact same people who have the peace of Christ, who are joyful, and who are called by Christ – “you are witnesses.” The picture of Christians, of church people in the twenty-fourth chapter of Luke is a picture of people who are flawed but called.
The good news of Christian faith is that God meets us where we are, accepts us as we are, loves us and calls us in every moment and circumstance of our lives. God meets us, accepts us, loves us, calls us with all our imperfections, with our doubts and questions, with our anxieties, with our hurts.
Yes, God invites us to work on our imperfections. God forgives and seeks to repair the torn places in our lives.
God seeks to give us peace so that we might overcome our fears and anxieties, or keep them in check. God seeks to heal our hurts.
God is with us even as we ask questions, even as we doubt. God invites us to live our questions in ways that help us appreciate the complex beauty and mystery of our lives and of the world.
The good news is that we don’t wait until everything is perfect in our lives to be witnesses for Jesus Christ through words and deeds of love, through offering hospitality and welcome, through care, through working for justice, through compassion, through kindness. I would argue that one way we witness to God’s love in Jesus Christ is precisely through being honest and humble and genuine – not pretending to be people we are not, not hiding behind a façade of self-righteousness.
About a year and a half ago, I preached a sermon in which I talked about how I would like people to be different because they are a part of this church, and one of the ways I hoped people would be different is that they would be more genuine - - - with the capacity to enter into deeper and more genuine relationships. I hope people are freed here to ask their deepest and most probing questions about life and faith. I don’t want people who join our church to be able to mouth pious platitudes that don’t connect with their lives. I want them to be able to engage the language of faith profoundly, deeply with all their heart, soul and mind. If I could take a full page ad out in the newspaper about our church, I might have it say – “Know the Faith? – Think Again.” I want people to be able to think profoundly and feel deeply because they are a part of this church. I believe that being a Christian is as much being a part of an on-going dialogue as it is affirming certain ideas. Christianity is not as much about memorizing answers as it is about asking questions and engaging in a conversation that has been happening since Jesus.
I love the words of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke on living questions. In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke wrote: Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it live your way into the answer. (34-35, Letter 4) Christians need not have all the answers. We can be startled and terrified and doubting and wondering and live the questions and still respond to Christ’s call to be witnesses.
In the early history of Christianity there were various phases of persecution by the Roman Imperial government. One intense period of persecution occurred in the early 300s, not long before Constantine gave favored status to Christianity with the empire. During this persecution, Christian churches were ransacked and Christian Scriptures were to be turned over to be burned. Some Christians were executed when they refused to do so and some Christians complied. When the persecution ended there was a significant quandary facing the church – how to regard priests and bishops who had turned over Scriptures and other religious objects to the Roman authorities. Donatus of Carthage argued that these apostate priests and bishops needed to go through and extended period of repentance and then be re-baptized. He and those who took his position argued further that the ministry of those priests and bishops who were not re-baptized was deficient. A Donatist bishop argued that the church should be like the Ark of Noah, well-tarred both inside and out. It should retain the good water of baptism and keep out the defiling waters of the world (Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 221). St. Augustine, on the other hand argued against re-baptism and for the validity of the ministry of even those priests who had not remained as faithful as they might have. He saw the church as dynamic, a place where growth was possible and needed (222-223). The church has within it imperfect people, sometimes frightened, sometimes with a faltering faith. Still Jesus tells us we are witnesses – flawed yet called. We can be forgiven and freed to do God’s work in the world.
Christians, people of the church are not immune from the hurts and pains of life. We are wounded by hurtful words. We grieve in the face of loss. Healing takes time, and there are not always many times when we feel without some pain, some hurt. Jesus offers us words of peace and we gratefully accept, but the words can take time to penetrate to the depth of our hurting hearts, our wounded souls.
Two 9/11 widows, grateful for the outpouring of support they received after their own loss, started thinking about the women of Afghanistan, who, when widowed, lose status in that society. Because of that, they find their difficult lives even more difficult. These two women raised money and formed a foundation called Beyond the 11th to help Afghan widows. They traveled to Afghanistan to meet the widows they were helping. (Feasting on the Word, 428) Wounded, yet healers. Frightened and wondering, yet reaching out to share love with the world.
How many of you know who Susan Boyle is. Susan Boyle has been all over the internet. She is from a small village in Scotland, in her late forties, and in the words of a columnist from the Los Angeles Times, “unemployed, with frizzy hair, midriff bulge and a figure like a spinster teacher from the 1940s” (The Week). She claims to have never been kissed. Well Susan recently appeared on television, on the British version of American Idol called Britain’s Got Talent. Her appearance has been viewed over 100 million times on You Tube, but not by Susan because she does not have a computer. Susan was called “Susie Simple” in school because of a mild learning disability. So why has she become so famous, so watched?
Susan got on this television show, which allows amateurs to share talent with an audience and three judges. She was everything she has been described as – not attractive by most standards, dressed in a rather plain dress. The judges, you could tell, were not expecting much. Many in the audience were rolling their eyes when she said she was going to sing “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical Les Miserables. Then she started to sing and it was remarkable. In the words of the columnist from the LA Times – “her piercingly beautiful voice stunned the slack-jawed judges and touched the hearts of everyone who heard her. If you haven’t seen this, find a computer and watch it. When I post my sermon this week, I will include a link. It sends chills up your spine.
Susan Boyle is, in many ways, a symbol of Christians and church people as Luke describes them in chapter 24: plain, ordinary, sometimes maybe even a little ugly - - - he uses words like startled, terrified, disbelieving, frightened, wondering. Yet they are loved as they are, given peace in Jesus Christ, called even as they are flawed.
Let’s be honest. Our lives are not always beautiful. We mess up sometimes. We wonder and doubt and question sometimes. We are anxious sometimes. Yet God still calls us. Jesus Christ still offers peace and we know joy in that call, the call to witness to the love of God in Jesus Christ. Into our plain ordinary lives, God has placed a song, and the call of God in Jesus Christ is for each of us to sing our song as best we can – even when we are not perfect, even when we don’t have it all together. Startled, terrified, disbelieving, frightened, wondering - - - given peace and joy, called to witness in word and deed to God’s love. Sing out!!!! Amen.

Susan Boyle Video