Sermon for August 21, 2011

Scriptures for this Sunday are Here

What if I told you that something you did tomorrow would change the world? You would probably say, you’re simply living your life in your small corner of the world – it seems pretty unlikely.

But think about this story, told by Andy Andrews, a motivational speaker, in a little book The Butterfly Effect, named after the scientific theory that says that a butterfly flapping its wings in North America can set off a chain of events that causes a hurricane in China:

In April 2004, ABC News named its person of the week – Norman Borlaug. You may never have heard of him, but in the 1940s, Norman Borlaug created a hybrid strain of wheat and corn that could survive in arid climates, making it possible for people in dry climates from America to Africa to grow grain. Norman Borlaug’s hybrid grains are credited with saving over 2 billion lives from famine: one small action that caused a Butterfly Effect that changes the world.

But wait, says Andrews, maybe the chain of events started before that. Maybe it started with Henry Wallace, U.S. Vice-President under Franklin D. Roosevelt, a former Secretary of Agriculture who championed the creation of an office that would develop hybridized wheat and corn, and hired a young man to run it – named Norman Borlaug. So maybe it was Henry Wallace that started the chain of events that saved over 2 billion lives.

But wait, says Andrews, maybe it started even before that – with the man who mentored Henry Wallace as a 6-yr-old boy, took him on long walks and explained agriculture to him, and awakened a love of agriculture that lasted throughout his life. That man was named George Washington Carver, born into slavery in 1864, who became a famous agriculturalist and developed 266 uses for the lowly American peanut. So maybe it was George Washington Carver who started a chain of events that saved 2 billion lives.

But wait, says Andrews, maybe it started even before that, toward the very end of the Civil War, When Mary Washington and her infant son, slaves in Missouri, were kidnapped by a terrorist pro-slavery group called Quantrill’s Raiders from across the border in Arkansas. And a couple named Moses and Susan Carver refused to give up, and kept looking for the kidnappers. It was too late for Mary Washington, who had already been sold into slavery in Kentucky, but Moses met the kidnappers in the middle of the night and took custody of her infant son, naked, cold, and dying, and opened his shirt and placed the baby boy against his skin to warm him up. And Moses Carver took the baby home to his wife, Susan, and they raised him as their own son, made sure he learned to read and write, though that was illegal at the time, and named him – George Washington Carver. So maybe the chain of events that saved 2 billion lives started with Moses and Susan Carver.

Maybe it began with that – or maybe it began with parents even before that who taught the Carvers that the life of a human child, and the love of parents, and the ability to read and write, were values worth risking one’s life for.

Who knows who set in motion the Butterfly Effect that saved 2 billion lives – so far. The point is, we just don’t know how what we do can change the world.

Our Old Testament lesson today tells us a story that set in motion a chain of events that changed the world, without which you and I might not be here today. It’s the story of Moses in the bulrushes, which if you grew up in the church, you probably learned by heart in Sunday school. But what you maybe didn’t learn by heart was the story that put that baby in the basket – the story of two brave midwives who risked their lives to save that baby. Unlike most women in the Old Testament, we know their names.

Shiphrah and Puah ignored the Pharaoh’s command to practice genocide against Hebrew baby boys, made excuses to avoid his command to drown them, and just might have saved numerous lives. One of them grew up to be another man named Moses, who heard God’s call, went to Pharaoh and demanded that he “let my people go.” He led the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt toward the Promised Land, where they would establish a nation that would live a way of life devoted to God until the day when another baby was born, named Jesus of Nazareth.

And that child would grow up to be recognized by Peter as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, and would live, die and be resurrected for our sake, and would open for us a new way of life.

We live in the Kingdom of Heaven he proclaimed, because he opened the way; because of him, we have committed ourselves to a new way of life in our baptism, and because we worship him, we are here today, getting ready to build a new church to accomplish the mission of Jesus.

All because two midwives stood up to the Pharaoh.

