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"
Friday, August 28, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Heel or Heal
Sermon preached July 19, 2009
Text: Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
Thoughts about God vary widely. Here are a couple of notes to God penned by children. Thank you for the baby brother but what I wanted was a puppy. Joyce. Dear God, If you give me a genie lamp like Alladin I will give you anything you want except my money or my chess set. Raphael. Here we have images of God as a cosmic waiter taking requests and filling them as best as God can - - - and sometimes missing the mark.
Not all our images for God, not all the images for God in our minds or in our culture are so gentle or benign. Some of the images used for God are more terrifying than funny.
The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the Fire. Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (July 8, 1741)
Okay, so that sermon is two hundred sixty some years old, but the image of God used there remains current in many strands of the Christian Church. The National Association of Evangelicals includes in their statement of faith a phrase about the “resurrection of damnation” that occurs in the future. The statement of faith of the Vineyard Church includes a belief about “eternal conscious punishment” for the wicked. Behind those phrases one sees Edwards image of an angry God, a God whose wrath and anger burn hot against those who do not fall in line. Their fate is fire, the resurrection of damnation, eternal conscious punishment.
When I encounter such doctrines I am reminded of the words of the third century Christian theologian Origen, who wrote that there were people in the church who, “while believing indeed that there is none greater than the Creator, in which they are right, yet believe such things about him as would not be believed of the most savage and unjust of men” (On First Principles, 184-5/253; p. 271). The God portrayed by Edwards seems a God most interested in us groveling, engaging in fearful obedience, clipping along at God’s heel. The image of God as master and humans as obedient puppies being taught to heel is not far from Edwards imagery, nor necessarily from those who would find Edwards imagery congenial today.
I believe some of these images haunt us. If they were ever a part of our experience of Christian faith, they often remain deeply embedded in our souls and we continue to struggle with them. These images of God sometimes also afflict our national life as some persons somehow take on the role as executors of God’s wrath and vengeance - setting off suicide bombs, flying planes into buildings, shooting physicians whose practices they oppose. Certainly the vast majority of people whose image of God fits in with this angry, wrathful judge do not engage in violent behavior, but the images are not simply benign.
While the Bible has a great deal to say about judgment, an excessive focus on that, on God as judge, is unbalanced and in many ways unbiblical. It certainly does not comport well with the central aspects of Jesus' teaching. Marcus Borg, in his book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time contends that “Jesus invited his hearers to see god not as the judge… but as gracious and compassionate” (82). Jesus himself, in Borg’s words is, for Christians, “the face of God… the side of God turned toward us” (137).
If we take Jesus as our definitive clue into the nature of God, as the side of God turned toward us, as the face of God, what does that tell us? As Jesus went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things…. And wherever Jesus went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.
The God of Jesus Christ, the God whose face shines in the face of Jesus, whose hands reach out in the hands of Jesus, who speaks in some remarkable way through the words of Jesus, this God is a God of care, of compassion, of healing. Healing of broken lives is what this God desires more, not groveling and heeling like some fearful pet. Does this God judge? Yes, but I would argue God’s judgment is not for the sake of punishment but for the sake of diagnosis – here are the broken places in your heart, mind, soul, world and they need healing and repair. Judgment is a function of compassion, not anger. God’s judgment might be something like these words from a psychoanalyst. “The ways we protect ourselves tend also to be the ways we imprison ourselves” (Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, On Kindness, 62-63). Hearing that, we know where to look to see our prisons and know something more about how to be more free, more whole, how to be healed and well.
God is a God of healing and well-being wholeness and God will use a variety of means to bring that healing and well-being and wholeness into our lives. The church exists to bring God’s healing into the lives of those who are a part of it and to share that healing with all the world. We are here for each other, and for our community and world. We celebrate the good news of God’s love here, help each other see those broken places, and help each other heal. We encourage each other to reach out into the world with hope and healing.
I believe Lake Superior is something God uses to bring healing into people’s lives. In some ways that is remarkable, because the lake’s effects can be cruel. Fifty degrees in July has a certain cruelty to it. More profoundly, we know that the Lake has taken its toll. Some of us remember the Edmund Fitzgerald. All of us know about the chapel in our church commemorating four lives lost in the Lake. Still this powerful, cold, mysterious presence is often a source of healing. Its fresh waters sustain our lives. Its navigable waters provide recreation and an economic resource. Its wonder and beauty nurtures our souls, our imaginations. When I was in college, I spent a number of thoughtful moments listening to the waters of the Lake lap up against the shore as I thought about my life. It is a discipline I should renew. I am often taken by the beauty of the Lake, on a sunny day the purity of its blue waters, on a full-moon night, its ability to reflect the bright orange glow. For me, and for many, Lake Superior is a healing presence, one of the ways God’s healing touches our lives.
God is a God of compassion, care, healing. Today, I invite you to know that, to experience that. See the broken places in your life and let God touch them. See those places in your life where self-protection has become self-imprisonment, and let God’s love free you.
Experiencing God’s love, compassion and care, reflect it in your life. Care for others. Tend all that heals, including caring for places like Lake Superior. Work with God to bring more healing to the world’s broken places.
Alexie Torres-Fleming is the founder and executive director of Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice in the South Bronx. She was raised in a housing project in the South Bronx by parents who were Puerto Rican immigrants. By the time she was in her twenties, she has escaped the poverty of her neighborhood, living in a nice apartment in midtown Manhattan. But she sensed that God wanted something from her. She sensed God was calling her back to her neighborhood to be a force for healing, to see the healing power of the people that were still there. She returned to her old church and worked with it to organize against drugs in the neighborhood. She worked with others to organize a march through the neighborhood and about two hundred people showed up. Two weeks later, drug dealers, in retaliation, torched her church. She worked with others again to organize another march, even in the face of death threats – this time 1,200 people showed up to march – God’s healing power at work. Alexie saw God’s healing power working through one person in particular.
I learned what power was that day… from a man who was homeless as a teenager, who was an alcoholic, who raised four children in the South Bronx, who was a deli man. A man who talked about how they used to make him work in the back of the deli. If he needed something, they had a little hole in the wall where he could ask, because they didn’t want to see the brown people in the front of the deli. A man who, when I was a little girl, washed urine off the elevator walls…. On that day, this man, my father, taught me the greatest lesson about the poor and about power, because when I looked out at the crowd gathered to march, he was there. (Sojourners, July 2009, 34).
There are places in our lives that need healing. Open to God’s compassionate healing. There are places in the world that need healing. Let the power of God’s compassionate healing touch the world through you.
One final story. One evening a child had been watching the news before supper. When he was asked to say the table grace he added a little to it. “Dear God, take care of Mommy and Daddy, and my little sister, and Grandma, and please, God, take care of yourself, because if anything happens to you, we’re all sunk.” (Dick Van Dyke, Faith, Hope and Hilarity, 39). We all need the healing power of God’s compassion in our lives to help mend those broken places within. It comes to us in many ways, a friend, a church community, a book, a lake. The healing power of God’s compassionate love can touch the world through you, too. Amen.
Text: Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
Thoughts about God vary widely. Here are a couple of notes to God penned by children. Thank you for the baby brother but what I wanted was a puppy. Joyce. Dear God, If you give me a genie lamp like Alladin I will give you anything you want except my money or my chess set. Raphael. Here we have images of God as a cosmic waiter taking requests and filling them as best as God can - - - and sometimes missing the mark.
