16 June 2013 “Stepping Out Of Place” Luke 7:36-8:3

   Last Sunday we learned of Jesus’ intention that we have life. He was coming into the city when a man who had died was being carried out. This man was his widowed mother’s only son. When Jesus saw her he was moved with compassion and love for the woman.

  What we may have missed is no one asked Jesus to intervene. No one asked Jesus to perform another miracle for this grieving widow. Instead, Jesus acts on his own.

 With a desire in his heart that this life lost be now restored, Jesus acts. He stops the procession, touches the bier and says to the dead son, “Young man, I say to you rise.” And he does. His life is restored. The young man sat up and began to speak and Jesus gave him back to his mother.

  Without being asked, Jesus acted.

  In this morning’s Gospel a woman wanders in off the street where Jesus is dining with one of the Pharisees. She comes into the dining room, uninvited, speaks to no one, and without being asked, she acts too.

  She learned Jesus was eating there and she walked right in to do one thing. She came that she might serve Jesus. She showed him compassion and she brought her tears. She brought her kisses and the one thing of value in her life, a fancy jar of costly ointment.

 Instead of asking for something from Jesus, she was determined to do something for Jesus to show her love. She stepped out of her place in her community and for her efforts she was roundly criticized.

 You may remember a story I have told of Anne Marbury. She was born in England in 1591. Anne was the daughter of an Anglican minister. She was surrounded at home, at school, and at church by scriptural teachings and theological thinking. At the age of 21, Anne married a neighbor, William Hutchinson.

  Eventually Anne left the Anglican Church and with her husband became a Puritan. She was not a casual church goer. Anne studied scripture and nurtured a vibrant inner spiritual life.

  The Puritans were soon harassed and persecuted for their faith during this period of history in England. The Anglican Church dominated life during that time.

 So at age 43, William and Anne and their children sailed for New England in search of religious freedom. They settled in the Puritan Colony of Massachusetts Bay. Anne began holding a weekly Bible study for women in their home. Soon another meeting was added that included men.

 The leaders of the colony became afraid of Anne’s influence with the people. They accused her of heresy. One leader said this of Anne, “She is a woman of ready wit and bold spirit who brought over with her two dangerous errors.”

 The first error the leader described was her notion that the Holy Spirit resides within us. Her second error was the notion that we are justified by faith and not by works.

  As heirs of the Protestant Reformation we believe with Anne that we are justified, not by works, but by grace through faith for Christ’s sake. We also believe that the Holy Spirit does live within us. To the leaders of the Puritan Colony these ideas from Anne were blasphemy and a heresy. She was eventually excommunicated from the church.   The charge that led to Anne’s excommunication from the Puritans reads in part, “You have stepped out of your place...”

 Anne stepped out of her place! She stepped out of her place because of her convictions. For many years historians described her as an American Jezebel. In the modern word Anne would be the patron saint of those with the bumper sticker that reads, “Well behaved woman seldom make history!”

 It is clear that she was not a jezebel of any sort. Anne was a woman passionate about her religious convictions. But in the eyes of the status quo, she had stepped out of her place.

 Our woman of the city, the one who attends to Jesus while he is dining, is a story of another woman stepping out of her usual place.

 Luke gives us the details. Jesus is dining with this fellow whose name is Simon. When our woman of the city steps out of her appointed place, Simon loses it. He challenges Jesus wondering how he can allow this woman to behave this way. He begins to doubt that Jesus is a prophet. His thinking is that Jesus should have known what sort of woman this was and stopped her from washing and anointing his feet. Simon cannot imagine what Jesus must have been thinking.

 Or perhaps Simon understood all too well. Perhaps he wanted to prove all along when he invited Jesus to dine with him Jesus was no prophet. Perhaps this was unfolding exactly as Simon hoped so he could discredit what people were saying about Jesus.

 For his part, Jesus knows what Simon is up to. He knows what is in Simon’s heart. His action proves who he has become. Simon is out of touch, a non-believer, and obviously not in love with Jesus. He need not tell Jesus who this woman is. Jesus knows this woman and he knows the true Simon for what he is. Jesus knows what is in their hearts.

  He then fully exposes Simon’s weakness in a parable about a creditor who has two folks who owe him money. One owed the creditor a large sum of money and the other much less. Neither could repay their debt. The creditor, filled with compassion, forgave the debt for both men.

  Jesus asks Simon, which of these two men will have the greatest love for the creditor? Simon answers correctly, “I suppose the one for whom he forgave the greater debt.” Jesus agrees.

