Sermon for 10.17.10

Scriptures for this week are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp24_RCL.html

The world watched in wonder and awe as one of the most inspiring rescue stories I can ever remember unfolded over the past week. If you’re like me, it was hard to keep from watching the dramatic appearance of one Chilean miner after another, liberated by a capsule called Phoenix from a hot underground tomb where they had been trapped for 69 days. I watched the men step out of the capsule, allow themselves to be unstrapped, and then turn and step into the arms of their waiting families while the crowd shouted “Chi, chi, chi, le, le, le,” and the world watched, and wept. And I wondered whether any of the men felt just a bit like Lazarus, called forth from the dead, stepping out of the tomb, blinking in the sunlight, whether they felt as if the voice of God had shouted to them, “Lazarus, come forth!”

And in fact, it seems that, for a number of them, their Christian faith sustained them in very real ways. Mario Gomez acted as a spiritual leader for the trapped men, requested Bibles, prayer books and religious statues, and led them in prayers twice a day. Mario Sepulveda, the jubilant second miner out, who led the crowd in cheers and chanting, jumping and hugging, said he left 40 years of his life down in the mine. “I was with God, and I was with the devil. They fought, and God won.” He said he reached out for God’s hand, and never let go. And from that moment on, he never doubted that he would be rescued.

All of them, as they emerged into the fresh air, were beige T-shirts. On the front were the words, Gracias, Senor (Thank you, Lord), and on the back were these words from Psalm 95, words which they said had brought them great comfort: “In His hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to Him.” For many of them, it seemed, God was present with them, so that it was not 33 people underground, but 34.

We can look at this miraculous resurrection of 33 miners from an underground tomb and ask ourselves – Where was God in all this? Did God reach out his hand and rescue these miners? Is the rescue attributable to a divine miracle? This is not a question that I can answer, for several reasons. First, if you didn’t believe in God at all, you could look at the careful, methodical, dedicated, impassioned work of the engineers, medical workers, psychologists and many other people who devoted the last 69 days to getting these men home alive, and credit the rescue to them – and you’d be right, in a way. It would be wrong to discount the human ingenuity that brought them home.

More than this, in general, it’s always dangerous to say what God is and isn’t doing, and why. If we assert that God rescued these 33, we have to ask ourselves why other miners die in other accidents, why perfectly kind and faithful people get incurable diseases, why hurricanes strike and innocent people are swept away. Surely we can’t say that the faith of those who die in other situations is any less valid than the faith of these miners, or that more people were praying for the miners and therefore God paid more attention.

And we know perfectly well that everyone suffers – most of us not as publicly or dramatically as the miners, most of us in ordinary, humble, common ways. We might suffer from stress, from strained relationships, from financial worries, from substance abuse (our own or that of someone we love), from grief, from health problems, from fatigue and disappointment and fear. And as your pastor, someone who has the privilege of walking that road of suffering with many people, I know that faithful and prayerful people are just as likely to endure these things as anyone else – faith is not a magic bullet that will make these struggles magically melt away.

So let’s ask ourselves: where is God in our suffering? What’s the role of faith in times like these? And that is where our scriptures give us some excellent guidance.

In Genesis reading today, Jacob is experiencing one of those nights we’ve all had: night so caught up in worry and stress that you spend the whole night wrestling with something you can’t identify – yourself, an angel, God maybe. In Jacob’s case, here’s what’s happening: Jacob has spent years deceiving, scheming and tricking others out of what is theirs. As a young man, he schemed with his mother to trick his father into giving the birthright to him instead of his older twin brother, Esau. When his father found out what he had done, Jacob fled for his life, with Esau’s threats following. He then spent years with his uncle, married his uncle’s two daughters, engineered an ingenious breeding scheme to divert most of his uncle’s sheep to himself, and when his uncle found out and got angry – he fled once more.

With nowhere to go, he heads back home, to his angry twin brother. Afraid his brother will attack with an army, he sends his wives and children away to safety, and waits alone for his brother to arrive. And in the dark night as he waits for the showdown that will determine the course of his life, indeed whether he lives or dies, he begins to struggle. The text tells us that a man shows up and they wrestle all night – and when morning comes and the man tries to leave, Jacob refuses to let go until the man gives him a blessing. Somehow Jacob has identified the man as God, or God’s messenger. And God gives him a new name: instead of Jacob, the deceiver, he becomes Israel, one who struggles with God and prevails. The angel, or God, strikes him once more, in the hip, and marks him with a wound that will make him limp for the rest of his life.

And God’s blessing seems to bear fruit – because in the morning, a miracle happens. Esau arrives, and instead of doing what Jacob fears and attacking him, Esau weeps with joy, and opens his arms, and welcomes his brother home. Is it a miracle? Nothing supernatural happens as Esau weeps and holds out his arms – yet the miracle has happened inside him – rivalry and hatred has been transformed into welcome and love, and the nation of Israel is born.

In our gospel passage, we have another story of someone who refuses to let go. Jesus tells a parable of a widow who will not stop bothering an unjust judge until the judge relents and grants her justice. Now I don’t think Jesus is telling us that the squeaky wheel gets the grease and that God is like an inattentive parent who keeps getting interrupted by an annoying child until he finally says, OK, you can have a cookie. (I would do that, but I don’t think God does!)

On one level, Jesus is saying if a bad judge will sometimes listen, how much more will a loving God listen? Of course God hears our prayers. But there’s more to it, of course, because Luke records this story at a time when the Christian community was suffering persecution and in danger of losing heart, giving up on their faith that Jesus would return. Luke, in fact, is relating this parable of Jesus’ to a group who is wrestling through the same kind of dark night of struggle and worry that Jacob did. They are wondering: where is God? And how are we going to survive? And how will we find our way out of this dark and scary place? And what is going to happen in the morning? And Jesus is telling them, God is here, right here in this struggle, God is the one you are wrestling with – God is with you – and if you have faith in God, you will find the strength you need to face these worries.

Prayer is not a matter of asking God for personal favors, personal miracles. Prayer is a matter of staying in relationship with God, knowing that in that relationship we will find the strength we need to help us through our struggles. And that as we struggle with God, as we grab onto God’s hand and refuse to let go, we will be blessed.

In the case of the Christian community hearing the parable of the unjust judge. the blessing is the deep knowledge that God is not an unjust judge, that God is loving and merciful, and that God will always be present with them – a knowledge that gives them the ability to turn their small band of dispirited believers into a worldwide movement of divine transformation. In the case of Jacob, struggling with an angel, the blessing is a personal transformation that allows him to greet the brother he fears and loves, and to see that love, not fear, comes out triumphant.

