"Thy Kingdom Come"--Sermon 9/25/11

Thy Kingdom Come

Jesus was in the heart of his ministry. The disciples were joining, the crowds were gathering. Seeing Jesus heal and hearing him speak had become stranding room-only events. His words were words that set the people on fire. His message was one which could never have been imagined before in that time. He had become a prophet of the first order, and his words were both challenge and comfort. And it was, at this time, as the crowds fanned in to hear him, and as his polling numbers had risen to their height, that he was asked an important question. And the question, posed by some of those who followed him, by some of those who wanted to be the favorite of their teacher, by some who wanted to be assured of how to please their master, was a relatively simple one. Perhaps it was just one of them who nuzzled their brother to the front to ask, or maybe a few of the disciples rallied together to implore Jesus. However it happened, the question was asked, “Jesus, who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”

You see, they had been listening to all this talk of the kingdom, of the coming reign of God, of the mystical union of Mr. Rogers neighborhood and streets of gold that they had been wondering about. They knew that the kingdom was near, that the meek and the persecuted and the poor were welcomed there. They knew that they were to strive for the kingdom, and they knew that Jesus was at the heart of telling stories about this place. They knew that the kingdom was like a mustard seed that grew to enormous proportions if left unfettered. They knew that like yeast that could do mysterious things to bread causing it to rise the kingdom of God would also grow. They knew that there was joy in the kingdom, joy akin to finding treasure in a field, and joy akin to hauling in nets and nets full of fish. They knew that they had been promised keys to heaven. And they knew it had many rooms. They knew the stories they had been told by a loving teacher, but they still must have had swirling thoughts in their head about this mysterious other-worldly, out of time world. Its values antithetical to the world they knew. What was important in the here and now would be tilted upside down there. What was clung to on earth would have no bearing in heaven. And the questions they would ask about the kingdom reveals not ignorance, as much as earnest desire.

“Jesus, who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”

I find myself wondering what it was they expected to hear. Were they wanting reassurance that they were worthy of the kingdom? Were they wanted Jesus to name names? Were they competitive, wanting one of their names to be spoken and not their rival? Did they really expect an answer that would even make sense to them given their confusion about the kingdom of heaven after all?

Jesus didn’t answer the disciples. Not a word was spoken. But as they stood, with baited breath, he turned from them and called to him a child, a child who may have been standing with a parent nearby, or who may have been playing in the dust of the ground. A child, a paidion (pie dee own), one between three and five years old, not entirely unlike the little ones we minister to here at The Children’s Nursery school, was beckoned by a gentle Jesus into the circle of disciples. Jesus told a story with a simple gesture. All the while the disciples stared on, watching the lesson unfold.

Jesus placed the child before them. Perhaps he held the child close to his chest, or urged his disciples to make their way down closer to the ground to look at this little one eye-to-eye. And with the disciples looking on, he said quietly and reverently, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And then he added even more, perhaps still standing eye to eye with the little one gathered in their midst, surrounded by these grown up men, “and whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”

I’ve been thinking about this verse throughout the week as we consecrate our nursery school teachers, as we celebrate their teaching in our midst, as we recognize our Sunday school teachers and as we emphasize our commitment to education. And I’ve been thinking about this verse in light of the fears I sense in our world. It’s hard not to ponder the problems with our national economy, as we wonder about the future of our planet, as we worry about what kind of world we are offering our children. There are dark days pressing around us. Days when I am almost afraid to turn on the news for fear of what I will learn next. There are times when I wonder if the kingdom of God is all some aberration. There are days when I want to shake my fist and demand that the human race figure out how to do better than we’ve been doing. And I have to ask, “How do we as the United Church of Christ, people who believe in ushering in the kingdom of God in the here and now, who believe in the power of the kingdom to burst forth in this world, how do we make that happen?”

Perhaps one of the greatest gifts we have in answering that question comes when we listen to the ones who Jesus pointed toward, when we listen to children.

Our building is hopping all week with our littlest ones. That may be easy to forget if you’re only a Sunday morning dweller here at Peace, but our Children’s Nursery School little ones call our building home. They wander in and out through the doors, leave their handprints on the walls, scuff their shoes on the floors, drop tiny goldfish crackers on the carpet. They also bestow on those of us who are blessed enough to get to know them random moments of unexpected grace as they offer us hugs, or sing in warbling voices sporadic songs in the hallways, or look at us with eyes filled with hope. And the best way for us to welcome the kingdom, is to follow Jesus’s example and welcome the little ones.

This week I was talking with another parent about my sermon this week. I was sharing that I wanted to talk about the kingdom of God, and how we instill faith in our children, and how hard that was to do when I felt so little hope right now in the world. I lamented and I despaired and I wrung my hands in misery and may have even said, “Oh, woe is me, how do I preach…woe is me.” And she said calmly and with pragmatic certainty, “Then, perhaps, you should spend a little time in the nursery school this week instead.” And I remembered the words of Jesus, that to enter the kingdom we must become like children. To enter the kingdom, we must sit in little chairs, and watch with big eyes, and touch with small hands, and trust with open hearts.

And so what does it mean for us as a church community to usher in the kingdom of God? What does it mean for all of us as a community to embrace child-like ways that we may be instruments of the holy spirit?

I believe we begin by looking at our brothers and sisters with child-like attitudes of truth and openness. I believe we begin with facing our deepest fears. I believe we begin by trusting that the world is a good place, and that we were created for good. I believe we begin by listening to the stories of Jesus. And I believe this leads us to worlds of hope anew. But it all begins with welcoming children.

My grandmother died five years ago. This week would have been her 95th birthday, and so my mind has been drifting back and forth to her this week. I’ve found myself reflecting on the legacy she left and on the lessons she taught me and to the ways in which she shaped me. I learned from her what it meant to welcome children—to welcome their passion, and their wonder, and their questions, and in so doing, create an inkling of what it means to be part of the neighborhood of God. One afternoon a year or so before she died, I went with my mother to take my grandmother to lunch. This was often a bit of a chore to do because at that time in my grandmother’s life she had difficulty seeing and hearing. She would speak loudly, and due to a problem with double vision, one of the lenses of her glasses was tinted black. We sat, a happy intergenerational trio on that Saturday morning, at Cosmos restaurant and as we were eating our scrambled eggs and bacon a preschool girl, her pigtails bobbing, turned around in the booth in front of us and after carefully sizing up our dining party decided to strike up a conversation with my delighted grandmother, who never knew a stranger. This little one watched my grandmother hesitantly, and then said curiously, “Why’s your eye like that?” And my grandmother paused in her eating and first admired, loudly, to my mother and me, how cute the child was, how adorable was her red shirt, and then she turned her attention to the business at hand. She inched her face closer to the face of the girl and said, “Well, let me tell you a story. My eye doesn’t work very well anymore. It’s broken So, now I have this black thing here and, look, I don’t need to use my eye anymore! It’s hidden!” The little girl stared closer, the two generations almost touching nose to nose. And my mother and I held our breath, because we always worried that Grandma would get self-conscious. But we were wrong, because Ila Soderstrom was not a woman to let a little honesty from a child get her down. She welcomed the conversation, and in so doing she welcomed the child. And then the little girl said, softly in response, “Does that make you sad? To not have your eye work?” I was struck at the time how intuitive this child was, how honest she had been, how easily she offered sincere empathy. And my grandmother nodded quietly with resignation, and said, “Thank you.” I still remember that encounter, for it is a reminder to me of the power of welcoming children, and of realizing once you’ve welcomed them that they offer us a glimpse of what the kingdom of God looks like. It must be a place of honest compassion, and curious wonder, and authentic vulnerability. In that graced space where we meet one another nose to nose, generation to generation and God is there in the midst of it.

The prophetic writer Paul Grout, a Church of the Brethren sage, once wrote these words which I have kept in a quote file on my desk and have read and reread again and again, “The North American Church may be in trouble, make no mistake, The kingdom of God is not.” And that sentence resonates deep in my soul. For the kingdom of God is not made of rules and requirements about who belongs and who doesn’t, as the church can do. And the kingdom of God is not concerned with declining membership, as the church has been. And the kingdom of God is not focused on fear, as the church can do. The kingdom of God is doing just fine.

Remember: when Jesus invites us to consider the kingdom it is a child who is our example. May we be wise enough to clasp the tiny hands they offer and may we allow them to lead us into a world of hope that God’s will may be done.

Amen.

Vineyard Justice?--Sermon 9/18/11

Vineyard Justice?
A prominent Homiletics professor when asked about preaching on this scripture once wrote, “The parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard is a little like cod liver oil: You know Jesus is right, you know it must be good for you, but that does not make it any easier to swallow.” (Barbara Brown Taylor, The Seeds of Heaven, p. 100). It is one of those scriptures that tends to afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted, depending on where you see yourself standing in line. It’s one of those stories which can make us feel just a little bit edgy, a little bit itchy, a little bit uncomfortable. It proposes a reversal of order, an upset of the apple cart, a topsy turviness that we didn’t see coming. It challenges the sacred assumptions of the way things should be, heck, it even calls into question our beloved Protestant work ethic.

So let’s unpack this scripture a little shall we? Let’s look a little at the message Jesus was trying to impart both for his followers that day, and for 21st century readers. The story is a quite simple one. There was once a vineyard owner. An esteemed man who invited workers to labor in his vineyard. The scripture isn’t clear on telling us whether or not this vineyard owner actually needed the help, or whether he was just providing the opportunity for work, offering the chance to make an honest day’s wage for someone in need, but regardless, there he was, first thing in the morning. Now, if you were looking to hire someone to work in your own personal vineyard back in the first century in Palestine, you’d be inclined to look for strong workers, capable workers who could harvest a hefty yield. And your best bet to find those workers would be to go first thing in the morning as the sun rose, to the marketplace. There you’d gather with other estate managers and you’d carefully examine the pooling crowds of laborers, looking for the strongest, the ablest, the one who comes from the heartiest stock, the one who has that ambitious glimmer in his or her eye.

And in our story, laborers were, indeed, hired that morning and a fair price was offered in keeping with the laws of the Torah, and all seemed content. Vineyard management team and contracted laborers alike. A deal was struck and hands were shook.

But a few hours later, after this first cream of the crop of workers was picked and already at work, the manager went back and saw that there were still others looking for work, still others unemployed, and so again the vineyard manager offered a fair price, and it was accepted, and more workers joined the workforce already toiling away in the vineyard…three hours later, but still in the morning.

