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.

The Future of the Church?

I posted this article on Facebook yesterday: "Of Storks and Canaries: Youth Ministry, New Vocations, and the Future of the Church," by the Rev. Frederick Schmidt. The article makes the very good point that we need to treat youth and young adult ministry as a serious vocation and not a way station on the way to somewhere else; and we need to call and equip appropriate leaders for that ministry, including young adults. Our future as a church depends on it.

Well and good. My post prompted the following comment from a young seminarian: "Regarding patronizing attitudes, I think the denomination needs to gain some clarity about who the church is. The 'under-30' crowd, and even the under-20s, are not just 'the future of the church.' We too are the church."

Also well and good. Although the commenter was focusing on young(ish) adults, and I am really focusing on children 18 and under, I couldn't agree more - young people are here now, and they are fully as important members in our congregations as the older members who generally exercise leadership and control resources. The fact that we should be ministering to young people in our churches should be self-evident. We shouldn't have to argue to get appropriate resources allocated to children's and youth ministries - the least and smallest should always come first in the church. Didn't Jesus say that? Frederick Schmidt's article should not be necessary, and it shouldn't be necessary for the House of Bishops to spend a meeting considering how to reach out to young people. It should be happening as a matter of course, right? Our future depends on it, right?

Well, right. But I think this whole question is framed wrong. If we're saying that we should be ministering to young people because they are the future of our church, we have it exactly backwards.

Here's the deal: we don't do ministry to anyone in order to build up the church. The church is not an end in itself, and young people are not the means to an end. We don't do ministry to young people so that the church will survive - because we fear that we will die if we don't. If we are leaders in Christ's church, then we are meant to be leading the mission of Jesus. Not perpetuating an institution. Not operating out of fear.

Don't get me wrong - I love the church. I love this institution, and I think it's worth perpetuating. But I'm a leader in Christ's church because I believe in Christ's mission. And I will stay a leader in Christ's church as long as I believe that it's the best hope for accomplishing Christ's mission.

We don't do ministry with young people so that our church will survive. We do ministry with young people because Jesus loves them. We do it because we love them. We do it because we want their world to be a better place. We do it because of who we are as followers of Jesus. And we do it because of who they are.

And who are they? This is who they are:

• They are the two children who committed suicide this week in a neighborhood near my church. And they are all the other children in my neighborhood and yours who are depressed, sad and lonely enough for that horrible thought to cross their minds.
• They are the gay and lesbian teenagers who are trying to understand how God made them, and whether Jesus loves them the way they are.
• They are the bright, committed and earnest students who make straight As in school, and wonder whether they will ever be able to afford a college education.
• They are the runaways who spend their days in the airport terminal because it's air-conditioned, they can use the restrooms, and no one will kick them out.
• They are the kids who understand that Jesus loves them, but wonder why a powerful and loving God would allow a tsunami to wipe out whole villages in Japan.
• They are the young people who are confronted with a parent's serious and life-threatening illness, and who have to come to terms with questions of life and death way, way too young.
• They are the kids who come to youth group because they like the fun and games, and they are the kids who come to youth group because they want to understand Jesus.
• They are the kids who are bullied, and they are the kids who do the bullying.
• They are the kids who wish their parents would leave them alone.
• They are the kids who wish their parents would pay them some attention.
• They are children of God.

These children of God - inside the church, and outside the church - need to know that God loves them. That's why we do youth ministry.

Sermon for 3.27.11

Scriptures for this Sunday are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Lent/ALent3_RCL.html

What is your favorite romantic movie? Mine, because I like subverting well-known conventions, is The Princess Bride: an adventure story full of (as Peter Falk tells his grandson): “Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles....” Necessary elements to any love story, right? Not to mention masked pirates, princesses, fire swamps, logic contests, Billy Crystal, and rodents of unusual size. (Here’s an assignment: if you’ve seen the movie and you love it, on the way out, you can tell me your favorite quote.) The hero Westley is disguised as the dread Pirate Roberts, which causes all kinds of problems as his true love, Buttercup, doesn’t recognize him, leading to mishaps and adventures as his identity is revealed and his love is proved.

When you watch a romantic movie, you know from the beginning where it’s going to end up, right? Cinderella and all the fairy tales end up with “And they lived happily ever after”. The Princess Bride ends up with “Since the invention of the kiss, there have been five kisses rated the most passionate, the most pure. This one left them all behind.” Most modern romantic movies end up with some version of a wedding, a kiss, or a happy couple riding off into the sunset.