In the case of the Chilean miners, the blessing seems to have been a spirit that brought together every single person involved in the rescue, from the president of Chile to the engineers at NASA who provided special protein drinks, to every miner entombed in that dark, cramped underground cavern, and made them think of every possibility, prepare for every contingency, and engineer the perfect rescue operation. But even more than that, it seems to have been a spirit of teamwork inside the mine that refused to give up, refused to let go, kept faith every moment that God would never desert them – and brought the miners together as a group.

And in the case of you and me, with our ordinary everyday struggles, I think prayer brings us a spirit of hope. Hope that in our own long dark nights of struggle, dark nights that for some of us last for weeks or years – we may begin to understand that underneath all our worry and stress, the one we are really wrestling with is God. That God is present, giving us the hope, strength and faith we need. That somewhere in our struggles, God has a call for us. That somehow at the end of the struggle, we will be transformed. And that we, too, at the end of the dark night, will emerge blinking into the sunlight, God’s voice echoing in our minds, knowing that we have never been alone, that every moment of the way, God was present with us.

Sermon for 10.10.10

Scriptures for this week are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp23_RCL.html

Time magazine has an interview this week with Rabbi Naomi Levy, who writes in her new book (Hope Will Find You) about the biggest upheaval of her life. It began in the middle of a festive Sabbath meal, when a doctor called to let her know that her daughter, Noa, had a rare degenerative disease - one that usually puts children in a wheelchair by 12 or 13 and is fatal by 20. Levy’s book is about how her life was transformed by this news.

Time asked whether it sparked a spiritual crisis, and Levy replied that it was more like a spiritual paralysis. Levy said she didn’t know how to pray – she didn’t believe that God gives people diseases and disasters, that these happen in the course of nature. So if God didn’t give this disease, how could she pray for God to take it away? She found herself not sure what to say to God, unable to feel God’s presence. So she did what any parent would do: she devoted herself to her daughter, and remarkably, her daughter grew and developed.

Despite some physical and learning disabilities, the time came for Noa to prepare for her bat mitzvah, age 13, and she was still strong & healthy. So her mother, the Rabbi, began to teach her the passage of scripture she needed to recite at her bat mitzvah. The next words are Rabbi Levy’s:

“I asked Noa what her [scripture passage] meant to her and she told me, ‘Mom, I think it means if you don't like your life, if you try really hard, you can find hope.’ And then Noa corrected herself. She said, ‘No, Mom, hope will find you.’

“I gasped when Noa said ‘hope will find you.’ I lost my breath. Because I had been trying for so long to hold onto hope or to grasp for hope, but my wise child was telling me I didn't have to try so hard or hold on so desperately. She was telling me to relax, let hope in, like a kind of grace. Noa was telling me hope was looking for me. That hope would track us all down.”

Much later, Rabbi Levy learned the incredible good news that her daughter's diagnosis had been wrong. She didn't have the degenerative disease, and though she has a few learning and physical disabilities, she is now on her high school's volleyball team, and she is growing strong and healthy. What a miracle.

Hope will find us. It’s a kind of wisdom that can come only from someone who has experienced a life crisis, the kind of crisis that requires you to find reserves of faith, strength and courage you didn’t know you had. This is the kind of crisis the people of Israel are experiencing in the reading from Jeremiah today. To give you an idea of what is going on here, the prophet Jeremiah is writing to a people in exile. For years, Jeremiah had been warning that Jerusalem was on the wrong course, politically and socially, that it had strayed away from God’s hopes for it, for a just society that cares for its members and remembers its identity as the people of God; and that if it kept on course, Jerusalem was going to bring disaster on itself.

And for years, Jeremiah was ignored by people who preferred not to see the truth, preferred to listen to false prophets who said everything was fine. In 587 BC, the disaster occurred: Babylon invaded Judah and took its leaders into exile – king, priests, ruling class, artisans, educated people. And now Jeremiah, the prophet of doom, who warned them repeatedly about the disaster to come, begins to speak a new word to people who have lost hope – and that new word is: hope will find you. Wherever you are, he writes to a people in exile, live a life of hope, and hope will find you: build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat what they produce; marry and have children and create a life for the future. Where you find yourself, he says, is where hope will find you also. And though life may feel like a disaster now, God is still present in that disaster, and God is working in you and through you to bring new hope for the future.

Jeremiah goes even further than telling people to settle and find new ways to make a life for themselves – he tells them that the place where they are, the place of captivity, loss and exile – that is their mission field. As the people of God, he tells them, they must make this strange and foreign city their own city, they must seek the welfare of Babylon, work to improve it, pray for the people who are holding them captive. And as they bring new life to the city of their captivity, they will find new life for themselves – hope will find them.

If there’s any word we need to hear more clearly in our world today than Jeremiah’s words to a people in exile, I don’t know what it is. Because we are a people in exile too. News commentators tell us that we are suffering from “economic dislocation,” that the way we had learned to make our home in the world, a home built on a foundation of a strong economy and a stable culture, that world no longer exists, and we are a people in exile.

Bad news piles up day by day, news of two wars, of terrorism, of job losses, of ordinary people who can’t make ends meet, of corrupt Wall Street titans who continue to profit from the misfortunes of ordinary people. We are a people in exile from the stable and prosperous world we had known, who have to learn to find hope in a world whose foundations are shaking. And it’s not only the public world that is in exile, there are heartbreaking recent episodes of children who lost hope taking their own lives. And many of us are experiencing personal exile as well – job insecurity, economic losses, personal grief and tragedy, addiction, unstable relationships.

In this world of exile, the last thing we do naturally is what Jeremiah recommends: to pray for our enemies and seek their welfare. It is tempting instead to turn on each other and point fingers at each other, polarizing ourselves into teams that call each other names and refuse to listen or hear or give each other credit for any wisdom or courage. Into such a world, Jeremiah comes – Jesus comes – God comes – to speak a word of hope, telling us to make our home here, and make this world of exile our mission field – to make the welfare of the community around us our dream, devote ourselves to God’s mission of healing and reconciliation among these people, and in that mission we will find our own hope.

Hope means believing that God’s love and God’s mission continues in all the exiles in which we find ourselves. Hope means seeing the world more completely, understanding that underneath the reality of this exile in which we find ourselves lies a hidden dimension: God’s love, promise, and healing that is always with us.

When we read a story of healing like the one in the gospel today, about the healing of ten lepers, it is easy to focus on scientific questions like, can God really heal, and miss the larger message: that God is in every situation, that hope will find us, that what it takes to be healed and restored of all the exiles we find ourselves in is a new kind of eyesight, a sight that begins on the inside, with a complete reorientation of our minds and hearts – with hope.

In the story, tenlepers were cured of their disease; nine of them missed that message of hope. Leprosy in that time wasn’t just the Hansen’s disease that we know – it was any skin disease – an imperfection that made a person impure and disqualified them from entering the temple. And because they were impure, anyone who touched them was also impure – they were spiritually contagious. So they were banished from society and could only associate with each other.

