Sermon for 7.3.11

Scriptures for Today are Here

You may think it’s hot here, but you haven’t felt heat until you’ve spent a summer day in the melting humidity of New Orleans, as the youth group did on our mission trip last week. We spent a day walking around the Algiers Point neighborhood, which two centuries ago was a port where slaves were offloaded from ships from Africa. We went to the Tomb of the Unknown Slave, where we thought about the slaves and about what it meant for people like us to be bound by things in our lives, and what it would mean to let Christ free us from the things that bind us. We had our wrists bound, we thought about bondage and about freedom, then we let the leader cut the ties that bound us and set us free.

The next day, we returned to the same area, a majority African-American neighborhood. We picked up trash in a neighborhood of small shotgun houses, cracked sidewalks, shabby-looking churches, small corner stores, empty lots. Not much like Scottsdale, but not a slum. A quiet, peaceful place.

One of the revelations of a trip like this is the opportunity to interact with people from a different place. So every person we encountered, we stopped to talk, and we soon learned that the code of behavior in New Orleans is that you smile and greet everyone you see with a “Hi, how y’all doin’?” Most everyone we met wanted to know where we were from and what we were doing, and all of them smiled and said thank you, and seemed truly grateful that we cared about them and their neighborhood – glad to know that 6 years after Hurricane Katrina, they haven’t been forgotten.

One of my favorite interactions was with a man who came out to his car while we were walking by his house – he smiled, asked how we were doing and where we were from. When two girls in our group said they were from Dallas, he said “Mavericks!” and they smiled and gave a thumbs-up, and immediately we were all on common ground – basketball.

“Here’s something you need to know,” he said. “Those Mavericks, back before they won the championship, back when everyone was talking about them and saying they had no chance, that they were going to lose it all, that they were a terrible team with terrible players – way back then, they were already winners. Think about it! If you’re going to win, you’re already a winner, long before you know you’re going to win!”

So – you may already be a winner! Now I’m listening carefully to what he is saying, because of course I save up stories like this to tell you in sermons, and I’m trying to get the sermon lesson out of it. So I quickly think up two possible life lessons he may be trying to tell us: One: you may already be a winner, but does that imply that you may already be a loser too? That’s not such a heart-warming lesson. Or two: God was on the Mavericks’ side, and God decided they deserved to be winners and made it happen, like a player controlling the little men in a Foosball game (or whatever the basketball version is of Foosball). Well, I don’t believe that God controls us like puppets and decrees in advance what we all are going to do – else God has a lot to answer for, paying attention to the Dallas Mavericks and forgetting about all the suffering going on in the world.

So, working to make this into a sermon for you all, I asked him – do you mean that whatever you’re meant to be, you already have that inside you? You already have what you need to be a winner, you just need to work to make it happen? And he smiled at me, and he said yes, that’s what I mean. Now wasn’t that lovely that we created a sermon together.

So – you may already be a winner! Because what you need, you already have! Which is an appropriate concept to consider, on a day we call “Freedom Sunday.” It’s the Fourth of July holiday weekend – a time to celebrate our American heritage and the freedom we are blessed with. I want to be clear – as Christians we know that our ultimate allegiance is to our God – our allegiance to our country always comes second.

Nevertheless, freedom is a very Christian concept, one which the Bible discusses in detail. The Founders didn’t dream up the idea of freedom, they attempted to enshrine it in a governmental structure. And they weren’t entirely successful, not immediately – for long after the Declaration of Independence was signed, slaves were still being offloaded in Algiers Point. But the governmental structure the founders of our country created did make it possible for enslaved and oppressed people to struggle over the centuries for their freedom.

But the physical freedom of emancipation, liberty from tyranny, freedom of religion, speech, press, the other freedoms we take for granted in our country - this is only part of the kind of freedom Paul is talking about in our New Testament lesson. Christian freedom encompasses this kind of political freedom – we Christians believe it is everyone’s right to struggle for freedom, because the kingdom of God Jesus proclaimed is one where everyone is free. But it is more than that too – Paul, in his letter today and last week, is talking about Christian freedom from sin. In the excerpt from Romans we read last week, he says specifically that before the Roman church found Christ, they were slaves to sin. When they gave their lives to Christ, they became instead “slaves to righteousness.” Which begs the question – what is Christian freedom if it simply means trading one kind of servitude for another? If we give up being slaves to sin (yet find ourselves caught in the bonds of sin over and over, as Paul describes today), and become servants of God instead, how is that freedom?

This is the question that Jesus addresses in his famous lines in the gospel today: “Come to me, all you who are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Jesus says when we accept what he offers, that we are not throwing off all yokes – we are taking a new yoke upon us, like a pair of oxen yoked together. But he says that we are yoked with Jesus himself. Yoked together with Jesus, our burdens are easy, for he carries the weight.

So what does that mean in 21^st century America, the land of freedom and opportunity? For people like us who have all the political freedom we need, what burdens can we shift to Jesus, and what does it mean to take on Jesus’ yoke instead? I look around me, and we are very stressed and anxious about many things. For a group of generally fortunate people, we worry about our jobs, our school work, our crime rate, our education system, our politics, our economy. And ordinary people have such busy schedules that we often can’t make time for God, families, or ourselves – our blood pressure soars, our stress level skyrockets. Methodist bishop and preacher William H. Willimon predicted that "our age shall be known, not as the age of freedom, but as the age of anxiety. We are anxious about many things: having enough money, having good enough health, being secure and safe." In a way, we are yoked, bound, by all our cares, obligations, and anxieties.

Freedom in Christ means making the free choice to shift our attention away from ourselves to God and other people, and to live according to the law of love, the easy and light yoke that Jesus offers.