Not all our images for God, not all the images for God in our minds or in our culture are so gentle or benign. Some of the images used for God are more terrifying than funny.
The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the Fire. Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (July 8, 1741)
Okay, so that sermon is two hundred sixty some years old, but the image of God used there remains current in many strands of the Christian Church. The National Association of Evangelicals includes in their statement of faith a phrase about the “resurrection of damnation” that occurs in the future. The statement of faith of the Vineyard Church includes a belief about “eternal conscious punishment” for the wicked. Behind those phrases one sees Edwards image of an angry God, a God whose wrath and anger burn hot against those who do not fall in line. Their fate is fire, the resurrection of damnation, eternal conscious punishment.
When I encounter such doctrines I am reminded of the words of the third century Christian theologian Origen, who wrote that there were people in the church who, “while believing indeed that there is none greater than the Creator, in which they are right, yet believe such things about him as would not be believed of the most savage and unjust of men” (On First Principles, 184-5/253; p. 271). The God portrayed by Edwards seems a God most interested in us groveling, engaging in fearful obedience, clipping along at God’s heel. The image of God as master and humans as obedient puppies being taught to heel is not far from Edwards imagery, nor necessarily from those who would find Edwards imagery congenial today.
I believe some of these images haunt us. If they were ever a part of our experience of Christian faith, they often remain deeply embedded in our souls and we continue to struggle with them. These images of God sometimes also afflict our national life as some persons somehow take on the role as executors of God’s wrath and vengeance - setting off suicide bombs, flying planes into buildings, shooting physicians whose practices they oppose. Certainly the vast majority of people whose image of God fits in with this angry, wrathful judge do not engage in violent behavior, but the images are not simply benign.
While the Bible has a great deal to say about judgment, an excessive focus on that, on God as judge, is unbalanced and in many ways unbiblical. It certainly does not comport well with the central aspects of Jesus' teaching. Marcus Borg, in his book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time contends that “Jesus invited his hearers to see god not as the judge… but as gracious and compassionate” (82). Jesus himself, in Borg’s words is, for Christians, “the face of God… the side of God turned toward us” (137).
If we take Jesus as our definitive clue into the nature of God, as the side of God turned toward us, as the face of God, what does that tell us? As Jesus went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things…. And wherever Jesus went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.
The God of Jesus Christ, the God whose face shines in the face of Jesus, whose hands reach out in the hands of Jesus, who speaks in some remarkable way through the words of Jesus, this God is a God of care, of compassion, of healing. Healing of broken lives is what this God desires more, not groveling and heeling like some fearful pet. Does this God judge? Yes, but I would argue God’s judgment is not for the sake of punishment but for the sake of diagnosis – here are the broken places in your heart, mind, soul, world and they need healing and repair. Judgment is a function of compassion, not anger. God’s judgment might be something like these words from a psychoanalyst. “The ways we protect ourselves tend also to be the ways we imprison ourselves” (Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, On Kindness, 62-63). Hearing that, we know where to look to see our prisons and know something more about how to be more free, more whole, how to be healed and well.
God is a God of healing and well-being wholeness and God will use a variety of means to bring that healing and well-being and wholeness into our lives. The church exists to bring God’s healing into the lives of those who are a part of it and to share that healing with all the world. We are here for each other, and for our community and world. We celebrate the good news of God’s love here, help each other see those broken places, and help each other heal. We encourage each other to reach out into the world with hope and healing.
I believe Lake Superior is something God uses to bring healing into people’s lives. In some ways that is remarkable, because the lake’s effects can be cruel. Fifty degrees in July has a certain cruelty to it. More profoundly, we know that the Lake has taken its toll. Some of us remember the Edmund Fitzgerald. All of us know about the chapel in our church commemorating four lives lost in the Lake. Still this powerful, cold, mysterious presence is often a source of healing. Its fresh waters sustain our lives. Its navigable waters provide recreation and an economic resource. Its wonder and beauty nurtures our souls, our imaginations. When I was in college, I spent a number of thoughtful moments listening to the waters of the Lake lap up against the shore as I thought about my life. It is a discipline I should renew. I am often taken by the beauty of the Lake, on a sunny day the purity of its blue waters, on a full-moon night, its ability to reflect the bright orange glow. For me, and for many, Lake Superior is a healing presence, one of the ways God’s healing touches our lives.
God is a God of compassion, care, healing. Today, I invite you to know that, to experience that. See the broken places in your life and let God touch them. See those places in your life where self-protection has become self-imprisonment, and let God’s love free you.
Experiencing God’s love, compassion and care, reflect it in your life. Care for others. Tend all that heals, including caring for places like Lake Superior. Work with God to bring more healing to the world’s broken places.
Alexie Torres-Fleming is the founder and executive director of Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice in the South Bronx. She was raised in a housing project in the South Bronx by parents who were Puerto Rican immigrants. By the time she was in her twenties, she has escaped the poverty of her neighborhood, living in a nice apartment in midtown Manhattan. But she sensed that God wanted something from her. She sensed God was calling her back to her neighborhood to be a force for healing, to see the healing power of the people that were still there. She returned to her old church and worked with it to organize against drugs in the neighborhood. She worked with others to organize a march through the neighborhood and about two hundred people showed up. Two weeks later, drug dealers, in retaliation, torched her church. She worked with others again to organize another march, even in the face of death threats – this time 1,200 people showed up to march – God’s healing power at work. Alexie saw God’s healing power working through one person in particular.
I learned what power was that day… from a man who was homeless as a teenager, who was an alcoholic, who raised four children in the South Bronx, who was a deli man. A man who talked about how they used to make him work in the back of the deli. If he needed something, they had a little hole in the wall where he could ask, because they didn’t want to see the brown people in the front of the deli. A man who, when I was a little girl, washed urine off the elevator walls…. On that day, this man, my father, taught me the greatest lesson about the poor and about power, because when I looked out at the crowd gathered to march, he was there. (Sojourners, July 2009, 34).
There are places in our lives that need healing. Open to God’s compassionate healing. There are places in the world that need healing. Let the power of God’s compassionate healing touch the world through you.
One final story. One evening a child had been watching the news before supper. When he was asked to say the table grace he added a little to it. “Dear God, take care of Mommy and Daddy, and my little sister, and Grandma, and please, God, take care of yourself, because if anything happens to you, we’re all sunk.” (Dick Van Dyke, Faith, Hope and Hilarity, 39). We all need the healing power of God’s compassion in our lives to help mend those broken places within. It comes to us in many ways, a friend, a church community, a book, a lake. The healing power of God’s compassionate love can touch the world through you, too. Amen.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Dance, Dance, Dance
Sermon preached July 12, 2009
Text: II Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19
Warning – the following story is rated PG-13. Now that I have your attention… You heard about the fundamental Christian preacher who spoke often against the evils of premarital sex - - - he was concerned it might lead to dancing.
The church deals with serious matters. What we do here is serious business. A couple of weeks ago I quoted psychotherapist Michael Eigen to describe the ministry of the church: “in this business we deal with broken lives and heartbreak, and we do so with our own broken hearts” (The Electrified Tightrope, 277). That is serious stuff.
