A sermon by Greg Ledbetter preached on Epiphany, Year A
January 6, 2008
Sermon Texts: Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12
Realizing he was lost, a balloonist dropped down to ask directions. "Excuse me, but I'm a little off course," he shouted. "I promised to meet a friend an hour ago. I don't know where I am."
A woman on the ground yelled back, "You're in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're at exactly 40 degrees, 22 minutes and 21 seconds north latitude and 70 degrees, 30 minutes and 33 seconds west longitude."
"Amazing," the balloonist replied. "You must be an engineer!"
"I am," she replied. "How did you know?"
"Well, everything you told me is technically correct, but I can't use your information. I'm still lost, and you haven't been much help at all. If anything, you've delayed my trip."
The woman thought for a moment, then replied, "You must be in management."
"I am," replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well, you don't know where you are or where you're going. You've risen to your position due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. In fact, you're in exactly the same position you were before we met, but somehow it's now my fault." (Source: Jon Carroll/San Francisco Chronicle – December 4, 2007)
This may be the most whimsical Sunday of the year, particularly when Epiphany falls on a Sunday and we get to pull out all of the Epiphany stops. It’s hard to think of a New Testament text that has gathered more curious attention than the story of the wise men from the east. And it’s hard to think of a New Testament story that’s been more spoofed.
And on this Sunday following the Iowa caucuses, one might be tempted to create yet another spoof featuring this haggard group of presidential wannabees questing after the ultimate in dubious prizes. We can at least hope that a few of them are in church this morning and are listening to the reading of the Psalms where the psalmist calls upon the rulers to be just and to embrace those who are usually left out.
We grew up singing: “We three kings …” and found ourselves wondering about the location of “Orientare”. Of course, some spoil-sport scholars (and I’m one) have to go and remind us that Matthew doesn’t note just how many wise men came. As Doug reminded us at our Christmas dinner, it is the number of gifts brought that has helped shaped the popular understanding of “three kings”. And, of course, they’re not kings at all, but seers and visionaries … and very possibly priestly advisers in the court of the rulers of the kingdom from which they’ve come.
The wise men—or the magi, as we’ll call them—show up in Matthew’s version of the birth story which, you’ll recall, bears no resemblance to Luke’s far more familiar version. In Matthew’s birth narrative, Jesus is born with a minimum of fanfare. The angels and shepherds Mary’s magnificat are all a part of Luke’s telling.
The magi are something of a plot device in Matthew’s storytelling. They are in the story, in part, to help point out that Jesus was born “under the radar”. Until they show up, no one seems to have known. King Herod doesn’t know there is a competing ruler growing up nearby until the magi speak of him. The chief priests and scribes know WHERE the child is supposed to be born, but seem to have no knowledge that the blessed event has already occurred.
So … a sign in the heavens was visible, the child was born and growing … and yet, until the wise men from East of Eden came looking, NO ONE SEEMS TO HAVE NOTICED! The wrong people took note of the star and seemed ready to follow this sign to the ends of the earth. And the right people—the seemingly wise and the seemingly powerful—the right people missed it altogether. Well, OK, in Luke’s version, the shepherds took note … but did anyone else? And did the shepherds tell anyone? And would anyone have believed them if they did?
In the mind of Matthew the storyteller, I wonder what it was the magi saw in the heavens that so moved them that they chose to travel to an obscure village in a backwater corner of the Roman empire? Further, what moved these magi, to take expensive gifts and offer their homage to the infant and as yet, unrecognized and uncrowned ruler of a foreign and insignificant people?
As I understand them, I have to think that the magi are like some of the meteor observers that I have known. Told of impending meteor showers, I know people who have repeatedly scanned the skies in vain for that little skyward spark that indicates a bit of space rock racing through earth’s atmosphere. I know people who claim to have NEVER seen a meteor. I imagine the magi as being like my poor, meteor-less friends. The magi are those whose job it is to scan the heavens for glimmers of the divine … for messages from the cosmos … for signs of something other than divine indifference or divine absence. And it’s not hard for me to imagine that these magi have seen —if they were to be completely honest—nothing … simply faked the evidence to keep the ruler happy … and then … and then after all that fruitless searching of the skies, an honest to God sparkle of the divine in the heavens. “This we gotta see …”.
In some scholarly circles, there is speculation that the Jews in exile in Babylon in earlier generations had spoken so compellingly of their God, that hints of that promise such as we heard in Isaiah this morning had lingered in the minds of Babylons high priests, the magi.
And so they mounted their camels … well, OK, no camels in the story either. But get this, on the eve of Epiphany—yesterday—as Jan and I drove the back roads of Merced for reasons completely unrelated to this day or this sermon, I suddenly slammed on the brakes and stared out the window. There in a pasture were three two-humped camels—they’re called Bactrian camels I now know … three camels looking like they were fresh from a re-enactment of the journey of the three kings. I am not making this up. There was also a hissing, grinning llama and an extremely tiny burro, but that’s another Bible story.
Well, by whatever means, the magi left their own land and followed the sparkling and twinkling sign in the sky. Their journey passes through Jerusalem and through the courts of Herod, and finally to Bethlehem where they locate the child. And having found that for which they had journeyed so long, they are overwhelmed with joy, they pay homage to the toddling goodness of God and they spill gifts at his feet. Who knew that foreigners of such suspicious origins could thrill to the hope of the ages? Who knew that the light of the world could shine so brightly in such foreign places? And who knew that God’s own chosen people would miss the signs and miss the wonder of it all. Matthew knows these things; Matthew wishes his readers to know them as well.
Epiphany, this manifestation of God, Epiphany humbly begs of us not to miss the star, not to miss the birth, not to miss the wonder, not to miss the opportunity for overwhelming joy, not to miss the chance to offer our own selves as gifts in service of that child. Epiphany also begs us to stand shoulder to shoulder with any and all who appreciate the birth of love and kindness, goodness and hope into the world and who believe the promises of God that continue to be made manifest. Don’t miss it! Asks Epiphany. And don’t try to go it alone.
You’ll recall that in the opening story the arrogant balloonist explains to the woman on the ground that he is a “little off course”. The truth is, he was not only “off course”, he really had no idea where he was. It’s the western explorer Kit Carson all over again who explained that he wasn’t lost, exactly, he just didn’t know where he was for three weeks.
Situated as it is at the beginning of our calendar year, Epiphany offers us the chance to recognize that we can drift off course, that we can lose our way. It’s a long journey—normally—from the cradle to the grave and there are plenty of ways to drift from the path.
And what is “the path” exactly? It’s a fair question to ask of those who would be modern magi. There are many ways to answer that question, but one poetic way that I think of comes from a song by Rod Romney, a retired Baptist minister and friend. In his song “Bring Us Home” there is a little snippet that sings of coming home “to the truth we are”. The course … the way … the journey … the path: all these, which are unique to each of us, could be simply described as “the truth we are”. I also like Howard Thurman’s take on it: "Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
What is the truth of who you are? What makes you come alive? These are hard questions … deep questions. Do you know yourself well enough and have the courage to try to answer these questions?
I get the sense that the encounter in Bethlehem brought the magi alive and that they were never the same. Even the phrase “and they went home by another way” is suggestive of the change that had wrought in them. You get the sense that the magi learned in great measure who they were while kneeling at the feet of Jesus.
What is the truth of who you are? What makes you come alive? We would probably agree that some of life’s significant moments can offer us a chance to reflect on the truth we are. We also know that some of life’s significant moments can FORCE us to reflect on the truth we are.
Health – Too many close friends to name have serious and/or odd ailments which have given them serious pause and shaken up their sense of themselves. How does our health help us reflect on the truth we are?
Retirement – That which had defined you for so long, that which had consumed so much of your time and energy and very being … over. Now what? What next? How does retirement help us reflect on the truth we are?
Aging – Just the other day my dad was reflecting on being nearly 80 … “I won’t be here forever”. Thanks, dad. Or Sue Smith at 102 saying: “I won’t be here forever”. Of course, none of us will be, but as we draw nearer our end, it can give us pause. How does aging help us reflect on the truth we are?
Crisis – I’m thinking, just now, of the crisis of incarceration because two people who are significant in my life, one a friend and one a young relative, are in jail. And having never been incarcerated, I can only imagine the ways you would be forced to consider the truth of yourself while cooling your heels. How do times of deep personal crisis help us reflect on the truth we are?
And in the midst of these challenging life paths that inform the path of our own journey, for those of us who go by the name “Christian”, there is also the path to Jesus. Epiphany invites us to not only stay on the path that is the truth we are, but that a part of the truth we are is bound up in the child whom the magi worshipped. Part of the challenge of this time past Christmas is to continue to seek and to find Christ beyond Bethlehem … on every step and at every turn in this path of our life and faith.
At the risk of quoting every week from our collective supply of refrigerator magnet and bumper sticker wisdom, I would suggest that the phrase “Wise Men Still Seek Him …” while kind of trite and exclusive in its language, still may have a kernel of truth for us. It is to say that the journey in search of one’s self in meaningful relationship to Jesus is a journey well worth taking. The implication of the phrase—which I also have emblazoned on a mug—is that there is a danger that we may stop seeking, stop searching, stop combing the heavens and the earth for signs of God’s continuing incarnation.
There was a special on PBS on brain health the other night. Jan watched the special and I watched Jan watch the special, if that makes any sense. The program spoke of the importance of actively stretching and exercising the brain which, in turn, helps to forge new neural pathways. The brain that is settled and unchallenged, the brain that is “un-seeking” is the brain that atrophies and, ultimately, the body with it. What is scientifically true of the brain is observably true of our journeys, the paths we are on, the truth that we are.
There are many examples of elders in our midst who have demonstrated what I’m talking about. But just now I’m thinking of Jane Bishop. Jane, I continue to marvel at your remarkable engagement with this stage of your life. You have faced loss and many challenges and growing limitations … yet, you refuse to “cease in your exploration” of the truth that you are, to echo the poet T.S. Eliot. Later today, at her request, I will be giving Jane a couple of books from my library because for her the journey of exploration continues. I would suggest that our Sunday night gatherings with Angela and Linda and Terry and our books are also evidence of journeys of exploration, of seeking and finding.
Have any of us ceased in our exploration? Have any of us stopped seeking, stopped searching, stopped combing the heavens and the earth for signs of God’s continuing incarnation?
I think one could argue that an interesting corollary or companion to “Wise ONES still seek him” could be the United Church of Christ slogan: “God is still speaking”. This is to say that God has not stopped seeking us … God has not stopped reaching out for us … God has not stopped wooing us or seeking to speak to us in fresh ways God’s language of love and compassion, including the flowering of love and compassion in the lives of ordinary human beings like you and me.
You know, stars may guide us for a time, but even stars can be obscured by clouds and by daylight. Might we say today that the star is not in the sky but on the ground on two legs. Maybe the star is no longer a heavenly body, but now an ordinary human body that knows the truth it is, that will not cease in its exploration and is willing to seek with all its being to know “the mystery of the ages” revealed in Jesus the Christ.
One of T.S. Eliot’s contemporaries was another poet, W.H. Auden. His wonderful poem “For the time being” graced the back of last Sunday’s bulletin. Reflecting on the sacred journey of the wise ones from the east, Auden reflects also on our journeying:
To discover how to be human now
is the reason we follow this star.
In this season of Epiphany and in the year ahead, I pray that you discover how to be human, that you discover the deepening truth of who you are, that you forge new pathways into the heart of God and that you only cease in your exploration of these things when you cease to be.
Amen.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Monday, December 31, 2007
Goodness Born with a Gasp & Cry
A sermon by Greg Ledbetter preached on the First Sunday after Christmas Day, Year A
December 30, 2007.
Sermon Texts: Isaiah 63:7-9; Hebrews 2:10-18; Matthew 2:13-23
Somewhere in our old boxes of things we have photos and even 8mm videotapes of Christmases past. You know the kinds of photos and videos I’m talking about … everyone in their pajamas … wrapping paper everywhere … the kids looking joyous and energized and the adults rumpled and tired and looking as though a good shot of espresso would help. On-camera, there are usually lots of smiles, plenty of Christmasy show and enthusiasm … items being held up and displayed for whoever it is that will be viewing these visual archives years hence. Off-camera, it can be a different story. The actors in the photos and videos turn down the wattage of their smiles … best behavior is set aside for whatever fits the reality and the moment. Off-camera, the knee-deep wrappings are being carted off to the recycling bin—or carefully folded for re-use as in the home of my childhood. Off-camera, one can begin to assess this day of days … this long-awaited time. Were everyone’s hopes and dreams realized? … the gifts the children begged for? … the family harmony and togetherness that mom or dad prayed for? Did two millennia of singing about “peace on earth and good will among men and women” bring the ancient dream any closer to fruition?
The lead-up to Christmas gets us pretty well-acquainted with the on-camera details of the story of Jesus’ birth as the writers of the gospels of Luke and Matthew describe and/or imagine them. Shepherds … singing angels … mangers … grouchy inn-keepers … stars in the sky and odd-looking and sounding foreigners who follow them.
Perhaps it’s the off-camera realities that hit the holy family so swiftly, so soon after the birth that keep the gospels of John and Mark from caring about trying to describe the cozy scene at all. The un-coziness of the historical realities of the time intrude so quickly that it is only the luxury of later times that allows painters and poets and composers to imaginatively fill in the details that the gospel writers failed to provide.
Christmas Eve, as we drove home, as you likely did also, we drove by many homes that were beautifully lit and decorated. Christmas lights and decorations area like the winter equivalent of summer fireworks displays—it’s nearly impossible to be unmoved by evening the simplest of them. Gorgeous symbolism of the light that is entering the world, the light that is fragile and beautiful. If you’re a true Christmas light observer, you also take note of the outdoor Christmas decorating trends. For years, big, fat energy-sucking colored light bulbs were all we had, and so that’s what we hung on our homes each year. Some families, like Jan’s, went all-out and cut out plywood and painted versions of Santa and the Reindeer … or painted plywood nativity scenes. Then came the mini-bulbs … first in strings … then the strings started blinking and racing around … then came the strings of icicle mini-lights in white or rainbow colored versions. The latest fad in Christmas lawn decorations are these inflatable plastic and nylon snow-globes and back-lit figures. I’m sure you’ve seen them. Perhaps you’ve even seen the inflatable Santa on an inflatable motorcycle. Perhaps, like me, you wonder if this trend in Christmas decorating will last. And what will come next.
On Christmas day, we took a drive and I noted as we drove through the same neighborhoods through which we’d driven the night before that what had been these tightly inflated, lighted displays were now just sloppy piles of wet nylon and plastic in the yards. Such a depressing contrast with the night before.
You may have heard us speak of “ChristmasTIDE” … this is another way of referring to season of Christmas that extends from Christmas Day to Epiphany. These are the “Twelve Days of Christmas." By that reckoning, this is day six. As with the word “-tide” in Christmastide, there are almost tidal qualities to these days … possibly a heightened awareness of the ebb and flow in our lives and in the world around us. The light that is seeking birth in a back and forth struggle with that which would put it out. The same Christmas evening that we drove back home among the now re-inflated yard decor brought news of a tiger attack at the venerable San Francisco zoo. Two days later as Lura was leaving the office, she paused at my door and said, “Oh, and you did hear about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, didn’t you?”
All around us … before and after the joyous season … all around us … before and after the holy birth … the light that is seeking birth is locked in a back and forth struggle with that which would put it out. Goodness that seeks to be born with a gasp and a cry … always fighting the odds … always fighting an uphill battle. Hope in a deadlock struggle with fear. Joy going to the mat with terror.
When I was eight years old, my family and I joined my grandparents from the Central Valley on a summertime trip to San Francisco. One of my memories of that visit was reaffirming the great truth of Mark Twain’s observation that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. We went as a family to Candlestick Park and watched the Giants squeak out a win over the “Bums” … the hated Los Angeles Dodgers. Willie Mays was in center field and Juan Marichal was on the mound. We may have frozen our buns off in the cheap seats, but all was right with the world on that night at Candlestick. The next day we paid a visit to the San Francisco zoo. The father-in-law of my dad’s associate pastor was one of the zookeepers and so I had the kind of access to the zoo that other kids could only dream about. We got to go IN the cages. In particular, I remember getting to go in the ring-tailed lemur cages and feeding these wonderfully exotic mammals. We also got to go amongst the llamas with arms full of hay while they plucked at the hay and our hair and our clothing. It was a dream day at the zoo. It was a day that has become gilded in my memory, a golden day that has made a visit to the zoo a kind of comfy walk down memory lane.
And then the Christmas Day tiger attacks which were awful enough in themselves—this horrific reminder of the danger of sentimentalizing these gorgeous, but lethal beasts of the wild. I have these awful images of the two surviving brothers running back to the zoo café and wondering where in the dark the dangerous beauty was. Would that it had been the lemurs and llamas that had escaped their confinement.
Let me say again: All around us … before and after the joyous season … all around us … before and after the holy birth … the light that is seeking birth is locked in a back and forth struggle with that which would put it out. Goodness that seeks to be born with a gasp and a cry … always fighting the odds … always fighting an uphill battle. Hope in a deadlock struggle with fear. Joy going to the mat with terror.
This is Matthew’s message to us this morning. That the birth of THE child and perhaps the birth of every child is delight mingled with danger. Danger and delight. We’ll recall that this morning’s text follows immediately upon the heels of the visit of the magi whom Matthew describes as wise men from the East. Our singing of the “We Three Kings from Orient Are” may dull us from remembering that Herod the Great sought to manipulate the magi. Herod attempted to trick the magi into leading him and his soldiers to the place of Jesus’ birth so that they could destroy the threatening goodness of God that had been born.
After the visit of the magi, Herod gets wind that it is he that has been tricked … and he is furious. Herod goes into a murderous rage that results in a vast blanket of death being cast over the region where Jesus was expected to have been born. We may remember that the first attempt on Benazir Bhutto’s life killed 140 of her followers. Then and now, such is the tragic cost of being too near perceived greatness. The Roman historian, Josephus, makes no mention of Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents”, but we know from the simplest reading of history that tyrants and despots put no value whatsoever on human life when it comes to maintaining their power and pursuing their ends.
The foregoing is a song written by Harry Chapin that comes from the delightful and dangerous musical, Cotton Patch Gospel. The song is Herod’s song and later in the song, it is sung against the backdrop of Rachel’s lament from Isaiah whom we heard quoted by Matthew this morning.