And when I think about those midwives, I’m pretty sure they didn’t know they were making it possible for the Messiah to come into the world, or for us to be here in this room today. I’m pretty sure that all they knew was that they were committed to a profession, a calling, of bringing life into the world, and they were determined not to let that calling change into a calling of bringing death to innocent children. And they risked their own lives to answer their own calling. They refused to conform to what Pharaoh demanded of them. They stood up to an empire because they saw a power more important – the power of life that they had committed their lives to.

“Do not be conformed to this world,” says Paul in our lesson from Romans today, “but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God-- what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Or, as Martin Luther King translated this passage, live a life of transformed nonconformity. People who live lives conformed to this world, said Dr. King, are like thermometers, who just adjust to the temperature of the air around them. But if you live a life of transformed nonconformity, he said, you are more like a thermostat, that actually measures the temperature of the air – and then changes it.

When we live a life of transformed nonconformity, we look at the climate around us, and we make judgments about what needs to be changed. We become people who are, in the words of French sociologist Jacques Ellul, “positively maladjusted” the world around us. As Dr. King said, he hoped always to remain maladjusted to the evil of segregation. When we are positively maladjusted to evil, then we can work to change it.

And that’s what it means to live in the kingdom of God. Shiphrah and Puah were positively maladjusted to the kingdom of Pharaoh, that demanded the death of children to maintain Pharaoh’s power. And they stood up for life instead, in their own small and domestic way. You and I can be maladjusted to the things we see in this world, that are not the kingdom of God – poverty, disease, famine and suffering. We can devote ourselves instead to the things God calls us to do: to parent our children in positive ways, to teach the young and heal the sick and bring comfort to those who are suffering, to give of ourselves to help the poor. To develop strong businesses that will employ people to manufacture things and serve others and develop new products that will improve lives. To heal a sick person, to mentor a child, to start someone on a new path. Because these are the ordinary, everyday things that regular people like us devote our lives to, and Paul says these things are our spiritual worship.

We may think of worship as these things we do here on Sunday morning: something that involves singing and kneeling and hearing sermons and receiving bread and wine. And if we think that, we’re right – we do these things because we love our Savior Jesus, and we want to conform our lives to him, not to the world. We do these things so that we are constantly renewing our minds in his direction, always remembering that he is the Messiah, Son of Living God.

But Paul says that worship is far more than that. Worship is what we do every single day when we present our bodies, our whole selves, as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. Paul isn’t saying we should sacrifice ourselves in the sense of accepting death, or putting up with mistreatment from others, or giving up everything we love. Paul is using the word “sacrifice” in its original sense: we are setting aside our lives to make them holy, sacred to God.

Paul says that this is exactly what has happened to us in our baptism. We have been set apart as holy – living sacrifices, people who are sacred to God – which means that every single thing we do in our lives, we do for God. God has given us different gifts – one person is a priest, another is a businesswoman, another is an entrepreneur, another is a philanthropist, another is a parent, another is a lawyer, another is a teacher, another is a healer. Every single one of these everyday activities is sacred to God. Each of us can live a life of transformed nonconformity –not just thermometers who just reflect the world around us, but thermostats who take action to change it . Every one of us, every day, can do small things to change the world.

Because we are the church, we are the ones who have staked our lives on our faith in the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. And on the Rock of our faith, Jesus builds his church.

As we let Christ build us into his church, as we live into our identity as members of the Body of Christ, as we live lives of transformed nonconformity, declaring our loyalty not to the kingdoms of this world, but to the kingdom of God, we too can stand up against the evils of this world. We too can become midwives, helping Jesus bring a new kingdom to birth. We too can set events in motion in a Butterfly Effect we may never understand.

What if I told you that something you do tomorrow might turn into a movement that will change the world?