I think that taking on Jesus’ yoke is exactly what our youth did last week. By their own free choice, they took time away from their busy, stressed schedules – summer time when they could have been relaxing with friends, and used that time to help others, and to explore their relationship with God. Take my yoke upon me, and learn from me, says Jesus.

Our young people learned what it was like to give of themselves for others – in hard work like picking up trash on a melting hot New Orleans day; in everyday interactions with people on the street, like our wise preacher man; in their careful attention as we toured the Katrina Exhibit and the still-devastated areas of the Lower Ninth Ward; and in their prayers and their willingness to look for God on streets of New Orleans.

In giving up their time for the sake of God and the sake of other people, I think each of our youth discovered something new about themselves. I heard some amazing things from them as we shared at the end of each day. And I will let them tell you something about it themselves, on July 24. But what I think perhaps each of them found, in some way, was that they were already a winner – that God had already given them everything they needed to become who they are called to be: servants of Christ and servants of each other, who find their freedom as they freely learn to love and serve other people.

The same is true for all of us, whether we go on dramatic, life-transforming mission trips or not. Every time we make the choice to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves, in action as well as in words, then we are allowing Christ to release us from a little bit more of our bondage to sin, cut the ties that bind us, re-create us from the inside out. We are finding in ourselves what was there already. Because God has already given us the gifts we need to be truly free in Christ.

Sermon for 5.22.11

Scriptures for today are Here.

Well, I see you’re all still here too. Either the Rapture didn’t happen yesterday, or else none of us made the cut. Which is fine with me, because I’m not ready to leave yet. As far as I can tell, there is still plenty of work for Christians to do right here.

Our scriptures today tell us something about how Christians live right here. The question these scriptures ask is: how do we live in the in-between time? To show you what I mean by the in-between time, I have the Story Stick. The children know that when I bring out the Story Stick, it usually means I have a story for the children. And I do want to ask the children to help me with something in a minute, but first let me explain the Story Stick. It has pictures on it that explain all of salvation history, from the creation of the world at the very bottom, on up through Noah’s Flood and Moses and the building of the Jerusalem Temple, to right here, where Jesus is born. Then it has pictures of a lot of things that Jesus did, like feeding 5,000 people with a few loaves and fishes, then it has his death and resurrection. Then up here at the very top is what hasn’t happened yet – the moment when each of us will stand in front of Jesus and see him face-to-face. That moment will come someday, but in the meantime, each one of us lives our entire life in the in-between time – between Jesus’ life, death and resurrection down here, and the moment of his Second Coming, up here. And the question for today is, how do we live in the in-between time?

Well, our scriptures tell us something about that today. Our Acts lesson is about a new path to salvation arising: Stephen is the first Christian martyr, and our scripture lesson for today doesn’t include the whole story. Basically, Stephen is stoned to death for declaring that the Temple is no longer necessary; that Christ offers salvation through a new kind of Temple – Jesus Christ. Stephen is talking about the dawning of a new era through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and it costs him his life.

Our Gospel lesson talks about what is to come, way up on the top of the Story Stick: on the night before he dies, Jesus tells his disciples not to be worried about what is coming, because he will come again and will take us to himself – Jesus is preparing a spiritual home for us. The way I read this, we don’t have to get anxious or troubled about heaven, the Rapture, the Second Coming or anything else – whatever God has in store for us, we can count on it, we can put our trust in Jesus – his promises are rock solid, he will show us the way. Salvation is the free gift to us through Jesus Christ, and we don’t have to do a thing to earn it – it is already ours.

But here’s the question: how do we live in the in-between time? In between the life, death, resurrection of Jesus, and the time we will stand before Jesus, and see him face-to-face. Because honestly, this is the most vital question of our lives – we will all live our entire lives in this in-between time. Christ has risen, and Christ will one day take us home. But in between, God has given us the gift of this world, and this life; the gift of love and family, the gift of church, the gift of work and service, the gift of a calling to live in the light of the Resurrection. And how do we live in the in-between time? This is what 1 Peter addresses – and to look at 1 Peter, I’d like to invite the children to come forward and help me.

So right here, children, I have some Duplo blocks. We are going to build a building together. To build a building, you have to have a foundation, something solid to build it on so it doesn’t fall down. So I’m going to put this yellow thing here as a foundation. Now here are some blocks, and we’re going to call them stones, and I’m going to give them to you. Here’s a Jaclyn stone, and an Alec stone, and a Charlotte stone, and an Evie stone. Now can you put those four stones right here, as four corners of a building? I have a whole tub full of stones, and I want all the children to take one and build a church building right here. (Children build building.)

Thank you, children. What the Bible says in the lesson from 1 Peter that we read today, is that we are like a building – you and me. The church is like a building that is built on the foundation of Jesus, who is a solid foundation who will never fall down. And every person here is a living stone, which is built on that foundation. And all of us together make the church. The church is built out of stones like us – a Jaclyn stone, and a Virginia stone, and a Bob stone, and a Susan stone. The church is not a building – it is a group of people like us who build our lives on Jesus. Thank you children, you can go sit down now and I’m going to talk to the adults.

You all know that we are going to be building a church building, and that the foundation of any church is Jesus Christ – as we sang in our opening hymn – Christ is made the sure foundation, Christ the head and cornerstone. But when Peter wrote his epistle that we read this morning, and talked about building a spiritual house, with a solid foundation, built of living stones, he was not talking about building a church building. Peter was talking about us, the community of faith, as the true church. He is talking about how God is building new Temple not made of human hands. You and I form the walls of a spiritual house that will be the living sign to all the world that God is offering salvation to the world through Jesus Christ.