All around us … before and after the joyous season … before and after the holy birth … the light that is seeking birth is locked in a struggle with that which would put it out. Goodness that seeks to be born with a gasp and a cry fighting an uphill battle. Hope and joy in a struggle with terror and fear.
How do we emerge from this “joyous season of the holy birth” with its tigers and Herods and Bin Ladens—to say nothing of partly deflated Christmas hopes and family dustups—with our hope intact, with our resolve to continue giving birth in ourselves to the goodness of God?
For Matthew, it is that the same God who haunts our world with visions of Shalom, will habitate our dreams with visions of God’s protective grace. You may remember that Joseph really only gets a good part in the drama of Jesus’ birth in Matthew’s gospel. In this morning’s reading, Joseph plays a key role in protecting his little family from the wrath of Herod. Three times God appears to Joseph in his dreams and three times Joseph heeds God’s message of protective grace assuring that baby Jesus would live to be baptized by John in the river Jordan and live out the adult life that the world has never forgotten. Whether dreaming while sleeping or waking, God’s grace is ALWAYS with us and always WITHIN us.
In recounting the “gracious deeds” and “praiseworthy acts”, Isaiah said that is was in their time of distress that God became their savior:
It was no messenger or angel
but God’s presence that saved them;
in God’s love and pity God redeemed them;
God lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.
Not to get too maudlin, but Isaiah’s words can’t help but remind one of the “Footsteps in the Sand” poem that is stuck on the sides of so many refrigerators. In the poem, the deepened single set of footprints serve as an indication of the times when it was God’s strength alone that carried the struggler.
The author of Hebrews tells us that God’s servant, through whom we have received back our lives, was perfected by his struggles … his sufferings. The baby born to Mary and Joseph was no hermetically sealed seed of humanity protected against the “scuffing up” the rest of us have to endure, but one who was like us “in every respect”. “Because he himself was tested by what he suffered,” the author of Hebrews preaches to us, “he is able to help those who are being tested.”
So here at year’s end and mid-Christmas is where we are and what we have:
It may not be a Currier and Ives engraving with which we’re left with this day, this sixth day of Christmas, but I pray it is enough to lead you into a new year and a new day in your life with hope and resolve … a new year and a new day in your life where the goodness of God’s great love and mercy will be given birth, gasping and crying and thrust into your arms and your being to care for, come what may.
Amen.
December 30, 2007.
Sermon Texts: Isaiah 63:7-9; Hebrews 2:10-18; Matthew 2:13-23
Somewhere in our old boxes of things we have photos and even 8mm videotapes of Christmases past. You know the kinds of photos and videos I’m talking about … everyone in their pajamas … wrapping paper everywhere … the kids looking joyous and energized and the adults rumpled and tired and looking as though a good shot of espresso would help. On-camera, there are usually lots of smiles, plenty of Christmasy show and enthusiasm … items being held up and displayed for whoever it is that will be viewing these visual archives years hence. Off-camera, it can be a different story. The actors in the photos and videos turn down the wattage of their smiles … best behavior is set aside for whatever fits the reality and the moment. Off-camera, the knee-deep wrappings are being carted off to the recycling bin—or carefully folded for re-use as in the home of my childhood. Off-camera, one can begin to assess this day of days … this long-awaited time. Were everyone’s hopes and dreams realized? … the gifts the children begged for? … the family harmony and togetherness that mom or dad prayed for? Did two millennia of singing about “peace on earth and good will among men and women” bring the ancient dream any closer to fruition?
The lead-up to Christmas gets us pretty well-acquainted with the on-camera details of the story of Jesus’ birth as the writers of the gospels of Luke and Matthew describe and/or imagine them. Shepherds … singing angels … mangers … grouchy inn-keepers … stars in the sky and odd-looking and sounding foreigners who follow them.
Perhaps it’s the off-camera realities that hit the holy family so swiftly, so soon after the birth that keep the gospels of John and Mark from caring about trying to describe the cozy scene at all. The un-coziness of the historical realities of the time intrude so quickly that it is only the luxury of later times that allows painters and poets and composers to imaginatively fill in the details that the gospel writers failed to provide.
Christmas Eve, as we drove home, as you likely did also, we drove by many homes that were beautifully lit and decorated. Christmas lights and decorations area like the winter equivalent of summer fireworks displays—it’s nearly impossible to be unmoved by evening the simplest of them. Gorgeous symbolism of the light that is entering the world, the light that is fragile and beautiful. If you’re a true Christmas light observer, you also take note of the outdoor Christmas decorating trends. For years, big, fat energy-sucking colored light bulbs were all we had, and so that’s what we hung on our homes each year. Some families, like Jan’s, went all-out and cut out plywood and painted versions of Santa and the Reindeer … or painted plywood nativity scenes. Then came the mini-bulbs … first in strings … then the strings started blinking and racing around … then came the strings of icicle mini-lights in white or rainbow colored versions. The latest fad in Christmas lawn decorations are these inflatable plastic and nylon snow-globes and back-lit figures. I’m sure you’ve seen them. Perhaps you’ve even seen the inflatable Santa on an inflatable motorcycle. Perhaps, like me, you wonder if this trend in Christmas decorating will last. And what will come next.
On Christmas day, we took a drive and I noted as we drove through the same neighborhoods through which we’d driven the night before that what had been these tightly inflated, lighted displays were now just sloppy piles of wet nylon and plastic in the yards. Such a depressing contrast with the night before.
You may have heard us speak of “ChristmasTIDE” … this is another way of referring to season of Christmas that extends from Christmas Day to Epiphany. These are the “Twelve Days of Christmas." By that reckoning, this is day six. As with the word “-tide” in Christmastide, there are almost tidal qualities to these days … possibly a heightened awareness of the ebb and flow in our lives and in the world around us. The light that is seeking birth in a back and forth struggle with that which would put it out. The same Christmas evening that we drove back home among the now re-inflated yard decor brought news of a tiger attack at the venerable San Francisco zoo. Two days later as Lura was leaving the office, she paused at my door and said, “Oh, and you did hear about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, didn’t you?”
All around us … before and after the joyous season … all around us … before and after the holy birth … the light that is seeking birth is locked in a back and forth struggle with that which would put it out. Goodness that seeks to be born with a gasp and a cry … always fighting the odds … always fighting an uphill battle. Hope in a deadlock struggle with fear. Joy going to the mat with terror.
When I was eight years old, my family and I joined my grandparents from the Central Valley on a summertime trip to San Francisco. One of my memories of that visit was reaffirming the great truth of Mark Twain’s observation that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. We went as a family to Candlestick Park and watched the Giants squeak out a win over the “Bums” … the hated Los Angeles Dodgers. Willie Mays was in center field and Juan Marichal was on the mound. We may have frozen our buns off in the cheap seats, but all was right with the world on that night at Candlestick. The next day we paid a visit to the San Francisco zoo. The father-in-law of my dad’s associate pastor was one of the zookeepers and so I had the kind of access to the zoo that other kids could only dream about. We got to go IN the cages. In particular, I remember getting to go in the ring-tailed lemur cages and feeding these wonderfully exotic mammals. We also got to go amongst the llamas with arms full of hay while they plucked at the hay and our hair and our clothing. It was a dream day at the zoo. It was a day that has become gilded in my memory, a golden day that has made a visit to the zoo a kind of comfy walk down memory lane.
And then the Christmas Day tiger attacks which were awful enough in themselves—this horrific reminder of the danger of sentimentalizing these gorgeous, but lethal beasts of the wild. I have these awful images of the two surviving brothers running back to the zoo café and wondering where in the dark the dangerous beauty was. Would that it had been the lemurs and llamas that had escaped their confinement.
Let me say again: All around us … before and after the joyous season … all around us … before and after the holy birth … the light that is seeking birth is locked in a back and forth struggle with that which would put it out. Goodness that seeks to be born with a gasp and a cry … always fighting the odds … always fighting an uphill battle. Hope in a deadlock struggle with fear. Joy going to the mat with terror.
This is Matthew’s message to us this morning. That the birth of THE child and perhaps the birth of every child is delight mingled with danger. Danger and delight. We’ll recall that this morning’s text follows immediately upon the heels of the visit of the magi whom Matthew describes as wise men from the East. Our singing of the “We Three Kings from Orient Are” may dull us from remembering that Herod the Great sought to manipulate the magi. Herod attempted to trick the magi into leading him and his soldiers to the place of Jesus’ birth so that they could destroy the threatening goodness of God that had been born.
After the visit of the magi, Herod gets wind that it is he that has been tricked … and he is furious. Herod goes into a murderous rage that results in a vast blanket of death being cast over the region where Jesus was expected to have been born. We may remember that the first attempt on Benazir Bhutto’s life killed 140 of her followers. Then and now, such is the tragic cost of being too near perceived greatness. The Roman historian, Josephus, makes no mention of Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents”, but we know from the simplest reading of history that tyrants and despots put no value whatsoever on human life when it comes to maintaining their power and pursuing their ends.
All through the agesApparently this is the thinking in Pakistan and in far too many other devastated places and times on this planet.
the wise men and sages
have said there are dirty deeds that
simply must be done.
To keep society growin'
and the benefits flowin'
there's a simply necessity
of hurting someone.
It takes strength and agility,
takin' responsibility,
it's the core of what leadership's
really about.
When the red blood starts comin'
just think of it as plumbin' --
if you've got a problem you must
flush it out.
The foregoing is a song written by Harry Chapin that comes from the delightful and dangerous musical, Cotton Patch Gospel. The song is Herod’s song and later in the song, it is sung against the backdrop of Rachel’s lament from Isaiah whom we heard quoted by Matthew this morning.
'A voice was heard in Ramah,Chapin’s song continues:
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.'
Rockabye sweet angel, momma is here,
Hushabye sweet baby, there’s nothing to fear.
Close your eyes sweet darling, all through the night.
Momma will hold you tight, ‘til the morning light.
Momma will hold you tight, ‘til the morning light.
All around us … before and after the joyous season … before and after the holy birth … the light that is seeking birth is locked in a struggle with that which would put it out. Goodness that seeks to be born with a gasp and a cry fighting an uphill battle. Hope and joy in a struggle with terror and fear.
How do we emerge from this “joyous season of the holy birth” with its tigers and Herods and Bin Ladens—to say nothing of partly deflated Christmas hopes and family dustups—with our hope intact, with our resolve to continue giving birth in ourselves to the goodness of God?
For Matthew, it is that the same God who haunts our world with visions of Shalom, will habitate our dreams with visions of God’s protective grace. You may remember that Joseph really only gets a good part in the drama of Jesus’ birth in Matthew’s gospel. In this morning’s reading, Joseph plays a key role in protecting his little family from the wrath of Herod. Three times God appears to Joseph in his dreams and three times Joseph heeds God’s message of protective grace assuring that baby Jesus would live to be baptized by John in the river Jordan and live out the adult life that the world has never forgotten. Whether dreaming while sleeping or waking, God’s grace is ALWAYS with us and always WITHIN us.
In recounting the “gracious deeds” and “praiseworthy acts”, Isaiah said that is was in their time of distress that God became their savior:
It was no messenger or angel
but God’s presence that saved them;
in God’s love and pity God redeemed them;
God lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.
Not to get too maudlin, but Isaiah’s words can’t help but remind one of the “Footsteps in the Sand” poem that is stuck on the sides of so many refrigerators. In the poem, the deepened single set of footprints serve as an indication of the times when it was God’s strength alone that carried the struggler.
The author of Hebrews tells us that God’s servant, through whom we have received back our lives, was perfected by his struggles … his sufferings. The baby born to Mary and Joseph was no hermetically sealed seed of humanity protected against the “scuffing up” the rest of us have to endure, but one who was like us “in every respect”. “Because he himself was tested by what he suffered,” the author of Hebrews preaches to us, “he is able to help those who are being tested.”
So here at year’s end and mid-Christmas is where we are and what we have:
- A suffering savior who knows well our suffering.
- Carried safely in God’s arms as one would carry a child.
- Waking and sleeping dreams of God’s protective grace.
It may not be a Currier and Ives engraving with which we’re left with this day, this sixth day of Christmas, but I pray it is enough to lead you into a new year and a new day in your life with hope and resolve … a new year and a new day in your life where the goodness of God’s great love and mercy will be given birth, gasping and crying and thrust into your arms and your being to care for, come what may.
Amen.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
No One Left Behind
A sermon by Greg Ledbetter preached on the Third Sunday of Advent, Year A
December 16, 2007
It was well over a year ago that I began to wonder if quilts had anything to say to the season of Advent. Around the time I began my ministry here, I picked up a beautiful little book by Berkeley resident, artist and writer, Sue Bender. I also note, looking at the back cover, that I bought it at “Whole Earth Access” in Berkeley which tells you how long ago it was. Sue Bender’s book is entitled “Plain and Simple: A Woman’s Journey to the Amish”. At its simplest, the book describes how an encounter with an Amish quilt in a Long Island men’s clothing store, of all places, led her on a major journey of discovery and self-discovery.
Bender’s journey was a meandering one that led her, ultimately to a sojourn with two Amish families, “visits during which Bender enters a world without television, telephone, electric light, or refrigerators; a world where clutter and hurry are replaced with inner quiet and calm ritual; a world where a sunny kitchen ‘glows’ and ‘no distinction is made between the sacred and the everyday.”
The book itself is a wonder: simply written, gently paced, full of truthful insights about living our lives more honestly and authentically. The book is to the mind and spirit what a good cup of tea is to the stomach and the soul. I thought of the book because I am forever seeking antidotes to the hyper-kinetic energies of the Christmas season. Christmas in the stores and on the streets seems always to be urging you to “hurry up, hurry up, catch up, stay up.” It is partly a desire for self-preservation that makes me resist those hastening energies. But it is also the counter-weight of the season of Advent which, for me, is the most beautiful and gently solemn of the liturgical seasons. Advent invites us to slow down, step aside, watch, wait & pay very close attention. Where I and we need to be careful is to remember that in the end, Advent is not a season of “self-help”, but a time of sharpening our awareness of God’s great activities of goodness & hope that are not only glimmers on the horizon, but are already at work among us.
So … Advent and Sue Bender’s book “Plain and Simple” and Quilts … what’s the connection? It is that Amish quilts and quilting serve as the thematic thread with which Bender stitches together her thoughts. Bender describes her own life as a crazy quilt—and to that I can relate. But the book more nearly resembles the Amish quilts that first inspired her: thoughtful, subdued, carefully patterned. She writes:
Twenty years ago I walked into Latham's Men's Store in Sag Harbor, New York, and saw old quilts used as a background for men's tweeds. I had never seen quilts like that. Odd color combinations. Deep saturated solid colors: purple, mauve, green, brown, magenta, electric blue, red. Simple geometric forms: squares, diamonds, rectangles. A patina of use emanated from them. They spoke directly to me. They knew something. They went straight to my heart.
It was the quilt of her thoughts in her book that spoke to me and made me think that perhaps quilts and quilting had much to say to us in the beginning of our liturgical, worshipping life together. And, in fact, as we have seen in our Fall stewardship campaign where our theme was “Quilted Together in Community and Common Ministry”, quilts and quilting are richly symbolic and suggestive and have lent themselves marvelously to the thematic flow of this season.
If you have stepped outside in recent days, you’ll know that there is a new chill to the air that the ever-shortening days and lengthening nights have brought. We are now only five days away from the winter solstice on December 21st, but winter’s chill is only starting. Looking at the thermometer and the trees being whipped by a frigid wind the other day, I remarked to Jan they were conditions sure to deepen the misery of anyone who was already homeless. And homelessness is only one of many ways that human beings can feel naked and exposed.
Maybe you’ll remember that amazing poetic cry from the pen of William Shakespeare put on the lips of King Lear who says:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?
When King Lear bellows into a storm about the “poor naked wretches”, it is not just the tumultuous weather on the heath to which he is referring. It is the whole stormy human condition with all its threats and endangerments, the indignities and humiliations, the losses and injuries and defeats. It is the cancer ward and the lethal danger of inner city streets … it’s the darkness of depression and every damnable war ever fought … it is the accidents that befall us and enormity of nature’s wrath that can undo and unglue us. “Oh the weather outside is frightful …” and inside it can often be no better and it’s sometimes all we can manage to huddle for a bit of warmth and commiseration.
On Friday, I stood and spoke in front of about a hundred people in a beautiful jeweled box of a building in San Francisco. All in that place were there because in the past year they had lost a loved one. That’s a lot of loss all gathered into one place. For the second year running, I had been asked by the Neptune Society of San Francisco to lead a service of remembrance for those whom they had served in the previous year. And there were a lot of tears that flowed in that place and in that hour—including my own. And in that time and place, we who were strangers to one another, were not only bound together in common grief, but served in an odd way as a comforting blanket warding off the chill of our losses.
Looking around the Neptune Society columbarium, it’s clear that we’re not the only ones who are thinking of quilts this year. Surrounding the mourners in a “clothy” and comforting embrace were four enormous panels of the national AIDS quilt. In between songs by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus—some of whose former members were memorialized on the quilts, I led us on a path that tried to lead from loss to hope. And though I did not speak of it—it was not yet the time, I had a conscious end in mind, a conscious vision toward which I tried to direct us. As I had mentioned in our own service two weeks ago, I alluded to the stages of grief as described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. I read the words of poetry written by Peter McWilliams that were evoked by Kubler-Ross’ descriptions. Kubler-Ross’ stages end with “acceptance”, the sense that the griever has healed enough to feel ready to face whatever comes next. But McWilliam’s poetry adds a stage past acceptance, and that is “HOPE”. That was last week’s advent theme and candle you’ll recall. McWilliams says of HOPE:
And through all the tears
and the sadness
and the pain
comes the one thought
that can make me
internally smile again:
I have
loved.
Speaking to the mourners in the columbarium, I said that if one stays faithful to the path of healing, that past hope there may be even one stage more: JOY. That what begins in denial, anger, bargaining and depression can end in acceptance, hope and JOY.
And the vision I had in mind was based in this morning’s words from Isaiah 35. Isaiah’s vision is so bright, so sparkling, so joyous that they did not feel like quite the right words to speak to feelings so raw. But my hope and prayer is that the time of remembrance contained hints and glimpses of that vision so that when ready, those mourners would seek the vision and its fulfillment—in their lives and, perhaps ultimately, in the world around them.
And my hope and prayer is that our observance of Advent, though muted and solemn, will contains seeds of hope and joy that when planted faithfully in the chilled winter soil of our souls and our world will, in the warmth of spring, give rise to new seedlings of hope and joy and fruitfulness.