Sermon for August 14, 2011

Scriptures for this Sunday are Here

Earlier this year, Rob Bell, the pastor of an evangelical megachurch in Minneapolis, ignited a firestorm of controversy in the Christian world. He didn’t do anything wrong except to write a book – and the firestorm of controversy erupted even before the book was published, based on a 3-minute promotional video that he posted on his website. In the video, he tells a story of an art exhibit at his church; one artwork that really touched a lot of people was an exhibit that had a quote by Gandhi. The piece caused a lot of discussion in the church until one day, someone left a handwritten note on the piece saying: “Reality Check: He’s in Hell.”

In his video, Rob Bell stops, and says “Really? Gandhi’s in Hell? And someone knows this for sure, and felt the need to let us all know?” And he goes on to ask the question that many of us have asked: is God going to select just a few of us for salvation, and let billions of others burn eternally? Or, stated more simply – Who’s In, and Who’s Out? Who’s on God’s side, and who’s on the other side, and how do we tell the difference?

If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that the question of Who’s In and Who’s Out occupies a lot of energy in the human mind. We human beings are constant boundary-setters, always wanting to define our borders, delineate who’s on our side (the good side) and who’s not. And while setting personal boundaries is a healthy thing, enabling us to enter into strong, equal, adult relationships with people around us, in our communal lives, the boundaries we draw can quickly become excuses for conflicts and wars, like the Berlin Wall (whose 50^th anniversary we observed on Friday). And when we start defining our world in terms of what we think God thinks about who’s in and who’s out, things can become very frightening very fast.

We saw an example a few weeks ago in Norway, where Anders Breivik, a self-described Christian, murdered almost 80 people, mostly teenagers and young adults at a summer camp, because he felt that there were too many non-Christian outsiders being allowed to flourish in Norway. Since the society around him was not willing to answer the question of Who’s In and Who’s Out in a way that satisfied him, he decided to answer it himself. This is far from an isolated example – world history is full of terrible stories of In-groups destroying Out-Groups for religious reasons, believing God to be on their side – from 9/11 to the Holocaust (in recent history alone).

What is it in human nature that causes us to want to define in-groups and out-groups, and more importantly, does our tendency to draw these boundaries between people groups, our tendency to exclude the outsider – does this reflect the character of God? Our Old Testament lesson is the conclusion of a sad story where Joseph’s brothers get jealous of him, gang up on him and sell him into slavery. But he is so talented that he rises to the top and becomes Pharaoh’s right-hand man; years later his brothers, suffering from famine in Israel, come to Egypt to ask for help, and find themselves standing before brother they had wronged. Joseph, instead of defining the brothers who betrayed him as “outsiders,” recognizes God’s hand at work in his life, and displays the character of God in what he does next – extends the hand of forgiveness, welcomes his brothers with joy, and promises them everything that they need, they’ll have in Egypt. And from this extended family in Egypt, God creates the people of Israel.

God does not define outsiders based on our past mistakes, the wrongs we have done to others; God works with the situations we get ourselves into and, if we let him, can bring good even out of the worst evil in our lives. And God, like Joseph, extends the hand of forgiveness and welcomes us home. So if we are addressing Rob Bell’s question of who is an outsider to God – we can’t say that God defines outsiders based on sinfulness. God is on the side of reconciliation. God works with who we are, wherever God finds us – at whatever stage of life we’re in, whatever we have done – God welcomes us home.

Our gospel narrows down our question a bit more, because it is very specifically addressing the question of whether God defines insiders or outsiders based on what religious group people belong to. To understand the questions being asked here, we need to understand the fact that Christianity arose in the Jewish world. Jews were different than the other people around them – they worshiped one God, who was greater than all other gods, and who called them to be different.

As a mark of their difference and their loyalty to one God, they lived differently; they ate certain foods defined as clean (kosher), the men were circumcised; they did not eat or associate with Gentiles (pagans). And to the Jews, their status as God’s chosen ones, God’s Insiders, was easily visible in their careful observance of those laws – so that defining insiders and outsiders was a religious obligation, and a way of being faithful.