Therefore leprosy was far more than a physical illness – it was an illness that brought slow and agonizing emotional and spiritual death as they left their families behind and went into the heartbreaking exile of leprosy. The story doesn’t say Jesus cured them of their diseases – only that he suggested that they present themselves to the priest who could pronounce them pure. Nine of them were pronounced cured and went home. One realized that hope had found him, and that one was not just cured, but healed.

When Jesus says “your faith has made you well”, he uses different word from just “cured.” Jesus is saying “your faith has made you whole, complete.” Jesus recognizes that many things can bring a cure, but faith brings healing. Faith allows us to recognize that in the place of exile, hope will track us down. It allows us to see that spiritual dimension of reality that brings wholeness and wellness of body, mind and spirit and to know that God has been there with us in exile.

Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf, wrote about the moment when her teacher held her hand under a faucet and repeatedly tapped the sign for “water” into her hand until she suddenly understood what language was. "Suddenly," she wrote, "I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten -- a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could, in time, be swept away. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. . . . Every object that I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me."

Helen Keller was suddenly able to see, not because her eyes began to work, but because her mind formed a pattern that made sense of the world around her. Like the exiles in Babylon, struggling with a chaotic world and finding that hope came only when then they could reorient their minds and hearts to find new hope in a strange and foreign land, Helen Keller could see, hear, and interact with people only when her soul was awakened with a strange new understanding. She was not cured, but she was healed.

When we begin to see the reality of God’s presence in all the exiles of our lives (the reality that runs through our veins, through the air around us, the reality of new sight that opens our eyes to God’s work all around us) – then, for us as for Naomi Levy, as for Helen Keller, as for the exiles in Babylon, as for the tenth leper who saw what the other nine missed: our faith gives us hope, our hope gives us mission, our mission gives us power to change the world around us, our power brings hope to the world. And this is what it means to believe in God: hope will find us.

Sermon for 9.26.10

Scriptures for this day are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp21_RCL.html

Jesus is breaking rules again. We have a rule in American society – we don’t talk about money. We will tell the most intimate details of our sex lives – but we won't talk about money. Jesus breaks that rule, and comes right out and talks about the most taboo subject – and all three lessons today are about money, so I couldn’t avoid talking about it if I tried.

So I decided to research what it means to be “rich.” You can go on a website called GlobalRichList.com – you can enter your income and see where you stand in relation to the rest of the world. The median household income in US for 2007 was $50,233 – so think of Mr. or Ms. Average American, someone who worries about the price of gas and whether he can send the kids to college, and what happens if the car’s transmission finally goes out. He makes $50,233 a year. So if you enter this as your income, you get the following information: “You are the 58,938,818^th richest person in the world.” You don’t think that’s so hot, no one goes around shouting, “We’re number 58,938,818!” But the kicker comes if you look at the next line down, where it tells you what percentage that puts you in. If you make $50,233 a year, Mr. or Ms. Average American, that puts you in the top .98% - you are in the top 1% of the world’s income. And if being in the top 1% doesn’t qualify someone as rich, I don’t know what does.

In fact, even some poor people in the US are rich. The poverty line for a family of five in the US is $25,790, and if you make the US poverty line amount – you are still in the top 10% of people in the world – an incredible fact to me. Because there are plenty of people who struggle to make ends meet here – yet it’s all relative. A man in Haiti was quoted as saying, if you eat three meals a day – you are rich. Well, that’s a simple enough definition for us to go on.

So let’s take this information that the average US person is unimaginably rich to the average person in the world – half of world’s population lives on less than $2 per day (less than we would spend at Starbucks) – and ask what the scriptures have to say about it. And when you ask this question, you begin to think that maybe Halloween came a little bit early this year. Not that I’ve seen streets filled with miniature-sized Darth Vaders, fairy princesses, and teenage monsters lugging pillowcases full of Snickers. This early Halloween is way scarier than that. Because if you can read today’s scriptures from the standpoint of someone who is probably in the top 10% at least of the world’s income, and not be scared, you’re a lot braver than I am, and you can escort me into any dark alleys I need to go into. Someone once said, "It's not what I don't understand about the Bible that bothers me. It's what I do understand!" Yep, that’s the problem, all right.

I tried to talk myself out of being frightened by today’s scriptures. From the prophet Amos: Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory – hey, no problem – I don’t have any ivory in my house. Alas for those who eat lambs from the flock and calves from the stall – not to worry, I get my lamb and beef from the grocery store. Alas for those who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp – naah – I listen to them on my iPod (in my air-conditioned car, on my way to eat in restaurants and watch movies). Alas for those who drink wine from bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils – well, you get the picture. The technology has changed, but we have access to all these things – leisure time, plenty to eat and drink, entertainment to enjoy. And Amos says: if you have all these things, and are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph – alas to you.

If we can enjoy the good things of life, and not be grieved for those who can’t, we will be the first to go into exile, says Amos. A kind of exile that is brought to graphic life in our parable from Luke today, with its vivid description of the flames of Hades, which are the fate of a rich man who looks up from his torment to see the poor wretch he stepped over every day as he went into and out of his house, up in Heaven, and begs for mercy – but it’s too late for mercy.

Now Jesus isn’t telling us this story as description of what heaven and hell will be like – his point is about this life (God has heaven under control). What Jesus wants us to focus on is how we live right here, and how our use of possessions helps us or hinders us from loving God and loving our neighbors. Jesus spends a lot of time talking about this. Last week we heard him say “you can’t serve God and wealth” – we can’t serve two masters, it’s one or the other, and we’re kidding ourselves if we think we can compartmentalize our life into spheres – this hour on Sunday for God, the rest of our lives for everything else.

No, says Jesus, it all belongs to God already – we are just stewards, caretakers of the many blessings God has given us. Everything we do reflects how we feel about God – every interaction with another human, every hour we pass on this earth, every dollar we spend. I serve on the board of TENS, The Episcopal Network for Stewardship, and we have a very simple definition of stewardship: stewardship is everything I do after I say I believe.

We can wish that Jesus would concentrate on more “spiritual” matters like prayer and healing, miracles and heaven. But the fact is, Jesus talked more about our use of money than any other subject except the kingdom of God – in fact, today’s scriptures show that our use of money is intimately related to our place in the kingdom of God.

Now I want to be clear: this is not a stewardship sermon, not if you think stewardship is a euphemism for the church asking for money. Churches do need money do accomplish God’s mission, and that’s part of what God asks us to use his gifts for, but that’s not what I’m doing here. This is about something absolutely vital to our spiritual well-being, and I would be irresponsible as your pastor if I didn’t talk about this. Stewardship is not about what we do for the church, or about what we do for others – stewardship is about what we do for ourselves.