Such is the power of Isaiah’s joyful vision that it was to Israel in exile in their loop'd and window'd raggedness like a warm coat, a good meal, a soft bed covered with a thick quilt. If words could be food, nourishing and warm, Isaiah’s joyful vision of the coming of God that brought life to the wilderness and health to the people gave the people in exile new hope and new strength—hope and strength for the journey home they would soon be taking.
Isaiah 35:1-10
The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom;
like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,
and rejoice with joy and singing.
The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it,
the majesty of Carmel and Sharon.
They shall see the glory of the Lord,
the majesty of our God.
Strengthen the weak hands,
and make firm the feeble knees.
Say to those who are of a fearful heart,
'Be strong, do not fear!
Here is your God.
He will come with vengeance,
with terrible recompense.
He will come and save you.'
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
then the lame shall leap like a deer,
and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert;
the burning sand shall become a pool,
and the thirsty ground springs of water;
the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp,
the grass shall become reeds and rushes.
A highway shall be there,
and it shall be called the Holy Way;
the unclean shall not travel on it,
but it shall be for God’s people;
no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.
No lion shall be there,
nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;
they shall not be found there,
but the redeemed shall walk there.
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return,
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
Part of the incredible beauty of Isaiah’s vision is that no one has to wonder if the “good news” of the vision includes them. “What about me?” In Isaiah’s vision, when God comes to save, NO ONE GETS LEFT BEHIND. The weak and strong, the able and the challenged, the fearful and the confident—all shall partake in the God’s enactment of healing and homecoming.
Homecoming … Restoration … Healing … Joy … for ALL PEOPLE. Kindling a passion for these things is our Advent work … our Advent duty. Choosing to live by Isaiah’s vision is where Advent leads and guides us. Allowing our imaginations to grow ever more inclusive and ever more restorative and ever more equitable is a part of shaping our minds and hearts of faith in the Advent time of watching and preparing.
It’s a glorious vision AND … it’s a HIGH VISION. It’s a high vision in that it sets the bar to a lofty height of what everyone ought to have a right to expect in life and in this world. Once you hear this and others of Isaiah’s visions, you’re not to be faulted if you think to yourself—or even say out loud—this is the way it should always be … this is the way it should be for ALL people.
This week the general secretary of our American Baptist churches, Roy Medley, sent out an e-mail drawing our attention to an Op-Ed piece written by Jimmy Carter that appeared in last Monday’s Washington Post. Carter suggests, in his editorial, that certain amendments are critically needed to the 1933 Farm Bill so as to correct some horrific imbalances and injustices that affect small farmers with such dire consequences both at home and abroad. I sense hints of Isaiah’s vision in Carter’s words.
Isaiah’s vision has to do with justice and fairness and equitable distribution … it has to do with an end to oppression and violence and politics of fear … it has to do with a place at the table for all that no one has to earn--that all deserve by simply existing … it has to do with a time where all our human energies, joined with divine wisdom, come together to create all the healing and hope that is possible for those afflicted with mysterious and debilitating illness.
How are we choosing to live by Isaiah’s vision? In Advent, we are invited to wait and watch for God’s patient activity of homecoming, restoration, healing and joy on behalf of all people—and then to encourage and join that activity with all our hearts, minds and souls. The coming of God signals a time when NONE WILL BE LEFT BEHIND.
Just now I am thinking of a former member of Shell Ridge, Andrea Allmon. When I first met Andrea, she had been worshipping for two years or so in a Presbyterian church, hoping against hope that she would be accepted just as she was. Then came “the sermon” … the pronouncement from the pulpit bashing the love that dare not speak its name … and with the pronouncement, Andrea knew that she was not fully welcome and her heart and her hopes sank. The next week she found herself at Shell Ridge, though we hadn’t yet taken our new name. And after worship she pinned me down about having a cup of coffee, and by the way she asked for that time, I knew it wasn’t the coffee she was most interested in. If you remember Andrea, you know she can cut right to the chase. “I’m gay!” she said. “Will you and the people at the church accept me or reject me?”
How are we choosing to live by Isaiah’s vision? The full vision and not just the parts we can live with. I told Andrea that I would accept her and that many in the church would accept her, but that I could not speak for all. In time we accepted Andrea into our membership—and in time, there was a small exodus, sadly, of a fashion of church friends who lived by different visions.
About a year ago, a small minister’s support group to which I belong traveled to the new DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park. Our group is not only a place of mutual support, but we are also gathered by our common interest in the art of worship. And it’s hard to discuss the art of worship without ultimately coming ‘round to art itself. There was a rather singular kind of artwork on display at the museum that we had gone to see. On display were some 70 of the quilts of Gee’s Bend, last weeks featured quilts. And if you remember last week’s bulletin cover, you’ll remember that Gee’s Bends are quite different than the extreme mathematical precision of today’s Amish quilts. Gee’s Bend quilts are pieced together from whatever is lying around … nothing … NOTHING goes to waste. And it seems to me that this is one of the implicit messages of quilting: “No scrap is unusable … there is a place for each and for all.” It’s Isaiah’s vision all over again.
Whether we are lobbying congress to make laws that are fair and equitable for all … or … if we are making our way to dark and difficult places seeking to breathe a new word of hope and healing … or … if we are simply creating a new place at the table for one whose simple existence makes them worthy—we are choosing to live by Isaiah’s vision which is coming to pass in small, but noteworthy ways.
Those who lived in the time of Jesus saw in him, unmistakable signs of the flowering of Isaiah’s vision. And as always, Jesus’ claims for himself were modest … understated. One of this morning’s lections that we did not read this morning, tells of John the Baptist, the one who was to prepare the way, wondering from afar about this Jesus … and the stories that were coming to him. Matthew’s gospel says:
When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.’
If we are and if others are choosing to live by Isaiah’s vision, what will the world around us hear and what will they see? If they hear and see what the disciples of John could see so plainly in the work and ministry of Jesus, then you and I might not fault them if, with no irony at all intended, they begin to whistle or sing: “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.”
Advent, as I hope you can see, is not a bland lead-in to Christmas, but a robust time of preparing and visioning and, ultimately, acting. If we can ever speak about “Christmas faith” as some do, then it will be a Christmas faith rooted and grounded in the faith and the visions of Advent. The faith and visions of Advent have always been rooted and grounded in the expansive and hopeful visions of Isaiah. And more than one latter day Isaiah has reached back to the old prophet when seeking strength for current challenges.
On December 10, 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr., a 35 year old African American--and American Baptist!--preacher, was awarded the Alfred Nobel Peace Prize in Stockholm, Sweden. Near the end of King’s acceptance speech, he spoke of the faith that moved him that was rooted in Isaiah’s vision of a world at peace with justice. King said:
This faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.
Isaiah couldn’t have said it better himself.
Amen.
December 16, 2007
It was well over a year ago that I began to wonder if quilts had anything to say to the season of Advent. Around the time I began my ministry here, I picked up a beautiful little book by Berkeley resident, artist and writer, Sue Bender. I also note, looking at the back cover, that I bought it at “Whole Earth Access” in Berkeley which tells you how long ago it was. Sue Bender’s book is entitled “Plain and Simple: A Woman’s Journey to the Amish”. At its simplest, the book describes how an encounter with an Amish quilt in a Long Island men’s clothing store, of all places, led her on a major journey of discovery and self-discovery.
Bender’s journey was a meandering one that led her, ultimately to a sojourn with two Amish families, “visits during which Bender enters a world without television, telephone, electric light, or refrigerators; a world where clutter and hurry are replaced with inner quiet and calm ritual; a world where a sunny kitchen ‘glows’ and ‘no distinction is made between the sacred and the everyday.”
The book itself is a wonder: simply written, gently paced, full of truthful insights about living our lives more honestly and authentically. The book is to the mind and spirit what a good cup of tea is to the stomach and the soul. I thought of the book because I am forever seeking antidotes to the hyper-kinetic energies of the Christmas season. Christmas in the stores and on the streets seems always to be urging you to “hurry up, hurry up, catch up, stay up.” It is partly a desire for self-preservation that makes me resist those hastening energies. But it is also the counter-weight of the season of Advent which, for me, is the most beautiful and gently solemn of the liturgical seasons. Advent invites us to slow down, step aside, watch, wait & pay very close attention. Where I and we need to be careful is to remember that in the end, Advent is not a season of “self-help”, but a time of sharpening our awareness of God’s great activities of goodness & hope that are not only glimmers on the horizon, but are already at work among us.
So … Advent and Sue Bender’s book “Plain and Simple” and Quilts … what’s the connection? It is that Amish quilts and quilting serve as the thematic thread with which Bender stitches together her thoughts. Bender describes her own life as a crazy quilt—and to that I can relate. But the book more nearly resembles the Amish quilts that first inspired her: thoughtful, subdued, carefully patterned. She writes:
Twenty years ago I walked into Latham's Men's Store in Sag Harbor, New York, and saw old quilts used as a background for men's tweeds. I had never seen quilts like that. Odd color combinations. Deep saturated solid colors: purple, mauve, green, brown, magenta, electric blue, red. Simple geometric forms: squares, diamonds, rectangles. A patina of use emanated from them. They spoke directly to me. They knew something. They went straight to my heart.
It was the quilt of her thoughts in her book that spoke to me and made me think that perhaps quilts and quilting had much to say to us in the beginning of our liturgical, worshipping life together. And, in fact, as we have seen in our Fall stewardship campaign where our theme was “Quilted Together in Community and Common Ministry”, quilts and quilting are richly symbolic and suggestive and have lent themselves marvelously to the thematic flow of this season.
If you have stepped outside in recent days, you’ll know that there is a new chill to the air that the ever-shortening days and lengthening nights have brought. We are now only five days away from the winter solstice on December 21st, but winter’s chill is only starting. Looking at the thermometer and the trees being whipped by a frigid wind the other day, I remarked to Jan they were conditions sure to deepen the misery of anyone who was already homeless. And homelessness is only one of many ways that human beings can feel naked and exposed.
Maybe you’ll remember that amazing poetic cry from the pen of William Shakespeare put on the lips of King Lear who says:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?
When King Lear bellows into a storm about the “poor naked wretches”, it is not just the tumultuous weather on the heath to which he is referring. It is the whole stormy human condition with all its threats and endangerments, the indignities and humiliations, the losses and injuries and defeats. It is the cancer ward and the lethal danger of inner city streets … it’s the darkness of depression and every damnable war ever fought … it is the accidents that befall us and enormity of nature’s wrath that can undo and unglue us. “Oh the weather outside is frightful …” and inside it can often be no better and it’s sometimes all we can manage to huddle for a bit of warmth and commiseration.
On Friday, I stood and spoke in front of about a hundred people in a beautiful jeweled box of a building in San Francisco. All in that place were there because in the past year they had lost a loved one. That’s a lot of loss all gathered into one place. For the second year running, I had been asked by the Neptune Society of San Francisco to lead a service of remembrance for those whom they had served in the previous year. And there were a lot of tears that flowed in that place and in that hour—including my own. And in that time and place, we who were strangers to one another, were not only bound together in common grief, but served in an odd way as a comforting blanket warding off the chill of our losses.
Looking around the Neptune Society columbarium, it’s clear that we’re not the only ones who are thinking of quilts this year. Surrounding the mourners in a “clothy” and comforting embrace were four enormous panels of the national AIDS quilt. In between songs by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus—some of whose former members were memorialized on the quilts, I led us on a path that tried to lead from loss to hope. And though I did not speak of it—it was not yet the time, I had a conscious end in mind, a conscious vision toward which I tried to direct us. As I had mentioned in our own service two weeks ago, I alluded to the stages of grief as described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. I read the words of poetry written by Peter McWilliams that were evoked by Kubler-Ross’ descriptions. Kubler-Ross’ stages end with “acceptance”, the sense that the griever has healed enough to feel ready to face whatever comes next. But McWilliam’s poetry adds a stage past acceptance, and that is “HOPE”. That was last week’s advent theme and candle you’ll recall. McWilliams says of HOPE:
And through all the tears
and the sadness
and the pain
comes the one thought
that can make me
internally smile again:
I have
loved.
Speaking to the mourners in the columbarium, I said that if one stays faithful to the path of healing, that past hope there may be even one stage more: JOY. That what begins in denial, anger, bargaining and depression can end in acceptance, hope and JOY.
And the vision I had in mind was based in this morning’s words from Isaiah 35. Isaiah’s vision is so bright, so sparkling, so joyous that they did not feel like quite the right words to speak to feelings so raw. But my hope and prayer is that the time of remembrance contained hints and glimpses of that vision so that when ready, those mourners would seek the vision and its fulfillment—in their lives and, perhaps ultimately, in the world around them.
And my hope and prayer is that our observance of Advent, though muted and solemn, will contains seeds of hope and joy that when planted faithfully in the chilled winter soil of our souls and our world will, in the warmth of spring, give rise to new seedlings of hope and joy and fruitfulness.
Such is the power of Isaiah’s joyful vision that it was to Israel in exile in their loop'd and window'd raggedness like a warm coat, a good meal, a soft bed covered with a thick quilt. If words could be food, nourishing and warm, Isaiah’s joyful vision of the coming of God that brought life to the wilderness and health to the people gave the people in exile new hope and new strength—hope and strength for the journey home they would soon be taking.
Isaiah 35:1-10
The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom;
like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,
and rejoice with joy and singing.
The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it,
the majesty of Carmel and Sharon.
They shall see the glory of the Lord,
the majesty of our God.
Strengthen the weak hands,
and make firm the feeble knees.
Say to those who are of a fearful heart,
'Be strong, do not fear!
Here is your God.
He will come with vengeance,
with terrible recompense.
He will come and save you.'
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
then the lame shall leap like a deer,
and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert;
the burning sand shall become a pool,
and the thirsty ground springs of water;
the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp,
the grass shall become reeds and rushes.
A highway shall be there,
and it shall be called the Holy Way;
the unclean shall not travel on it,
but it shall be for God’s people;
no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.
No lion shall be there,
nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;
they shall not be found there,
but the redeemed shall walk there.
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return,
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
Part of the incredible beauty of Isaiah’s vision is that no one has to wonder if the “good news” of the vision includes them. “What about me?” In Isaiah’s vision, when God comes to save, NO ONE GETS LEFT BEHIND. The weak and strong, the able and the challenged, the fearful and the confident—all shall partake in the God’s enactment of healing and homecoming.
Homecoming … Restoration … Healing … Joy … for ALL PEOPLE. Kindling a passion for these things is our Advent work … our Advent duty. Choosing to live by Isaiah’s vision is where Advent leads and guides us. Allowing our imaginations to grow ever more inclusive and ever more restorative and ever more equitable is a part of shaping our minds and hearts of faith in the Advent time of watching and preparing.
It’s a glorious vision AND … it’s a HIGH VISION. It’s a high vision in that it sets the bar to a lofty height of what everyone ought to have a right to expect in life and in this world. Once you hear this and others of Isaiah’s visions, you’re not to be faulted if you think to yourself—or even say out loud—this is the way it should always be … this is the way it should be for ALL people.
This week the general secretary of our American Baptist churches, Roy Medley, sent out an e-mail drawing our attention to an Op-Ed piece written by Jimmy Carter that appeared in last Monday’s Washington Post. Carter suggests, in his editorial, that certain amendments are critically needed to the 1933 Farm Bill so as to correct some horrific imbalances and injustices that affect small farmers with such dire consequences both at home and abroad. I sense hints of Isaiah’s vision in Carter’s words.
Isaiah’s vision has to do with justice and fairness and equitable distribution … it has to do with an end to oppression and violence and politics of fear … it has to do with a place at the table for all that no one has to earn--that all deserve by simply existing … it has to do with a time where all our human energies, joined with divine wisdom, come together to create all the healing and hope that is possible for those afflicted with mysterious and debilitating illness.
How are we choosing to live by Isaiah’s vision? In Advent, we are invited to wait and watch for God’s patient activity of homecoming, restoration, healing and joy on behalf of all people—and then to encourage and join that activity with all our hearts, minds and souls. The coming of God signals a time when NONE WILL BE LEFT BEHIND.
Just now I am thinking of a former member of Shell Ridge, Andrea Allmon. When I first met Andrea, she had been worshipping for two years or so in a Presbyterian church, hoping against hope that she would be accepted just as she was. Then came “the sermon” … the pronouncement from the pulpit bashing the love that dare not speak its name … and with the pronouncement, Andrea knew that she was not fully welcome and her heart and her hopes sank. The next week she found herself at Shell Ridge, though we hadn’t yet taken our new name. And after worship she pinned me down about having a cup of coffee, and by the way she asked for that time, I knew it wasn’t the coffee she was most interested in. If you remember Andrea, you know she can cut right to the chase. “I’m gay!” she said. “Will you and the people at the church accept me or reject me?”
How are we choosing to live by Isaiah’s vision? The full vision and not just the parts we can live with. I told Andrea that I would accept her and that many in the church would accept her, but that I could not speak for all. In time we accepted Andrea into our membership—and in time, there was a small exodus, sadly, of a fashion of church friends who lived by different visions.
About a year ago, a small minister’s support group to which I belong traveled to the new DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park. Our group is not only a place of mutual support, but we are also gathered by our common interest in the art of worship. And it’s hard to discuss the art of worship without ultimately coming ‘round to art itself. There was a rather singular kind of artwork on display at the museum that we had gone to see. On display were some 70 of the quilts of Gee’s Bend, last weeks featured quilts. And if you remember last week’s bulletin cover, you’ll remember that Gee’s Bends are quite different than the extreme mathematical precision of today’s Amish quilts. Gee’s Bend quilts are pieced together from whatever is lying around … nothing … NOTHING goes to waste. And it seems to me that this is one of the implicit messages of quilting: “No scrap is unusable … there is a place for each and for all.” It’s Isaiah’s vision all over again.
Whether we are lobbying congress to make laws that are fair and equitable for all … or … if we are making our way to dark and difficult places seeking to breathe a new word of hope and healing … or … if we are simply creating a new place at the table for one whose simple existence makes them worthy—we are choosing to live by Isaiah’s vision which is coming to pass in small, but noteworthy ways.
Those who lived in the time of Jesus saw in him, unmistakable signs of the flowering of Isaiah’s vision. And as always, Jesus’ claims for himself were modest … understated. One of this morning’s lections that we did not read this morning, tells of John the Baptist, the one who was to prepare the way, wondering from afar about this Jesus … and the stories that were coming to him. Matthew’s gospel says:
When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.’