This happened again three more times on that day. And workers were still crowding the marketplace, looking hungrily for work that would offer them the coveted denarius which would pay them enough to buy a meal that night. Standing idly around wondering if they would have something to provide for their families that day, something to take home to wherever it was they sought shelter at night with growling hungry bellies and dashed hopes. The pickings for strong workers with each trip to the marketplace would have gotten slim, those who were left would have been weaker, perhaps lame, perhaps elderly, perhaps infirm, those who were not wanted, or those who had been cast away by other estate owners. And yet with each trip to the marketplace, our vineyard owner invited more, and more were hired and more were offered a fair wage. One has to wonder what the other estate managers and vineyard owners in the region were saying as that last load of workers were contracted even at 5:00 in the evening and still heading out to the field to work only for an hour as the sun began to set. Was there snickering at the naievety of the vineyard owner? Was there joking about how much work would actually get done and how much money would be wasted? Surely this vineyard owner missed his Corporate Economics 101 class, or at least was sick the day they talked about profit yielding.

And at 6:00 p.m. whenever the metaphorical equivalent to the time clock was punched and the dinner bells were beginning to ring, the workers headed in from the vineyard to receive their just rewards, their compensation for their hard work under the hot sun. Sunburned and sweaty they gathered, the strong and the weak, the ones with sinewy muscular arms and strong tanned backs and the ones with the withered legs and scoliosis and sunburns. The ones who could find work any day of the week and the ones who were still puzzled at how they were invited to be hired at all. All of the workers gathered to receive their pay.

And here’s where the story gets a little wonky, here’s the part that makes us scratch our heads. The workers were lined up in reverse order of when they were hired, those hired latest were placed first in line. And these were given one whole denarius. These late-day add-ons were given a full day’s wage. It was incredible really, a full day’s wage for an hour’s work, in this economy!.

And so those in the back of the line must have begun to imagine what the weight of a pocketful of coins felt like, the jingle as they were gathered into two receptive hands. For if a denarius was offered for an hour’s worth of work, how much would twelve denari buy. And one can imagine the excited murmurings. But as each successive group of workers made it to the front of the line to receive their wages, those happy murmurings probably turned into snarling gripes, for there was just one standard payment that day for all. One denarius. Early or late to work. Strong or weak. There was one standard price, a fair and agreed upon price, but the same for all. One denarius.

And scripture says that one outspoken worker named this perceived inequity and said, in the words of Eugene Peterson’s translation of the Bible, “These last workers put in only one easy hour, and you just made them equal to us, who slaved all day under the scorching sun.” The anger of these first-hired workers was not just over money, it was over status. They didn’t want those who were hired later to be equated with them. Those hired later, those who would have been weaker, were in a category all their own, considered the lowest of the low. They were the ones who had been cast-aside, the ones with the invisible “L’s” on their foreheads, labeled as losers and written off for whatever reason. How dare they be considered equivalent to the hale and hearty first-hired?

The vineyard owner was pragmatic. He said, “Friend, I haven’t been unfair. We agreed on the wage of a dollar, didn’t we? So take it and go. I decided to give to the one who came last the same as you. Can’t I do what I want with my own money? Are you going to get stingy because I am generous?” The Greek version of that last little bit has a bit more bite to it. It is translated this way, “Is your eye evil because I am good?”

And so ends the story. But, if you are anything like me, you may still be left with the question. Was vineyard justice done? Was it really fair?

Any of you who have more than one child, or who were raised with siblings may have faced this very dilemma. Shortly after Robert and I married, I moved into the home which Robert shared with Tess and Brynn who were then nine and six years old, I encountered my first difficult lesson in parenting. Sometimes fairness is not easily attained. Before parenting our three children, I had been largely oblivious to the ins and outs of sibling struggle. A common refrain I learned early on in our newly formed family’s life were those three deadly words, “It’s not fair.” I learned that it wasn’t fair when one sister got to keep the dog in her room overnight and the other sister was relegated to a cold dachshund-less bed. I learned that it wasn’t fair when one sister finished the last red popsicle in the freezer while the other sister was stuck with only the dreaded toxic orange ones. I learned that it wasn’t fair when one sister was sick and got to stay home sleeping fitfully on the couch while watching the Disney channel while the other sister had to go to school. There are a thousand things that are not fair in this world, I learned. And I learned it through the eyes of two children who I loved passionately and deeply and honestly. And I found myself uttering the words to them that I believe the landowner might utter to his workers, “No, no it isn’t fair, but it is still good. Trust in what I offer you.”

Barbara Brown Taylor writes, in her book The Seeds of Heaven, “God is not fair. For reasons we may never know, God seems to love us indiscriminately, and seems also to enjoy reversing the systems we set up to explain why God should love some of us more than others of us…God is not fair; but depending on where you are in line that can sound like powerful good news, because if God is not fair, then there is a chance we will get paid more than we are worth, than we will get more than we deserve. God is not fair; God is generous.”


I have a little secret to tell you this morning. The parable of the vineyard is not about fairness. It is about grace. The God of the vineyard is the God who surprises us all with what we need, and claims we are all entitled to walk on the same ground, the weak and the strong alike, the old and the young alike, no matter who you are or where you are on your faith journey. The God of the vineyard begs us not to begrudge our brothers and sisters of their good fortune, not to look at generosity with an eye of evil. The God of the vineyard throws caution to the wind and upsets the systems of power and domination and offers a new paradigm. The God of the vineyard offers generous grace and plenty.

The psychotherapist Gerald May once wrote, “Grace threatens all my normalities.” Yes, yes, yes. Extravagant grace, freely given, is hard to get our heads around. And can shake us to the core.

This is the truth which may be hard to swallow at first, just like that cod liver oil. But once you get past those first tastes you’ll realize how sweet life is in the kingdom of our generous God, where we look upon one another with only the eyes of love.

Amen.

True Confessions of a Bunnynapper

I admit it. Slap the handcuffs on me now. I kidnapped a bunny tonight.

I had accomplices, so don't send me to the clink on my own. Haul our ailing Brynn (who I might add has pneumonia so go easy on us, please) and four-year-old Grayson along with me. Please allow us to have one phone call so we can phone Robert, and wake him up from his nap (I repeat, he had no part in this bunnynapping and needs to stay home to care for the other animals to whom I have offered a piece of my soul).

The long and the short of it is this: the neighbors had a rabbit. For the past two months he has lived an eighth of a mile radius of their house. This is the second animal that they have neglected, the next-door neighbors adopted the dog who wandered the cul de sac for a good week before anyone took her in. I've tried to talk to our negligent neighbors twice, suggesting kindly and gently that perhaps it might be best for the rabbit to be moved to a safe locale. I've offered to adopt the rabbit. I've been sweet syrupy nice. I've cooed and batted my eyes.

They said the rabbit was fine. He liked to, you know, be with the wild rabbits outside so they could, you know, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Um, no. I refuse to allow rabbit solicitation or prostitution in my neighborhood. No, no, no. So I created my own little vigilante vice squad. I decided that once and for all wanton rabbit copulation, or suggestion thereof, could not happen on Strathdon Drive. No siree. Not on my watch.

The only thing to do was steal the rabbit. That's right, friends. I am now a rebel without a cause (or, wait, I guess I have a cause and my cause is this "Purity Codes for all Rabbits" or "Hey, Ho, Unprotected Rabbit Sex Just Has to Go!"). Just call me the Phyllis Schlafly of the bunny set.

I do have twinges of guilt about my role in the heist [in all honesty, I really am troubled by this, but after consultation with several neighbors who were all ready to call animal control it seemed like my own little "let my people go" moment], and my husband may not forgive me for the many dollars "we've" invested now in bunny paraphernalia, including a promise ring for Robert to give the rabbit to ensure its chastity. But, I can say that I will sleep better tonight knowing that I have curbed some of the rampant bunny madness in Crown Colony tonight.

Oil of Olay

When I was a little girl, my mother smelled of Oil of Olay night cream. The bed she shared with my father was hijacked by me, her only child, at bedtime while my dad was away at church meetings or tucked away in his dark room in the basement. The two of us, cocooned in the green and blue modern print 1978ish bedspread, would lie like spoons while she read aloud to me. Each in our own Barbizon nightgowns. Each flush from our evening baths. Each exhausted from our days at school as teacher and student. Oil of Olay was the elixir of my childhood. Aromatic comfort food. Scent of safe harbor. Truest, fondest, purest smell of my life on Christopher Lane in Fort Wayne.

Tonight after my own bedtime ritual at the ripe old age of almost-40 I slathered Oil of Olay on my own face. And then, when Grayson called out, startled, I went to him in the dark and kissed his warm cheek. He said, "Mommy, My Mommy, you smell so good. You smell just like my mommy." And I lay my head down next to his and we wrapped ourselves in his soft blue blanket at peace together.

And the daughter has become the mother. And I pray that he is comforted as I was. And I see myself in that long line of strong women who nurtured and tended and read bedtime stories.

And who knew the power of a good moisturizer.

A Contemplative Chaplain Diary: The Edge of Reason

6:34 p.m. Rats. The air conditioning is not functioning. Again. Just like last year. And the year before.

11:40 p.m. Will report that ACME Heating and Air Conditioning representative Vern is here to offer excellent customer service. Vern likes to explain things in detail. And mutter under his breath a lot about the shoddy A.C. which was put in originally. He blinks. Perhaps he has allergies? He shakes his head and says, “Wow…” and then reminds me he can fix it. Then he explains things again. And he draws diagrams. Lots of diagrams. Sadly, 4-year-old Grayson, the only one in our family who would care, is asleep.

11:42 p.m. Vern still on duty outside. Maisie, the miniature dachshund is hyper-vigilant and panting in her cage.

11:45 p.m. Vern and air conditioning unit still enjoying meaningful encounter in yard. I would like to go to bed, but Vern, he has other plans which include fancy red machine which looks like radar gun which beeps and tells temperature. Damn, how can Grayson sleep through this excitement?

11:46 p.m. Beginning to wonder if Vern’s inability to look me in the eye and his blinking thing is like the old veterinarian Dr. Curly who could only look at animals and not at people. Hmmm…wonder if this is a syndrome I don’t know the name of…Hmmm…will google.

11:48 p.m. Hmmm…could be NVLD, Non-Verbal Learning Disability. Will administer Myers-Briggs test to Vern in his next pass through the house to the upstairs thermostat.

11:53 p.m. I’m wondering if Vern is a 7 on the eneagram. Says that my air conditioner is an “adventure.” It’s “challenging.” I think Vern likes challenges. And diagrams. More diagrams. With arrows. And air flow charts.

