Sermon for 9.12.10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon for 9.5.10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SERMON NOTES FOR 8.22.10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon Notes for 4.18.10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon for Palm Sunday 2010

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

SERMON NOTES FOR PALM SUNDAY 2010

I have never been fond of roller coaster rides. The slow chug up to the top, looking out at the crowds and the amusement park below, the hesitation as the car reaches the top, the fear that wells up as you realize what is about to happen, the sudden swoosh as the car leaps over the peak and hurls you straight down at the ground, the dizzying whirls and loops as your stomach leaps up into your chest. All these are things I can live without.

Well, if you don’t like roller coaster rides, then Palm Sunday may not be your favorite day at church – because this liturgy is like nothing so much as a huge, dizzying roller coaster ride, hurling us from jubilant high to stomach-churning low with barely a pause for breath.

It is a day of polar extremes – from the beginning of joy and jubilation, as we hail Jesus as our king and shout Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest! – to the dizzying drop into darkness and sorrow as we watch Jesus die, slowly and painfully, on the cross. This is a day so bipolar that we have to give it two names: the official name of this day is Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday.

And if you want to ask, why is the Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday liturgy so strange, why couldn’t they adopt one theme – either Palm or Passion – and stick with it in an intelligent and rational manner – there are several excellent practical answers -- the foremost being the fact that you truly cannot experience Easter as a day of resurrection, unless you have also experienced the death that preceded resurrection. You can’t have Easter without Good Friday. If you try, you will end up with a lovely spring celebration that involves pastel colors and eggs and bunnies and visits from grandma, but you will not have Easter. And since many people will not or cannot worship on Good Friday, our calendar is set up so that we all experience some of Good Friday today.

Fair enough–but I think there is more to this roller-coaster day than that.

I think that this crazy swirl of emotions we experience today is very close to what the disciples experienced that last week in Jerusalem. One day they were parading in triumph through the streets, watching their leader hailed as King of the Jews. The next they were watching that same leader provoke the authorities with acts of defiance like driving money-changers out of the temple that were sure to get anyone killed who tried it. And a few days later they were hiding in terror as that leader died on the cross. A roller-coaster week indeed.

And when I read the gospels, I think Jesus intentionally set it up this way – he meant for this to be a week of extremes, veering from high to low in seconds flat. I think Jesus set this whole thing up knowing that it would come out exactly as it did.

To give you some context, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, in their book “The Last Week,” describe two processions arriving in Jerusalem that day. From the west arrives a column of Roman soldiers, Pontius Pilate at their head; though they live and prefer to stay in Caesarea Maritima, the new Roman capital of Judea on the coast 60 miles to the west, once a year at Passover, they make the journey to Jerusalem. They make this trip not out of any reverence for the Jewish festival, but in order to keep an eye on the population and the 200,000 pilgrims who swell a town of 40,000 to celebrate the Jews’ deliverance from an earlier empire that held them as slaves – and to squelch any trouble that might arise.

So imagine the Roman procession, say Borg & Crossan: “a visual panoply of imperial power: cavalry on horses, foot soldiers, leather armor, helmets, weapons, banners, golden eagles mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold. Sounds: the marching of feet, the creaking of leather, the clinking of bridles, the beating of drums. The swirling of dust. The eyes of the silent onlookers, some curious, some awed, some resentful.” The Roman procession demonstrates not only Rome’s power, but also Rome’s theology: Caesar was called Son of God, Lord, Savior – he was considered divine.

On the other end of town, from the east, an entirely different kind of procession is occurring, almost a parody of the first, certainly as a challenge. A ragged prophet from a no-account town in the northern countryside, a man with no profession and no home, has found a donkey – a donkey! – to ride into Jerusalem. His ragged crowd of followers follow him, shouting and proclaiming him king, and curious onlookers who are avoiding the Roman procession on the other end of town flood into the streets to join in the mayhem – not necessarily understanding what the fuss was about or even knowing about Jesus and his mission, but enjoying the insult to Rome.