If we are and if others are choosing to live by Isaiah’s vision, what will the world around us hear and what will they see? If they hear and see what the disciples of John could see so plainly in the work and ministry of Jesus, then you and I might not fault them if, with no irony at all intended, they begin to whistle or sing: “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.”
Advent, as I hope you can see, is not a bland lead-in to Christmas, but a robust time of preparing and visioning and, ultimately, acting. If we can ever speak about “Christmas faith” as some do, then it will be a Christmas faith rooted and grounded in the faith and the visions of Advent. The faith and visions of Advent have always been rooted and grounded in the expansive and hopeful visions of Isaiah. And more than one latter day Isaiah has reached back to the old prophet when seeking strength for current challenges.
On December 10, 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr., a 35 year old African American--and American Baptist!--preacher, was awarded the Alfred Nobel Peace Prize in Stockholm, Sweden. Near the end of King’s acceptance speech, he spoke of the faith that moved him that was rooted in Isaiah’s vision of a world at peace with justice. King said:
This faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.
Isaiah couldn’t have said it better himself.
Amen.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Stewards of Self & Substance
A Sermon by Greg Ledbetter preached on November 11, 2007
24th Sunday after Pentecost/Year C
Sermon Text: Psalm 145
What is it that would cause you to break spontaneously into song? Are you like that at all? Have you ever camped in the mountains and woken up just as the sun is beginning to paint the sky and the surrounding peaks and you crawl from your tent, stand straight, fill your lungs with pure mountain air and channeling Gordon MacRae, you suddenly belt out: “Oh what a beautiful morning, Oh what a beautiful day …”.
A beautiful fall morning can inspire as well … and if not a song, exactly, coming face to face suddenly with a spectacular blaze of crimson and orange and yellow can set everything inside of me a-jangling. Jan and I like to stroll with the dogs in a nearby park where crepe myrtles and scarlet maples put on a display that can leave us literally stammering.
One of our number here sent my family and me a seasonal greeting card the other day … inside was a handwritten note in the card that described the view from her living room window. The writer of the note exulted over the way the sun was lighting up the lower branches of a fall-colored Raywood ash … “red, gold, green, and orange shades of leaves with pots of chrysanthemums below reflecting all the same colors as the ash. “It is really NEAT!” said the writer of the note. “That is how I also praise God and feel so blessed to live here.”
Perhaps latent within us all is the impulse to praise God for the beauty of creation … mountain mornings, sunsets at the ocean, the unique beauty of changing seasons … the impulse to spontaneously voice our thanks links us to the psalmists whose great prayers of thanksgiving and praise have moved people of like heart and mind and spirit for thousands of years.
Psalm 148: Is a psalm of praise for God’s Universal Glory
When we worshiped at Congregation B’nai Tikvah recently and shared in their musical Shabbat, it felt to me closer to how I imagine the worship of Israel was in the time of the psalmists … closer certainly than the propensity of modern Christian worshipers to praise God with loud clanging electric guitars and PowerPoint. To be fair, there are Jewish congregations who also employ all the modern gadgetry in their worship … Christians do not have the corner on liturgical “kitchiness”.
There is a snippet from traditional Christian liturgies that is calling to me, just now … a snippet that many of you grew up praying every week, every time you worshiped. Just saying the opening words will trigger an automatic response in many of us. But as you respond in a moment, be especially mindful of the third phrase … the third response. And emphasize, if you can, the third word of that third phrase. I think you’ll understand when you get there:
This is entirely consistent with the praying sentiments of the psalmists … it is RIGHT and GOOD to give God thanks and praise. The psalms of praise exhort the people of God to give thanks to God, to sing praise to God, to bless God’s holy name.
It’s a little bit like Halloween where candy-laden fairy-princesses and pirates and ghouls traipse up the walk, offer you the choice of their trick or your treat … and then, on the occasions that they silently turn away from your door there is often a voice that speaks from the surrounding darkness:“Don’t forget to say ‘thank you’.” At which the little ghoul turns back and says: “Thank you!”.
It is indeed right and good to give almighty God thanks and praise.
Of all the things that moved the psalmists to voice their praise, it was, perhaps, God’s very goodness and God’s activity within history that moved them most of all. Praise for God’s mighty acts and God’s mighty works was at the heart of Israel’s praise of God. Israel understood God to be profoundly intermingled with human history and Israel’s history, profoundly intermingled with the doings of creation that God so deeply loved.
To sing praise to God’s mighty works and mighty deeds was to acknowledge God’s loving activity that ranged from the outer reaches of the cosmos to the inner reaches of every heart.
This joyful psalm that we sang together this morning praises God’s reign over the world. God has created a world of wonder and acted powerfully to save Israel. The psalmist says that faithful people declare to the next generation the wonderful works of God. The God of creation and history is a God of justice, hearing the cry of those who are oppressed and saving them. God watches over all. It is not only Israel who will be saved, but “all flesh” will come to know God’s greatness. This is the God who we follow as disciples, working to bring about God’s reign of justice and peace.
There is, in the psalms, a profound linkage between the “praise-worthiness” of God and God’s fiercely loving pro-activity on behalf of the weak and the poor and the oppressed. Those who would presume to offer their praise to God OR to lead God’s people in praising God would do well to remember this linkage, to remember, God’s bias on behalf of those denied access to the earth’s bountiful table of provision as our friend Ken Sehested has put it in our hearing so many times.
But … is it possible to praise God too much? Or to praise God wrongly? Is it possible for our praise—our worship—to become a hindrance to our wider responsibilities as God’s children and disciples of Jesus?
Apparently old prophet Amos thought so. To hear Amos describe the liturgical landscape of his day, you get the sense that the worship of Israel had pretty much reached its zenith. The simple spontaneous praise of God and God’s good works had evolved into a whole minor industry of worship … it’s kind of like some of these made for TV worship services that you can stumble across when channel-surfing. If only you could channel the preacher’s allowance for clothing, jewelry and hair-gel into a charitable cause.
Amos’ feelings about the worship of Israel as he observed and experienced it could be described as “less than charitable”.
Amos says:
The prophet Amos speaks so loudly, so stridently that reverberations of his ancient prophetic tirade can still be heard today. And it serves as a reminder that prayer and praise separated from compassionate activity and pursuit of justice obstructs God’s work and thwarts God’s intentions for the human family.
Of all the sermons preached on the subject, I’m not aware of any more powerful than that preached by Isaiah, the prophet. In the 58th chapter, the prophet distinguishes between false and true worship.
Isaiah 58: False and True Worship
CONCLUSION:
People of Shell Ridge Church: If, upon, rising, we are moved to sing “Oh what a beautiful morning …”, let us likewise be moved to labor on behalf of those who awake to hunger … to violence … to oppressive conditions … to despair … to war.
If, when we gather to worship, we are moved while singing “How Great Thou Art” and “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee”, let us ground our praise and ground our adoration of God in re-committing ourselves to serve God’s creation, God’s family, our neighbors and friends throughout this good earth.
In the Stewardship of our selves and our substance, our persons and our plenty, and in the larger scheme of life, witness, worship and work: there is no higher praise to God that we can offer than the nearly wordless praise of:
loving … giving … and serving.
Amen.
24th Sunday after Pentecost/Year C
Sermon Text: Psalm 145
What is it that would cause you to break spontaneously into song? Are you like that at all? Have you ever camped in the mountains and woken up just as the sun is beginning to paint the sky and the surrounding peaks and you crawl from your tent, stand straight, fill your lungs with pure mountain air and channeling Gordon MacRae, you suddenly belt out: “Oh what a beautiful morning, Oh what a beautiful day …”.
A beautiful fall morning can inspire as well … and if not a song, exactly, coming face to face suddenly with a spectacular blaze of crimson and orange and yellow can set everything inside of me a-jangling. Jan and I like to stroll with the dogs in a nearby park where crepe myrtles and scarlet maples put on a display that can leave us literally stammering.
One of our number here sent my family and me a seasonal greeting card the other day … inside was a handwritten note in the card that described the view from her living room window. The writer of the note exulted over the way the sun was lighting up the lower branches of a fall-colored Raywood ash … “red, gold, green, and orange shades of leaves with pots of chrysanthemums below reflecting all the same colors as the ash. “It is really NEAT!” said the writer of the note. “That is how I also praise God and feel so blessed to live here.”
Perhaps latent within us all is the impulse to praise God for the beauty of creation … mountain mornings, sunsets at the ocean, the unique beauty of changing seasons … the impulse to spontaneously voice our thanks links us to the psalmists whose great prayers of thanksgiving and praise have moved people of like heart and mind and spirit for thousands of years.
Psalm 148: Is a psalm of praise for God’s Universal Glory
1Praise the Lord!The psalmists were the praying, singing poets and composers of sacred verse and song in the worship of Ancient Israel. Onto parchments and skins they would scratch out the words that would guide the congregation of old in their worship of God.
Praise the Lord from the heavens;
praise God in the heights!
2Praise God, all God’s angels;
praise God, all God’s host!
3Praise God, sun and moon;
praise God, all you shining stars!
4Praise God, you highest heavens,
and you waters above the heavens!
7Praise the Lord from the earth,
you sea monsters and all deeps,
8fire and hail, snow and frost,
stormy wind fulfilling God’s command!
9Mountains and all hills,
fruit trees and all cedars!
10Wild animals and all cattle,
creeping things and flying birds!
11Kings of the earth and all peoples,
princes and all rulers of the earth!
12Young men and women alike,
old and young together!
13Let them praise the name of the Lord,
for God’s name alone is exalted;
God’s glory is above earth and heaven.
14God has raised up a horn for God’s people,
praise for all God’s faithful,
for the people of Israel who are close to God.
Praise the Lord!
When we worshiped at Congregation B’nai Tikvah recently and shared in their musical Shabbat, it felt to me closer to how I imagine the worship of Israel was in the time of the psalmists … closer certainly than the propensity of modern Christian worshipers to praise God with loud clanging electric guitars and PowerPoint. To be fair, there are Jewish congregations who also employ all the modern gadgetry in their worship … Christians do not have the corner on liturgical “kitchiness”.
There is a snippet from traditional Christian liturgies that is calling to me, just now … a snippet that many of you grew up praying every week, every time you worshiped. Just saying the opening words will trigger an automatic response in many of us. But as you respond in a moment, be especially mindful of the third phrase … the third response. And emphasize, if you can, the third word of that third phrase. I think you’ll understand when you get there:
The Lord be with you // and also with you.It is indeed right and good to give you thanks and praise, almighty God … continues the familiar Eucharistic prayer.
Lift up your hearts. // We lift them to the Lord.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God // It is right to give God thanks and praise.
This is entirely consistent with the praying sentiments of the psalmists … it is RIGHT and GOOD to give God thanks and praise. The psalms of praise exhort the people of God to give thanks to God, to sing praise to God, to bless God’s holy name.
It’s a little bit like Halloween where candy-laden fairy-princesses and pirates and ghouls traipse up the walk, offer you the choice of their trick or your treat … and then, on the occasions that they silently turn away from your door there is often a voice that speaks from the surrounding darkness:“Don’t forget to say ‘thank you’.” At which the little ghoul turns back and says: “Thank you!”.
It is indeed right and good to give almighty God thanks and praise.
Of all the things that moved the psalmists to voice their praise, it was, perhaps, God’s very goodness and God’s activity within history that moved them most of all. Praise for God’s mighty acts and God’s mighty works was at the heart of Israel’s praise of God. Israel understood God to be profoundly intermingled with human history and Israel’s history, profoundly intermingled with the doings of creation that God so deeply loved.
To sing praise to God’s mighty works and mighty deeds was to acknowledge God’s loving activity that ranged from the outer reaches of the cosmos to the inner reaches of every heart.
This joyful psalm that we sang together this morning praises God’s reign over the world. God has created a world of wonder and acted powerfully to save Israel. The psalmist says that faithful people declare to the next generation the wonderful works of God. The God of creation and history is a God of justice, hearing the cry of those who are oppressed and saving them. God watches over all. It is not only Israel who will be saved, but “all flesh” will come to know God’s greatness. This is the God who we follow as disciples, working to bring about God’s reign of justice and peace.
There is, in the psalms, a profound linkage between the “praise-worthiness” of God and God’s fiercely loving pro-activity on behalf of the weak and the poor and the oppressed. Those who would presume to offer their praise to God OR to lead God’s people in praising God would do well to remember this linkage, to remember, God’s bias on behalf of those denied access to the earth’s bountiful table of provision as our friend Ken Sehested has put it in our hearing so many times.
But … is it possible to praise God too much? Or to praise God wrongly? Is it possible for our praise—our worship—to become a hindrance to our wider responsibilities as God’s children and disciples of Jesus?
Apparently old prophet Amos thought so. To hear Amos describe the liturgical landscape of his day, you get the sense that the worship of Israel had pretty much reached its zenith. The simple spontaneous praise of God and God’s good works had evolved into a whole minor industry of worship … it’s kind of like some of these made for TV worship services that you can stumble across when channel-surfing. If only you could channel the preacher’s allowance for clothing, jewelry and hair-gel into a charitable cause.
Amos’ feelings about the worship of Israel as he observed and experienced it could be described as “less than charitable”.
Amos says:
21I hate, I despise your festivals,And reading the gospels you get the sense that Jesus is no less critical of Israel’s worship industry in his day, turning over the money changers tables and driving the worship merchants from the temple.
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
22Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
23Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
24But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
The prophet Amos speaks so loudly, so stridently that reverberations of his ancient prophetic tirade can still be heard today. And it serves as a reminder that prayer and praise separated from compassionate activity and pursuit of justice obstructs God’s work and thwarts God’s intentions for the human family.
Of all the sermons preached on the subject, I’m not aware of any more powerful than that preached by Isaiah, the prophet. In the 58th chapter, the prophet distinguishes between false and true worship.
Isaiah 58: False and True Worship
58Shout out, do not hold back![Preacher’s note: “At this point, I spoke away from the script for several minutes about two modern figures who are living out Isaiah’s vision: Dr. Paul Farmer (featured in Tracy Kidder’s “Mountains Beyond Mountains”) and Greg Mortenson (in his own account, “Three Cups of Tea”)].
Lift up your voice like a trumpet!
Announce to my people their rebellion,
to the house of Jacob their sins.
2Yet day after day they seek me
and delight to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that practised righteousness
and did not forsake the ordinance of their God;
they ask of me righteous judgements,
they delight to draw near to God.
3‘Why do we fast, but you do not see?
Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?’
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast-day,
and oppress all your workers.
4Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.
5Is such the fast that I choose,
a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,
and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the Lord?
6Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
7Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
8Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator* shall go before you,
the glory of the Lord shall be your rearguard.
9Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.
If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
10if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
11The Lord will guide you continually,
and satisfy your needs in parched places,
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail.
12Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.
13If you refrain from trampling the sabbath,
from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;
if you call the sabbath a delight
and the holy day of the Lord honourable;
if you honour it, not going your own ways,
serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs;*
14then you shall take delight in the Lord,
and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth;
I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
CONCLUSION:
People of Shell Ridge Church: If, upon, rising, we are moved to sing “Oh what a beautiful morning …”, let us likewise be moved to labor on behalf of those who awake to hunger … to violence … to oppressive conditions … to despair … to war.
If, when we gather to worship, we are moved while singing “How Great Thou Art” and “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee”, let us ground our praise and ground our adoration of God in re-committing ourselves to serve God’s creation, God’s family, our neighbors and friends throughout this good earth.
In the Stewardship of our selves and our substance, our persons and our plenty, and in the larger scheme of life, witness, worship and work: there is no higher praise to God that we can offer than the nearly wordless praise of:
loving … giving … and serving.
Amen.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Stewards of Grace
A sermon by Greg Ledbetter preached on November 4, 2007
23rd Sunday after Pentecost/Year C
Sermon Text: Luke 19:1-10
What is it that drives a person up a tree?
For Stephen Sillett, it was the chance to prove that the tree he was currently in was the world’s tallest. Stephen Sillett is a botanist at Humboldt State University in Arcata. Last year on the northern California coast, Sillett climbed a coastal redwood recently named “Hyperion” and proved that it was the tallest tree yet known to exist at 379.1 feet. On an earlier climb in another 300+ footer, Stillett fell from a height of around 28 stories and only saved himself by grabbing a branch on his way down. His shoulder was painfully ripped from its socket, but his grip held and he was saved.
What drove Julia Butterfly Hill to climb a 180 foot, 600 year old Redwood and not return to the earth for 738 days was a desire to prevent the Pacific Lumber Company from cutting down this old-growth giant. It is the same desire, as I understand, expressed by the tree-sitters who, even now, are perched outside the stadium on the Cal campus in Berkeley.
For any young girl or boy, it doesn’t take a noble cause to send you skyward. Just ask any one of a number of Shell Ridge kids who just can’t seem to stay out of our Sycamores.
When I was a young boy growing up in Port Angeles, Washington, there was an old Atlas Cedar across the street. We would ride our bikes and play with our matchbox cars in the dirt at its base. But sometimes when I was alone, I would climb the old tree’s branches almost like you would climb a ladder. Some 50-60 feet in the air where the top thinned out and swayed in the breeze I would perch and look out over our town. Had my mom known that from time to time I ascended to the wobbly top of this old tree, this mild-mannered pastor’s wife might have become prone to violence. There are some things your parents are better off not knowing. And there is something about climbing a tree for clearing your head or changing your perspective.
So what drove Zacchaeus up the sycamore tree as the author of Luke’s gospel tells it? This is one of the most familiar stories in the Bible for those of us who grew up going to Sunday school. Possibly it is because someone turned it into that snappy little song of which the Ramblers earlier reminded us: “Zacchaeus was a wee little man and a wee little man was he …”.
You know, as I try to shape a mental image of Zacchaeus, it’s not hard for me to imagine that a similar song was sung tauntingly and disparagingly about the once diminutive boy and now diminutive man. What is it about human beings that makes us want to exploit the perceived weaknesses of others? Zacchaeus’ vertically challenged condition was well-known enough that Luke notes that it is what drove Zacchaeus to climb that sycamore tree.
And isn’t it just like Luke’s gospel that all the wrong people seem drawn to Jesus. All the wrong people seem to “get” Jesus while all the right people fight him all the way to the cross. Zacchaeus is one of the “wrong people”. And it’s not his short stature that is what’s wrong in the sight of the good, respectable folk … it’s that he’s short on scruples and short on compassion and short on anything that makes a good person “good”. He’s the chief tax collector and as such had made himself rich on what he has forcibly extracted from residents of Jericho on behalf of the hated Roman government. If Zacchaeus had been wronged as a child, he made it up in spades as an adult.