Jesus pointedly addresses the things that Jews did to stay pure and separate in the gospel today when he talks about the food they ate (marking them as holy). It is not what goes into a person that defiles them, he says – it’s not the food you eat – it’s what comes out – it’s the things that you believe in your heart, that become actions you take in relationship to others, that mark you as holy. Religious observance is all very well, he says, but our hearts are where we know God, and if we know God, we will live as God wants us to live.

Jesus, the Jewish rabbi, is challenging the purity laws God had given the Jewish people, challenging the wall that kept them separate from outsider groups. As disciples point out to him, this is very offensive to the Pharisees. But Jesus is insistent that God looks at our hearts, not our outward actions.

Well, this is difficult for human beings – we want our boundaries to be clear. If the life of following Jesus is going to mean we can’t use obvious markers like what religious group someone belongs to, to judge whether people are on God’s side or not, but have to look more deeply at their hearts, life as a human being has suddenly gotten more difficult.

And, as if to underline just how difficult this will be, Matthew immediately tells us a story that lets us know that it was a challenge even for Jesus. Jesus is the Son of God, fully divine, but he is also fully human. And in a moment of full humanity, Jesus has to decide whether to open up his ministry to an outsider – a non-Jewish, Canaanite woman. She recognizes who he is – the Son of David, sent by God, the one who has the power to heal her daughter – but he does not immediately recognize who she is. He believes he’s been sent only to the lost sheep of Israel – not to the “dogs” outside Israel (and by the way, calling her a “dog” is a huge insult).

Yet it turns out that this dog, this outsider, is someone unexpected: she is a messenger sent by God to let Jesus know that it is time to open up God’s word, God’s healing power, beyond the Jewish people, to people everywhere. God’s love extends to all religious groups, apparently. Jesus has to listen for God’s call in the voice of the outsider – and hearing God’s call, Jesus changes his mind: because he understands what Joseph understood in the OT lesson – God is on the side of reconciliation.

In this moment in Matthew’s gospel, we watch Jesus’ whole ministry shift, from being a renewal movement inside Judaism to a movement of reconciliation and discipleship that will reach out to the whole world – till at the end of Matthew, the resurrected Jesus will tell the disciples to go, and make disciples of all nations – to bring Christ’s presence to the world.

God is the one who wants to bring us together, not keep us apart. God is not a maker of boundary lines; God transcends all boundaries.

Paul speaks about that in the Epistle today. For 3 chapters in Romans, he has gone round and round about the question of whether God still loves the Jewish people who have not accepted Christ – are they insiders, or outsiders? Finally he gives in. He doesn’t exactly reason his way to a conclusion. He simply decides that he can trust God – God has made a covenant with God’s people, and God is faithful to his covenants. God is merciful to all. God doesn’t make outsiders; God’s mercy wins.

Which is more or less where Rob Bell ends up, in the book I opened this sermon with, the book that has caused all the controversy in the Christian world. The book is called Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Rob Bell doesn’t know the fate of every person, any more than you or I do – in the end, we simply can’t know the mind of God. What we can do is trust God’s faithfulness.

The God we worship is a God who came in the person of Jesus to all of us when we were outsiders, separated from God by our own disobedience. This is a God who does not hold our sins against us, but like Joseph, holds out the hand of reconciliation when we deserved condemnation. This is a God who knows no outsiders. This is a God of mercy. This is a God of Love. And in the words of Rob Bell, Love Wins.

Sermon for 8.7.11

Scriptures for this week are Here

I recently returned from vacation, and if you’re new here, you should know that these guys don’t let me come back from vacation unless I have a story to tell. So let me tell you about the wondrous, beautiful, complex city of Prague. Wherever you go in Prague, you can peel back another layer of history. We landed in Prague to discover (not for the first time) that our luggage did not make it there with us. So our first full day there, I found myself without decent shoes, tripping over the ancient cobblestones of Prague in flimsy sandals, and it became a priority to find a place where I could buy some decent tennis shoes.