11:59 p.m. Offered Vern a caffeine-free diet coke. He doesn’t “drink on the job.” Efficient Vern.

Friday
12:07 a.m. Vern replaced 4 cubic something of coolant. Same amount as last year. And asked to see paperwork on unit to see if it’s still under warranty. I produced aforementioned paperwork and billing from previous contractors. Vern actually makes the “tsk, tsk” sound with his tongue. I had only read "tsk, tsk" sound in book. Never knew it really existed. Vern, though, Vern can demonstrate. “They charged you this much? For this unit? They just had this on-hand [tsk, tsk]. They were trying to unload it. In 2010 our industry was forbidden from selling this product.” Vern is clearly being polite, but what he means is, “You got screwed big time. And I think you know I don’t have to draw you a diagram to explain that.” He could say this with his eyes, but of course, he doesn’t. Because he is studying the cat hair ball Moses just puked up on the tile floor in the kitchen instead. Vern’s eyes could speak volumes if he would only look at me. Sigh. Oh, Vern…

12:11 a.m. It’s getting cooler. I am considering making my next tattoo a little icon that says, “I [heart] Vern.” or "Vern the A.C. man + Contemplative Chaplain = Love" Or maybe I’ll just get a roving eyeball to remember our night together.

12:13 a.m. I’m thinking of inviting Vern to church. Why not make the night an evangelistic opportunity? Will ask him how his walk with Jesus is when he comes in again. Will ask him if he is saved.

12:25 a.m. Missed opportunity for conversion as Vern seemed intent on leaving me with last diagram. Vern should have PBS show like artist Bob Ross who drew “tiny trees.” Vern would also look good with white afro.

12:34 a.m. $681.30 the poorer are we. Cooler. But poorer. But I have a new friend. And shouldn’t that be all that matters, really?

Holy Ground on a State Road--Sermon 8/28/11

Holy Ground on a State Road

It was the summer of 1993. I was twenty-one years old and in that liminal time in the summer before my senior year of college at Manchester. And I remember that August evening like it was yesterday, the night I experienced the holy in the ordinary and still get shivers. The night I felt, if just for a moment, as if the present held all of eternity. The night I felt that I should get out of my Honda civic and lay my Birkenstocks aside at the wonder I saw around me. It was on State Road 114 between here and North Manchester.

I was, at the time, renting a small house across from a noisy book bindery. I was commuting two hours round trip into Fort Wayne early in the mornings and again early in the evenings to work in a day care center. And the job, caring for eight infants, while, delightful was also exhausting. I had been battling with a low grade sinus infection all summer and was due to have sinus surgery. I was pondering breaking up with my boyfriend of four-years. And on that ordinary summer night I turned from my work toward home with NPR as my companion.

I want to state again that weatherwise there was really nothing remarkable about that evening. There was nothing different about my routine. But I was aware, as I graduated from I-69, to 24, to 114 that my shoulders were loosening from their customary location around my earlobes, and my breathing was steadying and deepening, and that furrow between my eyes was becoming a little less pronounced.

There was nothing different about that day. I promise. But I slowly realized as I was driving my customary route that the grass seemed greener, and the pinkish-blue of the sunset looked as if it were painted by Maxfield Parrish’s brush. The barns were so red, and even the yellow lines on the road seemed more vivid. I simply could not believe the beauty around me, the literal breath-taking beauty of a little road in Northern Indiana at sunset. I began to weep softly as I stared around me in wonder, and then I realized that I was sobbing, the kind of piercing sobs which make your face blotchy and cause your mascara to run. But I wasn’t sad. I was simply overwhelmed. Overcome with the beauty of the moment. I had not sought this. I had not anticipated it. I had instead stumbled into a sense of wonder, ushered into the presence of the holy in the ordinary. Experiencing my own mini-epiphany, a “take off your shoes” moment.

The story is told in Exodus 3:1-6 of a common man, a man who while keeping to the routine of his everyday life, while tending his flock of sheep, meanders into his own holy moment. The Moses in this story is not the Moses who leads his people to the promised land. He is not the one who parts the waters and talks with God on the mountain. The Moses who speaks in these verses is not the one with the big Charlton Heston booming voice. Instead, the Moses here is Moses the son-in-law, Moses the shepherd. Moses the guy next door. Moses was meant for great things, but at this point in Exodus, the great things have not even begun to happen yet. Moses in this story had not yet received “the call.” It is important for us to remember this.

As Moses wandered up and down those worn paths through the wilderness in Midian he stumbled upon an angel who appeared to him a flame of fire in a bush, and the text says, the bush was not consumed. This bush interrupts Moses’ work. It isn’t something Moses was searching for. And yet, Moses was open to this wonder in his midst. He responded, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why this bush is not burned up.” Something about this bush was so fascinating, perhaps sacred, perhaps beautiful, that Moses had to make the choice to stop and investigate. And when God saw that Moses had paused, God called Moses by name. In that liminal holy space, which Moses probably had no words to describe, God called.

Out of the fire God called, “Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”

I can almost picture in my mind’s eye this young man, awkwardly unwrapping the straps of his sandals, first one foot, and then the other, filled with wonder at this mystery set before him. God was revealed as the God of Moses’ forebearers, the God of Abraham, and therefore Sarah. The God of Isaac, and therefore Rebekah. The God of Jacob, and therefore Rachel and Leah. And Moses did what was customary in those times, Moses hid his face. In a culture where God’s name was so holy that it was not even to be uttered, the thought of actually seeing God face to face must have been mind-blowing, surely one might die, the Israelites believed. And so Moses did what was proper. And in his act, he acknowledged formally that he had been ushered into the holy, that this was the real thing. In the midst of his ordinary tasks, in the midst of the mundane details of life this revelation was opened to him. It was in the not-looking, in the not-expecting, that he saw, that he was found.

I consider this phenomena a lot, because I am paid by the church to try and usher all of you into holy places. It is my job to take off my shoes. I went to college and then seminary for this. So, shouldn’t it just fall into my lap? Shouldn’t the burning bushes just blaze all around me? And yet, I have a secret to tell you, those of us with M.Div. behind our name are no more equipped to stalk the divine than a common shepherd. And the times when I have tried to seek the mystery the most, the times when I have ardently demanded God’s presence are the moments when my relationship with God seems the most distant and elusive. Not always, certainly not always, but often enough. And so in my own life I have found that it is in letting go of the search, in simply pausing to open myself to the divine, that the sacred creeps in on tiny kitten-like paws. In the everyday tasting, seeing, listening, in the routine and commonplace all of a sudden I have been pounced on by the divine, sort of like Moses just watching the sheep in Midian. Sort of like a college coed just driving down a road in North Manchester.

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber has a name for this kind of holy encounter, the encounter where one realizes there is something more in an instant, something deeper in an event. He calls it the “I-Thou” encounter, an encounter which is outside the realm of details and physical realities but instead enters a realm of deep relationship and holiness.

In the novel, The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, a novel which takes place in the deep south before the civil rights movement, there is a perfect I-Thou encounter, a burning bush moment which I think names well some of what it means to meet the holy. In the book Shug, a former lounge singer, is recovering from a long illness and she explains to Celie, a woman horribly emotionally damaged by an abusive spouse, her theology. Shug says, “here’s the thing. The thing I believe. Sometimes God just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for. I believe God is everything. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that you’ve found It.” She continues, “My first step away from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being a part of everything, not separate at all…And I laughed and I cried…”

Shug had taken off her shoes after recognizing the holy. She hadn’t necessarily sought out this connection, she just happened upon it. In the presence of the mystery, her laughter and tears brought her to a sacred place. A shoe-removing place.

My hope for each of us this morning is that we may stumble across the holy around us. My hope is that we can welcome its presence even when we don’t expect it, and are even inconvenienced by it. My hope is that we, like Moses and Shug, can allow ourselves to be still to recognize the burning bushes in our own lives. And that we can pause wherever we are, whether it be Mount Horeb, or the deep south, state road 114, or in a sanctuary at Peace UCC, and that we can each take off our shoes.

Amen.

Life Going Not Backward

Cue the violins. Get 'em ready. Have them tuned, because after this post they'll be swelling to magnificent proportions in our final poignant scene as our young heroine turns her face toward the light, her eyes set on a future we cannot see but can only imagine and walks purposefully into the brilliant future.

I have learned something in parenting. Raising cats is easier. This is the truth of the matter. Cats may soil your rug. They may hack up hairballs on your carpet. They may decide to take a nap on your newly ironed black pants and leave a mess of fur behind. But cats, cats will never leave to go to college. Nope. The cat, he will stay home.

The truth about parenting is that if we do it right, one day our children leave us. Whether they walk out our doors hauling shower shoes and laptops to attend college, or take that ukelele and the tiny bubble maker and head to Hawaii to become the next Don Ho, the time will come when their dreams call them into a new reality. And we can't go with them.

I'm especially mindful of this after last Friday's sojourn to Franklin College, a two-and-a-half hours drive to the south of us. The cars were laden with a mini refrigerator, a microwave, ether net cables, and more shoes than Imelda Marcos. And as we made up the bed with the turquoise extra-long sheets, and lined up the staple of the college student's existence, Kraft macaroni and cheese, on the shelf, and as we made the last minute run to Walmart to buy lightbulbs I found myself simultaneously giddy for her and puzzled for how life continues at our home without her.

Kahlil Gibran once wrote these words in his poetic masterpiece The Prophet:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

Truer words have never been spoken.

And she is already dwelling in the house of tomorrow. While I sit with the cat quietly purring on my lap.

Well, Helllloooo, Internets....

Contemplative Chaplain back and reporting for duty. I know, I know, it's been a lapse of, what, three-four years? Oh, wait, let me see how old Grayson is...ah yes, yes four years. I've tried to keep you (and by "you," I mean, my one faithful and loyal reader, Ms. Sandi Buchanan, my mother's best friend out there on a mountain in North Carolina...hey, Sandi! Hey there...I see you...thanks for the encouragement and hanging with me, and thanks for sending me that curling iron back in fourth grade when my parents weren't sure I was mature enough to not burn myself!), I've tried to keep my reader(s) up to date on the whereabouts and that whatabouts of my life by dropping a few bird crumbs in the form of sermons here and there...so as to keep some hope alive for my inner-writer, some hope that I would return in time to being the blogging mistress that I once was.

