19 May 2013                “Jesus as God”                  John 14:8-17

  We who have faith in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior should never take our faith for granted.

  Rudy wasn’t a close friend. He had been my brother’s neighbor for years, so we would see Rudy and his wife Mary now and then. I knew from my brother that Rudy was a good guy. He was a successful realtor, steady family man, he had played football at Alabama, and loved to kayak.

 Suddenly and unexpectedly Rudy died. He came home from work, mowed his front yard, and was found slumped over sitting on a bench.

 Swirling in the struggle with the raw ending of his life we discovered Rudy did not have a home church. Actually, he nor Mary even knew a pastor. Mary didn’t know anyone to call to help with Rudy’s funeral. Anyone the funeral home mentioned would be a stranger. She had no one.  

 Staring at the death of her husband, Mary realized she desperately needed help with more than a pastor for a funeral. She needed God’s presence to help her make sense of this shock. As if death can be understood.

 We who have faith should never ever take our faith for granted.

 That faith we cherish recently took a turn when Jesus sat down to eat what would be his last meal on earth before he took up his cross. He knew what was coming. He knew the end meant he would never have his beloved disciples with him at table again. He knew his time had come.

 But we seldom do. We will not truly know when our last supper will be. How could we know when it is time to say all the things we will wish we had said? What will that last time be like that will be played over and over again in our memory?  Will we be like Rudy, doing what we have always done? Mowing the yard, tending to our chores, rising to do what we have always done, then searching for meaning in the most desperate of times.

  With memories flooding our every thought of those we have loved and lost it is hard not to want another get together, just one more day. Jesus must have wanted just one more day too as he offers one last bit of hope to his disciples.

Jesus began this 14^th chapter of John with words of comfort. He said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.”

 His friends must have known something was up. They must have sensed their time with him was about to end.  Yet they did not really know. Rudy had come home after work like so many other days. He wasn’t planning on a last supper.

 We recreate Jesus’ last gathering each first Sunday. Here at this table we gather round to hear his words again in hopes that he will still be here with us.  Perhaps that is when we will want to take the opportunity that was lost, the opportunity to truly see Christ and pray to him, speak to him, say those things to Jesus we intend to say all along, yet don’t.

 We will have tomorrow, we think. My fear, my worry, my sadness, my confusion, my longing to know “what next” with my life, can wait. It can wait. It can all wait, for surely there will be time for sharing our joy and our playfulness and our thanksgiving and our love. We have all the time we will need; the world is still filled with light. Darkness is far away. Jesus is here for us, that is why we come to church; we have Sunday’s to seek him.

 Frederick Buechner has written about this light and dark world of seeking Jesus in the story of a Christmas pageant as told by the rector of an Episcopal church.

 The manger was down in front at the chancel steps. Mary was there in a blue mantle and Joseph in a cotton beard. The wise men were there with a handful of shepherds, and of course in the midst of them all the Christ child was there, lying in the straw. The nativity story was read aloud by the rector with carols sung at the appropriate places, and all went like clockwork until it came time for the arrival of the angels of the heavenly host as represented by the children of the congregation, who were robed in white and scattered throughout the pews with their parents.

At the right moment they were supposed to come forward and gather around the manger saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will among men,” and that is just what they did except there were so many of them that their was a fair amount of crowding and jockeying for position, with the result that one particular angel, a girl about nine years old who was smaller than most of them, ended up so far out on the fringes of things that not even by craning her neck and standing on tiptoe could she see what was going on. “Glory to God on the highest and on earth peace, good will among men,” they all sang on cue, and then in the momentary pause that followed, the small girl electrified the entire church by crying out in a voice shrill with irritation and frustration and enormous sadness at having her view blocked, “Let Jesus show”.

 There was a lot of service left to go, but the rector knew to end everything right there. “Let Jesus show”, the child cried out, and while the congregation was still sitting in stunned silence, he pronounced the benediction, and everybody filed out of the church with those unforgettable words ringing in their ears.

 There is so much in our lives that hides Jesus from us. Even here in church some Sundays run the risk of becoming only a performance. Only rarely does anything take our breath away like a little girls cry, “Let Jesus show”, when we realize we got lost in our life and our thoughts of other things and suddenly we lost our reason for coming to worship. To be here with God, to hear Jesus’ words and remember him, to feel his presence in the love felt in this congregation. Suddenly Jesus wasn’t here for any of us.

 In despair we cry out. “Let Jesus show, let the light to the world be present, has he gone and we will never see him again.” Are we so terribly lost?

 “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he said in the midst of his own sadness at leaving them. I will ask my Father and my father will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.