We watch one of these movies, and we’re not sure what route the journey is going to take us on (they don’t ALL involve rodents of unusual size), but we’re pretty sure that it will involve misunderstandings, lost opportunities, disguises, discoveries of underlying truths, revelations of who people are under the masks they wear, and realizations of love that was there all the time unrecognized. And we know that the formula will end up with “happily ever after.”

The people hearing today’s gospel story for the first time would have the same feeling about the story they were hearing – because this starts out with well-known conventions in Old Testament tradition. A man and a woman meet at a well – it’s a perfect setup for a love story. In the Hebrew scriptures, romances regularly begin that way. Isaac’s servant met Rebekah at a well; Moses and his wife met at a well; and most famous of all, Jacob met his wife Rachel at a well. If there’s anyone in Jewish tradition who qualifies as the Jewish version of a fairy princess, it would be Rachel. Just to make sure we’ve gotten the point, John tells us that today’s gospel story happens not just at any well, but at Jacob’s well. The whole thing seems to be set up as a love story.

But John gets us all set up for a formula love story, then subverts our expectations. For one thing, the woman at the well is no Buttercup, no charming princess. This is a woman who has been ill-used by life and has failed in love, the victim of heartbreak after heartbreak; married 5 times, now living with a boyfriend. She might have been widowed a time or two, divorced the other times, who knows? But before we judge her too harshly, remember that women in those days had no control over divorce – it was entirely the man’s choice, by simply saying “I divorce you” three times. Perhaps she was just a woman who always found disappointment in love, perhaps she was unable to bear children so men used her and cast her aside. And in a society where women without a man had no way of supporting themselves, perhaps she has now simply settled for whatever man would support her and feed her, even if he wouldn’t marry her. Whatever the reason, love has failed her over and over. Until today: at high noon, she goes down to the well to get water.

And there, at the well, is a man, who asks for water to quench his thirst. In a society where unrelated men and women didn’t speak in public, and where Jews and Samaritans didn’t have anything to do with each other, and where honorable people didn’t associate with people who had failed in their personal lives the way this woman had (or the way the world had failed her), Jesus subverts all the conventions by speaking to this woman.

And Jesus shocks her by promising her something to quench her thirst in return for the water she gives him: living water that will well up to eternal life. It turns out that both Jesus and the woman are thirsty, and what they are thirsty for is a relationship with each other; not a romantic relationship, but a life-changing relationship of love and revelation and new life.

In a pattern that we saw in last week’s gospel about Nicodemus, and will see frequently in John, the woman starts by taking Jesus’ promise of water literally, and moves progressively toward more and more revelation, light dawning, disguises being shed, true identities being revealed. Jesus reveals that her mask is not really disguising her – he knows her past and he knows her identity, and he accepts her for who she is.

And in return, he reveals his own identity: he is the Messiah, and not just the Messiah, but the Word of God who was with God from the beginning. Jesus says in our paltry English translation, “I am he” – but in the original, it is simply “I AM”– the same words Moses had heard from burning bush – Jesus speaks the name of God, the name Yahweh. And she begins to understand that God himself is promising her not literal and tangible water from a well, but something to quench a much deeper thirst, a spiritual thirst, so that she will worship God in Spirit and in truth. This is such good news that she cannot resist running back into town and telling all the people of the town about the Messiah she had met. And as we watch her joy as a new life begins for her, we come to understand that this whole time, it has been a love story after all.

As well it should be, because just a few verses before, in last week’s gospel, John had told us some of Jesus’ most famous words: “for God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that all who believe in him should have everlasting life.” God’s love story begins with thirst: like Jesus’ thirst at this beginning of today’s gospel, it’s God’s thirst for us, his longing for relationship with us. God so loved us, says John, that God’s thirst for us welled up into a gift of God’s Son to us, beginning of a love story that will continue, as love stories do, with revelations of identity, falling of disguises, light shining in darkness, and will end up not just with “happily ever after”, but with everlasting life, life abundant, life that begins now, the moment we understand what we are being offered, and the moment we allow Jesus to see through our disguises and defenses and show him our true selves, life that wells up to eternity.

And we here in 21^st century America, a country so different from 1^st century Judea and Samaria that we have to interpret not just language, but social customs, to understand what Jesus did and meant, yet so similar to that time and place that we know we are still thirsty, we still thirst for meaning, truth, love. Yet like the woman at the well, we find ourselves trying to quench our thirst with things that are not true water. We try to base our identity on things like false relationships, money, job titles, possessions, houses; we use these things as the masks through which we show ourselves to the world; we pour our time into endless work and mindless entertainment; yet we thirst to know that when our masks are off, we will still be loved.