 Then he exposes Simon and makes his point. The woman who had entered Simon’s house had shown Jesus greater love than Simon. Simon gave Jesus no water for his feet, no kiss, and he did not anoint his head with oil.  “Therefore, I tell you,” Jesus says, “her sins, which are many, have been forgiven; she has shown great love.”  

 This woman’s faith comes from her trust in Jesus and she lived that faith when she stepped out of her place by committing herself and everything she has entirely to Jesus.

 The lesson Simon missed is that those of us who invite Jesus into our lives should also be prepared to step out of our usual place and to give to Jesus from our heart, from our love, everything we have. When we invite Jesus into our lives we should be prepared to step out and show compassion and love to all people, in all circumstances, in the entire world. We should be prepared to live and love as Jesus did.

 Timothy George, Dean of Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham Alabama has said, “Love is the one thing we can experience in time that will remain in eternity.”

 What then is Christ calling us to do? To be forgiving, yes. To be loving, yes. To be faithful and step out of our comfort to follow Jesus, again we must say, yes.

 Who then is Christ calling us to be? Why, disciples, disciples whose love will remain in eternity. Like this woman, out of love and compassion, our call is to step out of our usual place and to self-initiate a life of love.

 Often, it seems, we recognize an opportunity to self-initiate, to step out of our usual place, only in retrospect. Time passes and our mind does that “mess with us” thing. We hear ourselves thinking, I could have been friendlier to that person who seems dirty and disheveled and unworthy. I could have shared my money with those in greater need. I could have spoken up for my friend. I could have reminded my friend, my spouse, my partner, my child, my parent, that we are all children of God, and that God loves us and is present to us no matter what.

 Perhaps the real test is to discover beforehand what we love, who we love, and what our life reveals about what is in our heart. Are we more like Simon or that brave woman?

I know many of you have already stepped out and away from the usual. It is obvious you help others and one another. You work to promote justice for all people. You perform acts of kindness. You share the love of this gospel. You love as God loved you, filled with the Holy Spirit, offering to God with compassion your lives before you ask for anything in return.

  Have you therefore stepped so far from the face of the earth and our worldly ways that you have fallen right into the Kingdom of God? Have you stepped out with Jesus to that same rare air of devotion to the greater good, to commitment to faithful service, to a love in which your faith in Jesus Christ saves both us and the world?

  In so many ways we have. We have stepped out because God’s love calls us to do the right thing, even when it may cost us personally. We are called, not to sainthood, but to step out for the sake of love, knowing that God steps out with us, guarding, guiding, protecting, encouraging us every step of the way...and forgiving us when we fail.

  Dearest sisters and brother’s in Christ accept again this morning God’s invitation. Come again to God’s banquet. Step out of your place. Bring all that you have. Give all that you have. Show greater love.

  For when we do, when we step out with God’s love in our hearts, Jesus says of us: “Daughter, son, your sins are forgiven, your faith has saved you. Go 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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09 June 2013 “God Looks Favorably” Luke 7:11-17

Today is the 3^rd Sunday after Pentecost. It is also the 10^th Sunday in Ordinary Time. We took a big break from ordinary time on the church calendar during the Easter Cycle which began, as you know, with Lent. This second period of Ordinary Time began following Pentecost and continues until Advent.

 When we left off before the Easter Cycle the gospel reading was Luke 5 and Jesus had just called the first disciples. We were asked in that passage to pay close attention to the response of those first men; Simon, James, and John. They had fished all night and caught nothing. Jesus had begun to use their boat as a place from which he could teach the crowds. Out of the blue, Jesus tells them to put out into deep waters and “Let down your nets for a catch.”

 Their response gives us a sense of what we might correctly call, the “nature of (an) authentic response,” that Jesus expects from each of us when he calls. Their authentic response was to obey Jesus. Simon tells him they had fished all night and caught nothing, but, “if you say so, I will let down the nets.”

  The result is staggering. Their nets are overfilled with fish. They are flooded with feelings of amazement at the miracle and fearful at the same time. From where had all these fish come? Who has the power to make this sort of thing happen?

  Realizing the potential danger their life would be in if they continued to follow someone with such power, Simon asks Jesus to leave him alone, to go away. Jesus replies, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.”

 These frightened men left their former lives to follow Jesus. Their authentic response was immediate and it completely and totally changing them forever. They left it all to follow Jesus.

  Here we realize the cost of an authentic response to God’s call. How it can be both fearful and amazing at the same time. Why, following Jesus may even take us all the way to Livingston, Alabama.

 We return this morning to Luke 7. Jesus is teaching in the northern Galilee area beginning in Capernaum and ending up in Nain. In verses 1-10 Jesus heals a centurion’s servant.