And to a community that is asking the question – how do we live in the in-between time – between Christ’s resurrection and his coming again? To that question Peter answers, let yourselves be built up into a spiritual house that will live lives sacred to God. At our baptism, he says, we become spiritual infants, ready to be nourished with God’s living word and sacraments (spiritual milk), which is what we do here in church. And we must receive a steady diet of this spiritual milk in order to grow up into the salvation Christ has freely offered, to become the Christian Temple God has called us to become – the spiritual diet we receive as part of a church community. As living stones of God’s new Temple, we are rooted in God’s salvation, the foundation or cornerstone that is Jesus Christ. And we are also rooted in God’s creation, this world where we live our lives. Our purpose in this world, this world that God loves, in this in-between time, is to become “a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”

In other words, we are not just here to enjoy Christ’s promise of salvation ourselves. We are here to proclaim it to others, through our words and our actions. We are here to offer spiritual sacrifices – a word that means setting something apart, making it sacred, consecrating it to God – we make our lives sacred. And so we, as the spiritual Temple of God, offer ourselves and the community around us to God, working for healing, justice and peace; feeding and helping the poor, hungry and homeless; bringing up children in the knowledge of Jesus Christ; forming disciples by nourishing them with the spiritual milk that is God’s Word and Sacrament. That’s what the church does, and that’s what makes it a Temple of Christ’s salvation – not walls and windows and rooms; not even an altar.

If we ask why we are building a church building, it is not because a church building is the house where God lives. God lives in a house not made of human hands; God lives in us, because we are the Body of Christ. We are the Temple God offers to the world as a sign of Christ’s salvation. We are the ministers – the children, the youth, the adults, the musicians, the builders of houses through Habitat for Humanity, the proclaimers of God’s Word – we are the holy priesthood God has sent to the world God loves. The church we are building will be the home for those ministries, the tool God uses to empower the ministries of the real church, which is the Temple not built out of human hands, the Temple built on the one true and lasting foundation: Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Alleluia!

Sermon for May 8, 2011

Scriptures for today are Here.

This been a week of grand events – from the royal high of Prince William’s marriage to Kate Middleton, full of pageantry and glamour, to the stunning defeat of Osama bin Laden. It’s been a week in which our thoughts have moved from the joy of watching two people make life promises to each other to the deepest questions of life and death, revenge and justice, war and peace.

Into a week of grand international concerns comes the small, domestic festival of Mother’s Day. Not a religious festival, not a commemoration of any grand historical event, not a day that changes the course of nations. Just a quiet, thoughtful day in which we celebrate the ministry of motherhood.

As a mother myself, I often think this day is superfluous – I don’t need to be thanked or honored for being a mother – I need to thank God for the honor and privilege that I got to experience motherhood. Becoming a mother changed me, from the inside out – from a person focused on my own goals and priorities to a person who would give anything for her children. Parenthood opens you up, it makes you vulnerable in a way you never imagined, because a part of your heart is out there walking around on its own. This is nothing unusual, it happens to most mothers I know, and fathers too. The very fact of being given the gift of relationship and love with another person changes you, in a very deep way that it’s hard to describe. And I think that it’s just possible that these ordinary, common relationships – motherhood, fatherhood, childhood, marriage, friendship – these are the places where we come to experience Christ most deeply, these are the places Christ does his most transforming work, not in the great events of nations. Because as we give our hearts to other people, we encounter the self-giving love which is in the heart of Christ. The Christian writer Kathleen Norris reminds us that “to believe” is not a matter of the mind, but a matter of the heart. For what we “believe” is what we “give our heart to.”

Giving our hearts is what these scriptures for 3^rd Easter are about: as Presbyterian pastor Susan Andrews noted, they are about “pounding hearts, wounded hearts and burning hearts. And they invite us to encounter the living Christ in the heart of who we are.” Two disciples are on the road home from Jerusalem – Cleopas and someone else not identified, but let’s assume it’s his wife, since John’s gospel tells us that the wife of Cleopas was at the foot of the cross as Jesus died. We’re not told why they’re leaving Jerusalem, but they are heartbroken because Jesus has died.

What is so interesting about this is they have already heard the news of Easter. When an unrecognized stranger comes along and begins to walk with them, they tell him the sad story of their rabbi who was crucified, and of their hopes which had been so high, and were now dead along with him. And they say these things even though the women at the tomb have already reported to them the fact that the tomb was empty and angels appeared and said that he is risen. They have heard the news of Easter, and yet they are still living in Good Friday. Easter has produced no transformation, their hearts have not responded to the good news – they don’t recognize Jesus when he is walking alongside them!

No wonder Jesus says, “How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!” Belief is a matter, not of hearing facts and agreeing to them, but of allowing one’s heart to be broken open by a relationship with the one who loves us. These two disciples had heard about the resurrection, but mere head knowledge had not produced a faith that changed their lives. What changes their lives is what happens next: and pay attention, because what happens is the same thing we do in church every Sunday.

Jesus begins to interpret the scriptures to them – helps their minds to begin to understand how God has prepared their hearts for his presence – and as their minds are opened, their hearts begin to burn – which is exactly how we start each Eucharist, by reading and interpreting the scriptures. They offer him hospitality, invite him to stay, which is what we do in the Eucharistic Prayer. He takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them, just as we do in Communion. And in this simple act, an act they had seen him do many times before - in the feeding of the 5,000, in countless dinners with sinners, prostitutes, tax collectors, disciples, in the heart-rending dinner the night before he died, when he told them to do this always in remembrance of him; in that one, characteristic act, their eyes are opened and their hearts are transformed. And they go rushing back to Jerusalem to tell the others the good news.