 This is the Spirit of truth Jesus promises. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. I am here with you, your heart will not be broken forever. “Believe in God”, he said, “Believe also in me.”

 Earlier in the gospel Peter had asked Jesus, “Lord, where are you going?” And Jesus answered, “I go to prepare a place for you…that where I am you may be also.”

 For Jesus’ disciples and for those who grieve the loss of a loved one it is not unusual to hear them say, I wish I could just hear their voice once more, just a word. To hear the sound of their voice, the sound of their laughter, to call them on the phone and know with that pick up, they are there.

 We know there won’t be anyone there to answer and yet of course we couldn’t know for sure because nothing in this world is for sure. So we hold onto that phone and let it ring and ring and ring.

 Did they answer? How wonderful to be able to say that by some miracle they did and that we heard their sweet voice.  But, of course they didn’t, and all we heard was the silence of their absence.

 Yet who knows? Who can ever know anything for sure about the mystery of things? “In my Father’s house are many rooms,” Jesus said, and I would not be the one to doubt that in one of those many rooms the phone rang and rang true and was heard. We believers in the mystery believe that in some sense our loved one’s voice was in the ringing itself, and that Jesus’ voice was in it too.

 Jesus said, “I go to prepare a place for you…that where I am you may be also . .  . The Father will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth” we know as we celebrate this Pentecost day. The day the Advocate, the Holy Spirit fills our church, abides with us and answers Philip’s plea, “Lord, show us the Father.”

 As Buechner asks, “If there is a realm of being beyond where we now are that has to do somehow with who Jesus is, and is for us, and is for all the world, then how can we know the way that will take us there?”

 “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” is how Jesus answers. Even on this day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit comes to the church Jesus does not say the church is the way. He does not say his teachings or what others teach about him or even religion is the way. Jesus says he alone is the way.

 Jesus himself, not his words nor anyone else’s words. It is the fact of his being truly human and at the same time truly God that is the way. Jesus the person. That carpenter fellow who fixed our broken chair. He is the one. There is no other way.

 How then do we go where he is? How do we who cannot find our own car keys find the way that is Jesus’ way? We don’t know, is our response. Life is too raw, too unpredictable. Yet we search and we pray that Jesus will be shown to us. Shown to us any way he chooses.

 Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”  To this end we do our daily practice and cultivate a kind heart. We abandon impatience and instead we are content creating the causes for goodness knowing the results will come when God has them ready.

 And we keep on ringing and ringing and ringing. Calling for him, Jesus, the way, the truth, and the life, keeping that ringing in the air, creating the music of our way, our truth and our life as we draw near to Jesus and to each other any way we can. Because that is the last thing he asked of us in John 15, “that you love one another as I have loved you.”

 By believing against all odds and loving against all odds, that is how we seek him. That is how we let Jesus be shown in our own hearts and from our hearts to those with no church like Rudy, with no God like many we know, with no one to tell them the good news of hope and comfort.

 “Do not let your hearts be troubled, I go to prepare a place for you, I will take you to myself for I am the way, and the truth, and the life.

 If you aren’t sure, “Let Jesus show,” take a chance, give him a call.

 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen                                          

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12 May 2013 “Whose Glory?” John 17:20-26

12 May 2013                “Whose Glory?”                     John 17:20-26

  The 1999 movie Tuesday with Morrie, based on the book by the same name, is the true story of a sports writer, Mitch Albom, and his reunion with his former college professor, Morrie Schwartz, who is dying of ALS. Mitch was a multitasking workaholic, whose life is a series of hurried appointments, rushed phone calls, and last minute sprints to catch a flight. When he discovers that Morrie was in the last stages of his disease he honors a long overdue promise to visit him.

  In these visits, Morrie teaches Mitch some important lessons about what matters in life. In one scene Morrie is very frail and is lying in a recliner in obvious pain. He grimaces and asks Mitch to rub his aching feet with salve. “When we are infants,” he says, “we need people to survive; when we are dying, we need people to survive; but here is the secret: in between we need each other even more.”

  Mitch nods and remembers a quote he has heard Morrie say many times. He says, “We must love one another or die.” Morrie loses patience with Mitch. “Yeah, but do you believe that? Does it apply to you?”

 Mitch is stunned and defensive as he confesses that he does not know what he believes. The world he lives in does not allow for thinking about spiritual things.