But there are, alas, some complications now. For, I am no longer that same Contemplative Chaplain. I have even forsaken my coveted Association of Board Certified Chaplain title (and the $300 plus yearly dues that went with it) and cast my lot back in the land of pastoral ministry. And, so who am I? Musing Minister? Pondering Pastor? Pontificating Parson? And, there is that tricky issue of "Pastoral Authority." Seminary professors and Clinical Pastoral Educators get all sorts of hot and bothered when they took about "Pastoral Authority." Essentially, there are furrowed brows and wagging fingers by some when it comes to the issue of a pastor sharing themselves personally, or irreverently, or honestly. So, how do I navigate this terrain without being unprofessional, without embarrassing my parishioners, without being cordially invited to answer to the association ministry commission?

And further, there is this. One little person who stands about 36 inches tall who says, "Mommy, what are you doing? Why are you typing? I'm still starving. I've only had two fruit smoothies and now can I have another one [Answer: No, last time you drank three in a row you puked a technicolor smoothie Jackson Pollock on the white carpet]? Mommy, ummm...I'm really, really still starving. Can't you type on your 'puter another time?"

And yet, and yet, and yet...I miss this outlet. And I miss you all (Ms. Sandi Buchanan, reader extraordinaire), and Grayson needs to learn about patience, really, right? And so, I think I'm back. God willing and the parishioners don't mind.

The Most for the Least--Sermon 8/21/11

The Most for the Least


I pause as I begin this sermon this morning mindful of the sacredness of this gathered body, composed of two distinct groups of people united in mission. The two congregations: Pleasant Chapel and Peace. The two denominations: The Church of the Brethren and the United Church of Christ. The two settings: one rural and one suburban. My roots sink deep into the soil of your denomination, Pleasant Chapel, for I am a Bethany graduate who was ordained in the Church of the Brethren for twelve years. And it was the Church of the Brethren that gave me wings to fly in to the United Church of Christ a year or so ago. And so to preach to both congregations, to both denominational affiliations feels so natural, and I am humbled to have the chance to pastor a church which shares this partnership with the Global Foods Resource Bank.

In the twenty-fifth chapter of the book of Matthew, there is a story that Jesus tells which has guided the mission of both our denominations. It is a story which cuts straight through to the heart of our faith. There is little nuance, little subtlety. It is direct and succinct. “When the Son of Man comes…” it begins.

A middle eastern shepherd often tended different kinds of animals, and sheep and goats were common combinations. Both provided a decent income. During the day they would mingle together in the fields, but as the sun set they would have to be separated. You see, goats would become too cold in the nights and needed to be kept in a place of shelter, while the sheep with their wooly coats could sleep outside under the stars. And so the evening task of the shepherd was to gather the goats, and make sure they had a safe place to rest. Each night this was the shepherd’s routine.
And so, the parable that Jesus told hearkened back to a common role that his listeners, many of whom were shepherds, or who came from shepherding families knew. Separating sheep from goats, two distinct animals, no one breed any better or worse than the other, just different types of creatures with different needs in care.

But in the story that Jesus told on that day there was a twist, for one group of animals, the sheep were gathered at the right hand of the king at the place of honor, and the other group, the goats, were gathered at the left hand. And a pronouncement was made, the sheep were welcomed into the kingdom of heaven, and the goats, well, not so much. The sheep were called “blessed” and the goats, well, not so much. The sheep were validated for the acts of caring they had offered, and the goats, not so much. But what is really mind-boggling about this text was that neither sheep nor goats seem to know why they were placed in either category. Both are genuinely surprised at the outcome. Neither group remember the circumstances which led them to be chosen, or not chosen for eternal bliss.

I confess that this scripture causes me no tiny bit of anxiety. This is a brow-furrowing scripture for me. You see, while I am earnest about my desire to follow the teachings of Christ, I fear those things which I may neglect to do. I read this scripture as a grocery list of discipleship. Okay, Jesus said we need to “feed the hungry, provide beverage for the thirsty, house the homeless, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and imprisoned.” And I immediately want to run out and do each of those things: work in homeless kitchen (check), find someone who is thirsty (“Anyone here need some water?” check). And then I’ll head on over to Target and buy a few sweatsuits to pass out to those who might be cold (check). It is tempting, for us Type-A personalities, to see this story as a checklist and try to do everything on it so that we might receive tickets to the eternal kingdom.

And you know what? I have come to believe that this is not exactly what Jesus had in mind when he told the story. No, I think that there was a bigger picture that Jesus wanted his listeners to understand, a grander vision that he had in mind as he shared those words under that hot middle-eastern sun. And that bigger picture was this: It isn’t about trying to cross or “t’s” and dot our “i’s” just to score points in a grand celestial game, but instead it is about what we do in the moments when we think no one is watching, what we do when we choose to serve our brothers and sisters humbly, what we do for the one who is the most despised or alone in our society. It is about serving the least, and seeing the least, and aligning ourselves with the least, and realizing that this is where we will find the living Christ today. And it isn’t about trying to gain attention or trying to please others. What we do in the company of the least of these, whoever they are or or wherever they happen to be, is where we learn how to be true disciples.

The writer Barbara Brown Taylor in her book, The Preaching Life says this, “One thing is for sure. You cannot win the truth like a scavenger hunt, checking off one hungry person, one thirsty one, one sick one, and one in prison. You cannot toss a quarter in a cup or throw a dollar bill at an old woman in the grocery store and call it done, ‘There! There’s my good deed for the day, my ticket to eternity is with the sheep!’ You cannot use people that way, and besides, emptying your pockets may not always be the right thing to do.” [Taylor, The Preaching Life, p. 137]

But even beyond this, I think there is one more startling revelation that we can learn from the parable. And it is an admonition that we dare not ignore. The goats who are placed at the left hand of the king have not been deliberately cruel. They didn’t do anything purposefully to hurt others. They didn’t speak maliciously. They didn’t steal. They didn’t incite violence. Their sin, the thing which threw eliminated them from a chance for eternal life in the hereafter was this: they were apathetic. They simply passed over the needs of the least. They failed to look. They failed to serve. With their tunnel vision and their ability to ignore, they lost their chance to mingle with the living Christ--the Christ who came to them in the beggar, and in the prisoner, and in the stranger. The goats didn’t overtly wound their neighbors, they just neglected to notice them. The sin was in the omission. The sin was in avoiding the faces of those who were considered “the least.”

In the spring of 2002 I was at a retreat center in Three Rivers, Michigan called The Hermitage. The war in Afganistan and Iraq had only broken out a few days before. It was an agonizing time for our country in the wake of the September 11th attacks of 2001. Our country was at war in a nation that I wasn’t even sure I could locate on a map, let alone understand. I had watched the bombings and the smoke on CNN and had worried and wondered about the safety of so many people—both civilian and military personnel, Afghanis, and Iraqis, and Americans all. Like many people concerned for issues of peace in the world, I felt helpless, and I felt angry. That evening I walked into the common area of the retreat center and saw, a framed portrait hanging on the wall. I’m sure many of you have seen it as well, for it is a portrait which has graced the cover of National Geographic and has been referred to as one of the most poignant pictures of the past thirty years. It is a photo that was taken by Scott McCurry in 1984 of an Afghan girl. A child who was a refugee forced out of Afghanistan after the death of her parents. A young girl who had traveled across the border to Pakistan and settled in a camp there. In the photo this child’s crystal clear aquamarine eyes stared out from beneath the dark folds of her robe, full of anguish and innocence. And one of the nuns at the retreat center in a shaky cursive hand had posted a 4x6 card right under this photo which said simply, “This is the face of an Afghani child. May peace prevail.” I stood with those eyes staring deep into my soul. Eyes which indicted me. Eyes which haunted me. Eyes which reminded me that I was not allowed to ignore my brothers and sisters in this world who were in war zones, or hungry on street corners, or alone in alleyways. I was not permitted to be a passive witness to suffering. I was not allowed to be ignorant.

This, I believe, is what Jesus wants us to learn. As disciples of Christ we cannot afford to be apathetic. We cannot afford to avert our eyes from pain, for in doing so we do not see Jesus. We cannot choose to isolate ourselves from our neighbors, for by doing so we isolate ourselves from the Christ.

But I have to warn you that looking comes at a cost. Gazing into the eyes of the least of these is a risk. Barbara Brown Taylor says it this way, “I will tell you something you already know. Sometimes when you look into those eyes all you see is your own helplessness, your own inability to know what is right. And sometimes you see your own reflection; you see everything you have and everything you are in a stark new light. Sometimes you see such gratitude that it reminds you how much you have to be thankful for, and sometimes you see such a wily will to survive that you cannot help but admire it, even when you are the target of its ambitions. These are all things we need to know—about Jesus, about our brothers and sisters, about ourselves—but we cannot know them if we will not look.”

This morning we gather as one body to worship God, to pause in gratitude and joy for our shared mission. But, we also gather to together focus our eyes together on the least of these, in a people who reside with Christ in Mozambique where 63% of children go to bed hungry at night and where 1 in 4 adults are infected with HIV/AIDS. And then we turn our eyes toward Uganda, where the life expectancy rate is 53 years old, and where malnutrition causes tiny bellies to swell. This morning may we turn our eyes to look at the faces of these brothers and sisters in Christ. And may we know that it is our responsibility to serve those who have so little, and need so much. It is not just our responsibility it is our duty.

There is a story that has been told throughout the years. It is a classic tale offered by the Desert Fathers and Mothers, those early Christian mystics who lived in the third century in Egypt. I believe it speaks to the truth of the imperative of service. Let me share it with you:
Past the seeker, as he prayed, came the crippled and the beggar and the
beaten. And seeing them, the holy one went down into deep prayer and
cried “Great God, how is it that a loving creator can see such things and
yet do nothing about them?” And out of the long silence, God said:
“I did do something about them. I made you.” [Spirituality of
Imperfection]

We are made to see. We are made to see the least of these, and to know that in seeing them we see Christ. May it be so for us this morning. For God made us for such a time as this.

Amen.

Seeds--Sermon 7/10/11

Seeds

When I was in seminary I was privileged to be part of a three week run of the musical Godspell. Many of you have seen the musical by Stephen Schwartz which is a retelling of the book of Matthew. Our cast was a motley assortment of all ages of seminary students and instead of choosing to set the production in clown garb, as it is often done, the director had chosen to set it with a Brady Bunch theme. Which meant that we wore groovy clothes circa 1975, while dancing in front of day-glo sets. Even today it is difficult for me to read a passage from Matthew without imagining that itchy polyester mini-skirt I wore, and the pigtails that curled and tickled my cheeks as I danced. But more than these visceral memories are the very real way in which the parables came alive for me, and the conversations I had with my fellow actors and seminary friends as we lived the stories.