Our lesson from 1 Timothy makes it clear – having money or wanting money can put us into grave spiritual danger: “Those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith & pierced themselves with many pains.”

It’s not the mere possession of money that is the problem, and you don’t have to be rich to have the problem of loving and wanting money too much – it’s what the love of money and the desire for money does to us spiritually. And we don’t even know it’s happening – we are unaware of what it’s doing to us. Clement of Alexandria, a 2^nd century theologian, compared wealth to the danger of handling a poisonous snake, "which will twist round the hand and bite, unless one knows how to lay hold of it without danger by the point of the tail. And riches, wriggling either in an experienced or inexperienced grasp, are dexterous at adhering and biting; unless one, despising them, use them skillfully, so as to crush the creature, and escape unscathed."

I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that for many 21^st century Americans, our use of money and possessions is the single most significant spiritual issue we will face in our lives. Not prayer, not church attendance, not for God’s sake, sexuality, but the practical, everyday, mundane, extremely personal question of how we use money.

So what is it that brought the rich man to this dreadful state? Look at parable: Lazarus lies at his gate; the rich man doesn’t give him even scraps from his table. Every single day this rich man goes out through his gate to visit his friends and transact his business in the town, steps over Lazarus on his way out and his way in, notes the crowd of friendly dogs trying to help Lazarus feel better, and does nothing.

It’s not the simple fact of being rich that condemns the rich man, it’s the fact that he does nothing to help this bleeding, starving man at his gate. He sees Lazarus every day, yet he doesn’t see him at all – not as a person for whom God gave him responsibility – Stewardship responsibility. The chasm between the rich man and Lazarus was fixed long before they died. That chasm was put there by the rich man, whose years of habit failed to let him see Lazarus as a human being, a brother, someone deserving of mercy and grace. And once they both died, that chasm remained right where the rich man had put it.

Once we are in habit of creating chasms between ourselves & our brothers and sisters by ignoring their claims on us, those chasms become hardened by years and years of practice, worn down to the bedrock of our souls, permanently fixed in our spirits. So that when we stand before God, we cannot remove them even if we try. For the rich man, his habits of mind have prevailed, the chasm cannot be crossed. His story is over.

The good news is, for you and I, story is not over. There is still time to cross that chasm. Because we are not the rich man in this parable, and we are not Lazarus. We are the five brothers, the ones still here on earth, the ones who can listen to what God has to say. We have Moses and the prophets to listen to, we have the words and witness of the church, we even have someone who has risen from the dead to tell us. All we have to do is listen.

There are two suffering people in this story. The suffering of Lazarus is easier to fix: for the hungry man, you bring him food. For the woman with no clean water, you bring her drink. For the children with no prospects in life, you give them education. For family with no livelihood, you give them work and a home.

But the rich man is suffering too. And so for the one who is suffering from the love of money, you set him free. The one who is clinging to wealth as his savior, you give him opportunities to share that wealth and turn his salvation over to God who has the power to give it.

Our story is not over, and the story of God is not over. For us, it’s not too late. God can open our eyes to see the needs of this world around us, so that we can begin living in the kingdom of God right now.

Sermon for 9.12.10

Scriptures for this day are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp19_RCL.html

“I once was lost but now am found; was blind, but now I see.” These are words that any of us can sing by heart. Words that powerful could only have come from a person with a profound sense of lostness, an overwhelming awareness of God’s grace and forgiveness. And it’s true – because the author of those famous words of Amazing Grace was an 18^th century clergyman named John Newton with a very dark past. He had been captain of a slave ship. Yet one night, in the midst of a terrible storm at sea, in fear for his life, he cried out the most basic prayer of all: “Lord, have mercy.” He became aware of the amazing grace of God, who found him when he was lost, renounced the slave trade, became an abolitionist and an Anglican priest and one of the most popular preachers in England – and wrote a number of hymns, including Amazing Grace, the hymn that brings tears to our eyes, because it speaks to us of a love that will find us no matter how lost we are.

Lostness is an experience we have all had to one degree or another. Some of us have experienced only the smallest moment of looking around and not seeing our mother as a toddler, some have “hit bottom”, knowing they’ve gone as low as they can go. Some have experienced desolation of lost love relationship or grief of a loved one’s death; some have experienced emptiness of realizing that all the time and effort we have poured into a lifetime of work doesn’t fill an empty heart.

It’s a sense of isolation that I think is one of the core experiences of human life, and it’s to this basic experience of lostness that Jesus speaks in our gospel today. Confronted with a group of upstanding church people who believe that anyone who they consider “lost” doesn’t have any right to be found, instead of arguing with them, Jesus tells them a story.

Now remember, when Jesus tells us a parable, he intends for us to be surprised, and we can uncover several surprises in this gospel. First: here is Jesus, speaking to a group of well-behaved, sincerely religious people and saying to them that they’re welcome, but they’re not the guests of honor at his party. The guests of honor, the ones he’s throwing the party for, are those sinners and tax collectors they’d rather not have around. He’s saying, the church is not a museum for saints, but a hospital for sinners.

I have heard people say, I don’t think I can come to church, because all those people have it all together and I don’t. And Jesus says, that’s why the church is here. If you think you have it all together, if you think you know what God is up to, if you think you are doing just fine, Jesus says, think a little bit harder. Because the closer you come to what God is up to, the further out of your comfort zones you will find yourself going. You might even find yourself out there with God, searching and sweeping to find others who are lost, and throwing parties when they are found – so watch out.

The second surprise is this: the God of the universe, the being of unlimited power and unsearchable might, is not a God who chooses to exercise power at all. God cares about people’s behavior, but when they are sinners, instead of zapping them with lightning bolts or calling down the wrath of heaven, God goes out searching, with lamps and brooms, calling out their name, and trying to win them with love, not force.

This comes as a huge shock to people in the ancient world, who believe that a God who is worth anything is a God who can force people to do his will. And maybe it comes as a shock to us as well, because no matter how often we’re told that God is a God of love, not of overwhelming force – it’s hard for us to believe. But this gospel says clearly that this is a God who yearns for us, and who will keep on calling and keep on searching – a God who will not violate our free will to behave as badly as we want, but who will also never stop loving us.

Here’s the third surprise: "Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?” Let’s ask ourselves – which one of us WOULD do that? How does this make any sense? To leave 99 sheep to wander off and get lost or eaten by wolves, just to save one? Only a crazy person who hasn’t thought it through would leave 99 to save one. The second parable seems to make more sense – if you have only 10 coins and you lose one somewhere in the house, of course you would light a lamp and get out a broom and sweep till you found it. But then what would you do? Would you throw a party for all the neighbors? Spend more than the coin you found to buy food and drink for all to celebrate? Once again, Jesus isn’t making any sense.