  Mitch’s struggle is not so different from ours.  Anxiety and passion in life are intimately connected. Writers have even spoken of John Calvin, one of our Presbyterian forefathers, as “a singularly anxious man.” One spoke of him as “viewing human existence as a perpetual crisis of indecision, echoed in the contingencies of nature itself.”   All that keeps the universe from falling apart in any instance, said Calvin, is the immediate act of God’s continual creation.

  “The glory of God, he said, [is] manifested in the stability of the earth.” Apart from this sustaining act of divine intervention, the earth would be “plunged into darkness, . . . thrown into a state of confusion and horrible disorder and misrule, for there can be no stability apart from God.”

 Were God to withdraw God’s hand in any way – were the praise of God to cease in the world, “all things would immediately dissolve into nothing.”

“We must love one another or die,” says Morrie, “It is a very simple lesson, Mitch.”

  In the scripture we have heard this morning, Jesus is praying to God for the church. Jesus is praying that the church feel the hand of God, hear God’s raise and experience the same kind of love and unity in the Spirit that Jesus himself experiences with God. “May they be one, just as I am in you and you are in me.”

 It is important we experience this unity with Jesus and God and the church because how we act says something to others about who God is. It is important because we need each other.   It is also important to remember unity is not uniformity. Jesus did not pray, “That they all may be the same.” He prayed, “That they all may be one.” Variety is valuable, and in the words of Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, “different is not deficient.” It is just different.

 In the movie The Apostle, there is a wonderful scene where Robert Duvall, who plays an evangelist, the Apostle E.F., in the southern Holiness Pentecostal tradition, has just  re-baptized himself by emersion in the river. He is in a simple shirt and pants, the only clothes he has. The river is muddy. It is in Southern Louisiana.

 Then, as he is traveling he comes across a big Roman Catholic celebration, where a whole line of boats festively decorated are traveling down the river and the priest in all his finery is there sprinkling holy water on the boats as they come near the dock. It is a blessing of the fishing fleet.

 The Apostle E.F. says to himself as he watches, “you do it your way, I do it mine, but we get the job done.”

 Yet, it is, of course, precisely because we are different that our unity is sometimes our greatest struggle.   It is important to remember our differences serve a very important function:  They keep us from grievous error. They keep us fresh and alive. They keep us mentally awake and alert. Differences awaken competing viewpoints, which keeps us fresh and relevant. They keep us growing.

  Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks of glory for all. Right at the beginning Jesus and the disciples go to a wedding. You know the story. The wine gives out. Jesus turns water into wine. There was an overflowing of graciousness, a miraculous abundance. This first miracle sets the tone for others to come.

 Often it takes a moment like that to see God’s glory. We plod along in our accustomed ways, victims of the ordinary and the everyday. Allowing the small pleasure, you do it your way, I do it mine, and we both get it done.

  Then there comes some shining moment, an outbreak of glory, a blessing of self or a blessing of the fleet that takes us by surprise. The ordinary veil of the everyday is pulled back, light shines, everything is transformed into golden hues, and we see glory.

 The poet Mary Oliver writes a friend of hers, who is a monk, and a bishop often challenges her to, “Put yourself in the way of grace.”

  For ourselves, well, often we try another way. We do not think first about putting ourselves in the way of grace. No, we look instead for a light in the wilderness. We seek knowledge and understanding from the light of reason. Mary speaks of the light in another way. Not knowing what to call it, she says it may be hope, or even faith.

 Putting ourselves in the way of grace, hope, or faith begins with listening. Listening to the whispering in the recesses where one is less oneself than a part of some single indivisible community. The poet William Blake likens it to “taking dictation.”

What we seek begins and ends with the act of noticing and cherishing, and it neither begins nor ends with the human world. It is like a nudge, the prick of the instant, the flame of appreciation that shoots into our soul, the unspeakable notion.

 There is nothing so special in this and it may not prove anything in the usual sense. But living like this may be the difference between a luminous life and a ho-hum life.   Between grace and anxiety about what we believe.

 As Mary Oliver say, “My affinity is to the whimsical, the illustrative, and the suggestive – not to the actual or the useful. I walk, and I notice. I use my senses in order to be spiritual.”

 So, we are to put our self in the way of grace. To believe in grace and the soul, to believe in them exactly as much and as hardily as one believe in a mountain, say, or a fingernail, which is ever in view – imagine the consequences!  How far-reaching, and thoroughly wonderful and potentially life changing!

 For everything, by such a belief, would be charged, and changed. You wake in the morning, the soul exists, your mouth sings it, and your mind accepts it. And the perceived, tactile world is, upon the instant, only half the world! The other half is filled with amazing grace.