In a couple of weeks I will be in Chicago teaching a ten-day class in Christian ethics for persons licensed for pastoral ministry in The United Methodist Church. Unlike ordained pastors, those licensed are not required to complete seminary, but have to do summer course work along the lines of a seminary curriculum, and I was asked to teach the class in Christian ethics. One of the texts for the course is The Pastor as Moral Guide. I recently finished reading it and heard powerful stories within it about the kind of serious issues the church confronts in its ministry: a family with two hard-working parents seeking help with their fourteen year-old who has violated the towns curfew and is probably smoking marijuana; a couple married nineteen years with two adolescent daughters on the verge of a divorce because the woman is seeing someone else who she says makes her free and happy and loved; another marriage where the wife is being physically abused by her husband; a church staff situation where the senior pastor is made aware that the associate pastor, who is married with young children, is having an affair with a parishioner who is also married with young children. It is easier to use stories from the book, but from my own experience I can tell you that they are not out of the ordinary for the ministry of the church. There is heartbreak in the world and the church is about the serious business of bringing healing. We need to be a place where we see the heartbreak in our own lives, where we see the heartbreak in the world, and where we offer each other and the world the healing power of God’s love in Jesus Christ.
But if we are not also teaching you how to dance, if we are not teaching each other how to dance with all our might, we are not being the church. We are not doing our job. The church deals with serious issues, but we should never be dour. Those churches that through history condemned anything that looked joyous, raucous, that smacked of laughter and pleasure, somehow must have missed this part of the Bible. David and all the house of Israel were dancing before the Lord with all their might, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals. Truth be told, most of us probably grew up in churches that while they did not condemn dancing, also didn’t think it was very “proper” for church – which was always to be quiet and pious and somber. We deal with serious issues in the church, and silence has its place in worship, but the church should also be a “Hoorah!” place, a place of laughter and not just tears, a place that is serious without being somber and dour, a place that is realistic and hopeful at the same time, a place of joy and dancing even as we take seriously the sorrow, pain, tragedy, hurt, and injustices of the world. David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet.
Frederick Buechner, minister and author has written some of the wisest words about vocation I have ever read, vocation meaning “the work a person is called to by God” (Wishful Thinking, 118-119). Buechner argues that we all hear all kinds of voices in our lives, and so distinguishing the voice of God takes careful listening. How do we figure out what God might be calling us to do in our lives? By and large, a good rule for finding out is this: The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you most need to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing cigarette ads, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you’ve probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you’ve not only bypassed (a), but probably aren’t helping your patients much either. Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
Deep gladness, joy, dancing. If we are not learning how to dance together with all our might, if we are not schooling each other in joy, we are not being the church.
I need to add a small caveat to Buechner’s words. The job to which God calls us will not always be delightful in every moment or in every respect. The Minnesota Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church is asking all of its congregations and pastors to think more broadly, more deeply, more intentionally and more systematically about their ministry - - - and a part of doing that will be to document these conversations in goal statements and ministry plans. The thought of all the additional paperwork being asked does not bring me deep gladness, even though I think what is being asked can be used to help us in our ministry as a church. Not every moment is a high point, no matter the job to which we are called, but being in ministry with you here often gladdens my heart.
We as the church of Jesus Christ are invited to be a place of great joy, a place of dancing and music, a hallelujah place. I don’t think we are fully where we want to be yet, but I see times when we are just such a place. The past Thursday the Duluth-area United Methodist Men held their annual golf tournament and thanks go to Irv St. John, Jim Terry, Kent Giese for planning this event. It is a nice way to get United Methodist men from the area together, and those who work together to plan the event seem to enjoy that. We also had our fourth annual Coppertop Drive-In. Because of the golf tournament I arrived late, but when I got here, I could not help but feel the sense of joy among those who were here to be a part of the drive-in. It is a lot of work, but coming together to accomplish a shared task brings joy and for me to contribute to the day a little by cleaning up some trash, by helping a little boy who had spilled his milk shake and was crying, by picking up a mop, really felt good. Thanks to Lisa Blade for being the lead coordinator of this event and for each and every one of you who were part of the day.
I think we need to build on these kind of experiences here – not to do big Coppertop Drive-In events more often, but to find ways we can come together in groups to share tasks – serving a meal together at the Damiano Center or Union Gospel Mission or CHUM, getting a few families together for a picnic and conversation to discuss family life in our hectic world, bringing people together to discuss a book, painting a room here at the church. Some of this happens. More can, and our joy will be enhanced.
Two final, and quick remarks about the dancing joy of the Christian life. Our dancing joy should always seek to enlarge the circle of dancers. I am struck in the passage we read just how often we hear the word “all”: David and all the people, David and all the house of Israel, with all their might, David and all the house of Israel (again), all the people, all the people (yes, twice). The community of dancing joy that God creates in our life together is meant to be an inclusive community. David’s wife, Michal, who is herself the daughter of a king, despises David for his dancing, and at least a part of the reason for this is that she thought his behavior unbecoming, vulgar, too common. He, the king, danced with all the people. He was inclusive when some thought the role of the king was to be more exclusive. In the dancing joy of God, there is always room for more dancers, singers, musicians.
The dancing joy of God should always seek to enlarge the circle of dancers. The dancing joy of God also gives us energy to reach out to the world in love and care. The joy we know here is not meant to be hoarded, but move us to care for the world. At the end of the story, food is distributed among all the people – bread and meat and raisin cakes. One function of the joyous celebrations in the life of Israel was to distribute food, to make sure no one went hungry. Joy and care for the world. At his best, the recently deceased Michael Jackson combined those well. When he was teaching the world to dance to Billie Jean he was also organizing world hunger relief through We Are the World. Whatever the other more tragic dimensions of his life, and there were many and we need not consider his whole life exemplary, still in some small way he taught us how to dance and care.
The dancing joy of God in Christian community always moves us out of our doors to invite others to the dance and to meet the needs of the world. Our deep gladness, the deep needs of the world - - - Dance, Dance Dance! Amen.
Text: II Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19
Warning – the following story is rated PG-13. Now that I have your attention… You heard about the fundamental Christian preacher who spoke often against the evils of premarital sex - - - he was concerned it might lead to dancing.
The church deals with serious matters. What we do here is serious business. A couple of weeks ago I quoted psychotherapist Michael Eigen to describe the ministry of the church: “in this business we deal with broken lives and heartbreak, and we do so with our own broken hearts” (The Electrified Tightrope, 277). That is serious stuff.
In a couple of weeks I will be in Chicago teaching a ten-day class in Christian ethics for persons licensed for pastoral ministry in The United Methodist Church. Unlike ordained pastors, those licensed are not required to complete seminary, but have to do summer course work along the lines of a seminary curriculum, and I was asked to teach the class in Christian ethics. One of the texts for the course is The Pastor as Moral Guide. I recently finished reading it and heard powerful stories within it about the kind of serious issues the church confronts in its ministry: a family with two hard-working parents seeking help with their fourteen year-old who has violated the towns curfew and is probably smoking marijuana; a couple married nineteen years with two adolescent daughters on the verge of a divorce because the woman is seeing someone else who she says makes her free and happy and loved; another marriage where the wife is being physically abused by her husband; a church staff situation where the senior pastor is made aware that the associate pastor, who is married with young children, is having an affair with a parishioner who is also married with young children. It is easier to use stories from the book, but from my own experience I can tell you that they are not out of the ordinary for the ministry of the church. There is heartbreak in the world and the church is about the serious business of bringing healing. We need to be a place where we see the heartbreak in our own lives, where we see the heartbreak in the world, and where we offer each other and the world the healing power of God’s love in Jesus Christ.