 In that healing we learn again of the power of Jesus’ ministry and we are given another lesson in what our authentic response to Jesus’ presence in our life should be. By telling Jesus he need not go to the place where his slave lay ill, that he need only speak his healing words, the centurion is repeating the lesson of having faith and trusting in our Lord.

 This morning, Luke’s story is of Jesus raising a widow’s son from the grip of death. From the first disciples obedience to Jesus’ call to follow him, to the deep and abiding faith and trust in Jesus’ presence to heal the sick, Jesus now takes us where no one has ever gone before, raising the dead.

 This new story in Luke is filled with bad news. It is that dreaded call in the middle of the night. Someone has died. Once we are shaken awake we realize it is the death of a young man. To heap more bad news onto bad, he was the only son of his poor mother. Just when we thought that was enough, we learn this woman was also a widow.

 Towards this woman Jesus shows the compassion of someone in love. In love with the vulnerability of human life, in love with all of God’s creation, in love with the love that God has for each and every person in each and every generation in each and every circumstance.

 For love is at the core of the essential nature of God, Christ Jesus and our Holy Spirit. Jesus’ human side as well as Jesus’ divine side are driven by his holy love. Love, especially when bad things happen, and they do happen to us all.

 Especially then do we feel God’s true nature. It is a nature in favor of life. It is a nature that protects and sustains and nourishes all life.

 I was reminded of the depth of God’s love for us when I thought of a story I have told many times of the Reverend William Sloan Coffin’s son who was killed in a tragic auto accident. If you can imagine it, the next Sunday the Reverend Coffin preached to his church about his grief and God’s grief.

  Here is some of what he said: “The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is, “It is the will of God.” Never do we know enough to say that.  My consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car God’s was the first of all our hearts to break.”  God’s was the first of all our hearts to break.

When we learn about tragic events like this our first response may be to scream, No! God can do all things! Why did God not intervene, call 911 or do that God thing that saves folks. God knows how much Alex was loved. Why did God not do something?

 Our only authentic answer must be, we do not know. As people of faith, we know there are times when we just do not know why God does what God does. God is God after all and we are not.  But that does not lesson the pain. Saying we do not know does not give us comfort and rest. It may actually add to our anguish.

 But there are truths about God we do know. Our God is a God of the resurrection, resurrection to restoration, restoration to all eternity.  Our God has the power to resurrect life, to restore life and our God always will.

 Jesus’ words to the young man who had died, “I say to you, rise” reverberate with our Gospel hope in the presence of death.

 The angel at Jesus’ tomb was the first to pronounce such hope as Jesus himself had risen. The disciples later announced, “This Jesus, God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.”

 Paul will connect Jesus’ resurrection with our own hope for life beyond death. He proclaimed, “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who died.”

 The resurrection of Jesus, the one who had compassion on a widow in her grief, provides the basis for the apostle’s confident vision of the end.  “For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable.”

 The hope of being raised imperishable, therefore, is not grounded in the fact that the widow’s son came back to life but in the fact that the one who had the compassion in the first place has himself triumphed over death.

  God’s covenant power of restoration to eternal life, that also raised the widow’s son from death, is even available for each of us. It is the same power that will also raise those whom we love, those who are no longer with us. Yet, it is even more than this.

 The truth of the power of God’s restoration to eternal life fills us with an eternal hope. For the widow’s son, for Jesus, and for our loved ones, and ourselves, we have unbridled hope.

 We who know the power of God’s love have a lasting hope that will comfort us in our sorrow. We who know Jesus’ love live with a hope that is with us day and night as we struggle with our own grief and despair.

 It is the power of God’s restoration to life eternal that helps those of us who are left behind to pick up the pieces of our broken lives and feel God’s loving arms wrapping us up to help us rise to the new life ahead. It is the power of God’s restoration love that keeps us alive in the midst of death.

 Running through these thoughts, we see most clearly in Luke’s gospel that Jesus is living the example for us. He speaks of his own life. He shows us the faithful way through his destiny with the cross, his triumphant restoration to life, and his glorious ascension to heaven.

 Our hope is mirrored in our understanding of our own future with death and the miracle of our own restoration to eternal life, our own ascension to be with God in heaven.

 About that time, Jesus says, we are to rise.

 But there is more, our hope lives for something more. We are to rise from what seems like death even today, though we are alive. We are to rise from our feelings of death when we find our lives dry, lost, and without faith.  Be it from work, or addiction, or recklessness, or the sheer weight of life’s unfolding, we will be reunited again and again to Christ Jesus, because of his love.