We do all this in church every Sunday, but do we recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread, or do we believe that we’re just doing a series of pleasant but empty rituals? A friend of mine, Corky Carlisle, a priest in Alabama, tells this story: in a small parish he served, he had an associate priest, who at the breaking of the bread would break the bread and hold it up for what seemed to Corky like an inordinately long period. After a few weeks of this, Corky started to notice that every time this happened, a 4-year-old boy in congregation would start making noise. Corky assumed the boy was protesting the boredom of the long silence. Finally, one Sunday he asked the boy’s mother what was happening. She said, you have to ask him, I can’t describe it. So Corky bent down in all his vestments and finery and asked the boy why he made all that noise each Sunday. And the boy answered: in the space between the two halves of the bread, every time the bread was broken, he saw the face of Jesus.

In the breaking of the bread, He is here. He is here, he is risen, he is inviting us to let our hearts be transformed. And we may come here just like those two disciples walking the road to Emmaus. We’ve heard the news of Easter but we’re still downhearted, we still have lost our hope, we’re still not sure where Jesus is for us or how he transforms us. And our hearts may not be burning, our eyes may not recognize him, our minds may not believe that our relationship with him is one that will change us from the inside out, will break our hearts open as we learn to give ourselves to others in love.

We may not know these things because we don’t always recognize him as he walks beside us – but nevertheless, he is here. He is here as we do all the things those two disciples did on road to Emmaus: interpreting the scriptures, inviting him to stay, taking bread, blessing it, breaking it, and giving it away. And he is here as we do what the disciples did, leave the place where they saw him and go out to tell the good news to others. Because the climax of this story is not the moment when the disciples recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread. The climax is the moment when they leave the house and run back to Jerusalem and tell the other disciples what had happened. They have been transformed from sad storytellers to joyous proclaimers of the good news of Christ. And the question for us is also: how are we transformed by what we do here? How are we broken open and given as bread for the world? Because the fact is, the Body of Christ is not just this bread on this altar. We are the Body of Christ, and we too are taken, blessed, broken, and given away as bread for the world.

Sara Miles was a woman living in San Francisco, an atheist, an intellectual, someone who scorned all thought of Christianity or Christian doctrine. Yet one Sunday she wandered into St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church. The story of what happened next is in her book, Take This Bread. She wrote:

“The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer at all, but actual food — indeed, the bread of life. In that shocking moment of communion, filled with a deep desire to reach for and become part of a body, I realized what I'd been doing with my life all along was what I was meant to do: feed people. 

And so I did. I took communion, I passed the bread to others, and then I kept going, compelled to find new ways to share what I'd experienced. I started a food pantry and gave away literally tons of fruit and vegetables and cereal around the same altar where I'd first received the body of Christ. I organized new pantries all over my city to provide hundreds and hundreds of hungry families with free groceries each week…. My new vocation didn't turn out to be as simple as going to church on Sundays, folding my hands in the pews and declaring myself 'saved.' … I had to trudge in the rain through housing projects, sit on the curb wiping the runny nose of a psychotic man, take the firing pin out of a battered woman's .357 Magnum, then stick the gun in a cookie tin in the trunk of my car…. I met thieves, child abusers, millionaires, day laborers, politicians… gangsters and bishops, all blown into my life through the restless power of a call to feed people, widening what I thought of as my 'community' in ways that were exhilarating, confusing, often scary.”

As Sara Miles learned to recognize Jesus in the breaking of bread, she learned also that she herself could be broken bread, the Body of Christ, bread broken and given for the world. In the breaking of the bread together, we too can learn – sometimes in a moment, like Sara Miles and the disciples on the road to Emmaus – and sometimes over a lifetime of allowing Jesus to feed us – to recognize the one whose heart was broken open for us. And we can be transformed into the Body of Christ too.

On this Mother’s Day, consider how you are broken bread and poured-out wine for others. Consider those places where your heart is burning within you, for those who are hurting or hungry or lonely, or for your own family, given to you to love. Ask God to bless you as the Body of Christ, given for world he has made. And leave this place rejoicing, ready to share with others the nourishment that Christ has given us.

Because for most of us, it is not in the grand events of nations and history that God calls us to live out our faith. It is in the relationships of our daily lives, motherhood and fatherhood, childhood, marriage, friendship, freely offered to God’s beloved ones. It is in the relationships in which we give ourselves as bread, and receive God’s love in return, that we can let our own hearts be taken, blessed, broken, and given away as God’s love for the world.

Sermon for Easter 2011

Scriptures for today are here (we used the gospel from Matthew)

If you believe in Easter according to Walgreen’s, Easter is a festival celebrated in pastel colors. The shelves are filled with marshmallow Peeps in hues of pink and yellow, chocolate bunnies in rainbow foil, fluffy pink ducklings, peanut butter eggs beautifully wrapped in lavender, stuffed bunnies with big yellow bows, and so on. And – not that there’s anything wrong with that – but I think the reason for this explosion of cuteness is that we live in a world that has no idea what to do with Easter. We live in a world that believes in Good Friday, and believes that every story ends with Good Friday, with death. A Good Friday world has no idea what to think of the message of Easter, which proclaims life that comes out of death. So it trivializes it into a springtime festival, a feast of pastel colors.

But if you read the Bible, Easter is not a feast of pastel colors at all. Easter begins in darkness. Easter begins in disappointment that must have filled Jerusalem that day. Historians tell us that Jerusalem was a city of 40,000 people at the time of Jesus, but that at the Passover, the population swelled to 200,000 with Jews who came to Jerusalem to celebrate the great feast of freedom, the Passover feast remembering their deliverance from long-ago slavery in Egypt. But they arrived in Jerusalem each year to find it thronged with Roman soldiers, and realized that they were still slaves.