But if we are not also teaching you how to dance, if we are not teaching each other how to dance with all our might, we are not being the church. We are not doing our job. The church deals with serious issues, but we should never be dour. Those churches that through history condemned anything that looked joyous, raucous, that smacked of laughter and pleasure, somehow must have missed this part of the Bible. David and all the house of Israel were dancing before the Lord with all their might, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals. Truth be told, most of us probably grew up in churches that while they did not condemn dancing, also didn’t think it was very “proper” for church – which was always to be quiet and pious and somber. We deal with serious issues in the church, and silence has its place in worship, but the church should also be a “Hoorah!” place, a place of laughter and not just tears, a place that is serious without being somber and dour, a place that is realistic and hopeful at the same time, a place of joy and dancing even as we take seriously the sorrow, pain, tragedy, hurt, and injustices of the world. David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet.
Frederick Buechner, minister and author has written some of the wisest words about vocation I have ever read, vocation meaning “the work a person is called to by God” (Wishful Thinking, 118-119). Buechner argues that we all hear all kinds of voices in our lives, and so distinguishing the voice of God takes careful listening. How do we figure out what God might be calling us to do in our lives? By and large, a good rule for finding out is this: The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you most need to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing cigarette ads, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you’ve probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you’ve not only bypassed (a), but probably aren’t helping your patients much either. Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
Deep gladness, joy, dancing. If we are not learning how to dance together with all our might, if we are not schooling each other in joy, we are not being the church.
I need to add a small caveat to Buechner’s words. The job to which God calls us will not always be delightful in every moment or in every respect. The Minnesota Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church is asking all of its congregations and pastors to think more broadly, more deeply, more intentionally and more systematically about their ministry - - - and a part of doing that will be to document these conversations in goal statements and ministry plans. The thought of all the additional paperwork being asked does not bring me deep gladness, even though I think what is being asked can be used to help us in our ministry as a church. Not every moment is a high point, no matter the job to which we are called, but being in ministry with you here often gladdens my heart.
We as the church of Jesus Christ are invited to be a place of great joy, a place of dancing and music, a hallelujah place. I don’t think we are fully where we want to be yet, but I see times when we are just such a place. The past Thursday the Duluth-area United Methodist Men held their annual golf tournament and thanks go to Irv St. John, Jim Terry, Kent Giese for planning this event. It is a nice way to get United Methodist men from the area together, and those who work together to plan the event seem to enjoy that. We also had our fourth annual Coppertop Drive-In. Because of the golf tournament I arrived late, but when I got here, I could not help but feel the sense of joy among those who were here to be a part of the drive-in. It is a lot of work, but coming together to accomplish a shared task brings joy and for me to contribute to the day a little by cleaning up some trash, by helping a little boy who had spilled his milk shake and was crying, by picking up a mop, really felt good. Thanks to Lisa Blade for being the lead coordinator of this event and for each and every one of you who were part of the day.
I think we need to build on these kind of experiences here – not to do big Coppertop Drive-In events more often, but to find ways we can come together in groups to share tasks – serving a meal together at the Damiano Center or Union Gospel Mission or CHUM, getting a few families together for a picnic and conversation to discuss family life in our hectic world, bringing people together to discuss a book, painting a room here at the church. Some of this happens. More can, and our joy will be enhanced.
Two final, and quick remarks about the dancing joy of the Christian life. Our dancing joy should always seek to enlarge the circle of dancers. I am struck in the passage we read just how often we hear the word “all”: David and all the people, David and all the house of Israel, with all their might, David and all the house of Israel (again), all the people, all the people (yes, twice). The community of dancing joy that God creates in our life together is meant to be an inclusive community. David’s wife, Michal, who is herself the daughter of a king, despises David for his dancing, and at least a part of the reason for this is that she thought his behavior unbecoming, vulgar, too common. He, the king, danced with all the people. He was inclusive when some thought the role of the king was to be more exclusive. In the dancing joy of God, there is always room for more dancers, singers, musicians.
The dancing joy of God should always seek to enlarge the circle of dancers. The dancing joy of God also gives us energy to reach out to the world in love and care. The joy we know here is not meant to be hoarded, but move us to care for the world. At the end of the story, food is distributed among all the people – bread and meat and raisin cakes. One function of the joyous celebrations in the life of Israel was to distribute food, to make sure no one went hungry. Joy and care for the world. At his best, the recently deceased Michael Jackson combined those well. When he was teaching the world to dance to Billie Jean he was also organizing world hunger relief through We Are the World. Whatever the other more tragic dimensions of his life, and there were many and we need not consider his whole life exemplary, still in some small way he taught us how to dance and care.
The dancing joy of God in Christian community always moves us out of our doors to invite others to the dance and to meet the needs of the world. Our deep gladness, the deep needs of the world - - - Dance, Dance Dance! Amen.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Motown Sandwich
Sermon preached June 28, 2009
Text: Mark 5:21-43
One of the joys of life for me is the discovery of writings that move me – that stir my heart, my mind, my soul, my imagination. Last summer I read Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death and found it an incredibly rich work on human life. Becker drew on the tradition of psychoanalysis for some of his incredible insights, and in the year since I read Becker, I have found myself coming across certain psychoanalytic thinkers from time to time, and this has led me to Michael Eigen. I came across his name in a few places and one day in a used book store I came across one of his books, The Electrified Tightrope. It bursts with insightful remarks about human life. Eigen is a therapist, and he writes well about his work. I have experienced many miracles of growth. Mangled areas of torment and stagnation have opened gardens of subjective delight. Out of Egypt, through the wilderness, to the Promised Land: repeatedly. How does this happen? What is IT that does it?... One cannot predict when or how one will find the spot or particular point of entry that will do the trick. (277, 275) I love the way Eigen describes the kind of healing that happens in therapy, and the mystery of that process.
We encounter the mysteries of healing in the gospel reading for today. Crowds surround Jesus. Jairus asks for help for his daughter. Jesus responds by going with him. Suddenly a woman fights her way through the throng to touch Jesus, and she is healed. Jesus makes his way to Jairus’ home only to be told he is too late. Is he? Apparently not, for Jairus’ daughter is brought from seeming death to life, from sleep to wakefulness. The stories are jammed together in a way that heightens their drama and our amazement. We are left wondering, at least a bit – how does this happen? What is IT that does this?
Without taking away all the mystery in these stories, we can learn from them something about how healing happens, about what healing is like. While the stories focus on physical restoration, their meaning penetrates more deeply. Salvation, healing, wholeness are related words in the New Testament, and I think these stories speak powerfully about being made more whole in the broadest sense. I think they speak of aliveness and deadness as described by the teacher and writer Ann Belford Ulanov in her work The Unshuttered Heart. Deadness is living in such a way that it is as if “some part of us has been driven into exile and we cannot get it back” (ix). Deadness feels like no zest, crippling anxiety, a hole in us from something done to us that should not have been done, or from something not done with us that should have been done - - - living at half strength, feeling tepid, dull (9). Ulanov argues that “we all know something of this deadness and we all struggle to be alive and remain alive with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength” (15). To deadness, she contrasts aliveness. Aliveness comes down to one thing – consenting to rise, to be dented, impressed, pressed in upon, to rejoin, to open, to ponder, to be where we are in this moment and see what happens…. Aliveness springs from our making something of what we experience and receiving what experience makes of us. (15)
These stories are about healing, wholeness, aliveness, coming out of deadness. There is a certain mystery here, yet the stories reveal something of what it means to be healed, to be made more whole.
