Everybody is a Star

Sermon preached September 20, 2009

Text: Mark 9:30-37

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

Into the Great Wide Open

Sermon preached September 13, 2009

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

Offensive Words

Sermon preached September 6, 2009

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

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

Life on the Strip

Sermon preached August 30, 2009

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

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

Escher, Mobius Strip

Forty Years Ago Today

Sermon preached August 23, 2009

Text: Psalm 84

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

Paul McCartney "Gratitude"

Everyday People

Sermon preached August 9, 2009

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

Sly and the Family Stone, "Everyday People

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

You Da Man

Sermon preached August 2, 2009

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

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