As the prophet Isaiah says: “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?” And isn’t that a fine description of so many lives in our community? Spending money on expensive things but never being satisfied; pouring life and labor into activities that bring us abundant possessions, but not abundant life? No matter how much time and energy we pour into these things, we are still thirsty, still dry in our spirits, still wanting to find a well that will never run dry.

Jesus offers us this well. Jesus gives us living water. Jesus lets us drop our masks, recognizes us for who we are, accepts and loves us, quenches our thirst. Because the love story that started so long ago at Jacob’s Well in Samaria continues still today: Jesus is still thirsty. God still longs for us. Spirit is still ready to be poured into our hearts, overflowing to touch all those around us. And all we need to do to receive this gift of living water is to let down our disguises and our defenses and allow God’s love story to be told through us.

And as God begins a new story in us, God also gives us the power, like this woman, to share that story with others. The woman runs back into town to tell everyone about this Jesus, this Messiah. She’s not thinking about things like church growth or evangelism, she’s simply telling the good news about an encounter she has had with the living Christ who has given her living water to quench her thirst.

And as we talk in this church about evangelism, which is simply a word that means telling the good news, it’s the same for us as for her. It’s not about church growth – it’s about encounters with the living Christ. What have we found in our relationship with Christ that has changed our lives? How have we found that he allows us to drop our disguises, our mistaken identities, the masks we wear? What encounters with him are quenching our thirst for the living God?

That’s what we have to share with others. That’s what we cannot, not share. That’s the gift that it would be a shame to keep to ourselves. Because it’s a gift that is desperately needed by our dry and unsatisfied world. It is the gift of living water that quenches our thirst for God, and God’s thirst for us. It is the gift of a love story with the living Christ who dismantles our disguises and loves us for who we truly are. It is the gift of love that leads to eternal life. That eternal life begins right now, and it wells up to … happily ever after.

Sermon for 3.13.11

Scriptures for today are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Lent/ALent1_RCL.html

A long time ago and far away, I served as Director of Children’s Ministries at another church. One year, we decided to do a children’s Ash Wednesday service where we explained to the children what sin was – so what better way to explain it than with today’s Garden of Eden story from the Old Testament? We wanted to tell the story experientially, so here’s what we did. We set up in the middle of the courtyard a tree – just a branch with no leaves on it, planted in a pot. On the end of each branch of the tree we put a big, fat, juicy, luscious-looking gumdrop. As the children arrived, I greeted them and watched their eyes go straight to the gumdrop tree. They were attracted to it like moths to light. And every time I saw one of them looking at it, I would explain, “No, I’m sorry, you can’t have a gumdrop. It’s against the rules.”

I started telling the Garden of Eden story, but when I got to the part about how God said the man and woman couldn’t eat from the tree, I suddenly “remembered” something I had left inside, and told them I would be back in just a minute to finish the story. While I was gone, of course I had set up someone else to be a “tempter” to tell the children it was all right, they could go ahead and eat the gumdrops.

I came back outside and the first thing I saw was a little boy, his cheeks bulging with gumdrops, a little bit of blue dribbling down his chin. He saw me and pointed at his sister. “She ate some gumdrops!” he accused. I looked at his sister, whose cheeks were also bulging and who had a little bit of red dribbling down her chin, and she pointed at the tempter. “She said I could!” she said.

It was one of the funniest Ash Wednesday experiences ever, and the parents and I could hardly keep from giggling our way through the Imposition of Ashes. If you ever want a hilarious Ash Wednesday service, this is a method you could try. And I have to say, it was one of the best enacted parables I was ever able to achieve in working with children.

However, I’m not sure I would ever do it again. For one thing, the “tempter” wasn’t too happy about being cast as Satan. But the most troubling thing was that we set up the children to fail. We knew their little hearts could not resist temptation. And we put the tree there knowing (hoping) they would eat from it.

Which begs the question: was the whole original biblical Garden of Eden story an elaborate setup by God? Did God create humans with desires, put the very thing in the garden that they desired most, then forbid them to take it? Why would God do this except to find us laughably charming? Except that in the story, God doesn’t seem to find it too laughable – the penalty is death, but he gives the people a stay of execution – banishes them for life, out into the wilderness, where they will spend the rest of their lives toiling, sweating, suffering and longing for what they left behind in the garden. God takes this transgression very, very seriously.