The only way any of this makes any sense is if these are not stories about sheep and coins at all. It only makes sense if we are not numbers to God, something to be counted, but rather beloved children. So think of it like this: Which of you, losing track of a beloved child, would not sweep and search without ever tiring, for the rest of your life if necessary, until that child is found? And then it makes sense. it doesn’t make sense to risk 99 sheep to save one, and it doesn’t make sense to spend two coins to celebrate finding one. But if you have a child, and you love that child more than your own life, you are not going to stop searching till you find him. That’s the only way these stories make sense – they make sense if God is crazy in love with us, if God refuses to stop searching till every one of us is home safe, and when we’re home, safe and sound, God throws a party to celebrate. ‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.

No matter how far we are separated from God, God keeps on searching. Maybe it’s just me – but it seems that this year the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks 9 years ago yesterday has been particularly contentious and difficult. It doesn’t help that a fringe pastor of a tiny church in Florida threatened to mark the anniversary by burning copies of the Koran, an act which is not just disrespectful, but truly contrary to common sense, putting countless American and other lives at risk. And it brings up a question for me: what illuminates the Bible for us? What helps us shed light on God’s word and God’s truth spoken to Christians? Burning Korans doesn’t illuminate the Bible, what illuminates the Bible for me is the way it is lived out in real life. And as I think back to that day of desolation, I remember a couple of iconic photos from that day. One you may remember seeing – a photo of a quiet church graveyard, white with ash and blowing paper – the graveyard of St. Paul’s Chapel, Episcopal chapel of Trinity Wall Street. In the months after the attacks, that little chapel became the headquarters of a troop of 60 chaplains of all faiths – Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus – who ministered to the recovery workers at Ground Zero – provided them food, kept the chapel open 24 hours a day – there are photos of firefighters in full gear taking a break to sleep in St. Paul’s Chapel. About 60 % of those chaplains were Episcopalians, since it was St. Paul’s. Those who participated in that ministry, who provided comfort, nourishment and simple presence and care to exhausted workers, speak of it as a life-transforming experience – God’s presence in the midst of lostness, God’s care in the midst of devastation. God comes to us in the most extreme places of our lives, and brings comfort.

One more iconic photo I remember – a blurry photo in a stairwell – office workers running down, firefighters running up – some of the true heroes of that day. I won’t speak any more about that photo, because we will all be in tears if I do, but it helps illuminate God’s word for me. Running into a burning building – was that not exactly what Jesus Christ did when he came to earth to find us when we were lost? Putting himself in harm’s way for the sake of the people he loved enough to die for?

When God looked at humankind, lost in emptiness, loneliness, war and destruction; when God looked at all the inventive ways human beings had devised to hurt and kill each other; when God saw that we were lost so far that we would never find our way back to him on our own – God’s son came into this hurting world to find us.

Our God is the one who runs into a burning building instead of running out. Our God is the one who loves us so much he would never stop searching. Our God is the one who would give everything, up to and including his own life, to make sure that no one is ever lost again.

Our God is the true author of Amazing Grace – the one who comes to us and finds us when we are lost. And our God is the one who sends us out to search in turn – for the lost, the lonely, those in despair, those separated from God’s love because they have never heard of it. Our God is the one who searches for each beloved child until he finds us, brings us home and tells us to invite all our friends, because God is planning to rejoice and throw a party – 99 sheep all celebrating the return of one more – which is what we come together to do here every week.

Rejoice, for God has brought us home to his banquet. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.

Sermon for 9.5.10

Scriptures for this week are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp18_RCL.html

I went to high school in Austin, Texas, one of the country music capitals of the world. Nowadays it’s edgy and indie-rock oriented, but back in the late 70’s, Austin was full of hard-core country music. I went to high school with boys who dressed in hand-tooled leather belts with big turquoise buckles and their names on the back, so if you happened to forget who you were talking to, you could just walk around back and take a look to remind yourself. While you were back there, you might (or might not) take note of the fact that he had a round, worn circular spot on his right back pocket where his chewing tobacco always rested when not in use. (If you happened to walk into class behind one of those boys with a worn circle on his back pocket, and he was carrying a paper cup, you knew to stay away from that thing.)

We went to high school dances and danced to the same stuff everyone else was dancing to in the late 70’s – Saturday Night Fever and the soundtrack from Grease and “Crocodile Rock” and “Stairway to Heaven,” (what’s a bustle in your hedgerow, anyway?) – but we had other stuff too. If you went to high school in Austin in the late 70’s, you had to know how to two-step, and polka, and waltz, to hard-core classic country and western songs. And the dance floor would really fill up when they put on the Cotton-Eyed Joe, with everybody linking arms and doing the original line dance, and periodically shouting out a certain word that I can’t repeat in church, but if you’re from Texas, you know what I’m talking about.

Well, so if you spent any time listening to 70’s country music, you know a few of the classics. “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain,” and “Luckenbach, Texas” and “London Homesick Blues” (“I want to go home with the armadillo” – a song that people from Texas sing with tears in their eyes). And then there were the ones that were written with maybe a little less reverence: “Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble, when you’re perfect in every way.” Someday I’ll preach a whole sermon on that song.

But of all the classic 70’s country and western songs, one has to stand head and shoulders above the rest. It’s the song that Wikipedia claims is the world’s only Christian football waltz, and I mean to tell you, if there’s any kind of song more perfect for Texas than a Christian football waltz, I can’t think what it is. My only question is why it only ever occurred to one person to write a Christian football waltz. I’m talking, of course, about Bobby Bare’s immortal “Drop kick me Jesus, through the goal post of life,” featuring such cherished lines as “I’ve got the will, Lord, if you’ve got the toe,” and, “All the dear departed loved ones of mine, Stick ‘em up front in the offensive line.” Yes, “Drop kick me, Jesus, through the goal post of life” is an all-time classic.

Well, if ever there were a set of scriptures to drop kick us somewhere, these scriptures today are the ones! You might say that in these scriptures, Jesus gives us a good swift kick in the pants. They make us stand back, ask what we’re doing and what we intend to do, and they ask us to count the cost.

Paul’s letter to Philemon: you read this and you don’t necessarily think it’s earth-shattering. But what Paul is doing is no less than upsetting the foundation of all human relationships. Paul is saying Jesus is here -- and everything has to change. The apostle Paul is sending a runaway slave, Onesimus, back to his master, Philemon, with a plea for mercy. Paul knows he hasn’t a legal leg to stand on in asking for Onesimus’ freedom, and yet Paul knows also that in Jesus, all relationships have changed.