He’s a bit of a Richard Nixon character. When Nixon lost to Pat Brown in the California governor’s race in 1962, he purportedly withdrew from politics and blamed the media for his loss saying: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more …”. When people start talking about themselves in the third person, it’s time to get worried.
Zacchaeus knows what it’s like to be kicked around. And while he’s had some measure of revenge, so it seems, something about Jesus drove him to want to get closer and have a look at this man that some were claiming to be a fulfillment of God’s promise to send a messiah, God’s representative on earth. If Jesus really did represent the goodness and mercy of the God of Israel, Zacchaeus wanted to see it for himself.
While Zacchaeus had long been judged by what people thought they knew about him, his tree-climbing reveals that there was more to know. And presumably “the more” that there was to know was that this heartless thug yet had the capacity to change … to transform … to discover a capacity for generosity and kindness.
As children we are warned not to pre-judge … not to judge a book by its exterior, yet on the other hand, paradoxically, we’re told—warned— that “we never get a second chance to make a good first impression”, that the initial seconds of every first meeting create an indelible image of a person that is almost impossible to erase. It’s possible to spend much of one’s adult life trying to outlive the old and often false myths of one’s childhood … the names we got called, the caricatures of our true selves that we got saddled with. Some of us have fled our families of upbringing because of our families’ refusal to let us change, develop, transform and their determination to tell the old stories of childhood as though they still define us. As odd as it seems for the son of a pastor who is himself a pastor to say it, this is in part my own story.
What did the good people of Jericho think they knew about Zacchaeus? Bad man. Cheater. Collaborator. Opportunist. Clear case of Napoleon complex. A neat little box. And it serves people’s own ends … their own needs to keep others in little boxes. As long as “bad people” behave like “bad people”, then perhaps the extremely modest goodness that I am capable of won’t seem quite so modest. This is partly what’s at stake in the story of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in the previous chapter of Luke who are both everheard praying at the temple. Here’s how Eugene Peterson describes the two prayers and their pray-ers in his translation, “The Message”:
The Pharisee posed and prayed like this: 'Oh, God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, crooks, adulterers, or, heaven forbid, like this tax man. I fast twice a week and tithe on all my income.' "Meanwhile the tax man, slumped in the shadows, his face in his hands, not daring to look up, said, 'God, give mercy. Forgive me, a sinner.'"
Do you not find it interesting to note that Jesus said that is was the tax man and NOT the Pharisee who went home made right with God? Luke tells us that Jesus told this story to “some who were complacently pleased with themselves over their moral performance and looked down their noses at the common people.”
Last night, several of us from Shell Ridge attended a celebration at San Leandro Community Church. We celebrated together the widening circle of inclusion on behalf of our lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgendered sisters and brothers in Christ. But reading the ancient and awful prayer of the Pharisee should remind us that widening circles of inclusion don’t likely happen easily or overnight.
Last night, my longtime and very dear friend and colleague, Jim Hopkins told a story I’d never heard before. During his admission into seminary, Jim was asked if there was anything that might ever cause him to ever leave the ministry in the American Baptist denomination. Jim quickly and confidently replied that if ever the denomination permitted homosexuals to assume pastoral leadership, that would be the time for his exit. This story was told in the midst of his description of his long, full circle of healing from the homophobia with which he’d been raised. He described how his parents had left the Southern Baptist church of his childhood because the Southern Baptists had just gotten “too liberal.” If you don’t know it, Jim has pastored for 18 years the congregation that has helped lead the healing of homophobia and helped widen the circle of inclusion for LBGT folk for a couple of generations. It is the congregation where I received my pastoral training. It is the congregation that aided in my own healing from homophobia.
I learned something else last night. George Barna is the leading pollster on behalf of Evangelical Christianity, in other words, on behalf of fairly traditional and conservative Christianity. He’s the Southern Baptist equivalent of the Gallup Poll. In a recent poll whose results have just been released, Barna asked both churched and un-churched young adults to describe in a single phrase what it was that summed up Christianity. A single phrase. Churches like us take a crack at that from time to time. We say about ourselves things like: “friendly … caring … welcoming … peacemaking … justice-seeking” … inclusive … any others? _____________________???
So, a large sampling of young adults from age 16-29, both self-described non-Christians as well as avowed churchgoers, were asked: “In a word, what describes Christianity?” 91% of the non-Christians and 80% of the regular church-goers, the Christians, said the same thing. The phrase that best describes Christianity from the vantage point of their generation is: “anti-homosexual”.
WOW. Wow. Is it this for which Jesus came to live, minister and die and be reborn? Is this what the modern church has been reduced to in its public witness on behalf of Jesus the Christ? This Jesus who called down from the tree Zacchaeus, this Jesus who joined Zacchaeus in his home at the common table, this Jesus who would soon go up on this own tree because he believed that nothing less than full “God-imagined” humanity resided in every human soul, every heart, and could be freed for the benefit of all … if only we saw people as God saw them.
If rotten to the core, tax-collecting, Rome-collaborating Zacchaeus, who was worse than even “robbers, crooks and adulterers” in the minds of his more righteous neighbors—if Zacchaeus could be transformed and discover within a wellspring of generosity and justice … well … what’s possible for you and for me? And what’s possible for the venerable and vulnerable church? Might we one day not be defined and described by what we are against but the many good things we are for?
Now, as much as ever, is the time for the church to prove to a cynical world that it is not a “heartless thug”, but a place and a people of transformation and healing, generosity and kindness, a people of hope where there is “a place for all.” Now, more than ever, may be the time for Shell Ridge Church to unequivocally declare that “if God made you, then we want you.” Now may be the time for us to plainly state that there are NO people, none of God’s human creation in its wondrous variety who are not fully welcome into the life and the love of this congregation.
It is at the table of fellowship in his own home that Zacchaeus discovers his own hidden capacities for transformation and generosity and fairness. It is at the table of fellowship in our home—THIS home—that we are given an opportunity to discover and live out these things as well. It is at the table of fellowship that we learn and re-learn how to be good stewards of the grace of God that has been showered so generously upon us in the person and the sacred friendship of Jesus.
It is also at the table of fellowship in this “home of faith” that we learn that it takes all of the Zacchaeuses of the world together with all of us to create the truest vision of hope and transformation for our world that is in such need and knows such hunger for bread and meaning and hope.
You’re learning these Sundays that we are in a Stewardship campaign … a campaign where we are invited to “surrender all” … where we are invited to place “all that we have” and “all that we are” in God’s hands so that God’s great work of Shalom may be done in our world and in our time.
Our theme this year is “Quilted Together in Community and Common Ministry”. As I’ve thought a bit about this theme, it occurs to me that there’s nothing lonelier than a single “quilt block”. Can you imagine trying to get warm under a single, tiny square of fabric? It is only as dozens and hundreds of odd bits of random fabric are lovingly joined together that a quilt reaches its potential as a source of protective warmth and a thing of great beauty.
Very much the same is true of the bread that we break at each and every time of communion. The individual ingredients of bread are, by themselves, basically AWFUL … it is only being mixed together in the right proportions … lovingly kneaded … and carefully baked that we get a good loaf of bread that is a delight to both the mouth and the soul.
On our own, we cannot rescue the tarnished name of Christianity … or save the world from its many enormous challenges or its seeming determination to destroy itself. But when we come together around the table with our hearts and hands open to receiving the grace of God in Christ as symbolized in these gifts, we give God the chance to soften us and transform us. We give God the chance to channel the very same grace that has been given to us into the lives of the world around us.
It is at the table of the Lord where we know grace and feel the powers of transformation at work and where we can hear and repeat the words spoken to the transformed and transforming chief tax collector: “TODAY is “salvation day” in this house.”
People of Shell Ridge and Stewards of God’s grace: TODAY IS the day that God has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
Today IS salvation day in this house!
Amen.
23rd Sunday after Pentecost/Year C
Sermon Text: Luke 19:1-10
What is it that drives a person up a tree?
For Stephen Sillett, it was the chance to prove that the tree he was currently in was the world’s tallest. Stephen Sillett is a botanist at Humboldt State University in Arcata. Last year on the northern California coast, Sillett climbed a coastal redwood recently named “Hyperion” and proved that it was the tallest tree yet known to exist at 379.1 feet. On an earlier climb in another 300+ footer, Stillett fell from a height of around 28 stories and only saved himself by grabbing a branch on his way down. His shoulder was painfully ripped from its socket, but his grip held and he was saved.
What drove Julia Butterfly Hill to climb a 180 foot, 600 year old Redwood and not return to the earth for 738 days was a desire to prevent the Pacific Lumber Company from cutting down this old-growth giant. It is the same desire, as I understand, expressed by the tree-sitters who, even now, are perched outside the stadium on the Cal campus in Berkeley.
For any young girl or boy, it doesn’t take a noble cause to send you skyward. Just ask any one of a number of Shell Ridge kids who just can’t seem to stay out of our Sycamores.
When I was a young boy growing up in Port Angeles, Washington, there was an old Atlas Cedar across the street. We would ride our bikes and play with our matchbox cars in the dirt at its base. But sometimes when I was alone, I would climb the old tree’s branches almost like you would climb a ladder. Some 50-60 feet in the air where the top thinned out and swayed in the breeze I would perch and look out over our town. Had my mom known that from time to time I ascended to the wobbly top of this old tree, this mild-mannered pastor’s wife might have become prone to violence. There are some things your parents are better off not knowing. And there is something about climbing a tree for clearing your head or changing your perspective.
So what drove Zacchaeus up the sycamore tree as the author of Luke’s gospel tells it? This is one of the most familiar stories in the Bible for those of us who grew up going to Sunday school. Possibly it is because someone turned it into that snappy little song of which the Ramblers earlier reminded us: “Zacchaeus was a wee little man and a wee little man was he …”.
You know, as I try to shape a mental image of Zacchaeus, it’s not hard for me to imagine that a similar song was sung tauntingly and disparagingly about the once diminutive boy and now diminutive man. What is it about human beings that makes us want to exploit the perceived weaknesses of others? Zacchaeus’ vertically challenged condition was well-known enough that Luke notes that it is what drove Zacchaeus to climb that sycamore tree.
And isn’t it just like Luke’s gospel that all the wrong people seem drawn to Jesus. All the wrong people seem to “get” Jesus while all the right people fight him all the way to the cross. Zacchaeus is one of the “wrong people”. And it’s not his short stature that is what’s wrong in the sight of the good, respectable folk … it’s that he’s short on scruples and short on compassion and short on anything that makes a good person “good”. He’s the chief tax collector and as such had made himself rich on what he has forcibly extracted from residents of Jericho on behalf of the hated Roman government. If Zacchaeus had been wronged as a child, he made it up in spades as an adult.
He’s a bit of a Richard Nixon character. When Nixon lost to Pat Brown in the California governor’s race in 1962, he purportedly withdrew from politics and blamed the media for his loss saying: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more …”. When people start talking about themselves in the third person, it’s time to get worried.
Zacchaeus knows what it’s like to be kicked around. And while he’s had some measure of revenge, so it seems, something about Jesus drove him to want to get closer and have a look at this man that some were claiming to be a fulfillment of God’s promise to send a messiah, God’s representative on earth. If Jesus really did represent the goodness and mercy of the God of Israel, Zacchaeus wanted to see it for himself.
While Zacchaeus had long been judged by what people thought they knew about him, his tree-climbing reveals that there was more to know. And presumably “the more” that there was to know was that this heartless thug yet had the capacity to change … to transform … to discover a capacity for generosity and kindness.
As children we are warned not to pre-judge … not to judge a book by its exterior, yet on the other hand, paradoxically, we’re told—warned— that “we never get a second chance to make a good first impression”, that the initial seconds of every first meeting create an indelible image of a person that is almost impossible to erase. It’s possible to spend much of one’s adult life trying to outlive the old and often false myths of one’s childhood … the names we got called, the caricatures of our true selves that we got saddled with. Some of us have fled our families of upbringing because of our families’ refusal to let us change, develop, transform and their determination to tell the old stories of childhood as though they still define us. As odd as it seems for the son of a pastor who is himself a pastor to say it, this is in part my own story.
What did the good people of Jericho think they knew about Zacchaeus? Bad man. Cheater. Collaborator. Opportunist. Clear case of Napoleon complex. A neat little box. And it serves people’s own ends … their own needs to keep others in little boxes. As long as “bad people” behave like “bad people”, then perhaps the extremely modest goodness that I am capable of won’t seem quite so modest. This is partly what’s at stake in the story of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in the previous chapter of Luke who are both everheard praying at the temple. Here’s how Eugene Peterson describes the two prayers and their pray-ers in his translation, “The Message”:
The Pharisee posed and prayed like this: 'Oh, God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, crooks, adulterers, or, heaven forbid, like this tax man. I fast twice a week and tithe on all my income.' "Meanwhile the tax man, slumped in the shadows, his face in his hands, not daring to look up, said, 'God, give mercy. Forgive me, a sinner.'"
Do you not find it interesting to note that Jesus said that is was the tax man and NOT the Pharisee who went home made right with God? Luke tells us that Jesus told this story to “some who were complacently pleased with themselves over their moral performance and looked down their noses at the common people.”
Last night, several of us from Shell Ridge attended a celebration at San Leandro Community Church. We celebrated together the widening circle of inclusion on behalf of our lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgendered sisters and brothers in Christ. But reading the ancient and awful prayer of the Pharisee should remind us that widening circles of inclusion don’t likely happen easily or overnight.
Last night, my longtime and very dear friend and colleague, Jim Hopkins told a story I’d never heard before. During his admission into seminary, Jim was asked if there was anything that might ever cause him to ever leave the ministry in the American Baptist denomination. Jim quickly and confidently replied that if ever the denomination permitted homosexuals to assume pastoral leadership, that would be the time for his exit. This story was told in the midst of his description of his long, full circle of healing from the homophobia with which he’d been raised. He described how his parents had left the Southern Baptist church of his childhood because the Southern Baptists had just gotten “too liberal.” If you don’t know it, Jim has pastored for 18 years the congregation that has helped lead the healing of homophobia and helped widen the circle of inclusion for LBGT folk for a couple of generations. It is the congregation where I received my pastoral training. It is the congregation that aided in my own healing from homophobia.
I learned something else last night. George Barna is the leading pollster on behalf of Evangelical Christianity, in other words, on behalf of fairly traditional and conservative Christianity. He’s the Southern Baptist equivalent of the Gallup Poll. In a recent poll whose results have just been released, Barna asked both churched and un-churched young adults to describe in a single phrase what it was that summed up Christianity. A single phrase. Churches like us take a crack at that from time to time. We say about ourselves things like: “friendly … caring … welcoming … peacemaking … justice-seeking” … inclusive … any others? _____________________???
So, a large sampling of young adults from age 16-29, both self-described non-Christians as well as avowed churchgoers, were asked: “In a word, what describes Christianity?” 91% of the non-Christians and 80% of the regular church-goers, the Christians, said the same thing. The phrase that best describes Christianity from the vantage point of their generation is: “anti-homosexual”.
WOW. Wow. Is it this for which Jesus came to live, minister and die and be reborn? Is this what the modern church has been reduced to in its public witness on behalf of Jesus the Christ? This Jesus who called down from the tree Zacchaeus, this Jesus who joined Zacchaeus in his home at the common table, this Jesus who would soon go up on this own tree because he believed that nothing less than full “God-imagined” humanity resided in every human soul, every heart, and could be freed for the benefit of all … if only we saw people as God saw them.
If rotten to the core, tax-collecting, Rome-collaborating Zacchaeus, who was worse than even “robbers, crooks and adulterers” in the minds of his more righteous neighbors—if Zacchaeus could be transformed and discover within a wellspring of generosity and justice … well … what’s possible for you and for me? And what’s possible for the venerable and vulnerable church? Might we one day not be defined and described by what we are against but the many good things we are for?
Now, as much as ever, is the time for the church to prove to a cynical world that it is not a “heartless thug”, but a place and a people of transformation and healing, generosity and kindness, a people of hope where there is “a place for all.” Now, more than ever, may be the time for Shell Ridge Church to unequivocally declare that “if God made you, then we want you.” Now may be the time for us to plainly state that there are NO people, none of God’s human creation in its wondrous variety who are not fully welcome into the life and the love of this congregation.
It is at the table of fellowship in his own home that Zacchaeus discovers his own hidden capacities for transformation and generosity and fairness. It is at the table of fellowship in our home—THIS home—that we are given an opportunity to discover and live out these things as well. It is at the table of fellowship that we learn and re-learn how to be good stewards of the grace of God that has been showered so generously upon us in the person and the sacred friendship of Jesus.
It is also at the table of fellowship in this “home of faith” that we learn that it takes all of the Zacchaeuses of the world together with all of us to create the truest vision of hope and transformation for our world that is in such need and knows such hunger for bread and meaning and hope.
You’re learning these Sundays that we are in a Stewardship campaign … a campaign where we are invited to “surrender all” … where we are invited to place “all that we have” and “all that we are” in God’s hands so that God’s great work of Shalom may be done in our world and in our time.
Our theme this year is “Quilted Together in Community and Common Ministry”. As I’ve thought a bit about this theme, it occurs to me that there’s nothing lonelier than a single “quilt block”. Can you imagine trying to get warm under a single, tiny square of fabric? It is only as dozens and hundreds of odd bits of random fabric are lovingly joined together that a quilt reaches its potential as a source of protective warmth and a thing of great beauty.
Very much the same is true of the bread that we break at each and every time of communion. The individual ingredients of bread are, by themselves, basically AWFUL … it is only being mixed together in the right proportions … lovingly kneaded … and carefully baked that we get a good loaf of bread that is a delight to both the mouth and the soul.
On our own, we cannot rescue the tarnished name of Christianity … or save the world from its many enormous challenges or its seeming determination to destroy itself. But when we come together around the table with our hearts and hands open to receiving the grace of God in Christ as symbolized in these gifts, we give God the chance to soften us and transform us. We give God the chance to channel the very same grace that has been given to us into the lives of the world around us.
It is at the table of the Lord where we know grace and feel the powers of transformation at work and where we can hear and repeat the words spoken to the transformed and transforming chief tax collector: “TODAY is “salvation day” in this house.”
People of Shell Ridge and Stewards of God’s grace: TODAY IS the day that God has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
Today IS salvation day in this house!