We wandered for several miles until – the first layer of history, current history – Tom finally Googled “Prague shoe stores” on his Blackberry, and we discovered that in the center of the city, right on Wenceslas Square, was surely the largest shoe store I had ever seen, 5 stories of every imaginable brand of men’s women’s, and children’s shoes. Now you can peel back the history of Prague just one layer to appreciate the amazing irony of a 5-story shoe store right on Wenceslas Square. Because 22 years ago, at the height of communism, we would hear of people waiting in lines for hours just to buy ugly black shoes that didn’t even fit, but under communism they were lucky to have something, anything, on their feet. Now, there on Wenceslas Square, where 600,000 people crowded in November 1989 to hear Vaclav Havel speak, and gently bring down communism in the Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia, now you can buy a pair of Nikes, or any kind of shoe you want, in air-conditioned comfort, from a sales clerk who speaks fluent English, and not wait in line at all.

Peel back more layers of history in Prague, and you begin to find a searing history of religious conflict in the Protestant-Catholic violence of the 17^th century – which I will tell you about another time.

Peel back another layer of history in Prague, and you might find yourself in one of the most fascinating sights I’ve seen. In the old Jewish quarter, there is a 13^th century synagogue, the oldest synagogue in continuous operation as a synagogue in Europe. It doesn’t take much peeling to know how unusual this is – most synagogues in Europe did not survive WWII – but in Prague, Hitler preserved the Jewish Quarter because he intended to open a museum there to the extinct Jewish race.

The tour guide in the synagogue told us how 3 Jewish men worked through WWII to catalog priceless Jewish treasures brought there from looted synagogues all over Europe. Among the many treasures were numerous Torah scrolls brought from destroyed synagogues. If you don’t know, the Torah scroll is the most precious possession of any synagogue. It is the hand-lettered, illuminated scroll on which the Hebrew Bible is written, and each Sabbath the members carry it out, touch it and kiss it, and read from it in the synagogue. The Torah scroll is so precious that if a synagogue catches on fire, it is the one thing people will run into a burning building to rescue. When a scroll finally wears out after centuries of use, it is not thrown away – it is buried in a graveyard, like a person.

After the war, the treasures that were catalogued in the old synagogue in Prague were dispersed all over the world, because the synagogues they had come from were destroyed, along with their people. The tour guide in the synagogue told us of one Torah scroll from a small Czech town that was saved from the war and ended up in a synagogue in New Zealand. The woman rabbi from the New Zealand synagogue brought the Torah to its ancestral home in the small Czech town (with its destroyed synagogue) for a visit, and Jewish leaders from all over the country came for the occasion to celebrate the Torah’s visit to its home village. The tour guide owns a DVD of the Torah’s visit, and she got tears in her eyes as she told us about it.

Hitler is gone, but the old synagogue in Prague is still there; you can still see its plaster walls, its worn-down stairs; its outer room for women, its inner sanctum for men at prayer. And most fascinating to me, its ancient Torah scroll, carefully stored in an inscribed tabernacle on the wall, with an eternal flame burning next to it. Just as we have a flame burning here behind our altar to show that God’s presence is here in the bread and wine we have reserved in our tabernacle, the Jews keep an eternal flame burning next to the Torah.

Why is the Torah such a precious thing to the Jews? It is because the Torah is the closest the Jewish people believe God comes to them. When Paul quotes the Hebrew Scriptures (in today’s epistle lesson) as saying “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart,” he is reflecting the Hebrew belief that the word of God that we hear in the Bible is the same power of God that spoke the universe into being. God’s presence is with them in the words of Torah. The word of God carries the power of God, and it is more precious than gold.

For Christians, we treasure the words of God in the Bible; but we believe that the Word of God that spoke the universe into being has gone further than words; it has come into human flesh in Jesus. (Which, incidentally, is why we in the Episcopal Church are not Biblical literalists. The words in the Bible are mediated to us through imperfect human authors, though they are divinely inspired. Only Jesus is a perfect reflection of God – Jesus is the Word of God made flesh.)