Paul wrote in Galatians: “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Here he puts those words into action. He presents Onesimus no longer as a slave, but as a brother with whom Philemon shares the bond of baptism – and that means everything has to change. He begs Philemon to look at Onesimus as if he were looking at Paul himself.

In fact, in Jesus, it’s the same thing - all of us are one. In Jesus, all the social structures that have held the world together have fallen apart – and the only bond that matters is the bond of love that holds together the beloved people of God. We are all one in Christ Jesus.

And if this causes us to think twice about all the social positions that people hold in our world, if this causes us to squirm in discomfort at the inequalities we see and know about, things that keep people apart like education, wealth, citizenship, race, sexual orientation, political outlook, instead of helping them remember that in Christ they are brothers and sisters, if this makes us uncomfortable with the way the world we live in works, it should. Because following Jesus has never been sweet and easy. Following Jesus means everything has to change.

Following Jesus is costly and difficult, and it means everything about us has to change – our relationships, our commitments, and our use of possessions. That’s what our gospel says today. Barbara Brown Taylor says about this passage: after meditating on this passage, she has to say that Jesus would not have been a good parish priest. Because here in church, we make lots of efforts to invite people in and make them feel beloved, safe, welcome, and assure them of benefits of membership. But here’s Jesus – followed by crowds of people who can’t wait to see and hear what he does next – and what he does is he turns around, looks at them and warns them that if they think they want to follow him, if they want to be members of his movement, if they want to become his disciples – they might not have thought the whole thing through. They might just want to turn around and go back home.

Because if they follow him, if they truly and honestly put their hearts into becoming his disciples – then everything will have to change. He’s just going to give them a good swift kick into a whole new life. He tells us that the whole structure of our relationships is going to have to change – and it’s not that the Lord of love is truly telling us to go around hating other people. It’s not that we are supposed to give up on loving our families, it’s that Jesus is giving us a whole new family – our brothers and sisters in Christ –and we are supposed to love him, and them, just as much as we love our families.

Now remember, for the Jews, love was not something you felt, it was something you did. To love someone means to take action to care for them. That means that we are supposed to care as much about the education of a child in Veracruz as we do about our own children. As Paul says to Philemon, treat Onesimus as you would treat me. So we are to treat every person as if they were Paul, or even Jesus himself, because we are all one in Christ Jesus.

And if we didn’t think that was impossible enough, then Jesus says we are to take up our cross and follow him. This is not something annoying (like we go around saying, my mother-in-law calls me on the phone and wants to talk for an hour every day; I guess she’s my cross to bear), this is something terrifying – Jesus is saying we need to be willing to die like a condemned criminal for the sake of the gospel. And maybe we’re OK with that, because in our world, it’ll never come to pass We Christians don’t get executed for our beliefs in 21^st-century America.

But if the idea of bearing a cross doesn’t trouble us, maybe the last sentence should: you can’t become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions. It kind of drops with an empty thud, doesn’t it? It leaves us gasping, because I don’t think there’s one of us present who’s ready to do it. And if we think about that, we might not be so ready to get out on the dance floor and waltz to “Drop kick me Jesus, through the goal post of life.”

Because if we let Jesus into our lives, if we really decide to follow him, Jesus is going to ask us to change in every part of our lives. Jesus is going to ask us to start living as though we have been launched right into a whole new world, a world in which every thing we do, every relationship we have, every possession we own, every vote, every purchase, every interaction with anyone, anywhere, is holy and consecrated to him.

That doesn’t mean we spend all our time in church, and it doesn’t mean we give every thing we have to the church – in fact, what it means is that the holy part of our lives extends way past the boundaries of any church and way past the one hour a week we spend worshiping. It means that our world is our church, and everything we do in any part of our lives is a holy act of worship, consecrated to God. And if that’s not a thought that makes us stop in our tracks and wonder whether we want to stay on the Jesus team, it should be. Because Jesus wants every single thing we do to be in his name.

Back in Texas when I was growing up, people used to say things like “it’s cheap, but it ain’t free.” Well, that’s almost true about the grace of God – almost, but not quite.

The grace of God is free, but it ain’t cheap. Christ comes to us free, he lifts us out of death and into life, he surrounds us with the love of God and the knowledge that to God, we are infinitely precious and infinitely loved, and he lets us know that the Lord of the universe would do anything, anything, to save us from ourselves. But as we become aware of that grace and love of God, he asks something of us. He asks us not to hoard it for ourselves; he asks us to give it away to world around us – a world that is starving for it. He asks us to give ourselves away. Because the love of God is not ours to enjoy, it is the world’s to share. And that’s good news for the world.

So count the cost: is Jesus worth following? I think he is. I think the fact that Jesus came to live and die among us, just because God loved us, is life-transforming good news, and I think that good news is worth sharing. It’s news that’s worth giving ourselves, and taking up our cross, and starting a whole new life for.

Scriptures for this week are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp16_RCL.html

SERMON NOTES FOR 8.22.10

“In 1930 Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, a prominent leader in the American Jewish community of New York, fired off a telegram to Albert Einstein. The rabbi did not waste words: ‘Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. 50 words.’

‘The telegram was prompted by a public altercation that had arisen when Einstein published a statement that, to the consternation of some of his fellow scientists, he always referred to himself as ‘religious.’ He had written:

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly; this is religiousness. In this sense … I am a devoutly religious man.

“Using fewer than the 50 words allotted him Einstein told the rabbi that he leaned toward the kind of God Spinoza describes, ‘who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.’ He did not, however, believe in a God ‘who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.’” (Story quoted in Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith, New York: HarperOne, 2009.)

We Christians don’t agree with Einstein’s idea of an impersonal god. But what Einstein possessed was the first prerequisite for faith: a sense of awe, an ability to sense the ultimate mystery that lies behind all things, the capacity to imagine that beyond all the things our bodies and minds can sense and observe, there lies another reality that cannot be described. Einstein had the capacity for imagination.

You can argue that the capacity to imagine what cannot be observed is what makes us human and sets us apart from other creatures on earth. You can also argue that the capacity to imagine is what makes possible all human progress, including the process of scientific discovery. After all, if you cannot imagine it, you cannot discover it, you cannot invent it, you cannot make it a reality. Einstein’s theory of relativity is not something you can observe if you look around this room, any more than you can observe that the earth is round. To put forward his theory of relativity, Einstein first had to imagine a reality that makes no sense in the world that we ordinarily move around in.

In an article in the New York Times, August 15, 2010, Timothy Williamson, a logic professor at Oxford entitled “Reclaiming the Imagination” – says that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is arrived at by a combination of imagination, experience, observation and judgment in constant cycle of interaction.

For instance, he says, imagine that you are a primitive hunter, walking through the woods in the rain. You are wet and cold. You see a cave. You imagine yourself walking into the cave and lighting a fire and getting warm and cozy. Because you can imagine it, you can make it happen.