To be healed, to be made whole, to become more alive is to know that we matter, that we are not just taking up space, that God knows us by name. The scene for these stories is a crowd scene. Jesus is being followed, surrounded, pressed in upon. There is a great crowd, a large crowd, a commotion of people. Sometimes we feel lost in the crowd, less than alive in a sea of humanity. Even in church we can come and feel unnoticed, just part of the worship furniture. Healing happens when we are noticed, when we discover that we matter, when our names are identified – Jairus, when we feel the power of another and know that they feel our power.
This week I was at a denominational meeting in Nashville and one morning I was having breakfast with a couple of United Methodist seminary leaders – a dean and a president. The Dean at Drew Theological Seminary shared a story about classes the seminary was offering in prison. Seminarians were half the class and prisoners the other half. It was a powerful educational experience for the seminarians, in part, because they could begin to see these people in prison as persons, as individuals, as singular. When we see others in that way we are changed, made more whole. When we are seen, we are healed and made more whole – the daughter of Jairus, the woman who had been bleeding for years.
Healing happens, aliveness is encouraged when barriers are broken down and boundaries that separate person from person are crossed. The woman in the story who touches Jesus is a remarkable character, and the story is remarkable for all the social conventions violated. A woman should not have been touching a man. The woman’s bleeding made her unclean. She should have stayed away, isolated from all those surrounding Jesus. Instead, she crosses the boundary, she breaks down a wall, and Jesus calls this faith, faith that heals. Jesus goes in to a girl who may be dead – her body, too, would have been considered unclean, religiously impure. Jesus crosses a boundary, and healing happens.
Earlier this week, the youth of our church went to package meals for Feed My Starving Children in the Twin Cities, and you will hear more about that during our sharing time. All together we packaged enough meals to feed twenty-eight children a meal a day for a year. But before and after we watched videos about the children we would be packing meals for – children a half a world a way, children who could not be more different from our youth in so many ways. When we were done, we were headed to Valley Fair, and later ate at Famous Daves. The children we packed food for might not see the kind of money spent for a day at Valley Fair in a month. Boundaries were crossed, walls broken down, children fed – healed, youth made more aware – more alive.
Then there is the Motown sandwich part of the story. I know you have been puzzled by this – well here it is. The top slice of the sandwich is the way these stories tell us healing happens when we reach out – Reach Out, like the Four Tops. The Jesus of these stories encourages people to reach out with the assurance – I’ll be there. For our own healing, we need to be willing to reach out, to acknowledge our need for healing, wholeness, our need to be made more alive, our need to be resurrected from deadness. The insidious thing about deadness in life is that it can become our way of living. We get told often enough we have nothing to offer the world, and we come to believe it and melt into the crowd. We hear often enough that we cannot make a difference in the world, and we bury our gifts in the sand. AA has taught us that the first step in making change in our lives is to admit we need changing – but long before Bill Wilson there was the bleeding woman who had had enough and reached her hand to touch Jesus, and he touched back.
The other half of the Motown sandwich, the bottom slice is another reach out song – Diana Ross - - - reach out and touch, somebody’s hand, make this a better world if you can. In Christ, we can be healed, made more alive, resurrected from deadness – but these are gifts always to be shared. Healing is our ministry in a broken world. Michael Eigen says of therapy “in this business we deal with broken lives and heartbreak, and we do so with our own broken hearts” (277). That is a pretty good description of the ministry of the church. As our broken hearts are healed, we in turn offer others healing. We, in turn, offer healing to a broken world.
There is a certain mysteriousness in healing – how mangled areas of life are made more whole, but these stories give us some idea of what healing is like and how it happens. In these stories we are invited to reach out when we are hurting and when our lives feel dead, to hear our names called and know that we matter, to reach out beyond boundaries that separate. In these stories we are called to bring Christ’s healing to the world. We are called to create safe space here for others to reach out for healing. We are called to be a place where people are known and where they know they matter. We are called to be a place that breaks down barriers – barriers that get in the way of healing, well-being, wholeness - - - barriers such as race, class, gender, sexual orientation, background, education.
If you feel that you can’t go on, cause all your hope is gone, and your life is filled with much confusion, and happiness seems just an illusion – reach out, Jesus will be there reminding you that you matter, that your life matters, that your life is to be lived fully. As God’s lively people, reach out and touch somebody’s hand, make this world a better place, if you can - - - and you can! Amen.
Text: Mark 5:21-43
One of the joys of life for me is the discovery of writings that move me – that stir my heart, my mind, my soul, my imagination. Last summer I read Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death and found it an incredibly rich work on human life. Becker drew on the tradition of psychoanalysis for some of his incredible insights, and in the year since I read Becker, I have found myself coming across certain psychoanalytic thinkers from time to time, and this has led me to Michael Eigen. I came across his name in a few places and one day in a used book store I came across one of his books, The Electrified Tightrope. It bursts with insightful remarks about human life. Eigen is a therapist, and he writes well about his work. I have experienced many miracles of growth. Mangled areas of torment and stagnation have opened gardens of subjective delight. Out of Egypt, through the wilderness, to the Promised Land: repeatedly. How does this happen? What is IT that does it?... One cannot predict when or how one will find the spot or particular point of entry that will do the trick. (277, 275) I love the way Eigen describes the kind of healing that happens in therapy, and the mystery of that process.
We encounter the mysteries of healing in the gospel reading for today. Crowds surround Jesus. Jairus asks for help for his daughter. Jesus responds by going with him. Suddenly a woman fights her way through the throng to touch Jesus, and she is healed. Jesus makes his way to Jairus’ home only to be told he is too late. Is he? Apparently not, for Jairus’ daughter is brought from seeming death to life, from sleep to wakefulness. The stories are jammed together in a way that heightens their drama and our amazement. We are left wondering, at least a bit – how does this happen? What is IT that does this?
Without taking away all the mystery in these stories, we can learn from them something about how healing happens, about what healing is like. While the stories focus on physical restoration, their meaning penetrates more deeply. Salvation, healing, wholeness are related words in the New Testament, and I think these stories speak powerfully about being made more whole in the broadest sense. I think they speak of aliveness and deadness as described by the teacher and writer Ann Belford Ulanov in her work The Unshuttered Heart. Deadness is living in such a way that it is as if “some part of us has been driven into exile and we cannot get it back” (ix). Deadness feels like no zest, crippling anxiety, a hole in us from something done to us that should not have been done, or from something not done with us that should have been done - - - living at half strength, feeling tepid, dull (9). Ulanov argues that “we all know something of this deadness and we all struggle to be alive and remain alive with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength” (15). To deadness, she contrasts aliveness. Aliveness comes down to one thing – consenting to rise, to be dented, impressed, pressed in upon, to rejoin, to open, to ponder, to be where we are in this moment and see what happens…. Aliveness springs from our making something of what we experience and receiving what experience makes of us. (15)
These stories are about healing, wholeness, aliveness, coming out of deadness. There is a certain mystery here, yet the stories reveal something of what it means to be healed, to be made more whole.
To be healed, to be made whole, to become more alive is to know that we matter, that we are not just taking up space, that God knows us by name. The scene for these stories is a crowd scene. Jesus is being followed, surrounded, pressed in upon. There is a great crowd, a large crowd, a commotion of people. Sometimes we feel lost in the crowd, less than alive in a sea of humanity. Even in church we can come and feel unnoticed, just part of the worship furniture. Healing happens when we are noticed, when we discover that we matter, when our names are identified – Jairus, when we feel the power of another and know that they feel our power.