The parable of the sower and the seed was a one of our sillier interpretations coming in the second act of the play before things became serious and we sang “By My Side,” which recognizes the fate of Jesus. And in the parable, I played the role of the seed choked by weeds, I was especially proud of my dramatic interpretation of being choked by the other actors and was allowed to demonstrate a very impressive death scene complete with gagging and hacking noises (never let it be said that I am subtle). And then, the woman whose role it was to be the healthy seed that thrived, the good seed on good soil, did a little song and dance and bowed and curtseyed to the audience.

I confess that it was a scene, though, that always left me a little uncomfortable. You see I am a worrier, and with each acting of the scene I would find myself wondering where I stood in my faith. Was I that seed that would be plucked by birds? Was I weak I on shallow ground? Was I exuberant now, only to be lured away by promises of materialism later? The odds clearly weren’t in my favor; after all, there was only a 25% chance of being the good soil.

And so I came to live with the text this week with a little hesitancy. Because let’s be honest, sometimes there are those scriptures that we don’t always get, there are those scriptures that sometimes we don’t quite have the ears to hear. I sat at my desk on Thursday and made little notes for myself to try to get my head around this scripture. I drew little stick figures…there’s the seed on the path, and look there’s my pathetic attempt at a bird pecking at it…there’s the seed on the rocky soil…there’s the sun coming out to wither the seeds away. I spent a lot of time thinking, thinking about how to convey these four soil types into modern day language. It was exasperating, sort of like a math equation. Type A soil would equal yield X. And then my eyes fell to the heading of the story in my Bible, “The Parable of the Sower,” and something clicked and it occurred to me, “maybe this is about something else…maybe this is not about what is sown, but about who does the sowing.

Barbara Brown Taylor in her book The Seeds of Heaven writes this, “We hear the story and think it is a story about us, but what if we are wrong? What if it is not about us at all but about the sower? What if it is not about our own successes and failures and birds and rocks and thorns but about the extravagance of a sower who does not seem to be fazed by such concerns, who flings seed everywhere, wastes it with holy abandon, who feeds the birds, whistles at the rocks, picks his way through the thorns, shouts hallelujah at the good soil and just keeps on sowing, confident that there is enough seed to go around, that there is plenty, and that when the harvest comes at last it will fill every barn in the neighborhood to the rafters?” (Taylor, p. 26). What if this story is instead about a grace filled God who has enough grace to waste it all over, and if that is what the kingdom of God looks like? Not one of measured careful soil analysis and calculated crop yields, but one where the seeds are scattered in abundance absolutely everywhere!

As many of you know I have a four-year-old son, Grayson. And Grayson is a fairly spirited child, to call him exuberant might be an understatement. Lately I have been trying to introduce him to an evening practice of devotion and prayer that I learned from a Quaker friend, a time of reflection meant to deepen the spiritual focus of children. I ask him when he saw the light of God shine that day, when he felt especially aware of God’s presence. Grayson tries to participate with his pastor-Mommy in this exercise. He really does. I give him examples from my own life. I say, “Grayson, Mommy felt God’s presence when I sat around the table with Tess and Brynn and Daddy and you and felt the love of my family as we had supper.” I say, “Grayson, I heard mourning doves coo and thought of God’s creation.” And Grayson scrunches up his eyes in an attitude of prayer and when I ask, “And tell me, tell me, when did you feel God?” And he’ll say, “I see God everywhere!” And then I press, “I know, but what exactly…” And quizzically he says, “In everything!” My grown-up brain tries to measure out the seeds and plant them in certain locations, guessing where the good soil is, only seeing God in those places which are known, and which are safe, and this four-year-old sees the abundant God who scatters the seeds to the wind and finds God everywhere, and opens the door to see God in everything. I view a world that rations out its sacred and puts it in safe and tidy ordered confines and he sees the abundance of a world where God’s handiwork is never separated from any of us at any time.

The parable of the sower asks us a question, and perhaps it isn’t the question of how we become good soil. Instead, maybe the question is this: how do we as a church live into the vision of this sower who practices such impractical grace? Knowing that God throws seeds even into places where they might not take hold how do we also take those kinds of risks and scatter seed everywhere? How do we imitate our own radical seed sowing?

Brian Hiortdahl in last week’s episode of The Christian Century names the truth of the scripture this way, “Beneath this parable is a bedrock assumption of abundance that we too rarely trust. There is seed enough to lose, and the God who makes sun to shine and rain to fall upon both the righteous and the unrighteous is indiscriminate about sharing. Grace is flung and wasted everywhere.”

I have come to believe that the kingdom of God must be one in which we always err on the side of grace. I have come to believe that the kingdom of God must be one where we stop trying to decide which of our brothers and sisters in the world is worthy of love, and which we will do not feel safe taking chances on. I have come to believe that the kingdom of God must be one where all are welcomed, even if they are different than we are, or threaten what we believe. And I have come to believe that the kingdom of God must be one which is characterized by sowing seeds everywhere, and not just in safe rows which we can control and shape to fit our purposes.

I want to close by reading to you a retelling of this parable by Barbara Brown Taylor from the perspective of the sower:

Once upon a time a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came along and devoured them. So he put his seed pouch down and spent the next hour or so stringing aluminum foil all around his field. He put up a fake owl he ordered from a garden catalog and, as an afterthought, he hung a couple of traps for the Japanese beetles.

Then he returned to his sowing, but he noticed some of the seeds were falling on rocky ground, so he put his seed pouch down again and went to fetch his wheelbarrow and shovel. A couple of hours later he had dug up the rocks and was trying to think of something useful he could do with them when he remembered his sowing and got back to it, but as soon as he did he ran right into a briar patch that was sure to strangle his little seedlings. So he put his pouch down again and looked everywhere for the weed poison but finally decided to pull the thorns up by hand, which meant that he had to go back inside and look everywhere for his gloves.

Now by the time he had the briars cleared it was getting dark, so the sower picked up his pouch and his tools and decided to call it a day. That night he fell asleep in his chair reading a seed catalog, and when he woke the next morning he walked out into his field and found a big crow sitting on his fake owl. He found rocks he had not found the day before and he found new little leaves on the roots of the briars that had broken off in his hands. The sower considered all of this, pushing his cap back on his head, and then he did a strange thing: He began to laugh, just a chuckle at first and then a full-fledged guffaw that turned into a wheeze at the end when his wind ran out.

Still laughing and wheezing he went after his seed pouch and began flinging seeds everywhere: into the roots of trees, onto the roof of his house, across all his fences and into his neighbors’ fields. He shook seeds at his cows and offered a handful to the dog; he even tossed a fistful into the creek, thinking they might take root downstream somewhere. The more he sowed, the more he seemed to have. None of it made any sense to him, but for once that did not seem to matter, and he had to admit that he had never been happier in all his life.

Let those who have ears to hear, hear. (Taylor 28-29. The Seeds of Heaven, Westminster John Knox Press, 2004).

May our God’s abundance inspire us to be radically giving and sowing as well.

Amen.

Listen--Sermon 7/3/11

Listen
When I was in preschool, I would wait patiently to hear my Dad’s footsteps walking in the back door at around 11:30, as he rode his bike home from the church for lunch with my mom and me. While my mother was preparing our egg salad sandwiches, I often had my dad’s undivided attention and we’d wander into the living room for our noon-time confab (which as the parent of a four-year-old now, I realize was probably a tremendous relief for my stay at home Mom who had been trapped in the house all day with a child who could be a bit locquacious, not unlike her son is now). Each day Dad would ask about my morning. I’d ask about his day at the office. I’d tell him how many times the ping pong balls got dropped on the head of Captain Kangaroo that morning. He’d tell me which of the parishioners had stopped by to say hello and have a cup of coffee with him while he was working on his sermon. I’d put on a ten minute dance recital for him. He’d teach me that magic trick where a quarter came out of my ear. Most days this was our routine.

The story is told by my parents, that one day our routine was interrupted. It was, I believe, during the time of Richard Nixon’s resignation and the papers were filled with juicy tidbits and details. While my mother was putting lunch on the table, my father hunkered down in his reading chair with the newspaper, trying to catch up on the national news. This was not a normal day in my world, which revolved around only me. As many times as I would try to catch my father’s attention, he would answer from behind his Journal-Gazette with only a half-hearted, “hmmmmm…” or “oh, really?” I watched him expectantly with all the impatience and righteous indignation that a precocious preschooler can muster, and when I could stand it no further, I climbed onto his lap, scrunching the paper underneath my tiny body by sitting on it, and then took his two whiskered cheeks in my little hands. I turned his face toward me and put my nose mere inches from his and said, “Daddy, you must look at me when I talk to you! I need to know you’re listening!”

This morning, we’re going to talk about listening. And what it means to listen for the Word of God. So often in our media-saturated culture we hear so much spoken, chaos and cacophony. It is hard to know who we should listen to, but more than that, I fear we are forgetting how to listen. For the kingdom of God cannot be created in this world unless there are people there to listen to the Word. The theologian Nelle Morton talks of our life in faith as, “hearing one another into being.” We need to listen, to be faithful disciples as well.

The Gospel of Mark is a unique one. It is, by all accounts, the earliest written Gospel, and it is terse to the point of annoyance at times for a word-lover like me. It is the shortest of the four Gospels and it records fewer of the words that Jesus spoke as well. The Jesus that we discover in Mark is always busy. He’s always moving. He’s always acting. He’s always doing. He’s always on the go. Reading the book of Mark is like watching a movie on fast-forward. Jesus has these marathon days where he heals, teaches, prophesies, performs miracles, walks on water, argues with Pharisees, travels from town to town to town, feeds multitudes, makes disciples, welcomes children…[sigh]. And then lather, rinse, repeat. The next day starts and he does it all again without even breaking a sweat. Surely this Jesus could rub his tummy and pat his head at the same time while whistling Great is Thy Faithfulness and standing on one foot. He’s one of those kind of guys, a multi-tasker, an up and comer. In fact, Mark’s favorite word, used over 40 times in this short book, is the Greek word meaning, “immediately” or “at once.” Mark tells us over and over again, “First Jesus was here, and now look, immediately he did this.” “At once he was over there and then, voila, immediately he did something else.” That Jesus was an activist is not arguable here. But even in this account of Jesus’s life, we have glimpses of another aspect of Jesus, a more contemplative presence of this one who was himself the Word, of this one who knew how to listen with an inner knowing.