Amen.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
In Good Times & Bad
A sermon by Greg Ledbetter preached on October 14, 2007
20th Sunday after Pentecost/Year C
Texts: Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Psalm 66; II Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17:11-19
This was not exactly another Friday night. It was intended to be the night of a lifetime … the night among all nights for the young woman and man. They had met a year earlier and now were preparing to enter into a life covenant with one another. The wedding was scheduled to be performed in a beautiful outdoor courtyard—enclosed on all sides, but wide open to the sky. Unfortunately, between the rehearsal on Thursday and the afternoon of the wedding on Friday, it poured BUCKETS.
October in California is famous for its lingering Indian summer, warm days and gentle evenings, soft breezes and rustling leaves. But this year has started off a bit on the soggy side and it threatened to drive the soon-to-be-married couple into a drab room off of the courtyard where they would, to be sure, be properly hitched, but not in the style they’d hoped. At five o’clock, the rain had stopped, but threatening clouds persisted. The temperature was hovering in the high 50’s—but at the moment, at least, it wasn’t raining. The hotel staff set out the folding chairs and stood the flowers on their stands where they danced in the breeze. A friend of the family rolled out the white runner and scattered rose petals daintily on its surface … and then a gust of wind blew it all away. At 5:30, there were occasional gaps in the clouds overhead, but still no rain. Now a solitary musician, a saxophonist, began his gentle wailing while the guests began to mill around the back of the courtyard.
Finally the time came: the guests were seated with the bride and groom’s mothers not far behind. The groom, best man and I entered from the side and were soon joined by the matron of honor. Then the bride came strolling down the flower-strewn, but now runner-less aisle, her arm looped in her father’s while the saxophone player offered up the most interesting version of Here Comes the Bride I’d ever heard. And still, the rain restrained itself from dampening the couple’s hopes and sending us all scurrying. We were shivering, but we were dry. Soon, we found ourselves in that so familiar and so difficult verbal terrain where spouses-to-be audaciously claim that no matter what lies ahead, they will survive it together as a couple, they will stick with it through thick and thin. In spite of admittedly knowing nearly nothing about the future and what it holds, this couple was the latest in a really, REALLY long line of marital daredevils to claim that their covenantal promise is: “for better, for worse … for richer, for poorer … in sickness and in health.”
The other really long line that Friday night’s couple joined was that of the writers and singers and poets and prophets and dreamers of the Bible whose every thought and word was based on the belief that God’s love and presence was as predictably certain as the daily emergence of the sun and the laws of gravity and the fact that the California Golden Bears will never quite be able to keep from stumbling in their ascent to the top of the college football heap. Corinne, let’s just let that deep sigh out and move on.
The Biblical writers knew they dwelt in an errant universe where calamity could strike at any time and where humanity could be unspeakably cruel. But that was far less important to the Biblical writers than the simple facts at the heart of the universe that God “IS”—simply “IS” … and that the God who “IS” is “for” God’s creation … for the earth and all that is in it. For the Biblical writers, God was a loving creator who had included God’s own being in the creation so that it was impossible that they could ever be apart.
Much, much later, in his letter to the Roman church, Paul reminded them that “nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God” … NOTHING. It was as though God had stood alone shivering in the early twilight of the creation of the universe and pledged God’s own being to a creation that was yet to be, promising for God’s own part: “I take you to be mine: for better, for worse … for richer, for poorer … in sickness and in health.” What has been joined together in the heart and imagination of God’s own being, nothing … NOTHING can put asunder. Not even our own willful, back-turning, back-sliding, so careless-in-the-things-that-really-matter selves can force God to turn God’s back on us. The author of the second epistle to Timothy, writing in the Spirit of Paul, said: if we are faithless, God remains faithful—for God cannot deny God’self.
It would be a denial of God’s own being to be anything other than faithful to God’s children, to God’s creation. Would that human parents could remain as consistently true to their best parental instincts and ideals. Would that the 16 year old boy in Martinez had had a father and the 9 year old boy in Berkeley had had a mother whose hearts were as clear about remaining faithful and loving as God is toward us all. And is it not implied in the contract made at birth—if not conception, that we parents—both biological as well as “situational”—promise with every cell and neural impulse to seek the highest good for the children we parent, truly: “for better, for worse … for richer, for poorer … in sickness and in health.” And I’ll leave it to the leaders of tonight’s “Healthcare for ALL” to possibly suggest that were we as faithful to the children among us as we believe God is to us, that there would be no uninsured child in this nation OR, if it be in our power, anywhere on this planet.
We may affirm that God is a faithful, loving parent who wills our highest good, but we’ll also acknowledge that God does not shield us from every earthly ill.
Several years ago at Peace Camp … several of us sat in a dormitory lounge passing a guitar around and sharing songs we knew. It’s always been one of my favorite parts of the summer gathering. My friend Joe Phelps, a pastor in Louisville, picked up the guitar and started singing a song called: “Poetry” and it became an instant “dormitory lounge” classic. Walt Wilkins is a friend of Joe’s and the writer of this song. Listening to the song, Walt clearly has no trouble thinking of God as creator and sustainer and gentle lover of all that is:
Now, somebody made everything
From the soul, inside out to Saturn's rings
How my baby smiles and how Ray Charles sings
Of course we were created
The clouds make rain, the ocean makes sand
The earth breathes fire, and lava makes land
Now that took a mighty hand
And a wild imagination
One of these days the Ramblers are gonna show up and sing Walt Wilkin’s wonderful song.
But the verse of the song that has always stuck with me the most is just a little snippet that goes: “the world has a way, if you know what I mean, of scuffin’ you up”. When I first heard them, those words hit with surprising force. Maybe it was because my pastor friend singing them had been through some very tough times. Maybe it was because I knew that each of us in that circle had been scuffed up a time or two or ten. Have you ever been “scuffed up” by life?
I’ll bet that’s how Israel in exile might have described it when Jeremiah spoke to them the word of the Lord that told them to hang in there.
And I’m fairly certain it is “life in exile” that is being described when the psalmist tells this morning of “being tried as silver is tried … of being brought into the ensnaring net … of having burdens laid on their backs … of having to endure a trek through fire and water.”
And what about being afflicted with a disease, as Luke tells it, that causes the whole human family to flee from the sight of you. It helps to remember that being “exiled” doesn’t necessarily involve being shipped off to a foreign land … it’s also being treated as foreign and strange and frightful by those of your own community … even those who are unaware they’re doing it … it is being exiled while yet in your own land.
Exile can even be something as simple as age and aging--though that’s certainly not true for everyone. I’m thinking right now of Millie Harris, whose birthday we celebrated on Wednesday at the American Baptist Women’s White Cross luncheon. Seeing Millie on her walker lets you know that life’s laid some “scuffing” on her, yet she entered the patio room with her trademark smile on her face and a quip on her lips. And perched jauntily on her head was an amazing velvet birthday cake hat complete with velvet candles.
Now no matter what age it is you are turning, it is good to be remembered on your birthday … perhaps it’s a small symbolic reminder that at the heart of all things, we are beloved.
I have a dear friend whose friendship goes back over thirty years. We met when he worked at my uncle’s church camp while I had a huge crush on his sister. In the more active times of our friendship, we were like blood-brothers and soul-mates. We roomed together in college and even began seminary together before he wandered off to get married and … scuffed up a bit by the experience.
He has long since re-married and has a wonderful family and a good career. Our friendship has been in a kind of “maintenance mode” in recent years, but the one thing we can always count on is that a birthday will never pass but that we will pause to call and catch up with each other. On May 5th, I called and wished my friend a happy 49th birthday. On September 7, on my 29th birthday … er, my 49th birthday, the day came and went with nary a word from my friend. It seemed odd to me, but perhaps it was simply a measure of how many years it had been since we’d been “best friends”. A whole month went by in silence … and then one day, a note:
Hey Greg,
I just realized for the first time in all the years I forgot your B-day. I'm sorry. I have been going through a lot of stuff lately. I know that is really no excuse, but it took my mind of off regular things for awhile. On the 28th of August I had to have a prostate biopsy. That was not fun. Then I had to wait to hear if I had cancer. My biopsy came out okay, except for one sample. They took 14 samples—NOT FUN!
From August 17th through September 4th I went through at least 20 tests. I had MRI's MRA's for my brain and neck. I was in the hospital almost every day. So, the end to my summer was not fun for me. After all the tests they ruled out a lot of things. I was diagnosed on September 4th with Parkinson's disease the day before school started. At first the doc thought I had symptoms of what the call Parkinsonism's. There is no medication for that form and the symptoms are horrible and scary. He tried me on a medication and said I'm going to treat you for Parkinson's and if the medication works on you; that will be a good thing. Well, the medication worked thus it relieved a lot of anxiety for Polly and me. She was a wreck anyway because she was reading stuff off the net. I choose to not read stuff and I went right to acceptance. Polly on the other has had a really hard time. But, now she is better. As of yet I don't have the tremors. Most of my symptoms are motor related. I have not missed one day of school. I'm still running as much as I can. My left side is affected a bit more than the right side. All in all I'm doing well. I hope you and your family is doing well too. Take care,
I hope you had a good B-day.
Steve
“Oh that my head were waters, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night.”
My friend Steve is entering a new time in his life—but “new” in this instance does not imply better or improved. He is entering a kind of exile where slowly, but damnably surely, his body will become exiled from itself.
We have all seen changes of one terrifying kind or another afflict people we love. And many of these changes are denoted by innocuous names that truly fail to convey the dreaded implications. And yet when we hear these names, there is a stiffening in our posture and perhaps a similar stiffening in our spirit.
What do we do when we get to the other half of the promise that seemed held out to us so cheerily at birth. At birth and in youth and even the perpetual youthfulness we many of us seem determined to live out, we often live as though the first half of the marital and divine promise is the only one we’ll ever know: better … richer … health. So what do we do when that chapter seems to end and now we arrive at the second part of the marital and divine promise: worse … poorer … sickness.
Perhaps we could call this “ultimate measure” time. You’ll likely recall that famous quote of Martin Luther King, Jr. when he said: The ultimate measure of a person is not where he or she stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he or she stands at times of challenge and controversy. What is true for the trials and tribulations of the world we live in can also be very true of the trials and tribulations we must face as solitary human beings as we come up against our own limits, our own mortality. Our “ultimate measure” will likely be exposed by the serious scuffing life can lay upon us.
My friend Steve and I took classes in college from an Old Testament professor who was a bull of a man. On the handball court, he would regularly whip opponents half his age. Then the summer between my junior and senior year, this stalwart professor suffered a serious, but non-fatal heart attack. And though he regained his health, his spirit was irreparably broken. And when he finally died several years later, it could be said that he had truly died some years before.
If we’re going to talk about the “ultimate measure” of a person, it’s not that we’re speaking of superhuman existential courage … scoffing at death when it sneers in our face. That’s not it. But it may be that the ultimate measure is the kind demonstrated by the 10 lepers in Luke’s story. The ultimate measure of a person is that in our hour of greatest need, we turn with confidence to that which will never fail us, will always be with us and for us, for better, worse, rich and poor, sick and healthy times of our existence.
The ten lepers know that in their condition, they really have no one to turn to, no one who will be with them and for them … except other lepers. But the communities of their upbringing and the center of their faith are all virtually closed to them. And with God so very strongly identified with the family and the temple, the lepers are, therefore, virtually without God. Yet in Jesus they see a glimmer of hope. The prophets of old had spoken of hope and healing that would come to barren and wasted places. And in Jesus they see the word of that hope made flesh.
And though Jesus had all the same reasons to reject the lepers as everyone else seemed to, he did not. We do not know exactly what transpired, but Luke tells us that Jesus inspires the ten lepers to go to the priest to present themselves and in that simple act of trust they find their healing. But Luke goes on to tell us that one of the lepers is “leprous” in more than one way—he not only has the dreaded skin ailment, but he is also a despised Samaritan. And though he, like the other nine, has been restored to health, he yet remains a Samaritan and what good will it do him to present himself to a priest of Israel, what good will it do for him to “go back home” when his home is not where the others are going.
And so, with what surely is some great trepidation, he turns back … back to the one in whom there had been no judgment, only welcome and hope and healing. I deeply appreciate what Ann Fontaine says in her blog in considering the odd actions of the healed Samaritan leper, returning to Jesus. She says: “When the ten lepers were all suffering from a common disease, they were bonded by their outcast status. When they were all healed, the nine returned to their life: their ethnic and religious life. The foreigner only had Jesus at that point … and perhaps he had found his true home.”
Given the chance, I wonder how my friend, Steve, would describe his encounter with God--with the Divine--in this utterly new and foreign time in his life. He did say to me in his note that, unlike his wife who has been quite undone by it all, that he has “gone right into acceptance.” His reference is, you might know, to Elizabeth Kubler Ross’ “stages of grief”. In her classic book, On Death and Dying, Ross describes the five stages as:
* Denial (this isn't happening to me!)
* Anger (why is this happening to me?)
* Bargaining (I promise I'll be a better person if...)
* Depression (I just don't care anymore)
* Acceptance (I'm ready for whatever comes)
I told Steve that in jumping straight to “acceptance”, he was a better and stronger soul than I am.
Jeremiah seems almost pastoral in seeking to move the exiles past all of the other very understandable emotional stages to the stage of acceptance. Might it be in acceptance of what cannot be easily or immediately changed that we find new strength for living and wellsprings of God’s grace?
Jeremiah tells the broken-hearted exiles who are now foreigners in someone else’s land, to settle into this experience, to live their lives the best they can, to resume the normal patterns of their lives as though they had not been uprooted and forcibly moved to a foreign land. It was in exile that the people of Israel learned to live with God in their hearts, and not just in the temple. Perhaps in finding God in the midst of their exile, the exiles found their true home.
Every one of us here, I suspect, has something … a wound, a weakness, an awareness … that cannot be easily or immediately changed. It may literally be a sickness unto death or it may be an inner affliction that will dog and worry us all the long way to the grave. Whoever we are, whatever our affliction, we may find our healing in approaching the source of grace and presenting ourselves to that source with “bold humility”.
We cannot guarantee that the promises we make to one another in good faith will survive the rough and tumble of human existence, we cannot guarantee that the good healthy genes of our parents will help us beat every deadly disease, we cannot guarantee that we will nimbly avoid every awful accident. We can only acknowledge that within the heart of all that is in this world, this universe, God is for us … that wherever we are, God IS with healing and grace for our change-battered souls.
God is the firm foundation upon which our lives can safely rest, come what may. And, as we will sing in a few moments:
The soul that on Jesus has leaned for repose,
I will not, I will not desert to its foes;
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,
I’ll never, no never, no never forsake.
Amen.
20th Sunday after Pentecost/Year C
Texts: Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Psalm 66; II Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17:11-19
This was not exactly another Friday night. It was intended to be the night of a lifetime … the night among all nights for the young woman and man. They had met a year earlier and now were preparing to enter into a life covenant with one another. The wedding was scheduled to be performed in a beautiful outdoor courtyard—enclosed on all sides, but wide open to the sky. Unfortunately, between the rehearsal on Thursday and the afternoon of the wedding on Friday, it poured BUCKETS.
October in California is famous for its lingering Indian summer, warm days and gentle evenings, soft breezes and rustling leaves. But this year has started off a bit on the soggy side and it threatened to drive the soon-to-be-married couple into a drab room off of the courtyard where they would, to be sure, be properly hitched, but not in the style they’d hoped. At five o’clock, the rain had stopped, but threatening clouds persisted. The temperature was hovering in the high 50’s—but at the moment, at least, it wasn’t raining. The hotel staff set out the folding chairs and stood the flowers on their stands where they danced in the breeze. A friend of the family rolled out the white runner and scattered rose petals daintily on its surface … and then a gust of wind blew it all away. At 5:30, there were occasional gaps in the clouds overhead, but still no rain. Now a solitary musician, a saxophonist, began his gentle wailing while the guests began to mill around the back of the courtyard.
Finally the time came: the guests were seated with the bride and groom’s mothers not far behind. The groom, best man and I entered from the side and were soon joined by the matron of honor. Then the bride came strolling down the flower-strewn, but now runner-less aisle, her arm looped in her father’s while the saxophone player offered up the most interesting version of Here Comes the Bride I’d ever heard. And still, the rain restrained itself from dampening the couple’s hopes and sending us all scurrying. We were shivering, but we were dry. Soon, we found ourselves in that so familiar and so difficult verbal terrain where spouses-to-be audaciously claim that no matter what lies ahead, they will survive it together as a couple, they will stick with it through thick and thin. In spite of admittedly knowing nearly nothing about the future and what it holds, this couple was the latest in a really, REALLY long line of marital daredevils to claim that their covenantal promise is: “for better, for worse … for richer, for poorer … in sickness and in health.”
The other really long line that Friday night’s couple joined was that of the writers and singers and poets and prophets and dreamers of the Bible whose every thought and word was based on the belief that God’s love and presence was as predictably certain as the daily emergence of the sun and the laws of gravity and the fact that the California Golden Bears will never quite be able to keep from stumbling in their ascent to the top of the college football heap. Corinne, let’s just let that deep sigh out and move on.
The Biblical writers knew they dwelt in an errant universe where calamity could strike at any time and where humanity could be unspeakably cruel. But that was far less important to the Biblical writers than the simple facts at the heart of the universe that God “IS”—simply “IS” … and that the God who “IS” is “for” God’s creation … for the earth and all that is in it. For the Biblical writers, God was a loving creator who had included God’s own being in the creation so that it was impossible that they could ever be apart.
Much, much later, in his letter to the Roman church, Paul reminded them that “nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God” … NOTHING. It was as though God had stood alone shivering in the early twilight of the creation of the universe and pledged God’s own being to a creation that was yet to be, promising for God’s own part: “I take you to be mine: for better, for worse … for richer, for poorer … in sickness and in health.” What has been joined together in the heart and imagination of God’s own being, nothing … NOTHING can put asunder. Not even our own willful, back-turning, back-sliding, so careless-in-the-things-that-really-matter selves can force God to turn God’s back on us. The author of the second epistle to Timothy, writing in the Spirit of Paul, said: if we are faithless, God remains faithful—for God cannot deny God’self.
It would be a denial of God’s own being to be anything other than faithful to God’s children, to God’s creation. Would that human parents could remain as consistently true to their best parental instincts and ideals. Would that the 16 year old boy in Martinez had had a father and the 9 year old boy in Berkeley had had a mother whose hearts were as clear about remaining faithful and loving as God is toward us all. And is it not implied in the contract made at birth—if not conception, that we parents—both biological as well as “situational”—promise with every cell and neural impulse to seek the highest good for the children we parent, truly: “for better, for worse … for richer, for poorer … in sickness and in health.” And I’ll leave it to the leaders of tonight’s “Healthcare for ALL” to possibly suggest that were we as faithful to the children among us as we believe God is to us, that there would be no uninsured child in this nation OR, if it be in our power, anywhere on this planet.