So the question is, what’s going on in this story and what is it saying to us? The first thing we all need to agree on is, this is not intended to be history or science. We Episcopalians agree that Genesis is not intended to provide a scientific or historical account of the origins of the world (in fact, the writers would have been puzzled by our ideas of science and history). What it’s intended to do is to convey to us a deeper truth than that: the truth of who we are as human beings, and what we are intended to be in relation to God.

So let’s listen to a beautiful, true story, and explore what it tells us about ourselves. God has created all that is, and has said it is not just good, but very good. As the crowning achievement, Genesis 1 tells us that God made human beings, male and female, in God’s own image. Genesis 2 then gives us a new wrinkle on this creation of humans. It pictures God doing this creating by taking a handful of dust, forming a little clay doll, then breathing life into it so that it becomes a human. The human is called “Adam”, which means creature of earth, little dust man. Interestingly, our own name human, from the Latin, points out the same relationship – human comes from same root as Humus, soil, and humble. Our very language confirms the truth of what the Bible tells us – we are creatures of dust and earth, made to be rooted in the earth, mortal, humble. We are dust, and to dust we shall return.

Yet God has a special love for the little earth creature, knows that the human should not be alone, and gives the creature a companion. And together, like a couple of teenagers, the two humans get into all kinds of mischief. The humans look at the one thing that has been forbidden to them, and they want it, they crave it, they realize that in this whole beautiful garden where they have everything they need, there is still an empty place deep inside them, a place where they are incomplete, insufficient, insecure. They look at the fruit of that beautiful tree and they suddenly believe that it is the perfect shape to fill up that empty hole, and they take it and eat it.

And why do they do this? The serpent, who is nowhere called Satan, but is instead a creature created by God, a part of nature, you might say a representative of the desires and yearnings of the human heart, gives us the key: he comes to the people and says, "You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

That’s the temptation: first, to believe that they will not die – to forget that they are creatures of dust. Second, to believe that God has set the whole thing up as some kind of purposeless test (“God knows”), to be violated at will. In other words, God, like me in my pretend garden years ago, is not trustworthy. And third, in their failure to trust God, they believe they can be like God.

Our mysterious human desire, the forbidden fruit that we may not grasp yet continually reach out for, the thing that we believe will fill the empty place in our hearts, is our desire to put ourselves and other things in place of God . In the garden, Adam and Eve have forgotten who they are and whose they are. And we too want to forget that we are humans, little dust creatures who will one day return to the dust we came from. We want to deny our own identity. We want to make ourselves gods, and we believe we can do it – we can stand on our own two feet – we have no need of God.

But surely this week of all weeks should remind us of our own dustiness. In the church, we come down rapidly from the mountain of the Transfiguration that we climbed the last Sunday of Epiphany, our faces still glowing from Christ’s glorious reflected light, straight down into the dry, dusty valley of Lent, as we are reminded Ash Wednesday that we are dust and to dust we shall return. And if we had any question of that, we need only to read the news – another terrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan, an advanced industrial country whose people were helpless in the face of forces of nature beyond our control. We think we can control the world around us, sitting in 72-degree comfort year-round, with our world lit up day and night, every comfort available to us, never hungry, never thirsty, able to reach out anytime for any luxury we desire. Yet videos of cars, trucks and ships slamming into buildings like specks of dust, advanced nuclear power plants exploding from too-hot water vapor, extremely well-built earthquake-resistant buildings collapsing nevertheless, should surely convince of us our own dustiness, our smallness, our mortality.

The great truth of our human existence is that we are not immortal, we are not like gods, we are dust – and yet our salvation lies in that very realization. Because as we realize our own mortality, we begin to understand that on our own we are incomplete. At the heart of our humanity is a restlessness, a yearning, a grasping for something more. We spend our lives searching and hoping, always looking for that thing that is missing, the thing that perfectly fits the emptiness we feel inside us.

Some of us try to fill our emptiness with good things – our families, friends, people we love. But isn’t it easy to try to stop up that emptiness with other things too? How many of us reach for alcohol to fill our emptiness? How many of us pour ourselves into our work? How many of us try to fill ourselves up by emptying other people out, through gossip or competition or grabs for power? We all have addictions, things that fill our emptiness, things we grow to depend on, yet ultimately the emptiness remains. And we are still incomplete, insufficient, insecure.