This week I was at a denominational meeting in Nashville and one morning I was having breakfast with a couple of United Methodist seminary leaders – a dean and a president. The Dean at Drew Theological Seminary shared a story about classes the seminary was offering in prison. Seminarians were half the class and prisoners the other half. It was a powerful educational experience for the seminarians, in part, because they could begin to see these people in prison as persons, as individuals, as singular. When we see others in that way we are changed, made more whole. When we are seen, we are healed and made more whole – the daughter of Jairus, the woman who had been bleeding for years.
Healing happens, aliveness is encouraged when barriers are broken down and boundaries that separate person from person are crossed. The woman in the story who touches Jesus is a remarkable character, and the story is remarkable for all the social conventions violated. A woman should not have been touching a man. The woman’s bleeding made her unclean. She should have stayed away, isolated from all those surrounding Jesus. Instead, she crosses the boundary, she breaks down a wall, and Jesus calls this faith, faith that heals. Jesus goes in to a girl who may be dead – her body, too, would have been considered unclean, religiously impure. Jesus crosses a boundary, and healing happens.
Earlier this week, the youth of our church went to package meals for Feed My Starving Children in the Twin Cities, and you will hear more about that during our sharing time. All together we packaged enough meals to feed twenty-eight children a meal a day for a year. But before and after we watched videos about the children we would be packing meals for – children a half a world a way, children who could not be more different from our youth in so many ways. When we were done, we were headed to Valley Fair, and later ate at Famous Daves. The children we packed food for might not see the kind of money spent for a day at Valley Fair in a month. Boundaries were crossed, walls broken down, children fed – healed, youth made more aware – more alive.
Then there is the Motown sandwich part of the story. I know you have been puzzled by this – well here it is. The top slice of the sandwich is the way these stories tell us healing happens when we reach out – Reach Out, like the Four Tops. The Jesus of these stories encourages people to reach out with the assurance – I’ll be there. For our own healing, we need to be willing to reach out, to acknowledge our need for healing, wholeness, our need to be made more alive, our need to be resurrected from deadness. The insidious thing about deadness in life is that it can become our way of living. We get told often enough we have nothing to offer the world, and we come to believe it and melt into the crowd. We hear often enough that we cannot make a difference in the world, and we bury our gifts in the sand. AA has taught us that the first step in making change in our lives is to admit we need changing – but long before Bill Wilson there was the bleeding woman who had had enough and reached her hand to touch Jesus, and he touched back.
The other half of the Motown sandwich, the bottom slice is another reach out song – Diana Ross - - - reach out and touch, somebody’s hand, make this a better world if you can. In Christ, we can be healed, made more alive, resurrected from deadness – but these are gifts always to be shared. Healing is our ministry in a broken world. Michael Eigen says of therapy “in this business we deal with broken lives and heartbreak, and we do so with our own broken hearts” (277). That is a pretty good description of the ministry of the church. As our broken hearts are healed, we in turn offer others healing. We, in turn, offer healing to a broken world.
There is a certain mysteriousness in healing – how mangled areas of life are made more whole, but these stories give us some idea of what healing is like and how it happens. In these stories we are invited to reach out when we are hurting and when our lives feel dead, to hear our names called and know that we matter, to reach out beyond boundaries that separate. In these stories we are called to bring Christ’s healing to the world. We are called to create safe space here for others to reach out for healing. We are called to be a place where people are known and where they know they matter. We are called to be a place that breaks down barriers – barriers that get in the way of healing, well-being, wholeness - - - barriers such as race, class, gender, sexual orientation, background, education.
If you feel that you can’t go on, cause all your hope is gone, and your life is filled with much confusion, and happiness seems just an illusion – reach out, Jesus will be there reminding you that you matter, that your life matters, that your life is to be lived fully. As God’s lively people, reach out and touch somebody’s hand, make this world a better place, if you can - - - and you can! Amen.
Early Rock n Roll
Sermon preached June 21, 2009
Text: I Samuel 17:1a, 4-11, 19-23, 32-49
Do you ever find that things you once really liked don’t have the same appeal to you they once did, or that things you once dismissed in some way now are objects of greater appreciation? When I was a kid, I loved watching old movies on television – the early movie after school when I did not have too much homework and the weather outside was not too nice, or, in the summer, the late movie after the 10 o’clock news. This was a time before cable movie channels, a time when network television was all there was. Among the movies I enjoyed as a kid were the Abbot and Costello comedies – among my favorites was Abbot and Costello Meet the Invisible Man – high art, I know! Not long ago I watched an old Abbot and Costello movie and while it was mildly enjoyable, it did not have the same spark I remembered.
Just this week, a new collection of George Harrison music was released – George Harrison of John, Paul, George and Ringo. I read a review of the CD on-line and the particular reviewer, while mildly pleased with the collection, also expressed disappointment that it lacked the song “Crackerbox Palace.” “Crackerbox Palace,” I had not heard that song in years. It came out when I was in high school and I did not remember thinking all that much of it then. Curiosity led me to i tunes, and for a mere $.99 I could download the song. I enjoyed it much more than I remember.
The story of David and Goliath, early rock n roll - - - when David rocked, Goliath rolled - - - is another case of something that has changed for me over time. My early impressions of the story are all very favorable. Who wouldn’t love a story like this? When you are young, to have a hero who shares your name is always kind of cool. The story is told in epic form and plays on classic themes of the triumph of the underdog, the overconfidence of the strong just before they fall, the unlikely hero. You just have to love it!
But at some point, I don’t know when, elements of the story began to disturb me. “This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head; and I will give the dead bodies of the Philistine army this very day to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the earth.” “David put his hand in his bag, took out a stone, slung it, and struck the Philistine on his forehead; the stone sank into his forehead, and he fell face down on the ground.” This is all a little gruesome, a little violent, and what’s most disturbing is that it seems God is pleased with the violence. A story like this could be used to justify “sacred violence” and in our world we don’t need any encouragement to be more violent, let alone justify our violence in the name of God.
So what shall we do with the story? Ignore it? We could have done that. The gospel reading for today was a very nice story about Jesus stilling a storm. But I don’t think ignoring stories from the Bible we find disturbing is a good response to them. Sometimes our lives need a little disturbing and to ignore every story that disturbs robs us of the growth opportunity such stories might provide. When Jesus’ mother and brothers come to see him in Mark 3, and he says to the crowd, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” and then sweeps his arms around and says, “Here are my mother and my brothers.” That is disturbing, especially on a day like Father’s Day. But if we simply cast aside such stories, we miss the opportunity to learn and grow.
Sometimes stories with disturbing elements, like the David and Goliath story, need to be read at a different level. The earliest Christian readers of the Scriptures argued that they are multivocal, polysemous, multidimensional. Origen (184-254) wrote about what he called the body, the soul and the spirit of Scripture and argued that Christians often needed to dig deeper than the literal story (the body) of a text, to get at its soul and spirit to enrich their own spiritual lives (First Principles, Book IV, Ch. 2, #4 – p. 276). Augustine in On Christian Doctrine (3.27.38 – p. 102) writes: “For what could God have more generously and abundantly provided in the divine writings than that the same words might be understood in various ways.”
Digging deeper, reading the story of David and Goliath more metaphorically to get at its soul and spirit, leads me to ask about the giants that cause us fear and trouble. Are there such giants? Where do we find them? Do we struggle against difficult odds sometimes? If so, maybe this story speaks more deeply to us than we might first imagine.