We may affirm that God is a faithful, loving parent who wills our highest good, but we’ll also acknowledge that God does not shield us from every earthly ill.
Several years ago at Peace Camp … several of us sat in a dormitory lounge passing a guitar around and sharing songs we knew. It’s always been one of my favorite parts of the summer gathering. My friend Joe Phelps, a pastor in Louisville, picked up the guitar and started singing a song called: “Poetry” and it became an instant “dormitory lounge” classic. Walt Wilkins is a friend of Joe’s and the writer of this song. Listening to the song, Walt clearly has no trouble thinking of God as creator and sustainer and gentle lover of all that is:
Now, somebody made everything
From the soul, inside out to Saturn's rings
How my baby smiles and how Ray Charles sings
Of course we were created
The clouds make rain, the ocean makes sand
The earth breathes fire, and lava makes land
Now that took a mighty hand
And a wild imagination
One of these days the Ramblers are gonna show up and sing Walt Wilkin’s wonderful song.
But the verse of the song that has always stuck with me the most is just a little snippet that goes: “the world has a way, if you know what I mean, of scuffin’ you up”. When I first heard them, those words hit with surprising force. Maybe it was because my pastor friend singing them had been through some very tough times. Maybe it was because I knew that each of us in that circle had been scuffed up a time or two or ten. Have you ever been “scuffed up” by life?
I’ll bet that’s how Israel in exile might have described it when Jeremiah spoke to them the word of the Lord that told them to hang in there.
And I’m fairly certain it is “life in exile” that is being described when the psalmist tells this morning of “being tried as silver is tried … of being brought into the ensnaring net … of having burdens laid on their backs … of having to endure a trek through fire and water.”
And what about being afflicted with a disease, as Luke tells it, that causes the whole human family to flee from the sight of you. It helps to remember that being “exiled” doesn’t necessarily involve being shipped off to a foreign land … it’s also being treated as foreign and strange and frightful by those of your own community … even those who are unaware they’re doing it … it is being exiled while yet in your own land.
Exile can even be something as simple as age and aging--though that’s certainly not true for everyone. I’m thinking right now of Millie Harris, whose birthday we celebrated on Wednesday at the American Baptist Women’s White Cross luncheon. Seeing Millie on her walker lets you know that life’s laid some “scuffing” on her, yet she entered the patio room with her trademark smile on her face and a quip on her lips. And perched jauntily on her head was an amazing velvet birthday cake hat complete with velvet candles.
Now no matter what age it is you are turning, it is good to be remembered on your birthday … perhaps it’s a small symbolic reminder that at the heart of all things, we are beloved.
I have a dear friend whose friendship goes back over thirty years. We met when he worked at my uncle’s church camp while I had a huge crush on his sister. In the more active times of our friendship, we were like blood-brothers and soul-mates. We roomed together in college and even began seminary together before he wandered off to get married and … scuffed up a bit by the experience.
He has long since re-married and has a wonderful family and a good career. Our friendship has been in a kind of “maintenance mode” in recent years, but the one thing we can always count on is that a birthday will never pass but that we will pause to call and catch up with each other. On May 5th, I called and wished my friend a happy 49th birthday. On September 7, on my 29th birthday … er, my 49th birthday, the day came and went with nary a word from my friend. It seemed odd to me, but perhaps it was simply a measure of how many years it had been since we’d been “best friends”. A whole month went by in silence … and then one day, a note:
Hey Greg,
I just realized for the first time in all the years I forgot your B-day. I'm sorry. I have been going through a lot of stuff lately. I know that is really no excuse, but it took my mind of off regular things for awhile. On the 28th of August I had to have a prostate biopsy. That was not fun. Then I had to wait to hear if I had cancer. My biopsy came out okay, except for one sample. They took 14 samples—NOT FUN!
From August 17th through September 4th I went through at least 20 tests. I had MRI's MRA's for my brain and neck. I was in the hospital almost every day. So, the end to my summer was not fun for me. After all the tests they ruled out a lot of things. I was diagnosed on September 4th with Parkinson's disease the day before school started. At first the doc thought I had symptoms of what the call Parkinsonism's. There is no medication for that form and the symptoms are horrible and scary. He tried me on a medication and said I'm going to treat you for Parkinson's and if the medication works on you; that will be a good thing. Well, the medication worked thus it relieved a lot of anxiety for Polly and me. She was a wreck anyway because she was reading stuff off the net. I choose to not read stuff and I went right to acceptance. Polly on the other has had a really hard time. But, now she is better. As of yet I don't have the tremors. Most of my symptoms are motor related. I have not missed one day of school. I'm still running as much as I can. My left side is affected a bit more than the right side. All in all I'm doing well. I hope you and your family is doing well too. Take care,
I hope you had a good B-day.
Steve
“Oh that my head were waters, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night.”
My friend Steve is entering a new time in his life—but “new” in this instance does not imply better or improved. He is entering a kind of exile where slowly, but damnably surely, his body will become exiled from itself.
We have all seen changes of one terrifying kind or another afflict people we love. And many of these changes are denoted by innocuous names that truly fail to convey the dreaded implications. And yet when we hear these names, there is a stiffening in our posture and perhaps a similar stiffening in our spirit.
What do we do when we get to the other half of the promise that seemed held out to us so cheerily at birth. At birth and in youth and even the perpetual youthfulness we many of us seem determined to live out, we often live as though the first half of the marital and divine promise is the only one we’ll ever know: better … richer … health. So what do we do when that chapter seems to end and now we arrive at the second part of the marital and divine promise: worse … poorer … sickness.
Perhaps we could call this “ultimate measure” time. You’ll likely recall that famous quote of Martin Luther King, Jr. when he said: The ultimate measure of a person is not where he or she stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he or she stands at times of challenge and controversy. What is true for the trials and tribulations of the world we live in can also be very true of the trials and tribulations we must face as solitary human beings as we come up against our own limits, our own mortality. Our “ultimate measure” will likely be exposed by the serious scuffing life can lay upon us.
My friend Steve and I took classes in college from an Old Testament professor who was a bull of a man. On the handball court, he would regularly whip opponents half his age. Then the summer between my junior and senior year, this stalwart professor suffered a serious, but non-fatal heart attack. And though he regained his health, his spirit was irreparably broken. And when he finally died several years later, it could be said that he had truly died some years before.
If we’re going to talk about the “ultimate measure” of a person, it’s not that we’re speaking of superhuman existential courage … scoffing at death when it sneers in our face. That’s not it. But it may be that the ultimate measure is the kind demonstrated by the 10 lepers in Luke’s story. The ultimate measure of a person is that in our hour of greatest need, we turn with confidence to that which will never fail us, will always be with us and for us, for better, worse, rich and poor, sick and healthy times of our existence.
The ten lepers know that in their condition, they really have no one to turn to, no one who will be with them and for them … except other lepers. But the communities of their upbringing and the center of their faith are all virtually closed to them. And with God so very strongly identified with the family and the temple, the lepers are, therefore, virtually without God. Yet in Jesus they see a glimmer of hope. The prophets of old had spoken of hope and healing that would come to barren and wasted places. And in Jesus they see the word of that hope made flesh.
And though Jesus had all the same reasons to reject the lepers as everyone else seemed to, he did not. We do not know exactly what transpired, but Luke tells us that Jesus inspires the ten lepers to go to the priest to present themselves and in that simple act of trust they find their healing. But Luke goes on to tell us that one of the lepers is “leprous” in more than one way—he not only has the dreaded skin ailment, but he is also a despised Samaritan. And though he, like the other nine, has been restored to health, he yet remains a Samaritan and what good will it do him to present himself to a priest of Israel, what good will it do for him to “go back home” when his home is not where the others are going.
And so, with what surely is some great trepidation, he turns back … back to the one in whom there had been no judgment, only welcome and hope and healing. I deeply appreciate what Ann Fontaine says in her blog in considering the odd actions of the healed Samaritan leper, returning to Jesus. She says: “When the ten lepers were all suffering from a common disease, they were bonded by their outcast status. When they were all healed, the nine returned to their life: their ethnic and religious life. The foreigner only had Jesus at that point … and perhaps he had found his true home.”
Given the chance, I wonder how my friend, Steve, would describe his encounter with God--with the Divine--in this utterly new and foreign time in his life. He did say to me in his note that, unlike his wife who has been quite undone by it all, that he has “gone right into acceptance.” His reference is, you might know, to Elizabeth Kubler Ross’ “stages of grief”. In her classic book, On Death and Dying, Ross describes the five stages as:
* Denial (this isn't happening to me!)
* Anger (why is this happening to me?)
* Bargaining (I promise I'll be a better person if...)
* Depression (I just don't care anymore)
* Acceptance (I'm ready for whatever comes)
I told Steve that in jumping straight to “acceptance”, he was a better and stronger soul than I am.
Jeremiah seems almost pastoral in seeking to move the exiles past all of the other very understandable emotional stages to the stage of acceptance. Might it be in acceptance of what cannot be easily or immediately changed that we find new strength for living and wellsprings of God’s grace?
Jeremiah tells the broken-hearted exiles who are now foreigners in someone else’s land, to settle into this experience, to live their lives the best they can, to resume the normal patterns of their lives as though they had not been uprooted and forcibly moved to a foreign land. It was in exile that the people of Israel learned to live with God in their hearts, and not just in the temple. Perhaps in finding God in the midst of their exile, the exiles found their true home.
Every one of us here, I suspect, has something … a wound, a weakness, an awareness … that cannot be easily or immediately changed. It may literally be a sickness unto death or it may be an inner affliction that will dog and worry us all the long way to the grave. Whoever we are, whatever our affliction, we may find our healing in approaching the source of grace and presenting ourselves to that source with “bold humility”.
We cannot guarantee that the promises we make to one another in good faith will survive the rough and tumble of human existence, we cannot guarantee that the good healthy genes of our parents will help us beat every deadly disease, we cannot guarantee that we will nimbly avoid every awful accident. We can only acknowledge that within the heart of all that is in this world, this universe, God is for us … that wherever we are, God IS with healing and grace for our change-battered souls.
God is the firm foundation upon which our lives can safely rest, come what may. And, as we will sing in a few moments:
The soul that on Jesus has leaned for repose,
I will not, I will not desert to its foes;
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,
I’ll never, no never, no never forsake.
Amen.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Anybody Listening?
A sermon by Greg Ledbetter preached on September 30, 2007
Year C / 18th Sunday after Pentecost
Text: 1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31
Many years after Paul had died, a wise church elder wrote a letter to a young leader of the church … or perhaps he wrote to young leaders in general. The wise church elder felt it was important to speak in the continuing spirit of the Apostle Paul who had been a wise shepherd and guide for the early church. And so he wrote this letter as though it was Paul writing to his young protégé and traveling companion, Timothy. Writing in the spirit of Paul, the Apostle’s counsel and wisdom found new expression in a new time in the life of the church.
I guess it’s a little like trying to remember the wisdom of one of your parents or a beloved mentor in their absence, and while you can’t quite quote them verbatim, you have a sense of how they might have approached a new time or a new predicament.
I told one of you recently that I continue to be amazed at how poorly received are my long and eloquent sermons to my children. And my personal sermons to my dear spouse are only slightly better received. I cast gems at their feet … I weave nearly visible wisdom in the air with my words … and do they clasp me in a warm embrace, eyes wet with gratitude, mumbling their deep and abiding thanks that I have seen fit to gently correct and guide them? Perhaps someday. And in ways they can’t know and I can’t even always say, they do bless and gratify me.
But I have also been blessed by the presence of others … students … docile souls who have been putty in my pastoral hands. But seriously … I have and we have all been blessed by women and men who were and are engaged in the study of ministry and related matters. Beth … Amy … Micky … Nancy … Jodie … Trevor … Jennifer … Angela. And looking back I find myself wondering who guided whom? Truly there was a high degree of mutuality and reciprocity in our relationship as student … pastor … and people. We all learned. We all grew.
Now it so happens that one of those ministers in training is all growed up and is now a pastor in a far place. In fact it’s so far away, that I’m pretty sure you can’t get there from here. In approximately one hour, our dear friend Trevor Hanbridge will be duly installed as the pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Springfield, Vermont. I really do think of the happy meeting of Trevor and Calvary as a modern sign of God’s continuing activity. In reading e-mails from Trevor and e-mails from one of the members of the pastoral search committee—a young man I knew from my days in Vermont, it seems clear that this is a marriage that has been and is blessed by God.
At some point in that service, an audio recording of a greeting from me on our behalf will be played at Trevor’s installation. What I’ve written is certainly no epistle, but it does give me joy to warmly recall the friendship masked as guidance that I was and we were all able to share with Trevor … and, also, of course, with Cindy, Isabelle and Mae.
Dearest Trevor, Cindy, Isabelle and Mae,
What a joyous day and time you must be having. And what a joyous day and time your now beloved congregation must be having.
And dear Calvary Baptist friends, my warmest congratulations on this God-drenched time in your life as a congregation.
Three years ago this month, a wide-smiling, bright-eyed, slightly graying young man from Burlington wandered into the open arms of our California congregation. Of course it was his lovely wife and daughters of whom we took the most notice. But this young man very quickly insinuated himself into the deepest places of our hearts. How blessed we every one of us Shell Ridgers have been to spend three years on a common journey with Trevor and the Hanbridge family.
One of the most impressive things I have noted about Trevor is his unwavering commitment to his family. Next to his loyalty to his God, nothing claims a higher place in Trevor’s life than his wife and his two daughters. One should always be suspicious of a pastor who thinks God calls him or her to place the church above their family. Trevor has got it right.
I must say that I liked Trevor from the first moment I met him. I’ll also say that I like the person and pastor Trevor is becoming. For three years I watched Trevor perform a slow, intricate dance with his God and his faith and this not-always-comfortable calling into pastoral ministry that yet beckoned him like a siren. Yet every step of Trevor’s dance was taken with thoughtfulness and integrity. Trevor could have tried to become a living miniature of the many wise and wonderful human influences in the church and the seminary around him, but instead he chose to remain, or perhaps I should say, continue to become his own man—his own person. Trevor certainly values the council of others, but he seems also to know his core and his foundation.
Calvary Church, you will be blest repeatedly as you share your journey with a pastor who has his priorities in order, is in love with God and his family, and is on a journey of life and faith whose outcome cannot entirely be known except that God is with you and you are on this journey together.
So, dear friends, on this day when you formally join into this sacred movement of Christ’s ministry together, my prayer for you is that you will strongly encourage one another in your becoming—that you will determine to grow as partners in this marriage of ministry. Grow in compassion. Grow in Christ-likeness. Grow in wisdom. Grow in depth and breadth of love for all people, and indeed, for all of God’s beloved creation.
God has richly blessed some two hundred years of this congregation’s life and ministry, your work and your witness. May God go with you, pastor and people, into every future minute and moment as you discover new vitality as the hands and feet of Jesus, serving in his stead.
Finally, to Trevor, Cindy, Isabelle and Mae: I love you all and the Shell Ridge church family and I wish you and the Calvary Baptist family the very best.
Peace, your friend Greg (or “P.G.”)
I’ve taken a few moments to mentally compare my celebratory note to Trevor with the Epistle to Timothy … and I realize how much trust and courage it takes to write a note as strongly worded and as fiercely directive as was the Epistle … or any of the other New Testament epistles. These are passionate sermons inscribed in blood on parchment and hide. They are written with great passion because they are about things that matter greatly. On the occasions I’ve stepped into the pulpit with that kind of passion, I’ve always done so with great fear and trembling … and I’ve always ended completely drained and literally trembling.
Now it may be a while before the right combination of trust and courage allows Trevor to preach on the subject of “blind greed”, but the author of 1st Timothy and the author of Luke’s gospel have noooo such fears, no such restrictions … they lay it out in living color. And their message? Greed is blind, greed is corrupting and greed kills.
It’s hard to contemplate a sermon on money and greed without thinking of the two Barry’s across the bay. Barry Zito is the former Oakland A’s pitcher who signed away his zen-loving soul when he inked a contract last year for $126 million, the highest paid pitcher in baseball history. As an impoverished pitcher in Oakland, he won the Cy Young award for the American League’s best pitcher. In a Giant’s uniform this year, he was, shall we say: lackluster? And then there’s Barry Bonds, the skinny but highly skilled player who was once baseball’s highest paid player. Barry now looks like two of his former self while the shadow of alleged steroid use clouds what should have been one of baseball’s brightest careers.
Only those who spent the last few months colonizing Mars will not know that Barry broke the most sacred record in sports, besting Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron as the new home run king. Except there’s that little cloud of doubt and suspicion. And actually, it’s not a little cloud.
A New York fashion designer bought Bonds’ 756th home run ball at an auction for $752,000. Then he ran an online vote to determine the fate of the ball. The three options were: send the ball to the Hall of Fame as it is, send the ball to the Hall of Fame with a giant asterisk branded in it or send it into outer space and oblivion. The fans chose to send the ball to the hall of fame with the asterisk to indicate that Bonds’ home run record will always exist under an air of suspicion.
And this summer, in the Tour de France one cyclist after another was dismissed from the tour for evidence of cheating. And last year’s winner will likely soon be stripped of his award.
As most of us know, Diablo Valley college has been rocked by a grade for sale scandal … criminal charges have been filed against 34 current or former students and 21 more are being investigated. A columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: “Ask a high school or college student about cheating, and before you can finish the sentence, the person will blurt out two things: "Everybody does it," and "It's no big deal."”
Million dollar baseball contracts, a branded ¾ million dollar baseball, steroids in baseball and blood doping in cycling, and academic dishonesty that “everybody does” and that’s “no big deal”. And these are just odd, random examples of values and balance and perspective gone awry. And it seems to me that one could argue that at the heart of these cultural maladies … these ailments is the old demon “greed.” Greed for money, greed for influence, greed for advantage, greed for privilege, greed for power, greed for winning at all costs. It’s all greed. And the wise old pastoral soul who writes in Paul’s name and the gospel writer who wrote Luke and Acts both wish to warn and remind us that “Greed is blind, greed is corrupting and greed kills.”
Greed may be dressed in Giant’s orange and black or the Tour’s yellow jersey or it may have a really odd Donald Trump hairdo, but in the end, the wise souls wish to remind us, greed feeds on itself, feeds on others, is nearly blind to its detructive ways and consumes everything in its path.