If you ask why a donkey, which contrasts so pitifully with the grand horses of the Roman army, the answer goes back to the prophet Zechariah, who had said that one day Jerusalem’s king of peace would come, riding a donkey. Jesus has chosen this mode of entry to not only proclaim himself king, a king of peace, but also deliberately to set up a contrast and a challenge to Rome – another bipolar extreme on this day of extremes. He does this knowing that Rome’s answer will be swift, unhesitating & brutal; knowing that the fate of anyone who challenged Rome was slow death on a cross.

Jesus knows that the week that begins with joy and jubilation, as people elevate him with the lofty title of “king of the Jews”, will end in crashing despair, as he is crucified for that same offense – claiming to be king of the Jews, challenging the power of Rome.

Luke, our gospel writer, of all the four gospel writers the one who writes most from the heart, catalogs the emotions of the week with precision: the shouting; the exultation so fierce that the very stones might cry out; the betrayal; the arrest in the garden; the armed defense that Jesus stops by healing the ear of the servant; the denial and then the bitter weeping of Peter; the release of an insurgent terrorist while the king of peace is put to death; the weeping of the daughters of Jerusalem; the crucifixion; the prayer, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”; the soldiers mocking him from the foot of the cross while the women who love him watch from afar. The darkness. The death.

It is a roller coaster ride from jubilation to agony, this Palm/Passion Sunday. And why would Jesus set us up for this? Why take us on this ride, why go to Jerusalem at all, why not hide out till all the fuss blows over and live to minister another day? Why come riding into Jerusalem in a way guaranteed to get him killed? Why do we celebrate this colossal disaster in this liturgy of Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday?

I think the answer, for us, lies in the fact that we call this worship a “liturgy.” Liturgy is not just a word that means “ritual” or “ceremony.” It is a word that means “the work of the people” – literally, a liturgy is something that we create together as community, with song, prayer, and communion. And when we understand what we are doing as not just a ritual but a liturgy, the work of all of us, we can begin to understand that, like the crowds in Jerusalem who one day shouted Hosanna and acclaimed Jesus their king, and days later shouted out for him to be crucified, we are not innocent bystanders. We are the same people shouting Hosanna and Crucify him. As Fleming Rutledge says, “the liturgy of Palm Sunday is set up to show you how you can say one thing one minute and its opposite the next. This is the nature of the sinful human being.” It’s the nature of each one of us. The extremes are in us. We are the disciples who sit at his feet and listen to his teaching and try our best to go out into the world and live as he has taught us. And we are also the disciples who sometimes betray him, sometimes deny him, sometimes cry out for his crucifixion - and then go out and weep bitterly when we realize what we have done.

On the cross we see Jesus identifying with the innocent victims of the world, those put to death, those mired in poverty, those stuck in hopelessness, homelessness, or despair, those who are stressed beyond the breaking point, those who are grieved even unto death, those who know that they are called to do something almost too painful to bear, those who watch as their loved ones suffer, those who have lost their way and those who have nothing left. On the cross Jesus takes on their burden.

And yet on the cross Jesus takes on another burden too. It is not only the suffering victims Jesus identifies with on the cross, it is other extreme too: the torturers and the perpetrators, the arrogant and the guilty. When Jesus says, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do,” he is identifying not only with those who suffer but with those who cause their suffering. And as we shout the words Hosanna and Crucify him, we recognize that we are both of these things – the victims who need to be rescued, and the sinners who are causing their suffering – as Rutledge says: “he makes himself one, not only with my pain but with my sin–because I myself, and you yourselves, and all of us ourselves, are sometimes victims of others and sometimes torturers of others and sometimes both, and when we recognize this we are, as Jesus says to the scribe, ‘not far from the kingdom.’”

Here we are, on this dizzying roller coaster of a day, hovering on the brink of disaster, careening madly downhill towards Good Friday. In this whirling, spinning, stomach-churning world, there is one point of stillness: the Son of God is motionless, suspended on the cross. To all our words of “Hosanna” and “Crucify him,” he responds with only one word: love.