This Sunday morning, the first day after the Sabbath, would be the first day they could travel back home after the Passover – one more disappointing Passover. Imagine this teeming crowd of hopeful people, longing for freedom, hearing the stories of how God had led their ancestors to freedom so long ago, yet questioning whether God was still present for Israel. Picture them packing up that Sunday morning to head back to their disappointing, ordinary lives in Galilee and Bethany and Magdala and Cyrene and all the countries where Jewish people lived; thinking about the farms and the fishing boats and the shops waiting for them there; and sighing not only with the letdown of the end of a holiday, but also with disappointment that once more, the Romans had made short work of a would-be Messiah, the young Jesus of Nazareth who so many hoped would be a new Moses.

So all over Jerusalem, as that black sky lightened into gray, people began to wake up and sigh and pack up their few possessions to head back home to Galilee and other country places and pick up their normal, poverty-stricken lives.

For the disciples, rubbing their eyes from lack of sleep and beginning to stir in the darkness, surely this Sunday morning must have been the day when they started to wonder what they would do, when they went back to Galilee. Matthew, the tax collector, thought about his old job, remembering how Jesus had called him into a new way of life, knowing he could never return to cheating people. Simon the Zealot, formerly a revolutionary rebelling against Rome, yet called into discipleship with the Prince of Peace, wondered whether he could ever go back to his old rebel friends after his newfound friendship with tax collectors and sinners, yet he knew he could never forget his detour into preaching love instead of revolution. Peter and Andrew, James and John, thought about old Zebedee whom they had left behind in the fishing boat, wondered if Zebedee would welcome them home, tried to imagine what it would be like to fish for fish instead of fishing for people. Thomas, the practical one, knew that Friday’s traumatic death was nothing unusual or surprising: it was only what he expected, it ended a beloved story the way so many real-life stories end: in irrevocable, irreversible death, a Good Friday ending. All of them tried to understand what it would be like to be back home in Galilee, all wondered whether any of the dream of the last three years would stay with them, or whether it was all for nothing.

For Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, waking with red and puffy eyes from weeping until they could weep no more, where every time they closed their eyes the picture of their Lord’s death would fill their minds, the long dream was completely, irrevocably ended. Perhaps they were wondering too whether they would be welcomed at home after their time of living scandalously, traveling around with a band of men. As they woke and dressed and went out to slip through dark city streets just coming to life, they knew the bright, shining life they had built with their Master was gone. The hopes, the dreams, the vision of a new way to live, a new way to love – all over. And the world was back to normal: heartbreaking, infuriating, devastating normal; the kind of normal that knows that life is ruled by death, the end of every story. And all they could do, as the first gray light began to glow in the eastern Jerusalem sky, was to go to the tomb to weep some more before heading back home to Galilee.

But then, the earth shook. For the two Marys, arriving at the tomb looking for death, an angel appeared with news so astounding that they quivered with fear. Death cannot hold the Son of God down; death has given way to life. Not bunnies and flowers, not life that springs naturally out of the earth; not the kind of life you wear pastel colors for as you celebrate springtime. Not any kind of life we understand, but life that contradicts the most fundamental thing we know: that life always ends in death. Life that says that the Good Fridays of the world are never the end of the story.

And as the sun rose in the Easter sky, the angel told the women the earth-shaking news that we have all come to hear: Alleluia! Christ is risen! [The Lord is Risen indeed! Alleluia!]

And when you hear this, when you realize that Good Friday is not the end of the story, when you understand that Easter Sunday follows Good Friday, life will never be normal again.

As the women rush back to tell the news to the other disciples, Jesus himself appeared. All the powers of evil that had descended on Jesus had done the worst they could possibly do, had overcome him, defeated him, killed him in wretched misery. Yet there he is: still bearing the marks of suffering in death, but transformed, alive, telling them to go home and meet him in Galilee.

Evil did not have last word, death did not have last word, the last word was God’s. And because God had the last word, and that Word was the flesh of Jesus, alive then as he will be for eternity, we know that all Jesus’ promises to us are true: the glorious promise that God will be with us always, to the end of the ages; the joyful promise of abundant life for us and for God’s whole creation; the radiant promise that you and I are forgiven and restored as children of God.

The Lord is Risen, and Jesus Christ is loose in our midst, and the whole world today is new. So we say, Alleluia! Christ is risen! [The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!] And 2,000 years later on Easter Sunday, we celebrate that triumph with flowers and bells and bright lights and beautiful clothes and beautiful soul-piercing music, and yes, pastel colors.

But here’s the question I always have: what happens when we go back to Galilee? You and I have ordinary lives, just like the disciples that Jesus told to go meet him in Galilee, we have our own fishing boats waiting for us, our computers and kitchens and schools and families and televisions, we have our normal joys and griefs, we have normal life waiting for us to take it up again as soon as Easter is over. And the question is, where in our own Galilees do we meet the risen Christ?

Because if Easter was just something that happened 2,000 years ago, a really happy event that we’re glad to remember, we can enjoy our bunnies and eggs, sing some beautiful hymns, and then go back to Galilee and forget about it till next year. But if Christ is on the loose, not just here in church on Easter, but in all the normal, everyday, Galilees of our lives, if Jesus Christ has really overcome the forces of evil and delivered us through our baptism into God’s new creation that starts today; if it’s really true that Good Friday is no longer end of the story; then that’s something that changes us inside out, irrevocably, not as a long and beautiful dream that we wake up from, but as a solid, tangible, observable presence in our lives.

And that, for me, is the whole point. It’s not just that Easter is the happy ending to a sad story that happened long ago. It’s not just that our grief at the death of a person we admire was followed by his appearance to those who loved him and the assurance that his love would not die. It’s not just that God’s love has power over death itself. It is all these things, but it is so much more.