I think we struggle with internal giants – parts of our inner life that work against our well-being and can come out of us sideways to hurt others. In the book we are reading in the First and Ten men’s group, Parker Palmer’s A Hidden Wholeness, Palmer writes: The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope and love. (82-83) Palmer is right about our needing to hold things like hope and despair in some paradox, but what if the despair becomes a giant threatening to crush hope?
I struggle with that giant sometimes, that inner Goliath that is comprised of knots I am good at tying up inside myself. When I arrived here as your pastor four years ago this month I was leaving a position as a district superintendent, a position in which I worked with churches and pastors trying to help them be their very best. I came here with the same hope, and part of what I envisioned as our very best as First UMC was a church that was attracting new people and growing, especially in our worship attendance. It has not happened that way. New people have come, and I am grateful that we continue to attract new people, but some former members have left. Last year we struggled in a few ways with worship, and we muddled through quite a few awful weather Sundays, and the result was an average worship attendance slightly below 200 – not the direction I hope to see. I put a lot of pressure on myself as a former district superintendent, maybe I don’t have what it takes to lead a congregation well? Maybe I have risen to the level of my incompetence? But helping a congregation grow is not about me – why would I even think in such terms, that doesn’t say much for me does it? Did I miss God’s call somewhere along the way? The knots of despair grow into a 9’9” Goliath, well-armed and well-armored. Maybe some of you are good at tying inner knots, too.
Giants lurk not only inside of us, but in church life itself. How often do we hear about the decline of mainline churches, churches that have been around awhile? We are old hat, taken for granted. Some argue that a church like First UMC declines because it is not socially relevant enough, not out there enough on the pressing social issues of the day. Others tell me that a church like First UMC declines because it is not “biblical” enough, and for them that means a more conservative interpretation of the Bible. Maybe the issue is that we are sometimes not deep enough, that is, we are content to let our faith ride at the surface or sidelines of our lives rather than permeate all our questions about life and the world – how to love, how to be a better partner, how to parent, our vocational life, our inner life, our relationship to the great issues of our world. To go deeper in our faith requires our time and attention, and then we confront the enormous giant of our fragmented, frenzied lives. Who has more time for reading the Bible, for praying, for gathering with other people of faith to ask what it means to live as a Christian today? We confront, as well, the giant of old cultural patterns. In a culture that was once predominantly Christian we assumed that the lessons taught in church would be reinforced in many ways – so faith could be church an hour a week. Our culture has changed, and that is not a bad thing, but it means we need to be more intentional about faith formation in our lives, and that cuts against old patterns that tell us we need not be so intentional, and tell us we can learn everything we need to about our faith by the time confirmation ends. Giants.
Giants also walk the wider world. Global health concerns loom large as AIDS and malaria ravage Africa. Children outside the industrial world die for lack of relatively inexpensive vaccines we take for granted. Yesterdays Duluth newspaper reported a story – world hunger has now reached the one billion person mark. In the United States, millions go without health insurance and lack adequate access to the wonderful quality medical care others enjoy. Recent debates in Congress and the media are reminding us of how big a giant this is. And when we think about global health, what of the health of the planet itself? The human community continues to engage in practices that portend harm to the very environment that sustains our lives, and changing our habits is a gigantic endeavor. Giants roam the earth.
Giants are very real – inside our lives, in our faith communities, in our world – massive giants - - - 9’9” Goliaths, well armed and well-armored. Suddenly this feel-good underdog story with its disturbing elements speaks more powerfully than I imagined. It doesn’t try to convince me that the giants are not real, that would make the story untrue to life. The giants are real – the despair I feel is real, the social forces that create challenges for long-standing churches making it feel like we are finding our way in the dark are real, the challenges of global health and hunger, and the health of the planet are real. The giants are real, yet we are told “let no one’s heart fail” (v. 32) because of them. Doubt, despair, and pain are real, but so, too, are faith, hope and love. Don’t let your heart fail, have courage. It takes courage to confront the giants in our world. It takes courage to listen to the difficult voices within and learn what we need to from them yet not let them overwhelm us.
If courage is required in the face of giants, so is creativity. Some of our old methods for getting rid of giants may not work. David could not walk in Saul’s armor because it did not work for him (v. 39). One can almost picture a young David clanging around in armor too big for him before asking it to be removed. Sometimes we deal with our inner giants by trying to ignore them, but that way doesn’t work very well. The church will have to be its creative best to confront the giants of our contemporary world, be creative and trust the chaos that is a part of creativity. When we are creative, some of our creative endeavors will fail. Some of the problems confronting the human community are not very amenable to technological fixes, our preferred mode of solving problems, but may need a creativity of spirit to be solved – a more generous spirit among the diverse people of the world.
But aren’t courage and creativity simply ways of whistling in the dark against the massive giants we confront in ourselves and in our world. How do courage and creativity make sense when the giants are so big and we are so small? They make sense because of God. To offer another Parker Palmer quote, “above all, God wants us to be alive: life, after all, is God’s original gift to us” (The Promise of Paradox, xxviii). God is with us as we struggle against giants, and God is that in us and among us that which fosters courage and enhances creativity. God is with us, to shrink the doubt, despair and pain we feel from gigantic proportions into their proper role as a part of the paradox of being human. God is with us to help us navigate the historical current we find ourselves in as a mainline church with an important mission, to touch people’s lives with faith, hope and love – to make a difference in people’s lives in the Spirit of Jesus and to make a difference in the world. God is with us as we seek to tackle the challenges of global health and hunger and the health of the planet, for the God of the Bible is most consistently a God of healing and of new creation.
Life’s giants are real, but with God we can confront them with courage and creativity. What a story! Amen.
Text: I Samuel 17:1a, 4-11, 19-23, 32-49
Do you ever find that things you once really liked don’t have the same appeal to you they once did, or that things you once dismissed in some way now are objects of greater appreciation? When I was a kid, I loved watching old movies on television – the early movie after school when I did not have too much homework and the weather outside was not too nice, or, in the summer, the late movie after the 10 o’clock news. This was a time before cable movie channels, a time when network television was all there was. Among the movies I enjoyed as a kid were the Abbot and Costello comedies – among my favorites was Abbot and Costello Meet the Invisible Man – high art, I know! Not long ago I watched an old Abbot and Costello movie and while it was mildly enjoyable, it did not have the same spark I remembered.
Just this week, a new collection of George Harrison music was released – George Harrison of John, Paul, George and Ringo. I read a review of the CD on-line and the particular reviewer, while mildly pleased with the collection, also expressed disappointment that it lacked the song “Crackerbox Palace.” “Crackerbox Palace,” I had not heard that song in years. It came out when I was in high school and I did not remember thinking all that much of it then. Curiosity led me to i tunes, and for a mere $.99 I could download the song. I enjoyed it much more than I remember.
The story of David and Goliath, early rock n roll - - - when David rocked, Goliath rolled - - - is another case of something that has changed for me over time. My early impressions of the story are all very favorable. Who wouldn’t love a story like this? When you are young, to have a hero who shares your name is always kind of cool. The story is told in epic form and plays on classic themes of the triumph of the underdog, the overconfidence of the strong just before they fall, the unlikely hero. You just have to love it!