At several points in Mark’s account, Jesus finds ways to go away, whether it be with others, or by himself, to pray and listen for the voice of God. At critical points in his ministry, Jesus makes his way to quiet places to connect himself to the one who named him “the word.” In the midst of action, and there is a lot of action, it is clear that there also needed to be space made for some profound listening. (And those of you who are introverts in this sanctuary can’t tell me that that doesn’t allow you to breathe a sigh of relief…). One of Mark’s stories tells us that in the whirlwind days of Jesus’ early ministry, shortly after his baptism, and after recruiting some disciples, and teaching in the synagogue, and healing a friends-mother-in law, and then leading a rally to heal the sick, he found a place to sleep and in the midst of all this action, he awoke while it was still dark and went out to a deserted place to pray. And then there was another time, a time when after encouraging his disciples to practice some self-care and find some time and space for themselves to pray he realized that there were hungry crowds and after multiplying food and taking care of needs he insisted, yet again, that his disciples go out onto the water for some R&R. That way he could be alone to listen for God, and to pray. And let’s not forget that on the night he was betrayed, after the bread was broken and the cup was poured, after the disciples were excused from the table for their final meal together, Jesus went off by himself to pray. Jesus, the Word incarnate, doesn’t just speak. He listens.

And while this would seem like a simple task, to just listen. I would wager that we, the modern day disciples of Jesus aren’t as good at it as we think. I would wager that what most of us are doing is hearing, hearing the sounds around us, hearing the noise, but not taking part in that active task of connecting the sound with our soul, where we really listen. For there is a world of difference between those terms.

Several years ago I took a group of 4th, 5th, and 6th graders away for an overnight retreat experience at a nature preserve. We were talking about creation, the grandeur of God’s creation, and I wanted them to know the wonder of the world through all their senses. And so, the thirty or so of us, sat outside on a sunny June afternoon in Wabash county with our eyes closed and listened, really listened to what we heard. After several minutes of this listening, they were given papers and pencils and asked to write or draw the sounds they heard on the paper. I was amazed at the variety of noise which surrounded us. And I became aware of the noise which I simply filter out each day, or don’t consider. I sat under a tree that day and listened with new ears. I did more than merely hear. I noted bird coos, and airplane sounds, wind in pine trees, and the distant bark of a dog. Really listening opened me in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

And it led me to imagine how much more I could be listening for God.

I confess that I am not one who hears the voice of God on a regular basis. Or, um, ever for that matter. And that doesn’t mean I haven’t deeply desired that kind of response at times in my life. A simple, “Yes, do this,” or “No, absolutely not, no, no, no” in a deep booming bass voice would be so helpful at times of major decisions, wouldn’t they?

I shared this lament, this lament about not feeling as if God spoke to me, with a spiritual director at one point in my life. And her response was elegantly simple, “Christen, perhaps God doesn’t do that anymore in our culture because God doesn’t have to. Perhaps we’re capable of being attune enough to God, to listen well enough, that God can afford to be subtle.” I hated her for that response at the time, because I still would like yes or no responses, but I confess that her answer gives me a great deal of hope. Perhaps the Word of God in our lives are so subtle around us that when we stomp through them like a bulldozer we are missing the slightest nuances of grace. Perhaps our demand for definitive answers leaves us oblivious to the whispers of our Creator.

Sometimes I have a vision of God, standing like that preschool child that I was, impatiently tapping a foot and waiting, waiting for me to stop and pay attention. I imagine God, pulling away the newspaper of my daily routines, cradling my face and looking into my eyes and saying, “Christen, you must look at me when I talk to you. And you must listen!”

May we all.

Amen.

All Good--Sermon 6/19/11

All Good

I want to begin this morning by sharing with you a story. You see, I collect stories, I love to hear them, I love them well-told, I love when the synchronicities within them lead to greater truth, and comfort, and peace.

When I was in seminary each of the seniors in our small community would lead a chapel service throughout the year. And in my first year in the Bethany and Earlham School of Religion communities I heard one of the truest and clearest and simplest stories of grace I had ever heard. I confess now that I have no idea who preached the sermon. I can tell you with some degree of certainty that his first name was Dean, but wherever Dean went after seminary or where his life journey took him I have no idea. Dean began his sermon that morning telling a funny story about growing up in a conservative Lutheran church, one of those traditional churches where all the pews faced the front and the altar was raised and set apart. As a young boy Dean would sit in worship and stare at that ornate altar, complete with its gold candelabras and towering cross. He decided in the way of only the most creative of four-year-olds that God must live behind that altar, else why did everyone bow down to it, face it in worship, pray toward it? One Sunday, his four-year-old, curiosity got the better of him and after worship he untangled his hand from his mothers and snuck away from and made his way down that long aisle to take a gander behind that altar, to see this God to whom he had learned to pray. He went forward, full of trepidation and awe, and cautiously and as reverently as a four-year-old can he looked behind the altar, where he found, stored, no doubt in a convenient place, by some dear church custodian an upright vacuum cleaner. The puzzled four-year-old backed away with a great deal of certainty and clarity, and Dean shared, jokingly that throughout his preschool years he truly believed that God was a Hoover.

His story, of course, got a chuckle, for we all know silly stories of misunderstandings we had about the nature of the church in our younger years. But then this masterful preacher quickly changed the subject and shared a different story, one which wasn’t as whimsical and silly. With a tentative voice, Dean shared painfully of what a difficult semester it had been. As a young seminarian he was working as a chaplain for three months in an intensive Clinical Pastoral Education unit at a trauma hospital in Dayton. He struggled with issues of doubt, grappled with questions of suffering and loss and the nature of God. And felt as if he were losing his faith. The painful horrors that he had seen in the trauma bays of the emergency rooms had left impressions which were hard to shake. And his supervisors were critical of him and his ministry. He felt all hope was lost. After a particularly bloody trauma call which involved two gunshot wounds on an overnight shift he made his way to an out of the way hospital waiting room, and sat, his head in his hands and began to weep quiet tears. Questioning his vocation, questioning God’s existence, questioning the world we live in where brothers shoot brothers. In the midst of his tears quietly a cleaning woman had entered the room to straighten and tidy it for the next day, and with her she brought, of course, a Hoover vacuum cleaner, symbol of Dean’s young faith. And Dean said that as he sat there, inwardly smiling at God’s sense of humor in that hour, he raised his feet to allow the cleaning woman to clean around him, and this saint of a woman put her hands on his shoulder and said, “No, you’re good. You’re good right where you are.”

Dean reflected later that he probably frightened that instrument of God with his sobs as she touched his shoulder and shared her divine proclamation (even if she only referred to the placement of his feet). But this young minister was certain of the message from his God. He had been reminded by his quirky creator, the God who has a sense of humor, of the truth of the matter. He was good. He was good right there. And it was both confirmation and creation, for Dean began a new career in his ministry. And his story was told, and is told again.

Creation stories, the origins of how things came to be are always fascinating to me. Often when I worked at Hospice, and spent time with patients who were near the end of life, I found that the richest conversations happened when we talked about how things began, or when new things came to be. Where were you born? How did you come to live in Fort Wayne? How did you meet your spouse? What led you to start that project, that business, to travel that life path? As a parent, I’ve learned that our children love few stories more than the stories we tell them about their own beginnings--where each of them were born, how Brynn spent her first nine days of life in the NICU at Lutheran, how Grayson turned to look at his daddy’s face as he lay in that incubator only minutes old, how Robert introduced Tess to trees in the car on the way home from the hospital. Creation stories fascinate us, for we love how artfully they weave the stories of our lives, how they proclaim the wonder of how we got from there to here. How they give us hints about who we would become, or how we were led to this spot on the map of our lives.

The Ancient Israelites were no less entranced with stories of creation and origin, and they were mindful of how those stories should be told to their children. At the time that the book of Genesis was recorded, the Israelites were held captive by their Babylonian oppressors. The stories the Babylonians told themselves and others about the creation of the universe were filled with violence and blood, stories of domination and power. The Israelites had a different sense of the creation of the world and in an act of counter-cultural revolution they knew in their bones a different story, a creation story with a different twist. The tale woven around the fireside that was shared with each generation of Israelite children, and the story documented by our forebearers in the Judeo-Christian tradition is a different one. It is a story of blessing and grace, a story where humanity is created after the universe was put into motion, woman and man created in the image of their loving and adoring God who looks on them with tender eyes and sees them as good. All good. The Spirit of God hovered and brooded over deep water, hopeful and yearning, and brought forth the blessing of our created bodies. All blessing.

Don’t ask me how this began to get twisted, how the idea of original blessing became original sin. Some say it was the first taste of the fruit Adam bit, or that pesky snake, or Eve wanting to have a teeny tiny bit more knowledge. But no word is mentioned in these accounts of sin, and God seems less angry Dad and more disappointed and reluctant parent as the tale continues. And so I think that original sin stigma came even later and forever shaped the history that grew up around it. Augustine, who wrote in the fourth and fifth century was the one who really claimed that there was a fall, or a break from our relationship with God. And the idea of original sin was expounded on, then by other early church fathers intent on maintaining order and demanding that children of the church repent of the sins of Adam and Eve. Meanwhile, original sin is never mentioned in the Bible. Nowhere.

Which raises the question again? How did we drift so far afield from this idea that humanity was created “all good,” that our inherent nature, the spark of God within us is made with a default “good” switch? How did we stray so far away from our scriptural roots? And how do we find our way back to that idea of original blessing?

If we know we are created in the image of God, created good, then what is our responsibility now? How do we live into this goodness? How do we accept this unimaginable gift of being loved inherently, just as we are?

I think we can offer two responses. The first is this: Knowing we are loved, we are required to love. Plain and simple. Knowing that God chose each of us as a vehicle for the divine, so much so that God chose to become mortal and walk the earth as Jesus Christ, reminds us of our mission. We are created in love, and so we must love. Even when we are afraid, even when we have doubts, even when it is difficult. The poet Mary Oliver once wrote, “There are a hundred different paths through the world that are easier than loving. But who wants easier?” May this be our mantra. We don’t need easier. We need to love. And so this must be the first response we have to our original blessing: love.

And the second response is like it: we must recognize our place in creation. Frederick Buechner wrote in his book Wishful Thinking, “Using the same old materials of earth, air, fire, and water, every twenty-four hours God creates something new out of them. If you think you’re seeing the same show all over again seven times a week, you’re crazy. Every morning you wake up to something that in all eternity never was before and never will be again. And the you that wakes up was never the same before and will never be the same either.” (Buechner, Frederick. Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, Harper San Francisco, 1973). As images of God, as original blessings, we must recognize that we are part of all creation, and that our role on this planet is not coincidental. We have a unique task to do here, and a God who whispers to us through all of creation, or through old upright vacuum cleaners, as assurance of our place here, and our goodness in it.