So, when we read the gospel from Matthew today, about Jesus walking on water, we should not get distracted by tangential questions – such as: did Jesus really walk on water, and how could he transcend the laws of physics if he was truly human? Or, questions of what Peter did or shouldn’t have done – is this a story about Peter’s faith or lack of faith? (I personally think Peter shows amazing faith here – I’ve tried to walk on water, and I haven’t succeeded yet!)

I think about all those questions, and they are all good ones, but I don’t believe that those are the points Matthew wants us to understand in this story. This is a story with one point, and the punch line is this: “Those in the boat worshipped him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’”

Over the 14 chapters of his gospel to this point, Matthew has been carefully unfolding a narrative that asks one question: who is this Jesus? He tells us things like, this is someone who threatens earthly authorities and people in power, who teaches about love and lives it out, who has authority to heal and forgive, who ensures (in last week’s gospel) that God’s creation means that everyone has enough to eat in abundance, in whom God’s kingdom has come to Israel, but who has also come for the healing of the whole world. Now, for the first time in Matthew, we understand: This is the Son of God.

Which means that in Jesus, the fullness of God’s presence has come to us. Torah is no longer only holy words on a beloved, cherished page. Torah, God’s law, God’s word, God’s power, is human flesh and blood in Jesus – human life that lived, died and was resurrected, and who has changed the very nature of human life as a result.

Our eternal flame burns next to the consecrated bread and wine because these elements mediate the real presence of God to us in Christ’s human body. Jesus said he personally is the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, the completion of the Torah that is held in such reverence by Jews. In Jesus, God’s presence dwelled, not symbolically in words, but completely enfleshed in a human body, lived out in a human life from birth to death.

Which means that our life, our Christian way of life, is more than just reading, understanding, and believing a set of words or doctrines. Too often, Christians have lived as if believing certain propositions about Jesus is enough, and we could live however we want to as long as we believe. Like the Jews, we are called to live by the Torah. But for us, that means we are called to live a life transformed by encountering Jesus in all the ways he comes walking toward us, recognized or not.

Christian author Kurt Willems wrote an online article this week, in which he made the shocking statement that he was done living like Jesus – he was done serving the poor, going the extra mile, being a husband who loves his wife as Christ loves the church, visiting the sick, loving his neighbor, living with integrity. Instead of living like Jesus, he said, he wants to start being like Jesus.

As we encounter Jesus through prayer, worship, spiritual disciplines, reading the Bible and sharing the Eucharist, he said, we become like Jesus. As we encounter Jesus in other ways - walking toward us, recognized or not, in times of fear and trouble; challenging our way of life, urging us to ask ourselves if we are truly living the law of love, we come to know Jesus. As we come to know Jesus through all the ways he encounters us, we don’t just do the things Jesus commanded us to do. Through knowing Jesus we become the kind of people who can’t help but do those things. We become people for whom the hard thing is not loving our enemies, but failing to love them; the hard thing is not helping our neighbor, but turning him away; the hard thing is not working for healing, but allowing unhealthy behavior to flourish. Through daily encounters with Jesus, we become people for whom the only safe and happy thing to do is to love God and love our neighbor. We become like Jesus.

So Kurt Willems wants to stop mechanically doing what Jesus would do and simply start being like Jesus: “So, yes, I’m done with living like a Christian. I’m trading that in for living in a deeper relationship with Christ. I want to know Jesus. I want to hear Jesus. I want to be empowered by Jesus. Not simply in theory as I do the good things that he calls us to do, but as the natural outflow of intimacy with God. The former way “gets the job done.” The latter way changes the world.”

When we open our hearts to being like Jesus, it is the Word of God who lives and breathes through Jesus that takes flesh in us.

When we encounter Jesus, become like Jesus, it is God’s Word that begins to breathe through words we speak to others who have not encountered Jesus.

And as we are transformed by Jesus, it is God’s own Son who reaches out his hand to us, and empowers us to change the world.

Sermon for 7.3.11

Scriptures for Today are Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon for 5.22.11

Scriptures for today are Here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon for May 8, 2011

Scriptures for today are Here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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