Easter is the stunning, joyous, incomprehensible good news that Christ was not just someone who lived in the first century AD. Christ is someone who is alive here and now, in church, and yes, in Galilee. In a world that still believes Good Friday is the end of all our stories, Easter is here.

The Risen Christ is with us still, healing the sick, releasing the prisoners, opening the eyes of the blind, proclaiming good news to the poor. Shining the light of God into the darkest places of human life. Commanding us to love one another as he has loved us.

Christ is with us still, telling us to go to Galilee and we will see him there. Go back to our normal everyday lives, go back to our workplaces and our schools and our families, go back to the joy and sorrows of human life. Go back to every place that believes in Good Friday and announce Easter. Live as Easter people in a Good Friday world, live as those who know that love always triumphs over death, live as those who have learned that the kingdom of death does not have the final say in our world after all, that the final word is God’s, and God’s love wins.

And know that he is there, the Risen One who encounters us in ordinary Galilees. Because friends, Jesus Christ has breathed his life and spirit into us, and we are his.

And so to each one of us this Easter, Jesus says, celebrate the joyous life of the resurrection. Celebrate the life that cannot stay dead, celebrate the life so abundant that it comes bursting out of the tomb, celebrate the life of joy that is promised to each person here. And then go back to Galilee and find Jesus Christ waiting for you there. Let him fill your life with joy and peace, let him promise you healing and fullness and eternal life, let him bless every corner of your everyday, normal, Galilee life. Because with Jesus Christ alive and on the loose, our normal lives are transformed into resurrection life, and every promise God has ever made us is true.

And so once more, let us say together: Alleluia! Christ is risen! [The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!]

New Blog

To those who read this blog: please note that I have started a new blog. From now on, I will use this blog ("Susan Snook's Blog") to post sermons only. For other thoughts, I will be writing on my new blog, "A Good and Joyful Thing." I have started by posting my thoughts from last week on ministry with young people. See you there!

Sermon for 4.10.11

Scriptures for today are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Lent/ALent5_RCL.html

An article in 2000 in the satirical newspaper The Onion – which writes articles lampooning current events as if they were real news articles – had this headline: “Christian Right Lobbies to Overturn the Second Law of Thermodynamics!” Which is funny enough if you’re like me and know very little about physics, and all you picture is clueless officials trying to repeal laws of the natural world. But it’s even better if you know what the second law of thermodynamics is.

My friend Lucas Mix, who is both an Episcopal priest (college chaplain at University of Arizona) and a PhD astrophysicist, explained it on his blog last week. Basically, this is the law that explains why your closet turns into a disorganized mess if you don’t stay on top of it with constant vigilance. Or, as Lucas puts it: “the disorder of a system can only increase or stay the same unless you put work into it. Properly, the law talks about heat transfer, but the practical effect is that order comes from organizing things – putting energy in – and if you don’t put energy in, they run down. Clocks run down. Closets become messy.” Or, if you drop a deck of cards, it sprawls in a heap on the floor, rather than spontaneously organizing itself into suits.

You may have guessed that physicists didn’t discover this rule by looking at their closets, but at the natural world, and Lucas says, “And, yes, even the physical universe will run down with time. We say that entropy (the measure of disorder) increases.”

At which point we come to a very interesting dovetail with Christian tradition, because the Creation story in Genesis 1 tells us that God created the universe by organizing it, by bringing order into chaos, by separating things from each other: darkness from light, earth from sky; water from dry land, etc.

Physics tells us that the universe that is now so carefully organized, with scientific laws that can be observed, is running down, very slowly, according to the law of entropy, and will eventually end in heat death, descent into chaos. Lucas says this idea should be even more of a problem for the Christian Right than evolution, if they knew about it. As a fictitious senator in The Onion article put it, “I wouldn’t want my child growing up in a world headed for total heat death and dissolution into a vacuum. No decent parent would want that.” (Not to worry – it won’t happen for billions of years.)

The fact is, however, that on a micro level, we all will die, the ultimate descent into chaos: Christian tradition is no denier of the obvious. Every human learns that death is as inevitable as taxes. And we humans develop a variety of strategies to deal with this fact. Some of them are good – taking care of our health, working on strong relationships with other people, developing a relationship with God. But many aren't so good – from the fabled midlife crisis, to killing each other, to grasping a number of false idols to save ourselves from death. An idol is something that can’t deliver on its promises, and our idols of money, alcohol, sex, appearance, success, and so on won’t help keep death away.

But – and Christianity gives us an enormous “but” to the Second Law of Thermodynamics – but God is still sovereign over the laws of nature. And our scriptures today say that the God who Created the universe by bringing order out of chaos has every intention of defeating the entropy that brings death and disintegration to humans and human societies.

One thing to understand about Jesus was that he was a Jew, immersed in 1^st century Judaism – and in the first century, Jews were divided over whether there was such a thing as resurrection. One faction was the Sadducees, who were wealthy, powerful collaborators with Rome who controlled the Temple. They didn’t believe in resurrection, and if you don’t believe God will eventually judge you, it gives you all kinds of license to sin.

On the other hand, Pharisees were close observers of the law, and did believe in resurrection, based on some scriptures like Ezekiel’s vision of Dry Bones in the Old Testament lesson today. They didn’t believe that it had actually happened in the past, or even in the present, but they believed that it would happen on “last day”, the day the forces of entropy finally brought an end to the world, and God reversed them and brought about a new creation, reorganizing death and chaos into order and life. This is what Martha refers to in the gospel when she says, “I believe my brother will rise on the last day.” Jesus agreed with the Pharisees on this – he is close to their beliefs despite the fact that he often disagreed with how they put their beliefs into practice.