Make no mistake. Discipleship is difficult. Doubts and fears will impede us at times. But we are made all good, and our creator delights and hovers over us offering us gifts of grace at every turn. It’s all good, friends. May it be so.

Amen.

When Pentecost is Personal--Sermon 6/12/11

I speak this morning from a unique vantage point, for I am both pastor and candidate for new membership. I am both welcomer and welcomed. I am both seasoned in Peace Church’s ways after being your pastor for almost a year, and one of the new kids on the block. It isn’t often that a preacher can speak from that perspective. It’s humbling, actually. And to do so on Pentecost as we celebrate the birth of the institutional church, as we imagine that gust of wind that shook the foundations of that room in Jerusalem, as we consider what tongues of fire are, seems even more overwhelming.

There are a lot of sermons I could give this morning on Pentecost, on the rich symbolism of the story, on the beauty of those speaking in different languages and all understanding one another, on the passionate joy in that congregation, joy which bubbled over so much that bystanders believed that the early church members had been tipping the bottle well before 9:00 a.m.

But I’m hoping I have many Pentecost Sundays in years to come to preach those sermons to you. So, instead I’d like to share a story.

In the most chaotic times of my life there is a recurring dream that I have. I’m sure a Jungian analyst would have fun with the symbols that flow out of my subconscious mind at night. When things are askew in my world in whatever capacity I dream of tornadoes, that Midwest flat-land funneling phenomenon. In the dreams I am running from them, seeking shelter, trying to find safe haven. And usually, thankfully, the dream often ends with my finding a cellar door open, or discovering a firmly-rooted tree that I can hold on to. And then, often the nighttime panic is averted. And I ride the storm out, only to awaken in the morning wondering how my mind had tangled itself into that dreamworld mess the nightbefore.

There was one night, though, when the tornado finally found me, caught me in my dreams. It was a snowy night in January of 2004. During that time I was leaving my first pastorate after having been together for six years. I left with a great deal of ambiguity, loving them, but knowing it was time to move to a new chapter. Wanting to hold on to the past, but knowing that there was no future for me in that congregation, or indeed, in that denomination. Swirling with emotions for a variety of reasons and feeling even angry at God for calling me into ministry and then leaving me in the wilderness. On that night in January I dreamt that I was driving a car which safely protected my new family, for Robert and I had only been married a few months, and that the four of us were being chased by a tornado together. I so clearly remember the sense of urgency, the sense that I needed to protect not just myself now but Robert, and Tess and Brynn. And in that dream landscape a church showed up on the horizon, and I ran to the door and jiggled the locked handle, and banged on the stained glass-windows and demanded to be let in. And someone yelled out to me that there was no room for any of us, and that I needed to go away. And before I could return to the car it was gathered into a whirlwind and scooped into the belly of the twister, everything scattered this way and that. I awoke that night in a sweat, and felt slammed back into the real world, disoriented and distraught.

But this haunting dream, accurately named my reality. For at that time in my life, for a variety of reasons, there was not a church which had sheltered us. While there was a God who I believed sustained me, there was no community to call home. And in a sense, I felt unmoored, and untethered.

I share that story with you as one who will make vows this morning that bind me in covenant with you, as one who represents the voice of so many in this world. There have been times and there are currently times when for whatever reason, the institutional church has failed and will fail to meet the needs of some. And there have been times and there will be times when for whatever reason the institutional church has not welcomed others and will not welcome others. There have been times and there will be times when this human social institution which we call “The Church” has disappointed us or betrayed us or abandoned us. But, when any of those times come, the Holy Spirit will sweep in and do Its fancy, sacred, passionate, Holy Spirit dance among us. And we realize that we can be more. The power of the Pentecost comes when we realize that within the church there is an unquenchable fire which has not stopped burning for two thousand years. And we realize that we are part of that flame.

The theologian Renita Weems has written, “We are the church, a ragged band of miracle workers: ragged because we are often contentious, scared, lazy, undependable and—in a word—flawed; miracle workers because we’ve had to take straw and build a cathedral of hope for every generation that crossed our threshold.”

Today we celebrate the birth of the church, church with a capital “C.” And we realize that with all of its imperfections and all of its faults, it has the capacity for miracles and we see them. We see them when we baptize children, and then when we watch them grow into beautiful high school graduates. And we know that the Holy Spirit is with us. We see it when the call goes out that someone is in need, and then casseroles are baked and paper products are collected. And we know that the Holy Spirit is with us. We see it when the still speaking voice of God urges us to speak out against oppression or injustice, and our voice is echoed and magnified by our brothers and sisters. And we know that the Holy Spirit is with us. We see it when our brother or sister disagrees with us and emotions run hot, and then reconciliation is sought and forgiveness is offered. And we know that the Holy Spirit is with us. We, this ragged band of miracle workers.

I have not had any tornado dreams in the past year. Ironic, isn’t it? As your pastor, and as someone who will be binding her troth with that of this church in the next few minutes I offer thanks to you and praise to God for that. For you are a welcoming, gracious people, and the Spirit is alive here.

May we, as the people of Peace United Church of Christ on this Pentecost Sunday, feel the wind on our faces as the Holy Spirit whips through this church to refresh us with its power, and if the wind ever feels too strong, may we know that we can always find solace in the shelter of one another’s love. May the fire of the Holy Spirit be kindled in us that we may live out our mission and be the church of Christ today. Amen.

Where Are You Looking?--Sermon 5/29/11

Where Are You Looking?

When I was in college I had a roommate who grew up in the rolling green hills of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (and just as an FYI, it’s pronounced Lancaster, and not Laancaster, as my Hoosier lips wanted to say it). And so I got to know this part of the country a bit better than your average midwesternern. Rebecca’s family were Church of the Brethren, one of the Anabaptist sectarian movements in those parts, but her family were close with Amish families, and Old Order German Baptist families, and Mennonite families. And so I learned more than the average a bear about life among the “plain people.” Rebecca and I were perhaps anomalies among our college friends and liked wandering around the tiny towns in Lancaster county looking at old antique stores, or Mennonite-owned quilt shops. And at that time I was fascinated by these folk who call themselves, “plain people.” One weekend in June, however, when I was visiting, and Rebecca and I were out galavanting we noticed that all the shops were closed. It was a weekday, a Thursday it seems, and it made no sense to us…what had we missed? Had the rapture come and we didn’t know it? Finally, on our third stop at an Amish bakery we saw a hand-written sign that said, “We are closed, to celebrate Ascension Day.” We both puzzled over the sign, having never heard of Ascension Day celebrations, or Ascension Day hooplas, or Ascension Day picnics. Even now, Hallmark hasn’t picked up Ascension Day theme with cards or gift wrap (and what would that look like exactly? Probably clouds?) and we don’t sing Happy Ascension Day to one another. I wondered then, and I continue to ponder even ten or twelve years later, “What’s this Ascension stuff mean? And how have I grown up in the church without ever really noticing it before? How have I allowed this liturgical obscurity to pass me by?”

This year I decided to make up for nearly forty years of Ascension Day ignorance by doing some remedial theological learning, and because whenever I get enthused about a theological topic I preach about it, guess who gets to come along on the journey with me? That’s right…you do! Wahoo!

The first chapter and first verses of the Acts of the Apostles are classically known as “the definitive” story of the ascension. The writer of Acts, who it is believed was also the writer of the book of Luke, was so amazed by the story that he actually wrote about it twice, once in Luke and then with more detail and four-part harmony again in Acts, and so it is this second scripture that we’ll look at this morning.

Picture if you will a motley crew of assorted characters. A band of followers who had lost their leader, and were at loose ends, sort of like the mice who have lost the pied piper, or a bee hive that has lost its queen. They were a scruffy band of folk who had had their hopes shattered by the death of this one they thought was the Messiah. They’d been in mourning for a good forty days, a little over a month after watching Jesus die. And not only did he die, but he died in an incredibly violent and agonizing and cruel way. And then, puzzlingly, strangely, there had been that cryptic message from the angel in the tomb, and those sightings of him, which were hard to wrap your head around. While it seemed Jesus was popping up here and there, or at least people were saying they had seen a fleeting glimpse of him (think of modern day Elvis sightings), there hadn’t been any clear directive from the disciples en masse. There was no clear movement or direction that could be agreed upon. There was no master plan, no mission statement, no grand vision. There were just some folks, scattered here and there, aimlessly wondering what was next for them, and what they should do with their remaining time on this earth.

And then, (and you already knew this, since Bev already read ahead in the story for you), lo and behold, there was a sign. Out of nowhere word came from this one who they knew as the Messiah, speaking on behalf of their God. Jesus appeared to the disciples and told them not to leave Jerusalem. They were to stay put, hang tight, just wait patiently. For there was something exciting and unanticipated on the horizon. The baptism of the Holy Spirit was imminent.

I love thinking about these disciples then…I have a pretty irreverent picture of them in my mind’s eye at this point. I see them as sort of like the Keystone Cops, fumbling and muttering to themselves, running into one another and bustling back and forth in a commotion. Not entirely understanding, not entirely catching Jesus’s drift, but still feeling the need to act. Perhaps I see them this way because it is I would see myself in their shoes, laughing along with jokes I don’t quite get, and wanting, desperately wanting to do the right thing, which would lead to lots of fumbling movement and accidental incidents.

The disciples didn’t understand. Not yet. They asked Jesus, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom of heaven?” Such an eager question. And the response they got was a perplexing one. Instead of answering the question he told them, politely, that the coming of the kingdom of heaven is in God’s hands. Jesus doesn’t give a yes or no answer, he doesn’t tell them an exact date and time and then encourage them to hand over their savings accounts to him so that he might create billboards and pass out flyers so that they might neglect the needs of this world and instead focus on the next one. Instead what Jesus says is this, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses.”

I wonder what the disciples thought of that response. Did they understand? Did they furrow their brows and scratch their heads? Did it make any sense to them? Does it make any response to those who follow him some two thousand years later?

Jesus’s response was a crafty one. If I were a disciple, I might have been inclined to want to grab his shoulders and shake him and say, “Just answer the question! The question is this: Are you, or are you not, here to restore the kingdom!?!” But Jesus has a wisdom which offers a depth that mere mortals like me don’t understand. The fact that Jesus didn’t answer this question, and moved on to another topic makes me think that the disciples were asking the wrong question. For if the disciples were simply continuing to hope for a cosmic ruler who would command the people and bring a new kingdom, if they are simply looking out into the distance and waiting for the next world, they are missing the point entirely. They are looking in the wrong place.