But you can also say to yourself, what if there’s a hungry bear sleeping in that cave? And you can make plans for what to do if a hungry bear comes charging out of the cave at you.

And you can imagine more, says Williamson. You can imagine that the bear isn’t hungry but lonely, and that he will see you coming and come out of the cave and give you a great big bear hug, and take you into the cave where you will be best friends for life. You can imagine it, but based on everything you know about bears and everything your friends have ever told you, it doesn’t seem very likely, does it? So when you're making your plans for the cave, you can leave that scenario out and just concentrate on the possibilities that actually seem likely to happen.

We are able to plan for the future because we can imagine alternate realities, judge which are most likely, and plan accordingly. All human inventions, decisions, and plans are based on this ability to imagine what you can’t yet see. Even in the scientific method: questions for experimentation are posed by imagining a hypothesis, imagining the possible outcomes if the hypothesis is true, then designing experiments to test whether those outcomes are achieved. A constant cycle of imagination, observation, judgment, and experience is the basis of all human knowledge and all human action.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the scriptures for today, where two intriguing stories call into question Einstein’s view of impersonal deity – these are stories of personal encounters with God. In our Old Testament lesson, we have the call of the prophet Jeremiah. As a young boy, Jeremiah becomes aware of a personal and individual call from a God who says, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you” – a God who knows Jeremiah so well that he knows that Jeremiah will have the rare gift of prophetic imagination. While other religious leaders in Israel have become complacent, oppressing the poor and engaging in a disastrous foreign policy, Jeremiah will be able to see what they cannot see, will be able to imagine God’s view of their activities. And Jeremiah will not be able to rest until he has spoken God’s words to them and described to them an alternate reality. No one believes Jeremiah and he suffers a lot, but Jeremiah is proved right by the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon in 587 BC. And it is from the vantage point of his career as the prophet whose imagination has become reality that he tells this story of his call as a boy. It is not his own words he speaks, but God’s, and God’s words have the power to make things happen – become reality.

We are not all, like Jeremiah, called to be prophets – yet we are all known as he was known, called as he was called, to the exercise of imaginative ministry, the ministry of making God’s word active in this world.

For a picture of imaginative ministry, the work of making God’s word active – take a look at our gospel story today – another healing story, one of the many healing stories in the gospels. A woman doubled over in pain, her vision limited to her toes, is healed. In reading healing stories, it is tempting to say, why her and not me? God does heal still, in miraculous ways – but that is not the point of the healing stories in the Bible – the healings themselves are not the point.

To understand what is the point, you need to understand that Jesus had one passion that he never let go of, one thing he never stopped talking about. Jesus’ mission was to proclaim the kingdom of God on earth – a kingdom that Luke says will release the captives (like the woman in the story), open the eyes of the blind, proclaim good news to the poor. Jesus has the prophetic imagination too – the ability to imagine a world that does not yet exist – a world where every person is healed and joyous, where every person is free from oppression, where every person has enough to call their life abundant, where no one is blind, lame, bent over or weighed down.

Every word Jesus says is to proclaim this mission, every action he takes is to help it come true, every healing he does is a real-life enactment of the kingdom of God that he can imagine. Remember, if you can’t imagine it, you can’t make it a reality. Think of Jesus’ life as one long enacted parable of the kingdom of God. Jesus’ life and Jesus’ healings and Jesus’ teachings allow us to experience some little bit of that kingdom of God that is to come.

And if we can imagine life without sorrow, life without injustice, life without weighed-down, bent-over pain, life without fear, life lived in self-giving service to God and to others, life where we can truly love our neighbors as ourselves and be loved by them in return; if we can imagine life lived in the kingdom of God, then we can begin to make it a reality, right here, one moment at a time.

And how do we begin to imagine the kingdom of God? God has given us a gift that allows us to live that reality one day a week, an enacted parable of the kingdom. It is the gift of Sabbath, our day to experience the freedom God gives. We see an argument erupt over Sabbath keeping in this gospel, because Sabbath to the Jews was not just a day of going to synagogue, a day of religious obligation. According to commentator Richard Swanson: “Sabbath is not just a day of rest. It is a day of promise….Sabbath is welcomed into the house as a queen would be welcomed. Sabbath provides a foretaste of the culmination of all things, a glimpse of God's dominion, a little slice of the messianic age dropped into the midst of regular time. Sabbath offers a remembrance of God's promise of peace and freedom for all of creation. It is a good thing, a gift from God.”

There are two strands of Jewish tradition explaining the origin of the Sabbath: honoring God’s work in creation and the fact that God rested on the 7^th day, and also remembering the Exodus from Egypt and the fact the God liberated the people of Israel from bondage as slaves – Jesus refers to this when he says this woman has been released from bondage. As Christians, we have added a third meaning – we have moved the Sabbath to Sunday to remember Jesus’ resurrection – we remember and celebrate our own liberation from evil and death.

In other words, our Sabbath is an enacted parable of the kingdom of God – our way of experiencing God’s reign here and now so that we can enact it in turn. Sabbath is not something we do out of obligation to God. It is something God does for us: an enacted parable of community, love, joy, service, sharing a meal that is God’s gift of God’s self to us, where. there is enough for everyone and no one is excluded from the table.

We need that experience. what we experience here allows us to imagine what God’s kingdom would be like if it were lived every day in our world. And if we can imagine it, we can begin to make it a reality. We can listen for God’s call, God’s knowledge of us that is so intimate and so deep that God can imagine us becoming what we were created to be. We can remember that we, too, have been set free from enslavement to Satan, to fear and to death. We can look around us and ask who else in our community might still be held captive, waiting for release. We can begin to work to heal the bent-over people, the people weighed down by burdens of poverty, of grief, of loneliness, of hopelessness.

If we can experience it, we can imagine it, and if we can imagine it, we can work to make it come true – seven days a week, in Jesus' name.

Sermon Notes for 4.18.10

Scriptures for today are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Easter/CEaster3_RCL.html

How have you encountered the risen Christ in your life? Is your experience more like Peter’s, or more like Paul’s? Our scriptures today give us the life-transforming experiences of Peter and Paul as they encounter the risen Christ.

Christian tradition remembers them together, twin giants of our faith: both leaders of the community of the risen Lord, both plain-spoken, opinionated. The scriptures tell us that they had at least one major, history-making argument, yet for all their disagreements they remained brothers in the faith, and apparently ended their lives very similarly. According to tradition, both were executed for their faith in Rome around 64 or 65. Peter, sentenced to crucifixion, protested that he wasn’t good enough to die the same way as his Lord Jesus, so the Romans crucified him upside down. Paul was more fortunate – as a Roman citizen, he was eligible for a less painful, less humiliating death, so he was beheaded, in the same city, quite likely in the same year as his brother apostle.