But at some point, I don’t know when, elements of the story began to disturb me. “This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head; and I will give the dead bodies of the Philistine army this very day to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the earth.” “David put his hand in his bag, took out a stone, slung it, and struck the Philistine on his forehead; the stone sank into his forehead, and he fell face down on the ground.” This is all a little gruesome, a little violent, and what’s most disturbing is that it seems God is pleased with the violence. A story like this could be used to justify “sacred violence” and in our world we don’t need any encouragement to be more violent, let alone justify our violence in the name of God.
So what shall we do with the story? Ignore it? We could have done that. The gospel reading for today was a very nice story about Jesus stilling a storm. But I don’t think ignoring stories from the Bible we find disturbing is a good response to them. Sometimes our lives need a little disturbing and to ignore every story that disturbs robs us of the growth opportunity such stories might provide. When Jesus’ mother and brothers come to see him in Mark 3, and he says to the crowd, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” and then sweeps his arms around and says, “Here are my mother and my brothers.” That is disturbing, especially on a day like Father’s Day. But if we simply cast aside such stories, we miss the opportunity to learn and grow.
Sometimes stories with disturbing elements, like the David and Goliath story, need to be read at a different level. The earliest Christian readers of the Scriptures argued that they are multivocal, polysemous, multidimensional. Origen (184-254) wrote about what he called the body, the soul and the spirit of Scripture and argued that Christians often needed to dig deeper than the literal story (the body) of a text, to get at its soul and spirit to enrich their own spiritual lives (First Principles, Book IV, Ch. 2, #4 – p. 276). Augustine in On Christian Doctrine (3.27.38 – p. 102) writes: “For what could God have more generously and abundantly provided in the divine writings than that the same words might be understood in various ways.”
Digging deeper, reading the story of David and Goliath more metaphorically to get at its soul and spirit, leads me to ask about the giants that cause us fear and trouble. Are there such giants? Where do we find them? Do we struggle against difficult odds sometimes? If so, maybe this story speaks more deeply to us than we might first imagine.
I think we struggle with internal giants – parts of our inner life that work against our well-being and can come out of us sideways to hurt others. In the book we are reading in the First and Ten men’s group, Parker Palmer’s A Hidden Wholeness, Palmer writes: The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope and love. (82-83) Palmer is right about our needing to hold things like hope and despair in some paradox, but what if the despair becomes a giant threatening to crush hope?
I struggle with that giant sometimes, that inner Goliath that is comprised of knots I am good at tying up inside myself. When I arrived here as your pastor four years ago this month I was leaving a position as a district superintendent, a position in which I worked with churches and pastors trying to help them be their very best. I came here with the same hope, and part of what I envisioned as our very best as First UMC was a church that was attracting new people and growing, especially in our worship attendance. It has not happened that way. New people have come, and I am grateful that we continue to attract new people, but some former members have left. Last year we struggled in a few ways with worship, and we muddled through quite a few awful weather Sundays, and the result was an average worship attendance slightly below 200 – not the direction I hope to see. I put a lot of pressure on myself as a former district superintendent, maybe I don’t have what it takes to lead a congregation well? Maybe I have risen to the level of my incompetence? But helping a congregation grow is not about me – why would I even think in such terms, that doesn’t say much for me does it? Did I miss God’s call somewhere along the way? The knots of despair grow into a 9’9” Goliath, well-armed and well-armored. Maybe some of you are good at tying inner knots, too.
Giants lurk not only inside of us, but in church life itself. How often do we hear about the decline of mainline churches, churches that have been around awhile? We are old hat, taken for granted. Some argue that a church like First UMC declines because it is not socially relevant enough, not out there enough on the pressing social issues of the day. Others tell me that a church like First UMC declines because it is not “biblical” enough, and for them that means a more conservative interpretation of the Bible. Maybe the issue is that we are sometimes not deep enough, that is, we are content to let our faith ride at the surface or sidelines of our lives rather than permeate all our questions about life and the world – how to love, how to be a better partner, how to parent, our vocational life, our inner life, our relationship to the great issues of our world. To go deeper in our faith requires our time and attention, and then we confront the enormous giant of our fragmented, frenzied lives. Who has more time for reading the Bible, for praying, for gathering with other people of faith to ask what it means to live as a Christian today? We confront, as well, the giant of old cultural patterns. In a culture that was once predominantly Christian we assumed that the lessons taught in church would be reinforced in many ways – so faith could be church an hour a week. Our culture has changed, and that is not a bad thing, but it means we need to be more intentional about faith formation in our lives, and that cuts against old patterns that tell us we need not be so intentional, and tell us we can learn everything we need to about our faith by the time confirmation ends. Giants.
Giants also walk the wider world. Global health concerns loom large as AIDS and malaria ravage Africa. Children outside the industrial world die for lack of relatively inexpensive vaccines we take for granted. Yesterdays Duluth newspaper reported a story – world hunger has now reached the one billion person mark. In the United States, millions go without health insurance and lack adequate access to the wonderful quality medical care others enjoy. Recent debates in Congress and the media are reminding us of how big a giant this is. And when we think about global health, what of the health of the planet itself? The human community continues to engage in practices that portend harm to the very environment that sustains our lives, and changing our habits is a gigantic endeavor. Giants roam the earth.
Giants are very real – inside our lives, in our faith communities, in our world – massive giants - - - 9’9” Goliaths, well armed and well-armored. Suddenly this feel-good underdog story with its disturbing elements speaks more powerfully than I imagined. It doesn’t try to convince me that the giants are not real, that would make the story untrue to life. The giants are real – the despair I feel is real, the social forces that create challenges for long-standing churches making it feel like we are finding our way in the dark are real, the challenges of global health and hunger, and the health of the planet are real. The giants are real, yet we are told “let no one’s heart fail” (v. 32) because of them. Doubt, despair, and pain are real, but so, too, are faith, hope and love. Don’t let your heart fail, have courage. It takes courage to confront the giants in our world. It takes courage to listen to the difficult voices within and learn what we need to from them yet not let them overwhelm us.
If courage is required in the face of giants, so is creativity. Some of our old methods for getting rid of giants may not work. David could not walk in Saul’s armor because it did not work for him (v. 39). One can almost picture a young David clanging around in armor too big for him before asking it to be removed. Sometimes we deal with our inner giants by trying to ignore them, but that way doesn’t work very well. The church will have to be its creative best to confront the giants of our contemporary world, be creative and trust the chaos that is a part of creativity. When we are creative, some of our creative endeavors will fail. Some of the problems confronting the human community are not very amenable to technological fixes, our preferred mode of solving problems, but may need a creativity of spirit to be solved – a more generous spirit among the diverse people of the world.
But aren’t courage and creativity simply ways of whistling in the dark against the massive giants we confront in ourselves and in our world. How do courage and creativity make sense when the giants are so big and we are so small? They make sense because of God. To offer another Parker Palmer quote, “above all, God wants us to be alive: life, after all, is God’s original gift to us” (The Promise of Paradox, xxviii). God is with us as we struggle against giants, and God is that in us and among us that which fosters courage and enhances creativity. God is with us, to shrink the doubt, despair and pain we feel from gigantic proportions into their proper role as a part of the paradox of being human. God is with us to help us navigate the historical current we find ourselves in as a mainline church with an important mission, to touch people’s lives with faith, hope and love – to make a difference in people’s lives in the Spirit of Jesus and to make a difference in the world. God is with us as we seek to tackle the challenges of global health and hunger and the health of the planet, for the God of the Bible is most consistently a God of healing and of new creation.
Life’s giants are real, but with God we can confront them with courage and creativity. What a story! Amen.
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