Blaise Pascal, the 17^th Century French mathematician and philosopher, said that we humans are empty inside – we have a God-shaped hole in our hearts. Yet he saw that hole not as a curse but as a blessing. It is the tether that keeps us throughout our lives attached to God. It is the thing that keeps us from believing we can be completely self-sufficient, a belief which in the end can only bring us death. St. Augustine said “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they find their home in you.” Only God can fill that God-shaped hole in our hearts.

And so here we are, beginning the season of Lent. It is a season of emptiness – a season when, with Jesus, we commit ourselves to spending 40 days in the wilderness. If we take Lent seriously, we do with this season what Jesus did: we empty ourselves, we fast from the things that promise falsely to fill us up, things that don’t fit that God-shaped hole in our hearts. What addictions do we need to let go of? What things present themselves to us as the perfect shape to fill that God-shaped hole? And how does God give us the strength to let go of them? And what disciplines do we need to take on, to train our longing hearts to grasp onto God for our identity, like Jesus in his desert, and not the empty things that tempt us to put them in the place reserved for God alone?

This time of Lent becomes our time to remember who we are and ask Christ who we are intended to become. And to journey through this desert, this dry and dusty wilderness, with Christ. Because those words of Ash Wednesday – we are dust and to dust we shall return – are balanced by the words of baptism: There is one Body and one Spirit, one hope in God’s call to us, one Lord, one faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all. With God as our loving Parent, we are more than dust this Lenten, desert season: we are beloved children of God, on a journey from dust and ashes to resurrection life.

Sermon for 3.6.11

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

SERMON NOTES FOR 3.6.11

If you have ever gone on vacation to get away from it all, and spent time hiking in the mountains, as Tom and I used to, you know the feeling. Climbing and climbing, up and up, into cooler and fresher air, thinking you’ll never get to the top, and wondering if it will be worth it when you get there. And slowly, as you ascend, feeling like you’re leaving your everyday, busy, worry and stress-filled life behind, peeling it all off like you would take off a jacket, and remembering who you really are when you aren’t rushing around like a crazy person, and step by step feeling more and more like yourself. And coming up the final hill and turning a corner and standing there at the very top of the mountain, no sound but the wind rushing in your face, and turning around and around and seeing all around you for miles and miles. You know eventually you will have to turn around and go back down that mountain, but for now, life is complete and you wish it would never end.

Today’s gospel is an experience a little bit like that. Not just in the fact that it is a story about a mountaintop experience. But because Matthew’s whole gospel is really structured that way. This is in a way, the high point of his gospel, the climax he’s been leading up to. From here, Matthew's gospel will lead straight down into the valley, as Jesus heads down the mountain and takes a turn toward Jerusalem where he knows he will die. But for today, we stand at the top of the mountain and look all around at the panoramic view Matthew gives us of Jesus’ ministry.

We can look back and see Jesus at his baptism, emerging from the waters and hearing the same words we hear today: You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased. We can look further behind us and see the beginning of Epiphany, when Matthew told us that a star lit up the sky, with light like the light of Transfiguration that we see today, and people came from faraway foreign lands to see a newborn child in a stable. We can look even further back than that and see the whole history of the people of Israel, embodied by Moses and Elijah on this mountaintop, the law and the prophets.

Then, if we turn and look the other way, we can look ahead of us and see a long Lenten road leading to Jerusalem, and we can see outside of Jerusalem another hill with three crosses on it. We can look beyond those crosses to the resurrection, as Jesus instructs the disciples to say nothing about what they’ve seen until he has risen from the dead. And we can look even further than that, to another mountain where the risen Christ will come to the disciples and promise to be with them always.

Today we stand at the top of this mountain and see those things with panoramic vision, but for now we are right here, in the presence of a teacher who has astounded us by being transfigured before our eyes. And we can ask ourselves the questions that are so important with all scriptures: What is happening here? And what does it mean for us?

If you ask – what is happening here, on the mount of the Transfiguration, and someone gives you a rock-solid, dependable, confident answer, you will know that he or she is lying. Because no human being can really understand what is happening here. This is something outside of normal human experience, this is something that defies the laws of physics. Jesus is an ordinary human being, dusty and dirty from the hike up the mountain, and suddenly his clothes become dazzling white and his face starts to glow, brighter than the sun.

We can ask: did Jesus change? Or did the disciples change how they saw him? The Bible doesn’t tell us: but I suspect that both are true. Jesus really did have a spiritual experience, Moses and Elijah appearing to him to strengthen him for the ordeal ahead. But the disciples experienced a miracle too: a gift from God of vision, a veil being lifted from their eyes so that suddenly they were able to see a truth that we ordinary human beings cannot see.