Sermon for 3.21.10

This week's Scriptures are here:

http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Lent/CLent5_RCL.html

SERMON NOTES FOR 3.21.10

Let me draw a picture for you. This is a picture of Harry and Sally. They live in our area, they have a reasonably stable marriage, they have a couple of children, they own their own home. Their income is roughly 5 times Arizona’s state average, so they are rich, but they don’t feel rich, because a lot of their money has gone to buy a nice house, two cars, nice furniture, electronics, travel etc. So they are sometimes anxious about money, but they are in no danger of starving. They’ve never been in trouble with the law other than a speeding ticket, their work and family life is proceeding more or less according to the expectations their parents had for them, they are doing what they are supposed to do. There’s not a lot of spare time in their schedule– they are very busy with work and family commitments. But when they can find the time, they do spend time thinking about God. They wonder how God looks at the world, they wonder whether there is some deeper meaning and purpose to their lives, they hope that the fact that they are doing the best they can with their lives counts with God & is appreciated.

If this picture of Harry and Sally sounds like you or someone you know, there’s a good reason for that – according to demographic data, this is a picture of the average family in our surrounding area. And for people who fit this profile, our scriptures today have a lot to say.

Let’s begin with Paul, who writes our letter to the Christians in Philippi today. I always get a kick out of Paul, because he says stuff like, “If anyone has reason to boast, I have more!” Paul says that even before he knew anything about Christ – his life was proceeding very well. he was a law-abiding citizen, very well-educated, respected by everyone, a good church-goer who had everything he needed or expected to have. And yet – he met Christ and decided that the one thing worth more in his life than anything else was the power of Christ’s resurrection. For the hope of Christ’s kingdom and Christ’s resurrection, Paul counted everything else in his life, everything he had to be proud of, as rubbish. He devoted his life to making Christ his own, because Christ made Paul his own. It’s an impressive commitment by a man who already had everything.

Isaiah gives us a more interesting view of what God might say to Harry and Sally. And to understand what Isaiah is saying, you need a little background. Two experiences of exile and homecoming formed the foundations of Israel. The first was their experience as slaves in Egypt – starving, beaten, oppressed, humiliated, murdered – God heard their cry and sent Moses to deliver them. Moses led them through wilderness for 40 years, they came to Promised Land. This Exodus experience took a ragtag bunch of slaves and made them a people.

Less well-known is the second experience, much later after Israel was established as a kingdom – Babylon invaded and carted off much of the leadership of Israel to Babylon. Now this Exile experience was much different than the slavery in Egypt. The people taken to Babylon were the educated leaders – they were not slaves – they had opportunities to do well in Babylon, to get education, to work – some of them rose to high and powerful positions in the new land. For them, the most powerful temptation of Exile was not despair, starvation, torture as it was for the suffering slaves in Egypt. For them, the risk was assimilation – that the comforts and opportunities of Babylon might make them forget who they were as the people of God; that they might adopt Babylon ways, Babylon values, Babylon gods – and give up their heritage as the children of God’s covenant.

Babylon understood something important: the way to kill a people is not to enslave them and make them suffer, but to take away their identity, to rob them of their dream, to replace God’s vision for them with another vision that is comfortable but small, dark and confining.

And if this seems long ago and far away, think of Harry and Sally – busy and comfortable and respected – yet tempted by busy schedules and comfortable homes and by a society that has very little interest in following God – to forget their own heritage as children of God and assimilate to the ways of the kingdom around us, the kingdom that tempts us to think that a comfortable lifestyle and a rewarding career are all we need to aspire to, and that God can be a convenient add-on when we have the time.

To a people in tempting, comfortable Exile, a people whose best opportunities for the future seem to lie in forgetting their own identity as God’s children, the prophet Isaiah says this: remember how those slaves were brought out of Egypt, across the Red Sea where Pharaoh’s horses and chariots drowned? Remember how God gave them hope and formed them as a people? Remember the miracles God can do? Remember those things! – and now forget them! Because that’s not all God can do! God has more to say that God hasn’t yet said, and God’s rescue of suffering slaves is not the only thing God is about! God is about to do a new thing! And forget the old thing, the slavery thing, because God can do something that is so transformative, so life-changing, that even a people in Exile among the comforts of Babylon can understand that it is worth giving up everything to be a part of this transformation.