 To be risen in Christ is to be risen to life itself. Void of worldly trappings and shackles, we are called to be risen to God’s Kingdom that has come. Isn’t this what we pray for. “Thy Kingdom come.”  We do not have to wait for heaven. Jesus has answered our call. The Kingdom of God is with us now, in our place, right next to us, all around us.

  This is God’s authentic response to our human condition. God’s kingdom is present this moment, for God is ultimately not interested in death. God is interested in bringing life, and new life to God’s people. Giving life is the first, mort important work that God does. It is, as Martin Luther put it, God’s “proper work.” Our God brings life.

 Still searching for an authentic response to the obvious in life?

 As ironic as it may sound, praise death. Praise the death of our old unworkable ways, praise the death of unrepentant numbness, praise the death of unforgiving pain and lost hope.

 For with death comes God’s grace and Christ’s call, restoring us to an eternal life to come.  “I say to you, rise.”

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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02 June 2013 “Such Faith” Luke 7:1-10

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

 It was during a particularly challenging discussion in a longer than usual session meeting we first heard the truth. Some of us were tired of hearing about “perceptions.”  We were discussing, yet again, what sounded like the same problems, the same complaints.

 In the midst of it all Session was doing a really good job of being faithful. They had long ago embraced the notion that God has called us to serve those whom God sends our way. We have embraced the vision that we are to take those who knock and ask for a crumb of bread and give them a safe place. We are to let them be here with us for comfort and nurture.

It is the desire of this Session to be faithful. It is the desire of this Session to take what God sends us and tend to it. Be it our poor, aging facilities infrastructure or these whom God has sent us who have these “perceptions” we do not understand. No matter. We trust God knows what God is doing.

 In the midst of it all we were complaining, just a little, about how hard being faithful can be. We do try to glorify God as we tend to the challenges God brings but why must this be so hard? Must every air conditioner on our campus break? What will leak next? Who is to blame? Is it the ubiquitous “they.”

 In exasperation Janette spoke for us all when she said, with a hint of playfulness, “God is the problem.”  God is the problem. Of course! She was right. God is the problem.  If God would just give us what we want and stop giving us these troubles things would be so much better.

 Indeed, dear ones, Janette hit on something.  God expects too much from us and we are weary.  God wants too much from us and we struggle to be faithful.  God demands too much from us and we are just one person.  How on earth can we do what God is asking us to do?

 Some days.  Some days we scream at God and throw in the towel. We want to be left alone.  God. You are our problem.

 It began God when we realized you were not finished with us after all.  Your churches, Trinity, Wilshire, and now Genesis.  We found ourselves on the brink and you grabbed hold of us and pulled us back, dusted us off, and set us on a new path.

 Community bound.  A worship center.  Serving those you have brought to our campus even as we have on occasion disagreed in the strongest of terms.  Yet,  here we are.  Still facing difficult questions.  Still gathering to worship and pray and overcome ourselves to at least the point where we can move forward.  Where we can gather the energy and faith we have to silence our resistance enough to humbly and patiently realize the joy that has returned, the bounty we have as we have sought to honor you by our acceptance and our giving away.

 Our acceptance of those whom you have brought us.   With their demands and their challenges and perspectives.  Our acceptance of what we are to give away.  Yes, our sacred spaces.  Yes, our privacy too.  And perhaps the greatest of all, a little bit of our selves.

 When I taught stress management I would first state the obvious.

We all have stress.   How we manage our stress is what makes the difference for our health and well-being.  We can choose health or unhealthy ways to do this.  Unhealthy ways are the easiest to follow.  We simply do what we enjoy in excess to drown out the pain.  Healthy ways on the other hand require work, change, and a life-long commitment.

 I also reminded folks that in a relationship,  be it family or work, we must adopt a position of selflessness.  To be as healthy as we best can be we must adopt a position of giving to the others in our lives all that we have. And it is best to remember,  we give to others on their terms.  We ask those others what their needs are, what their passions are, what their sacred spaces are.

 The hardest  part in this dynamic,   we cannot expect anything in return for our effort.  To do so puts us in the unhealthy position of expecting a payoff. We then feel we are owed something in return for our labor.

 To love, to have faith, to serve is to chip away at that self that holds us back from modeling Jesus’ life.   God gave us his son freely.  God did not set up an if/then relationship.  No, God’s gift is freely ours without our earning it.

 But God has told us what God wants from us. God’s expects us to follow Jesus’ model.  Jesus gave his all and God expects our all.

 See how problematic God is.  We have this great desire for God.  We love God.  We even try making our life in God’s image.  We try to live in a way that pleases God,  that glorifies God.  It just seems that God resists our efforts.  God does not cooperate with our desires.  God places more on our plate than we can carry.