These two apostles and their experiences with the resurrected Jesus are so alike and yet so very different, that we should look at them more deeply. Because I suspect that when we look at these two remarkable stories in our Scriptures today, each of us may find ourselves in these stories somewhere.

Our story from Acts tells us about a man named Saul –we know him better as Paul. Well-educated, probably from a prominent Jewish family in Tarsus, part of the Roman world, fluent in several languages, an excellent writer, a logical thinker, a persuasive talker, confident, persistent, determined, courageous, unswervable: this man knows exactly what he is doing and where he is going. Saul was a Pharisee and was determined to wipe out the Christian heresy to preserve the purity of the Jewish faith he knew and loved. So the first time we see him in the Bible, he is holding the coats of the people who stone the first Christian martyr, Stephen, to death – and he approves. Now we see him for the second time. Unchanged in his determination, he now is pursuing the Christian heresy to Damascus.

On the road to Damascus, he has a stunning encounter with the risen Lord. He is blinded by a light from heaven, knocked to the ground, and hears a voice. The voice tells him it is Jesus, and it tells him what he is expected to do – and Paul’s entire life is transformed in an instant. He becomes in fact what Jesus has chosen him to be: a man on a mission, an instrument to bring Jesus’ name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel, who will suffer great hardships for the sake of Christ. Never, through the remaining maybe 20 years of his life, does he swerve from his faith and dedication to Jesus – the determination he had put into persecuting Christ’s followers becomes the irresistible force that turns the Christian faith into a worldwide movement of transformation. And the world, and history, and the lives of millions, and the hearts of you and me, will never be the same – who we are as Christians, we owe to Paul, because Paul is the one who convinced the rest of the apostles that people who weren’t Jewish could still be Christians.

So back to the question I opened with: is your experience with the risen Christ like Paul’s? Have you had a moment when your life was changed, in twinkling of an eye (to use one of Paul's memorable phrases)? Have you been going along, determined on your own course, when suddenly God decided to knock you off your high horse and blind you with a new kind of light, an insight that remakes the whole world into something new? Many people have had some kind of life-transforming mystical experience like this: maybe a searing moment like John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who wrote that on May 24, 1738, at 8:45 p.m, he felt his heart strangely warmed. Studies say 50% of mainstream Protestants say they have had a mystical experience with the risen Christ – a moment of self-transcendence, an experience in which there was no doubt that God was present. We don’t talk about it much – we have a hard time describing it – we say things like – strangely warmed or – I can’t describe it, I just knew God was there. These are moments that leave us, like Paul, with no doubt about who was speaking to us.

But only 50% of us have had those experiences like Paul had – the other 50% maybe are more like Peter. Here in today’s gospel is Peter, the blunt, outspoken, impetuous, emotional, changeable, leader of the disciples, the plain, uneducated fisherman, the one Jesus called the Rock he would build his church on – the first to speak in any situation, the first to act before thinking, the first to drop everything and follow Jesus, the first to confess his faith in Jesus as the Messiah, yet the one to deny Jesus, 3 times. After the death of his teacher, the one he believed was the Messiah, Peter chooses to go back home, to return to the familiar, to engage in work he knows how to do – he gets in his boat and goes fishing. And there, in his familiar, everyday world, he meets the risen Lord.

Today he and Jesus come face to face in personal conversation, perhaps for the first time since that searing moment the night before Jesus died, when the cock crowed and Jesus turned and looked at Peter, and Peter went out and wept bitterly. Jesus asks Peter a question, three times: Do you love me? And three times Peter has the chance to undo his denial, three times, Jesus offers him forgiveness – three times, Peter says, yes, Lord, you know that I love you. And three times, Jesus gives Peter something to do: Feed my sheep. Just as Jesus had a mission in mind for Paul – to bring Jesus to the Gentiles – so Jesus has a mission for Peter – to lead the flock of Christians, be their shepherd.

But notice something here: Peter’s encounter with Jesus is very different from Paul’s – Peter encounters the risen Christ in the same way he first encountered the human Jesus during Jesus’ earthly lifetime – in his ordinary course of business, in the middle of his everyday world. It’s not just mystical, transcendent experiences that make Jesus present to us. 50% of us never have those experiences. Many of us will go through life without being knocked from our horse or blinded by a dazzling light or hearing a voice from the clouds. Many of us will simply grow in faith in ordinary, everyday ways. We will worship and pray and learn, we will live and worship in communities of faith, we will work and raise our families and we will witness God’s love in action in our everyday lives, and we will be convinced of God’s presence with us because of the way our communities and lives become evidence for it. And that way of experiencing God is just as good as the miraculous encounter on the road to Damascus – because the important thing is not how we encounter Christ, but how the encounter with Christ changes our lives.

As different as Peter’s and Paul’s encounters are, notice what they have in common. Jesus not only forgives them, Jesus has no interest in discussing what they have done wrong in the past – no discussion of denying him three times, no discussion of violently dragging off Christian believers to prison. Jesus isn’t interested in going over what we have done wrong in the past. Jesus doesn’t bother to argue doctrines or theology, either. What Jesus does, is he gives them each a mission – something to do. Martin Luther was right when he said that we receive God’s grace completely unmerited and undeserved – there’s nothing we can do to earn it. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do.

We are each commissioned to live in a way that helps Jesus create God’s kingdom here on earth. We are each given a mission, based on our own talents and strengths, our own life histories and our passions – a mission to help transform this world. What Jesus is interested in is not what we’ve done in the past, but what we are going to do in the future.

I read a study recently on happiness: there are many small factors that influence whether we consider ourselves happy: wealth, our family situations. But this study found, two things are absolutely essential for a life of deep joy: a sense of belonging to a community and a belief that what you do matters – a purpose in life. This is exactly what Jesus offers to Peter and Paul – membership in a community of disciples and a mission and purpose in life. And this is exactly what Jesus offers to each one of us; each of us is called to ministry, in our own special way, using our own special gifts. We may not change the world, like Peter and Paul, but we can change the community around us, our work places, our families, our churches. And we can change ourselves. We can mold ourselves, and let Christ mold us, into deeply happy, deeply purposeful, deeply joyful people on a mission.

You will be hearing a lot over the next few weeks about Nativity's Spirit Quest campaign. It is our way of empowering each one of you to seek out God’s mission and purpose for your life. You will be hearing about the many missions and ministries of this Church, and you will be given the opportunity to think deeply about your own mission and ministry, whether it is joining one that already exists or creating one. In any case, the question is the same: how do you encounter the risen Christ? And what does that mean for your life? When we do encounter him, and when we do answer his call, we find miracles happening all around us. And we can say, with Paul in the letter to the Ephesians, “Glory to God, whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to God in the highest.”