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.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Sunday, June 7, 2009
The New Late Show With
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
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
Monday, June 1, 2009
Winged and Wild Wind
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!
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!
Monday, May 25, 2009
Only the Lonely
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.
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.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Uno Dos Tres
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.
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.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Choosey People
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.
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.
Monday, May 4, 2009
The Gospel According to Elton John
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"
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"
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