In Luke, this morning, Jesus tells a parable that is astoundingly graphic. It’s about an extremely wealthy man who dress and conspicuous consumption tell the listener that this man has more money than he knows what to do with. He’s so wealthy that he uses bread for napkins and throws it on the ground where the dogs fight over it. When the dogs aren’t fighting over the bread, they are, in an odd depiction of kindness, licking the wounds of a beggar who lives at the wealthy man’s gate. And though the rich man is aware of the dogs, he seems completely unaware, completely oblivious to the beggar lying on the ground in his desperate and depressing condition. You get an early sense of where this story is going because while the dying beggar has a name, Lazarus, never is the rich man given that honor. It’s the first of several reversals in the story, reversals for which Jesus’ parables become well known. In this life, it is the wealthy and the powerful whose names we remember on concert halls and charitable foundations. But who remembers those whose lives are like the dust in which they are forced to dwell? The nameless multitudes whose misfortune it so nearly is to have ever been born.
And so what an astounding reversal of social expectation and an astounding reversal of roles. Lazarus soon dies, in Jesus’ story, and is carried by angels to the bosom of Abraham where he takes his rest. This is the royal treatment. The rich man is sent to eternal torment and even there remains unnamed, just another rich brute too blind to take note the great suffering that was at his very feet.
And you would think, within the context of this story, that his eternal torment would make him a bit wiser … and yet his two requests of Abraham regarding Lazarus shows that he still considers Lazarus as a lowly slave … a go-fer. Even in torment he cannot see the humanity of the one who had suffered on his doorstep.
If I were to take this sermon up to this point and leave it now in your hands to complete, where would you go with it? Any takers? I ask the question because in our modern era where satellite communications have given us a window on every corner of the planet—including the most miserable and afflicted corners, there are literally billions upon billions of Lazarus’ whose thin limbs, distended bellies, tattered clothing and sore-covered limbs are within our view … they are on our “virtual doorstep”. Probably not even Jesus could have foreseen a day when our technological omnipresence in the world would rival that of God’s. And we’d better hope that Jesus’ parable is just a stern warning to middle class and better citizens of first century Palestine, because if you and I have any sense that heaven and hell are literal realities, then we all better pack our coffins with a whole lot of aloe vera and lidocaine.
In a conversation with Jan’s mother who was visiting last week, she reminded me that the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that there will be 144,000 people in heaven … but according to my rough calculations based on Jesus’ parable this morning, there will be about 6 billion people gathered around Abraham’s bosom … I hope it’s a big bosom … and the top 5 percent of the world’s population who control the lion’s share of the world’s wealth are going to be begging a few of those billions to dip the tips their fingers in cool water to slake our eternal thirst.
When I was in junior high, I sang in a church youth choir directed by my mother. And one of the hot junior anthems of the late 60’s and early 70’s was entitled “Hey, Hey, Anybody Listening?”. The song went: “Hey, hey, anybody listening, hey, hey, anybody there? Hey, hey, anybody listening? Anybody care?”
It seems to me that this was the song Jesus was singing when he told his parable and it seems to me that it was the song that the author of the epistle to Timothy was singing: “Is anybody listening? Does anybody care?”
We do well to remember that Jesus’ parables were not typically sweetness and light. And of the harsh judgment found in his harder parables, we’d do well to consider that it may just be folk like us who receive the gloomiest verdict. It’s as if Jesus is asking: “Is anybody listening? Does anybody care?” At the end of the parable, the rich man, now desperate to warn his brothers, is now bargaining hard with Abraham: “but if someone goes to warn my brothers from the dead, they will repent." And Abraham said to him, "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets”—in other words, what has been taught to them for generations, “neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." '
Well, how do we find our way out of this homiletical corner? In part, it is by listening again to some of the final words to Timothy, words that remind the wealthy of his time and ours that we are all linked together, every way you can describe the polarities of human existence, that we are all yet bound up in a single garment of destiny, as Martin King put it.
As a fellow Baptist preacher said, “A faithful response to the poor now involves not only some clear refusals to own or spend in certain ways and some very personal acts of self-giving, but also commitments to far-reaching structural change. This does touch on who pays how much tax, and on what workers everywhere are paid and on what kind of healthcare is available to the poor. If we don't hear the Gospel impinging on those questions, it's not the Gospel of Jesus we've been hearing.”
From time to time, we are blessed to be able to serve the poor. Whether Winter Nights or Mexico Mission or White Cross or volunteer overseas missions or whatever … each of these experiences and others reminds of what we know deep down … that each time we serve, the ones we serve serve us … and inspire us and free us and renew our faith and empower us to live out the mission and meaning of Jesus. As Dorothy Day said so truly—this is my paraphrase: “I really don’t know about the salvation of any single soul; somehow we must all be saved together.”
So, dear friends, I’ll say to Trevor’s church and I’ll say to us, my prayer for you is that you will strongly encourage one another in your becoming—that you will determine to grow as partners in this marriage of ministry. Grow in compassion. Grow in Christ-likeness. Grow in wisdom. Grow in depth and breadth of love for all people, and indeed, for all of God’s beloved creation.
You may not realize it, but every sermon you’ve ever heard and every sermon you’ll ever hear again is asking one way or another, the question: “Hey, HEY! Anybody listening? Hey, HEY! Anybody there? Hey, HEY! Anybody listening? Anybody care?” Amen.
Year C / 18th Sunday after Pentecost
Text: 1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31
Many years after Paul had died, a wise church elder wrote a letter to a young leader of the church … or perhaps he wrote to young leaders in general. The wise church elder felt it was important to speak in the continuing spirit of the Apostle Paul who had been a wise shepherd and guide for the early church. And so he wrote this letter as though it was Paul writing to his young protégé and traveling companion, Timothy. Writing in the spirit of Paul, the Apostle’s counsel and wisdom found new expression in a new time in the life of the church.
I guess it’s a little like trying to remember the wisdom of one of your parents or a beloved mentor in their absence, and while you can’t quite quote them verbatim, you have a sense of how they might have approached a new time or a new predicament.
I told one of you recently that I continue to be amazed at how poorly received are my long and eloquent sermons to my children. And my personal sermons to my dear spouse are only slightly better received. I cast gems at their feet … I weave nearly visible wisdom in the air with my words … and do they clasp me in a warm embrace, eyes wet with gratitude, mumbling their deep and abiding thanks that I have seen fit to gently correct and guide them? Perhaps someday. And in ways they can’t know and I can’t even always say, they do bless and gratify me.
But I have also been blessed by the presence of others … students … docile souls who have been putty in my pastoral hands. But seriously … I have and we have all been blessed by women and men who were and are engaged in the study of ministry and related matters. Beth … Amy … Micky … Nancy … Jodie … Trevor … Jennifer … Angela. And looking back I find myself wondering who guided whom? Truly there was a high degree of mutuality and reciprocity in our relationship as student … pastor … and people. We all learned. We all grew.
Now it so happens that one of those ministers in training is all growed up and is now a pastor in a far place. In fact it’s so far away, that I’m pretty sure you can’t get there from here. In approximately one hour, our dear friend Trevor Hanbridge will be duly installed as the pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Springfield, Vermont. I really do think of the happy meeting of Trevor and Calvary as a modern sign of God’s continuing activity. In reading e-mails from Trevor and e-mails from one of the members of the pastoral search committee—a young man I knew from my days in Vermont, it seems clear that this is a marriage that has been and is blessed by God.
At some point in that service, an audio recording of a greeting from me on our behalf will be played at Trevor’s installation. What I’ve written is certainly no epistle, but it does give me joy to warmly recall the friendship masked as guidance that I was and we were all able to share with Trevor … and, also, of course, with Cindy, Isabelle and Mae.
Dearest Trevor, Cindy, Isabelle and Mae,
What a joyous day and time you must be having. And what a joyous day and time your now beloved congregation must be having.
And dear Calvary Baptist friends, my warmest congratulations on this God-drenched time in your life as a congregation.
Three years ago this month, a wide-smiling, bright-eyed, slightly graying young man from Burlington wandered into the open arms of our California congregation. Of course it was his lovely wife and daughters of whom we took the most notice. But this young man very quickly insinuated himself into the deepest places of our hearts. How blessed we every one of us Shell Ridgers have been to spend three years on a common journey with Trevor and the Hanbridge family.
One of the most impressive things I have noted about Trevor is his unwavering commitment to his family. Next to his loyalty to his God, nothing claims a higher place in Trevor’s life than his wife and his two daughters. One should always be suspicious of a pastor who thinks God calls him or her to place the church above their family. Trevor has got it right.
I must say that I liked Trevor from the first moment I met him. I’ll also say that I like the person and pastor Trevor is becoming. For three years I watched Trevor perform a slow, intricate dance with his God and his faith and this not-always-comfortable calling into pastoral ministry that yet beckoned him like a siren. Yet every step of Trevor’s dance was taken with thoughtfulness and integrity. Trevor could have tried to become a living miniature of the many wise and wonderful human influences in the church and the seminary around him, but instead he chose to remain, or perhaps I should say, continue to become his own man—his own person. Trevor certainly values the council of others, but he seems also to know his core and his foundation.
Calvary Church, you will be blest repeatedly as you share your journey with a pastor who has his priorities in order, is in love with God and his family, and is on a journey of life and faith whose outcome cannot entirely be known except that God is with you and you are on this journey together.
So, dear friends, on this day when you formally join into this sacred movement of Christ’s ministry together, my prayer for you is that you will strongly encourage one another in your becoming—that you will determine to grow as partners in this marriage of ministry. Grow in compassion. Grow in Christ-likeness. Grow in wisdom. Grow in depth and breadth of love for all people, and indeed, for all of God’s beloved creation.
God has richly blessed some two hundred years of this congregation’s life and ministry, your work and your witness. May God go with you, pastor and people, into every future minute and moment as you discover new vitality as the hands and feet of Jesus, serving in his stead.
Finally, to Trevor, Cindy, Isabelle and Mae: I love you all and the Shell Ridge church family and I wish you and the Calvary Baptist family the very best.
Peace, your friend Greg (or “P.G.”)
I’ve taken a few moments to mentally compare my celebratory note to Trevor with the Epistle to Timothy … and I realize how much trust and courage it takes to write a note as strongly worded and as fiercely directive as was the Epistle … or any of the other New Testament epistles. These are passionate sermons inscribed in blood on parchment and hide. They are written with great passion because they are about things that matter greatly. On the occasions I’ve stepped into the pulpit with that kind of passion, I’ve always done so with great fear and trembling … and I’ve always ended completely drained and literally trembling.
Now it may be a while before the right combination of trust and courage allows Trevor to preach on the subject of “blind greed”, but the author of 1st Timothy and the author of Luke’s gospel have noooo such fears, no such restrictions … they lay it out in living color. And their message? Greed is blind, greed is corrupting and greed kills.
It’s hard to contemplate a sermon on money and greed without thinking of the two Barry’s across the bay. Barry Zito is the former Oakland A’s pitcher who signed away his zen-loving soul when he inked a contract last year for $126 million, the highest paid pitcher in baseball history. As an impoverished pitcher in Oakland, he won the Cy Young award for the American League’s best pitcher. In a Giant’s uniform this year, he was, shall we say: lackluster? And then there’s Barry Bonds, the skinny but highly skilled player who was once baseball’s highest paid player. Barry now looks like two of his former self while the shadow of alleged steroid use clouds what should have been one of baseball’s brightest careers.
Only those who spent the last few months colonizing Mars will not know that Barry broke the most sacred record in sports, besting Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron as the new home run king. Except there’s that little cloud of doubt and suspicion. And actually, it’s not a little cloud.
A New York fashion designer bought Bonds’ 756th home run ball at an auction for $752,000. Then he ran an online vote to determine the fate of the ball. The three options were: send the ball to the Hall of Fame as it is, send the ball to the Hall of Fame with a giant asterisk branded in it or send it into outer space and oblivion. The fans chose to send the ball to the hall of fame with the asterisk to indicate that Bonds’ home run record will always exist under an air of suspicion.
And this summer, in the Tour de France one cyclist after another was dismissed from the tour for evidence of cheating. And last year’s winner will likely soon be stripped of his award.
As most of us know, Diablo Valley college has been rocked by a grade for sale scandal … criminal charges have been filed against 34 current or former students and 21 more are being investigated. A columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: “Ask a high school or college student about cheating, and before you can finish the sentence, the person will blurt out two things: "Everybody does it," and "It's no big deal."”
Million dollar baseball contracts, a branded ¾ million dollar baseball, steroids in baseball and blood doping in cycling, and academic dishonesty that “everybody does” and that’s “no big deal”. And these are just odd, random examples of values and balance and perspective gone awry. And it seems to me that one could argue that at the heart of these cultural maladies … these ailments is the old demon “greed.” Greed for money, greed for influence, greed for advantage, greed for privilege, greed for power, greed for winning at all costs. It’s all greed. And the wise old pastoral soul who writes in Paul’s name and the gospel writer who wrote Luke and Acts both wish to warn and remind us that “Greed is blind, greed is corrupting and greed kills.”
Greed may be dressed in Giant’s orange and black or the Tour’s yellow jersey or it may have a really odd Donald Trump hairdo, but in the end, the wise souls wish to remind us, greed feeds on itself, feeds on others, is nearly blind to its detructive ways and consumes everything in its path.
In Luke, this morning, Jesus tells a parable that is astoundingly graphic. It’s about an extremely wealthy man who dress and conspicuous consumption tell the listener that this man has more money than he knows what to do with. He’s so wealthy that he uses bread for napkins and throws it on the ground where the dogs fight over it. When the dogs aren’t fighting over the bread, they are, in an odd depiction of kindness, licking the wounds of a beggar who lives at the wealthy man’s gate. And though the rich man is aware of the dogs, he seems completely unaware, completely oblivious to the beggar lying on the ground in his desperate and depressing condition. You get an early sense of where this story is going because while the dying beggar has a name, Lazarus, never is the rich man given that honor. It’s the first of several reversals in the story, reversals for which Jesus’ parables become well known. In this life, it is the wealthy and the powerful whose names we remember on concert halls and charitable foundations. But who remembers those whose lives are like the dust in which they are forced to dwell? The nameless multitudes whose misfortune it so nearly is to have ever been born.
And so what an astounding reversal of social expectation and an astounding reversal of roles. Lazarus soon dies, in Jesus’ story, and is carried by angels to the bosom of Abraham where he takes his rest. This is the royal treatment. The rich man is sent to eternal torment and even there remains unnamed, just another rich brute too blind to take note the great suffering that was at his very feet.
And you would think, within the context of this story, that his eternal torment would make him a bit wiser … and yet his two requests of Abraham regarding Lazarus shows that he still considers Lazarus as a lowly slave … a go-fer. Even in torment he cannot see the humanity of the one who had suffered on his doorstep.
If I were to take this sermon up to this point and leave it now in your hands to complete, where would you go with it? Any takers? I ask the question because in our modern era where satellite communications have given us a window on every corner of the planet—including the most miserable and afflicted corners, there are literally billions upon billions of Lazarus’ whose thin limbs, distended bellies, tattered clothing and sore-covered limbs are within our view … they are on our “virtual doorstep”. Probably not even Jesus could have foreseen a day when our technological omnipresence in the world would rival that of God’s. And we’d better hope that Jesus’ parable is just a stern warning to middle class and better citizens of first century Palestine, because if you and I have any sense that heaven and hell are literal realities, then we all better pack our coffins with a whole lot of aloe vera and lidocaine.
In a conversation with Jan’s mother who was visiting last week, she reminded me that the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that there will be 144,000 people in heaven … but according to my rough calculations based on Jesus’ parable this morning, there will be about 6 billion people gathered around Abraham’s bosom … I hope it’s a big bosom … and the top 5 percent of the world’s population who control the lion’s share of the world’s wealth are going to be begging a few of those billions to dip the tips their fingers in cool water to slake our eternal thirst.
When I was in junior high, I sang in a church youth choir directed by my mother. And one of the hot junior anthems of the late 60’s and early 70’s was entitled “Hey, Hey, Anybody Listening?”. The song went: “Hey, hey, anybody listening, hey, hey, anybody there? Hey, hey, anybody listening? Anybody care?”
It seems to me that this was the song Jesus was singing when he told his parable and it seems to me that it was the song that the author of the epistle to Timothy was singing: “Is anybody listening? Does anybody care?”
We do well to remember that Jesus’ parables were not typically sweetness and light. And of the harsh judgment found in his harder parables, we’d do well to consider that it may just be folk like us who receive the gloomiest verdict. It’s as if Jesus is asking: “Is anybody listening? Does anybody care?” At the end of the parable, the rich man, now desperate to warn his brothers, is now bargaining hard with Abraham: “but if someone goes to warn my brothers from the dead, they will repent." And Abraham said to him, "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets”—in other words, what has been taught to them for generations, “neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." '
Well, how do we find our way out of this homiletical corner? In part, it is by listening again to some of the final words to Timothy, words that remind the wealthy of his time and ours that we are all linked together, every way you can describe the polarities of human existence, that we are all yet bound up in a single garment of destiny, as Martin King put it.
As a fellow Baptist preacher said, “A faithful response to the poor now involves not only some clear refusals to own or spend in certain ways and some very personal acts of self-giving, but also commitments to far-reaching structural change. This does touch on who pays how much tax, and on what workers everywhere are paid and on what kind of healthcare is available to the poor. If we don't hear the Gospel impinging on those questions, it's not the Gospel of Jesus we've been hearing.”
From time to time, we are blessed to be able to serve the poor. Whether Winter Nights or Mexico Mission or White Cross or volunteer overseas missions or whatever … each of these experiences and others reminds of what we know deep down … that each time we serve, the ones we serve serve us … and inspire us and free us and renew our faith and empower us to live out the mission and meaning of Jesus. As Dorothy Day said so truly—this is my paraphrase: “I really don’t know about the salvation of any single soul; somehow we must all be saved together.”
So, dear friends, I’ll say to Trevor’s church and I’ll say to us, my prayer for you is that you will strongly encourage one another in your becoming—that you will determine to grow as partners in this marriage of ministry. Grow in compassion. Grow in Christ-likeness. Grow in wisdom. Grow in depth and breadth of love for all people, and indeed, for all of God’s beloved creation.
You may not realize it, but every sermon you’ve ever heard and every sermon you’ll ever hear again is asking one way or another, the question: “Hey, HEY! Anybody listening? Hey, HEY! Anybody there? Hey, HEY! Anybody listening? Anybody care?” Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)