  Jesus has risen. He stayed with us for a while and this past week in the life of the church we remembered  the ascension of our risen Christ to heaven.  The Easter period begins to ease. We approach Pentecost and the day the Holy Spirit came to the church. And what, if anything, has been determined, selected, nailed down in our lives?

 Perhaps this is the lesson of age – events pass, things change, trauma fades, good fortune rises, fades, and rises again but different. Yet, what happened when one was twenty happens forever.  The sun rolls toward the north. Misery in the world we can do nothing about goes on.

 Along the way we have learned to live, to look, to see, to listen, to feel, to long for, to be surprised by the unexpected. To know joy, love, hope, grace even. There have been moments we thought hard to top. Then, we have.

  Mary Oliver writes, “Once I came upon two angels, they were standing quietly, keeping guard beside a car. Light streamed from them, and a splash of flames lay quietly under their feet. What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known?

 And if you think that one day the secret of light might come, grace might appear, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?”

 Would this not be your hour to share in God’s glory?

  Jesus says, “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you. I made your name known to them, so the love with which you have loved me may be in them.”

 “It is a very simple lesson, Morrie said to Mitch.”

 “We must love one another…”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever, Amen.                                                  

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05 May 2013 “Room for Greater Things” John 14:23-29

05 May 2013                “Room for Greater Things”                 John 14:23-29

  A little more than 30 years ago, a teenager named Jadav “Molai” Payeng began burying seeds along a remote sandbar near his birthplace in northern India’s Assam region to grow a refuge for wildlife. Not long after, he decided to dedicate his life to this work, so he moved to the site where he could work full-time eventually creating a lush new forest ecosystem. Incredibly, the spot today hosts a sprawling 1,360 acres of jungle that Payeng planted single –handedly.

 

The Times of India recently caught up with Payeng in his remote forest home to learn more about how he came to leave such an indelible mark on the landscape.

 It all started in 1979, when floods washed a large number of snakes ashore on the sandbar. One day, after the waters receded, Payeng, only 16 then, found the place dotted with the dead reptiles. That was the turning point of his life.

 “The snakes died in the heart, without any tree cover. I sat down and wept over their lifeless forms. It was carnage. I alerted the forest department and asked them if they could grow trees there. They said nothing would grow there. Instead, they asked me to try growing bamboo. It was painful, but I did it. There was nobody to help me. Nobody was interested,” says Payeng, now 47.

 While it has taken years for Payeng’s remarkable dedication to planting to receive some well-deserved recognition internationally, it did not take long for wildlife in the region to benefit from his manufactured forest. Demonstrating a keen understanding of ecological balance, Payeng even transplanted ants to his thriving ecosystem to bolster its natural harmony. Soon the shade less sandbar was transformed into a self-functioning environment where a vast array  of creatures could dwell. The forest, called the Molai woods, now serves as a safe haven for numerous birds, deer, and even rhinos, tigers and elephants.

  It was Payeng’s turning point that made all this happen.

 I can only imagine the moments in Jesus’ life that were his turning points. When he was young and was teaching in the Temple, when he began performing miracles, when he stood up to all authority for the one true authority in his life, when we turned one last time to Jerusalem.

 Like Payeng, I do not know if Jesus knew what he was in for. He must have known something. I wonder, could he have foreseen the resurrection and his eventual turn to heaven.

We do know that along the way Jesus taught, and taught, and taught. Never giving up, Jesus knew his lessons and he knew his responsibility.

 In the beginning, before God created man and woman, God created the earth. God saw that it was good. Then God created humanity, and we know how that turned out.

But God has hope for us. Through Jesus and Jesus’ sacrifice we have a chance for our own turning point. Jesus said, “I give you a new commandment.” It is a new commandment that we love one another. Just as Jesus has loved us, we should also love one another.

How is it this commandment is new? The commandment to love our neighbors as we love ourselves first appeared in the Old Testament in Leviticus. Yet, Jesus insists this is new.

What we may discover if we look more closely is Jesus is taking the old commandment and making in new with a new power. We are not to love alone. We are not to be the sole architect of our love.

God and God’s love will become one with ours. Our heart and soul will be made new in a surprising holy union with God. In this union God will create in us a new person, a new creation. We will be different in our identity and different in the composition of our humanity and different in our intention.

 God will create in us a newness in who and what we love and how we should live. To live this new commandment we will soon realize the intricate web of relationship we have with our created world, with all people in that world, and with God.

  Jadav Payeng shows us, and the world, and God what such love can do.

 Jesus Christ shows us, and the world, and God what such love has done.