I think, though no Bible expert or PhD theologian can tell you this for sure, I think that the truth is that Jesus always glowed like the sun, but that normal people could not stand to see it, so Jesus wore a veil of ordinariness to spare their eyes; yet once, just once, the veil was lifted and they could see.

And they could not only see, but hear the truth: a voice from the clouds, the voice of God saying “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him.” And this Transfiguration of Jesus brought about a transformation in them. Transformation is not the same as Transfiguration, but nevertheless what they witnessed transformed them. They are transformed by what they see, into witnesses of the power and glory of God revealed in Jesus, as we heard in the Epistle of Peter today.

And so what we have in today’s gospel is a miracle of vision, a gift to the disciples of a glimpse into God’s glory that gives them power to proclaim the gospel to all people. Yet our second question remains: what does it mean for us? One thing it certainly means is that we have the power of their witness to tell us who Jesus is, that Jesus was not just some ordinary teacher, Jesus was not even a spiritually powerful miracle worker, Jesus was not someone who was especially good at loving God and others who taught us how to do the same.

Jesus was all those things, but he was more. Jesus was God’s Beloved Son. We must listen to him.

And we have been listening to him, these long weeks of Epiphany. We have heard him tell us how to live, we have heard him explain how we are to love God and love our neighbors, we have heard him proclaim that we are salt of the earth and light of the world, we have heard him tell us even to love our enemies and pray for those who hurt us, we have felt his blessing and we have perhaps even been healed by him.

Yet now, here on this mountain, it’s time for us to see and hear more. On this mountain, we can see who Jesus truly is. But we can see more than that: we can see who we truly are. Because the true miracle of the Christian faith is this: who Jesus is, is who we are. Did we hear that right? Who Jesus is, is who we are. He is the baptized Son of God, the Beloved. So are we. We who are baptized have been baptized into his death and into his resurrection. We are children of God too. We are with him on this mountaintop, and with him we are shining like the sun.

You don’t believe that we are really like him? Listen to a story: On March 18, 1958, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, one of the great writers on Christian spirituality in the 20^th century, was walking down an ordinary street in the shopping district of Louisville, Kentucky, as crowds went about their business. When something happened: he looked around and saw something .

He wrote about it in his journal the next day: “Yesterday, in Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream.”

Years later, he wrote about the experience in his book, Confessions of a Guilty Bystander: “It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Walking around shining like the sun? Wait, wait! That may be true for Jesus, the Son of God – but surely it cannot be true for us. After all, we got up this morning, didn’t we? We brushed our teeth, we ate breakfast, we rushed to get into the car in time, we got ourselves and our children here to church, we settled into our chairs and tried to figure out the tune to the opening hymn, we are ordinary people who every now and then get a glimpse of what God might want for us.

And yet – Thomas Merton is not the only person to have seen this happen: I have seen it too. Sitting one day in a communion service in a church I had never attended before and never would attend again, surrounded by strangers I would never see again, suddenly as I looked at the people all around me, they changed. They began to glow, brighter than the sun. It lasted for only one second, but for that second I looked at these ordinary people around me and they glowed like the sun.

Here’s what I think this Transfiguration story is telling us, brothers and sisters: What Jesus is on this mountaintop is what we are destined to be too. And more than that, it is what we are. Think of yourself as a being shining with such glory that God has to veil all of our eyes so that we don’t all blind each other all the time, God’s Holy Spirit like tongues of fire, leaping from you to me to you, back and forth all the time, God’s glorious light shining in us every moment.

And what if it is really true? What if we are truly loved, not because we are good or kind or helpful, but because we are God’s children, because we are glorious? Then could we forgive ourselves our quirks, our helplessness, our insecurities? Could we let ourselves experience our anger and our sinfulness and our thoughtlessness? Knowing the whole time that there is nothing we could do that could ever stop God from loving us, because we are like God, not despite of the fact but because we are human?

And what would it be like if we could see past the veil that darkens our eyes, could believe that if it were lifted and we looked around at each other, we would see that same uncreated glory shining in our neighbors too? How could we not love our neighbors as we love ourselves, those who are veiled in disguises of poverty and foreignness and difference, those who are veiled in disguises of irritability and resentment, those who are far away and those who are near. How can we not love such glorious beings as they are?

How could we not give ourselves for them, as Jesus gave himself for us?

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, said Shakespeare, and it’s true. We are the dream of God, and God has given us a gift: the light of Christ, gloriously risen in us. Let that light shine before all.