What God has done in the past is only a small measure of what God can do in the future, because our God is the God of surprises, our God can lead us through the wilderness, bring water out of the desert, fulfillment out of emptiness, resurrection out of death itself. And nothing in our lives is worth as much as that prize, the prize of being part of the covenant people of God.

Which brings us to Mary and her crazy, extravagant gesture in our gospel today. Just a few days earlier, Mary had buried her brother Lazarus, and after Lazarus was buried for four days in the tomb, Jesus finally came, and called Lazarus forth from the darkness of death into the sunshine of life. All of Jesus’ miracles in John’s gospel are extravagant gestures, but calling Lazarus from death into life is the most extravagant miracle of all, the one that demonstrates Jesus’ power over death itself, the one that convinces Mary that Jesus is not just a miracle worker but someone who carries the power of God, the creative power of calling forth life.

Hearing about this impossible miracle, the rulers in Jerusalem decide that such power cannot be tolerated – God is the ultimate threat to their own power. So they begin to plot to kill Jesus – meaning Jesus will trade his own life for Lazarus’ – an extravagant outpouring of blood, flesh and spirit that is the new and stunning thing that God is doing through him.

Our gospel writer, John, tells us that this dinner party happens 6 days before the Passover, and John also tells us that Jesus died on Passover. So make note – this is the Saturday before Good Friday. The very next day will be Palm Sunday, and Jesus plans an extravagant gesture, entering into Jerusalem. He’s not planning to slip into Jerusalem through back alleys – he’s going to ride a donkey down the main street with people cheering and acclaiming him king. It’s a calculated gesture, planned to get the attention of the authorities, and Jesus knows exactly how it will turn out, with the even more extravagant gesture of pouring out his blood and his life on the cross.

Everyone else there also knows what is going to happen. They are all scared. Mary knows what is coming, and responds with an extravagant gesture of her own – anointing Jesus with oil worth whole year’s wages. If you think of that tax return you just filed, or are about to file, and you think of that income number at the bottom of page one, and you imagine breaking something worth that much money in honor of a guest, you will understand how extravagant this gesture is.

Judas, the thief, responds with more sensible ideas for how it could be used, but Jesus is adamant that the Son of Man has come, not just to give a small amount of money to the poor, but to bring the extravagant outpouring of the kingdom of God to life in this world, light into darkness, life into death – and therefore everything we have is not too much to pour into dream of God. It is the dream that makes us who we are, the dream that forms our identity as children of God, the dream that surprises us constantly with newness of life.

Don’t remember the things of old, says God! I am about to do a new thing!

If we think that God has already done everything that God ever intends to do; if we think that God has stopped speaking to us, that the scriptures are long ago, far away descriptions of the lives of a few strange old-fashioned people; if we think that God might have had much to say to people mired in slavery 3,000 years ago but not much to say to our comfortable world now - our scriptures tell us differently. Our scriptures tell us that God is constantly calling us forth into the extravagant kingdom of an extravagant God who poured out everything he had for us. Our scriptures tell us that the comfortable lives we create for ourselves are nothing compared to the immeasurable value of the prize God has waiting for us. Our scriptures tell us that God’s dream for ourselves and our community is new and fresh and surprising in every era.

And if Harry and Sally can begin to understand the dream God has for them, they can begin to know the hope that resurrection brings to their own lives, and their lives will be transformed. This is our mission at Church of the Nativity – not a mission to create a loving community or to build a beautiful building or to provide lovely worship, though all of these things are important and all of them will happen. Our mission is to reach into our community and find Harry and Sally, to help them dream God’s dream for their lives, to let them know how deeply they are loved. To transform their lives with the knowledge of the extravagant dream of the extravagant God who gave his own life for each of us.