Where Jesus does something revolutionary is in saying that the resurrection has already begun, that God’s new creation is not just somewhere in the future, but has been brought into the present with the life and ministry of Jesus, and it applies in some way to ordinary people like us, here and now. There’s so much happening in this gospel story: it’s such a human story – full of the deepest truths of human life – delay, irony, bravery, love, grief, neighbors who care for the grief-stricken, blame as Martha and Mary both come out to Jesus to say if he had been there, Lazarus would not have died. These are words we’ve probably all said to God at some time – and this gospel tells us that God is big enough to take it.

It’s a real, genuine story, full of the stories of real, genuine people. Yet, at the same time, this is another story in John that is a “sign” – it points to something else. We are familiar by now with John’s technique of narrating a physical story as a symbol of an eternal spiritual truth. Now he tells a story of death, and of life brought out of death, to introduce us to the truth that in Jesus, life triumphs over death, and God’s order trumps death’s chaos.

In this story, we learn many important things, but I want to draw your attention to three of them. First, we learn that Jesus loved this family – and this is the key to what happens. It’s not that Lazarus was a descendant of Abraham, it’s not that Lazarus was particularly good, it’s not even that Lazarus loved Jesus. John doesn’t tell us anything about these things. It’s just that Jesus loved Lazarus and his family.

Second: Jesus’ love leads to a new creation for Lazarus, a reversal of the entropy of death, as we hear Jesus’ stunning statement that he is Resurrection and Life. Jesus himself is Resurrection – not just that he will be the resurrected one – but he himself IS resurrection and life, God’s new creation come alive in the world. Right here and now, Jesus says, resurrection has begun.

In John’s characteristic way, we have a reversal of children’s Show and Tell. John tells us that Jesus is Resurrection, and then he shows us. Jesus gives a great shout: Lazarus, come out! And from the darkness of the tomb, Lazarus emerges into resurrection light and life.

And the third thing happens: Jesus calls the community into action: Unbind him, and let him go. Jesus saves Lazarus from the entropy of death – but it is up to the church community to surround him and help set him free.

Like all of John’s “sign” stories, this one operates on several levels – it is a story that happened at a particular time and place, to particular people Jesus loved. On a particular day, long ago, Jesus stood outside a tomb and shouted, “Lazarus, come out!” Yet because it is a “sign” story, John isn’t trying to tell us that if we pray hard enough, the people we love will be restored from death now. Instead, this is a sign to what God intends for the future – a complete reversal of entropy, and a new creation that restores the world to its intended state.

Yet, it is also a story about each of us –WE are Lazarus, the ones Jesus loves. Because John always operates on several levels, this story applies not just long ago, and not just sometime in the future; it applies now. It still happens every day.

Jesus still stands outside the tombs that imprison us and gives a huge shout. Lazarus, come out! And we stand blinking in the sunlight, called into freedom, away from the fear of death that imprisons us with chains that make us cling to money, possessions, alcohol, sex, or other false idols as our savior.

Lazarus, come out! calls Jesus, and we emerge from the dark, called away from our fixation on our own self-love, and called into relationship with God and our neighbor.

Lazarus, come out! calls Jesus, and we stand in sunlight, called out of death itself, into the eternal, abundant life that is ours by virtue of our baptism, which was the moment when we died with Jesus and were raised to new life, made part of God’s new Creation that has already begun, right here and now.

The law of entropy and death has been reversed into a new law of order and life. The seeds of the kingdom of God have been planted by Jesus, the and those seeds are us. Like Lazarus, we are imperfect, we don’t deserve it, but we are loved by Jesus, and that’s what counts.

And like everyone who is invited into relationship with Jesus, we are released from the grave clothes that bind us by the beloved community of Jesus, the community that is called to love and care for each one of us, and we are set free to be once more the people whom Jesus loves.

John tells us that Jesus’ raising of Lazarus was the final straw for Jesus’ enemies. From then on, they plotted to put Jesus to death. In a very real way, Jesus gave his life for Lazarus. And in the same way, Jesus gives his life for us. We are on the road to the cross now, walking with Jesus toward Jerusalem. With Thomas in today’s gospel, we can say, let’s go with him now, so we can die with him. But the good news is: in our baptism, we have already died with him, and in the waters of baptism, we have already been raised. With Jesus, we can have confidence, even as we walk to the cross, that we live already in Resurrection life. Thanks be to God.

Sermon for 4.3.11

Scriptures for Today are Here: ww.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Lent/ALent4_RCL.html

If you’ve ever been to the home of a person who is blind, you might notice the absolute order of his house, not one thing out of place. The extreme tidiness is not due to strict housekeeping standards; it is because of the simple fact that a blind person needs to know by memory where everything in his house is; how many steps it takes to get from the sofa to the kitchen; precisely where in the cabinet to find the salt shaker. A blind person never rearranges the furniture in his house; he needs things to stay the same so he knows where he is.

You and I rely on our eyesight to tell us these things most of the time; but we’ve all experienced blindness in some way: for instance, getting up in the middle of the night to go to the kitchen and get a glass of water, not turning on any lights so as not to disturb anyone, and knowing our way around the house; walking with hand held out, feeling our way so as not to bump into the door jamb.

Most of the time this works pretty well, and we manage to get our drink of water and get back to bed without incident. But what if someone left the dresser drawer standing open? We would have a big bruise on our shin the next day. What if someone left a pair of shoes in the middle of the floor? We might find ourselves sprawled out on the kitchen floor among shards of broken glass and puddles of cold water.

Worse still, what if someone snuck into the bedroom in the middle of the night and moved all the furniture around? We would be moving confidently toward the bedroom door when bam! There we’d be, come to a dead stop with a six-foot dresser barring our way and no idea how to get around it.