The kingdom language that Jesus spoke of throughout his life, throughout his ministry is not about another place and time. The kingdom language that Jesus uses has much more to do with how we bring about the community of God today, and tomorrow. And the job of furthering the mission, the task of ushering in the kingdom is the responsibility of us all. The reign of God is ushered in when we love. The reign of God is realized when we go about creating spaces of sanctuary for those in need. The reign of God is alive here when we practice compassion and tenderness. And this reign isn’t about tomorrow, and it isn’t about looking up. It’s about today. And it’s about looking here.

Listen to Jesus’s response to his disciples again, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all of Judea, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” What he says, in the common vernacular is, “It’s not just about me now, friends. This ushering in of the kingdom of God, it’s up to you now too.”

And after these words he was gone. Poof. As the disciples watched he was lifted into a cloud. He ascended. Voila, the first Ascension Day! And disciples are left with his words, and with a mission.

But there’s one more part of this story that I really love…the part that assures me that God has a twinkling sense of humor and a sparkle in the eye—as well as the patience to get through to even the densest of followers. While the disciples are still standing there, looking up, gazing heaven-ward two new men show up. Two mysterious men in robes and ask pointedly, “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” And the disciples must have wanted to point at Jesus’s still rising feet and say, “Well, um…duh!”

But the question seems to be the moral of the story, the way to sum it all up. Why stand around waiting? Why focus so much on the next world, when there’s a world right in front of you hungry for God’s touch? Why stand looking up when right down the road there is a beggar who needs help, when there is a blind man who needs healed? What are you looking at? The community of God needs to be ushered in here, my brothers, and it’s not going to get done if you just keep standing here staring at the sky.

I find it ironic that when the Church, and I mean Church with a capital “C” celebrates ascension, much more time is spent considering the rising, when what the writer of Acts documents, the words spoken from the lips of Jesus seem to have more to do with the witness that happens down here…in this world…in this place.

Friends, there is a hungry world waiting for out gifts, and the followers of Jesus don’t have the luxury of resting on our haunches. Friends, there is a planet which needs our attention, and the followers of Jesus can’t simply ignore it while we await the heavenly realm. Friends, justice is still slow to come to our nation, and to our world, and the followers of Jesus aren’t permitted to excuse ourselves from the cause.

Instead, we must stand together, and imbibe the power of the Holy Spirit. We can gaze fleetingly at the Christ who rose, but then we must get back to work building the kingdom on this ground, just as Jesus did in his ministry.

I want to close by sharing with you the words of a Nicaraguan song taught to me in college:

Enviado Soy de Dios
I am sent by God. My hands they are ready. Ready to build a peaceful loving world. The angels, they were not sent to change a world of pain into a world of peace. God has called me, to make it a reality. Help me, God, to do Your work.

In the name of Jesus, may it be so.

Amen.

Words Whispered Over Water--Sermon 5/22/11

A special thank you to the brave and wise Hannah Moore who allowed me to share her story this morning.


Words Whispered Over Water

In the United Church of Christ there is perhaps no greater day in worship than the Sundays in which we welcome those newest on the Christian journey through baptism. We welcome them when they are infants, or children, or adults. We welcome them by sprinking water from an ornate baptismal font, or pouring it from a pinky smooth shell, or even dunking in a river or lake. We UCC folk are not too particular about the details, we would rather dwell on the meaning. And the meaning is about new life being nurtured by God’s love. New life is about knowing that wherever you are in life, you are named as kin with Jesus. New life is believing that what was written is true, resurrection is possible, death does not have the final word. We baptize as a symbol of our belief in the power of resurrection. Just as John baptized Jesus in the river Jordan, we choose to be baptized as a sign of our connection to the one who was called God’s beloved. The words we whisper over the waters, the invocation of God’s blessing, and the act of baptism are some of the most profound words which can be uttered.

And so this morning, knowing that Matt and Marcy will be making covenantal vows about how Clara will be raised, we dare not forget that Matt and Marcy aren’t the only ones making promises, for we the living church, the church which loves and supports which weeps and holds which comforts and sustains will be making promises to them which are no less binding or powerful.

I love those moments of syncronicity in the lectionary when the verses which I am scheduled to preach on match perfectly with the world in which we are living in here at Peace United Church of Christ in little Fort Wayne, IN. I sort of feel as if it’s one of those serendipitious moments when God winks at us, as a way of saying, “Yep, I’m still watching…” For of all the texts that could have been assigned for this day, the text which we have been given is one from a letter to a group of people who were newly baptized.

This epistle, a fancy way for saying pastoral letter, was written by a leader of the church in Rome in or around the year 79. Some attribute the writings to Peter, but current Biblical scholarship suggests that Peter would have already have died years before. And so this unknown leader is writing in Peter’s name, sharing Peter’s thoughts, which was actually a quite common thing to do in the early church. This early follower of Christ was writing to a people in Asia Minor, people who had been raised in the Pagan ways, to worship the Pagan gods in the Pagan temples. Their fledgling devotion to Jesus and their new baptisms had not been well-received in their lands, and they had been mocked and slandered for their faith. At this point the taunting and discrimination had not become violent, the state had not taken a side on the issue, but there were fears about what proclaiming Jesus Christ meant.

The unknown author who is named as Peter reminds them that they are to crave the teachings and word of God just as a child craves milk from its mother’s breast. With the same intensity, and with the same fervor. And that the milk of that word is meant to sustain them, and strengthen them, and knit their spiritual bones together. But then our friend, also known as Peter, goes on to switch metaphors rapidly (its clear this writer was not an English major) and begins a lengthy treatise on the metaphor of stones, particularly living stones.

Living stones are not something that make much sense in our world. For us, with our tidy rational Western ways of thought, a stone is a stone. It is inanimate. It is hard. It is stable. And so there are times when the power of this metaphor has been lost on us. But, let me try to explain here…those who read this scripture were people who came from the tradition of the temple. The places where the worshipped were the most important thing. Pilgrimages were made to temples. Sacrifices were offered there. The temple in Jerusalem was destroyed only twenty to forty years before this letter, and the smoldering ruins must have been a memory that had been told. And so to utter the words to those new Christians, new Christians who were in a captivity of sorts, and living on the margins of society, to utter the words that they were to offer themselves as living stones was to alter their reality radically. The writer of the letter said to them, “No more are you people of the temple, but you yourselves are the temple. It is you, you who must become the church. There is no longer a place; instead there are a people.”

In January of 1998 I was called to pastor a church in North Manchester, Indiana. Fresh out of seminary, bright-eyed and hopeful, filled with new ideas and passion, I was called to pastor a historic old church well ensconced behind walnut trees in a small town. And a week before the call service, I received a call at 4:00 in the morning that the building was on fire, and would likely not be salvaged. I got in my car and drove the three hours there, and walked along the fire line barricades and wept with my future parishioners. I remember the audible gasp in that cold sleeting day when the last beam of the sanctuary fell, and then the cross behind it. And I confess that I began to ask the question, “How will we be the church now? Where will go know? Do I still have a people to pastor?” How naïve and unbelieving I was…for twelve hours later we stood on the front steps of the still smoking building, a sea of umbrellas and sang “Great is Thy Faithfulness” and recommitted ourselves to God and to this family of believers.

My hope is that none of you ever have to learn what it means when your own temple is destroyed to discover how to be living stones, that rather our discovery of that is born not out of crisis, but out of hope for new life.

This morning, as we baptize Clara Catherine Blundall, we must remember that we have become the living stones which are used by God to build her faith. We must allow the Holy Spirit to build us, to shape us, to create structures of haven and strength that we could never have imagined before. And we need to allow ourselves to be built not just for Clara, but for all our children, and our youth. We need to allow ourselves to be built because we have a purpose in this world, to feed the hungry, to support the homeless, to nurture the downtrodden. We need to allow ourselves to be built because we have been called by Jesus to bring about the kingdom of justice, to welcome the stranger, to offer grace. We must be the living stones which become the church, and today we start simply by being those living stones for Clara.

This week I heard a poignant story from some good friends of mine. It is the story of a fifth-grader here in Fort Wayne named Hannah. As can happen in any fifth-grade classroom, kids can be cruel, comments can be catty, people can be hurt or humiliated. Hannah was on the playground with her friends who, as her Dad pointed out, are all good kids, good students involved in lots of extra-curricular things at school—Math Bowl team, Spelling Bowl, Dance, band, art. These are girls who have been to one another’s homes to parties and for sleepovers. And on this particular day they were doing what they do on the playground—singing their favorite songs, telling jokes, talking fashion, and adding in the inevitable snark and gossip. And one of the girls in that close-knit circle began to speculate on the sexuality of a boy in their class, a young boy who was standing just out of earshot. Others playfully joined in commenting on his style of dress, how he talks, how he moves. And at first Hannah became quiet and sad as she listened. Aware of playground politics and the fast political and social rules of who is in and who is out it would have been easy for Hannah to have said nothing, to allow the rising tide of cascading laughter to roll over her, but she realized another emotion rising in her, that of righteous indignation and anger and she said later to her father, “It’s like I couldn’t control myself.” And she stood up and said loudly, to get everyone’s attention, “Hey! You guys are being mean. And ignorant. And he’s a person.” Her outburst was met with derisive laughter and then another girl said, “Well, I’m a Christian, and in my church I learned that being gay is a sin and you go to hell for it. So you must not be a Christian.” And Hannah paused, and thought about this, Hannah a child of Plymouth UCC where she was born and baptized and welcomed. And then she said with equal conviction, “In my church gay people are still people, and they’re great and kind, and we accept people for who they are, and I’m a Christian too.”

Hannah’s words of unequivocal love and welcome in the face of adversity speak of this call to allow ourselves to be built as living stones, but more than that, the thing which made my voice catch in my throat as I heard her story was the other piece. Because Hannah had been nurtured in a church, because she had seen the power of those living stones who have sheltered her, and taught her, and shaped her, she was empowered to follow the call of Jesus to give voice to those who are voiceless.

This morning we baptize a tiny infant. If we can become the living stones which create a solid church for her than we can give her the wings she needs to fly into this world. By rooting ourselves in the solid ground of God’s mercy and grace, By tending to the soil of peace and justice, and laying our foundations deep and strong and true, we have the power to be the living stones which continue to create the kingdom of Christ. The words we whisper over the water today radically alter our worlds. May it be so. For Clara and for us all.

Amen.