 Yet, we cannot abandon God.  We yell it to ourselves more often than we admit.  God is the problem in our lives but God’s resistance attracts us. God’s demands attract us.  God’s resistance to our best efforts,  our sincere desires,  our careful planning attracts us even more to desire God.

 This seems counter to everything logical in our lives doesn’t it?

 

The twentieth century Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas said that as we seek a God who is radically “Other,”  our training in the exercise of longing and loss prepares us for accepting the “desired” as something we never fully realize.  Yet, in the process, our attraction is only deepened.

 Desire for what he calls the “Most-High” is keenly aroused by the joining of beauty with absence,  by that which is inherently most desirable and yet at the same time most elusive.  “Desire nourishes itself,  one might say with its hunger,” says Levinas.  He insists that the desire for the “Other” is necessarily “a desire without satisfaction.”

Yet our desire is not diminished by such insight.  Our desire and our delight in knowing God leads to a delight in God’s own matchless beauty and to the covenant responsibility of safeguarding God’s reflected beauty in all of life and in all of God’s created world.

 A reformed and thoroughly Calvinist aesthetic or beauty remains restless in us until it expresses itself in moral action,  In how we do church,  In how we serve others,  In how we love.

Yet desire will always be the starting point.  We desire God.  We desire God’s attention and God’s love.  We are attracted to God and all that God has created.  Our enchantment with God and the world is prerequisite to the task of faithful discipleship.  To a life served restoring and protecting all of life.   As evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould has argued, “We will not fight to save what we do not love.”

So we hear ourselves saying at session, “God is the problem.”  We realize at session we are fighting to save what we love.  Our relationship with God and our desire to restore and protect our life on this campus as God’s church.  Even on God’s terms.

John Calvin gives us a unique perspective of how we might love and fight for what we desire.  He speaks first of the importance of respecting all the creatures involved in the drama of the world as a theater of God’s glory.  He then goes on to see the simple act of giving praise, of worship, as generating the life it celebrates.

 As we struggle with desire being unfulfilled this gives us hope.  By giving praise to God solely for the reason of giving praise and seeking nothing else in return, we will come closer to generating the very object of our affection.  We will come closer to God.

 Giving praise, for Calvin, requires performance.  It springs from an inner disposition of intense desire, influenced by its longing for the object of its love.  Hence, the act of praise has a double effect:  It subjectively stirs desire in the one who celebrates and objectively makes present and real that which is celebrated.

 There is a subjective aspect of our faithful living that relates to what the person absorbed in praise is experiencing – what happens over time in the process of  “becoming”  what one desires.  Subjectively, Calvin sees the worshipper as being stirred to desire through the act of prayer.

 The most important reason for praying, he says, is “that our hearts may be fired with a zealous and burning desire ever to seek, love, and serve God.”

 But there is also an objective aspect of religious devotion, located in its projection of a final reality onto the object toward which it is directed.  To God.

Faithful living,  as worship,  for Calvin is a celebration to the extent that its chief end is the praise of God’s glory.  Yet, Calvin’s conception of worship is also, as he has said, magical to the extent that the act of praise also contributes to the maintenance of our real life world.

  In the objective dimension of worship, Calvin declared that our reverence generates a powerful transaction of honor.  Our facing again and again the mundane,  repeated ups and downs of life honor God.  Praise is able to authenticate and sustain that toward which it is directed:  God.

In the act of praise,  the liturgy, our tending to the brokenness in our life, our living faithfully for God alone,  changes the very world it calls into being.  

As theologian Jürgen Moltmann says, “It opens creation for its true future. It is for this that human beings are created – for the feast of creation, which praises the eternal, inexhaustible God . . . This song of praise was sung before the appearance of human beings, is sung outside the sphere of human beings,  and will be sung even after human beings have –perhaps-disappeared from this planet .”

 We, dear ones, are created to create.  In our desire to faithfully serve others on this campus we praise God and we bring God here to be with us.

  As Belden Lane says, “Day after day, God brings the world to its feet in ecstatic applause as the curtain falls once again on God’s dramatic performance of desire.  Smitten by longing,  we stand alongside the others in speechless awe,  clapping our hands in hope of another encore, determined-if we can help it-that the performance  never ends.

We cannot imagine a God as eager to perform as we are to enjoy.  Held in strange and awesome embrace,  in the joyous meeting of God’s desire and our own,  we and the whole world with us are sustained by praise.”

This God, who is our problem, we praise.  Our God, who is so eager to perform, celebrates us.  God celebrates Genesis Church for we desire God be known in our midst.  We desire God’s encore.  That God’s love never end.

 God, dear ones, is more than the problem. God is also the answer.

 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen                                 060213.Gpc

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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