Think of the Pharisees in today’s gospel as blind people who believe they know where all the furniture is. This is no judgment on the Pharisees: the human condition is that we’re all blind, living in darkness; we can’t see all the time what God is doing and what God intends for us. God realized this a long time ago, and gave the Jewish people an excellent map in the form of the Torah, the law, which is pretty helpful to people who need to know how to feel their way through their daily lives.

But the problem is, what happens if someone (a) comes into the bedroom and rearranges all the furniture, and (b) turns on the light and says, you can open your eyes to find your way now!

John’s gospel from the beginning has set up this idea: in the first chapter, he tells us that Jesus is the true light that has come into the world. In the story of Nicodemus that we heard a couple of weeks ago, he tells us that Nicodemus came to Jesus under cover of darkness, and heard the great truth that Jesus has come into the world to save the world, to bring light to the world. However, Jesus tells Nicodemus that not everyone will welcome the light, and some who are evil will simply prefer to stay in darkness, and judgment will come to them not by God’s choice, but by their own.

Effectively, what John tells us in the gospel today is that when Jesus rearranged the furniture and turned on the light, the Pharisees in this story covered their eyes, refused to see by the light Jesus provided, and insisted that the furniture hadn’t moved. And their actions in this story reveal that they are the ones who are truly blind, because they prefer to remain stumbling in darkness.

This is a story laced with irony and comedy from first to last. The Pharisees come into the story assuming they can see and the man is blind. And they see lots of things: their religious furniture is carefully arranged. In one corner, there’s the nightstand: those who suffer must have deserved it, so they must have sinned – even to the absurd idea that a baby can sin in its mother’s womb. In another corner, the solid immovable dresser of the law meant that anyone who broke a rule like working on the Sabbath must not be from God. Therefore, no healings should take place on Sabbath, leading to the irony that they accuse God Incarnate of being a sinner for doing God’s work on the Sabbath.

In another corner, they have the certainty that since healings don’t take place on the Sabbath, that the man must not have been healed after all and in fact, has to be a different man. So they send for his parents to say maybe he wasn’t blind, or maybe this wasn’t him, but his identical twin or something. When assured that it was the same man and he had been healed, they reverted to their first certainty that he was a sinner and therefore had nothing important to say to them. And when confronted with a challenge to everything they knew about how the furniture was arranged, they simply decided they couldn’t deal with the challenge and drove the man out of the synagogue.

You can see what they’re doing: they’re carefully maintaining their blindness throughout, refusing to open their eyes and recognize that Jesus is a new light that allows them to see in new ways. And by refusing to see by Jesus’ light, they prove that they are willfully and intentionally blind, and they are stuck in darkness – so judgment comes to them. Ironically, at the end of the story it is the formerly blind man who can see - not only physically, but also spiritually, for he sees the truth that Jesus is the Messiah, with spiritual sight that unfolds gradually throughout the story. And it is the Pharisees who are blind, who have proved themselves to be sinners by choosing to remain in darkness.

Those silly Pharisees, right? Always making mistakes, bumbling their way through the New Testament like Keystone Kops, constantly critiqued by Jesus and everyone else as too certain, too rigid, too judgmental, too condemning of everyone else. It’s easy for us to criticize them because they’re so different from us.

And yet – and yet – aren’t we all Pharisees in some way? Think of who they were in Jesus’ time – sincerely religious, devoted people. Don’t we know lots of people like that? In fact, isn’t that why we’re here? We love God, we want to be what God asks us to be. Yet ultimately, we are all vulnerable to spiritual blindness – doing what the Pharisees did – taking something good, like the Bible, mixing it with our own preconceived ideas about how things should be, and coming up with the absolute certainty that we know who’s right and who’s wrong. There are certainly many religious fundamentalists who operate this way, but it’s not just fundamentalists. The controversies that erupt in the church on a regular basis don’t happen because some Christians want to throw away the Bible and write something new. They happen because people disagree on how to read the Bible, and which passages shed light which other ones.

Right now, the controversy du jour in the American Christian world is over a new book by an evangelical mega-church pastor, Rob Bell, who had the temerity to tell the Pharisees of our world that he doesn’t believe that all non-Christians are going to hell (in his new book, Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived). For his trouble, he got a lot of his evangelical brethren telling him that he was going straight to hell.

Rob Bell asks an important question, which I will talk more about in another sermon. But today’s gospel isn’t so much about the content of what we see, as how we see it. How do we determine what to believe when things aren’t as clear as they used to be, when we live in a time of huge transition, with furniture being moved all over the place?

Phyllis Tickle has written a book called The Great Emergence, in which she says that every 500 years, the church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale – getting rid of outdated beliefs and practices to make way for new ones that will help us face a new world. Talk about moving the furniture! She says that the transition we’re in now will be every bit as earth-shattering as the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago. And think about where our world is now. We are in a communications and technology revolution. Physicists tell us that time and space themselves are relative, so that we can’t even be sure of where we’re standing any more. And in the church, we can’t assume that we live in a Christendom world, where most everyone around us is Christian and our basic institutions are based on Christian principles. Around us, everything is changing and we have to find our way through the dark of a whole new world.

So here’s what I do when I think about the hard questions in a dark and murky world: I look at Jesus. When I look at Jesus, here is what I see: I see the Son of God who heals, who preaches good news to the poor, who loves others as he loves himself. Jesus’ story is not about a God who chooses to operate by use of power. This is the God who voluntarily chose to empty himself of power in order to give himself completely for love.

And this is the God whose last earthly command was for his disciples – you and I – to love one another as he has loved us. That means we give ourselves for each other, even if it means dying. That means we live according to the law of love, caring for one another, bringing healing to each other, shining light in the darkness of each others’ lives. That means we believe above all else that Jesus loves us and Jesus loves everyone who stumbles in darkness, looking for the light. Because God has given Jesus to us as the light of the world.