  Jesus died for us so we might live free from sin forever. This is the greatest love story the world has even known. God’s love is an unbelievable love. It is a love only God can give. It is that same love that God has infused into each of us, into our heart, and soul. God’s love is alive in each of us!

  Being this truth, God has another lesson for us this morning. In John 14 Jesus promise us that the Holy Spirit has also been sent into us by God.  Finally, we have a voice that will speak to us, teach us, and remind us how we are to live.  How we are to live for the sake of the world and everyone in it.

 The harsh and real truth is that love in this earthly realm is not a fairy tale story. The world is a dangerous place. There are storms and earthquakes and fires and draught and flood.

People are dangerous too. The good princess is not always rescued by the night in shining armor. And love for love’s sake often fades into a selfish mess. How often have we cried out from the wilderness, my mess proves God takes time off from dispensing God’s love!

A friend once told me a story about a woman named Mary. Mary dutifully cared for her loved one with Multiple Sclerosis. After carrying years of bitterness and pain, times when Mary was sure God’s love was gone, God showed Mary otherwise.

Mary found herself being a chaperone on a school field trip. Before they left school folks were asked to divide up and share in a carpool. Soon Mary found herself in a very uncomfortable position. She was left to ride with a women she did not know. The woman was not from her part of town and made Mary uncomfortable. She did not want to ride with her. But she did.

 As they drove along, this complete stranger, from the other side of the tracks, began to share her life and her pain with Mary. She learned that a loved one in her family had Multiple Sclerosis of all things and Mary learned of her despair, her fear, and her sense of being lost.

  

Mary was reliving all over again her own pain and suffering. Yet, she immediately overcame her sorrow and turned to show her love for her neighbor. She knew the right doctors and the best care givers and the necessary support systems that were needed and began to help this suffering woman with the knowledge she had only received as her life was falling apart. Mary knew and Mary shared God’s love from the darkest shadows in her life so this one she now cared for would receive Mary’s great gift of love and hope.

 Mary soon realized God had prepared her for this chance meeting. Painfully God had prepared her to meet a stranger and bring healing and hope and show the love and compassion that God placed in her heart. A love she did not recognize because of her suffering. Mary was able to show the world what a Christian does in the midst of pain and suffering. We love!

  Who in your life has brought this sort of good news to you, with love?  Or, who have you brought good news to, also with love?

 In the midst of it all, do we realize God has prepared us to see that the ultimate source for good comes solely from God’s presence in our lives, especially when times are tough. Especially when we sit down and weep. When the authorities say nothing will grow there. When we, one lonely person, have nobody to help. When we reach that turning point in our lives.

  Jesus came into this world a long time ago and now he is gone. But we are not alone. While he was still alive Jesus promised he will continue to care for us. He promised in his resurrection he will send us his shalom, his peace and wholeness.

  

The Reverend Barbara Taylor wrote about this passage, “I am a little fuzzy on the details, as John himself is, but abiding or having the Holy Spirit live in us, seems to involve becoming part of a large extended family, and a holy one at that. When God and Jesus move in with us, apparently, they make lots of keys – keys for the Holy Spirit, keys for the other disciples, keys for all kinds of indwelling cousins in Christ. Coming and going, we learn to recognize each other, and to call upon each other for everything that people who live together do.”

 These are the words that commit our ministry and mission to the health and wellbeing of our created world and one another. Loving our environment and those folk on our campus and beyond we call upon each other for everything that people who live together do.

 But, there is a price to pay for this act of love. True, God’s love is a gift and God expects no gift in return. But God does tell us to promise to keep God’s commandments. Having the character to live the commandments upholds our ability to love a Godly love.

Living with a Godly love and, like God, freely giving our love away, calling on one another for help and love, our actions then become a reflection of  God’s presence and our life becomes a reflection of Jesus’ teaching others to love.

Over and over again the dynamic of God’s love unfolds and the world becomes a holy vessel of love and ultimately knows heavenly peace.

How else will the world and all in it be saved if not by God’s love found in us? How can we expect the world to not be filled with hate and hurt and sin and suffering if we will not show the world another way?

God started this pathway to peace. God said, “Abide in my love.” 

Now it is our turn to show it to the world. We begin as Jesus did, with one person, in one desperate situation, with one love, holy and united with God, his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and our saving Holy Spirit.

 We begin as Jadav Payeng did planting one seed at a time. For more than 30 years. We begin today planting the seed  of good news through the mission and ministry God calls us to personally and as God’s church. Calling on one another and planting our love on our own barren sandbar. One seed, then another, then another.

 And at our end God will say, “Well done my faithful servant, well done. Go now in peace.”

  

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever, Amen.                                                  

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