Lay Aside Every Weight

A sermon by Jennifer Davidson preached on August 19, 2007

Texts: Isaiah 5:1-7 and Hebrews 11:29--12:2

“Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard:” begins the Prophet Isaiah in our first text this morning. Immediately we are swept into the poetic: awash in imagery of vineyards, a fertile hill. We see the Beloved working in the vineyard, back bent, digging in to the deep, aromatic soil. We watch as the field is cleared of stones, cleared of anything that will impede the growth of healthy plants. The Beloved, we see, plants the field with the best vines, with red grapes. The Beloved pours himself out into this fertile field, his heart is in his work, his sweat falls into the soil and waters it.

Occasionally he straightens up from his bent posture and gazes across the land, drinking in the sun, the distant hills, the very landscape itself. He is not merely a man standing in a field, he is now a part of the field, his work—even as it transformed the field, also transformed him. He is not the same as when he began. The aches in his back, across his shoulders, the deepening brown of his skin are inseparable from the turned soil, the pile of stones on the edge of the vineyard, the tender, planted vines. He is in all of them now.

The Beloved’s hope for a rich and abundant harvest is what hews out the vat for the wine. As he waits for the grapes to ripen, he smoothes the inside of the vat. Watch him as he does his work. He is full of expectation.

But this love song is one of heartache, not fulfillment. This love song, like so many, has loss at its center: disappointment, unmet expectations. The voice, in Isaiah’s poem, at verse 3, shifts from that of Isaiah to the voice of the Beloved--now the Lover--himself. He cries out when he sees the yield of the choice vines he planted, the vines he had loved, the vines that are a part of him now: They are not red, succulent grapes but wild grapes. He moves through the vineyard, disbelieving what he sees, “What more could I have done?” he asks, with his fingers trailing along the leaves of these unfamiliar grapes. All is lost.

We see him gaze out across the field again, out toward the distant hills, and his vision now cannot distinguish between the once-cultivated field and it’s wild surroundings.

He pours out his anguish in the remaining verses of the love song. His grief is real because his love for the vineyard was real. He falls to his knees, grasps a handful of soil in his hand, and lets the soil run through his fingers. His tears fall into the soil and water it.

Where does the vineyard end and the Lover begin? Where does the Lover end and the vineyard begin? Can you say for certain?


There is no one quite like Isaiah who can lay bare the heart of God in such a way as this: God, the Beloved; God, the Lover; whose heart breaks for God’s people; whose heart breaks for God’s cosmos.

God, the Beloved, God, the Lover, who pours out God’s very self in the sweat of grace in the tears of mercy.


This glimpse that Isaiah gives us into the heart of God is a passionate God: a God who suffers, whose heart breaks for creation, a God who deeply cares. One who is moved by the cries of the people.

Many of the images surrounding God throughout both the Old and New Testaments are of God’s passionate concern for creation. Despite this, a strong tradition rose up in early Christianity which depicted God as passionless. In fact, the Jesuit Philip Sheldrake points out in his book Befriending Our Desires, that God’s perfection was perceived to be precisely in the absence of passion.

Likewise, human passions became deeply suspect. So that some people came to believe that the more we can divest ourselves of our passions, the more closely we will draw to the heart of God.

Perhaps it is the remnants of these beliefs that cause us to recoil when we read passages like we did this morning. God’s passionate disappointment in the vineyard is all too easily cast as “that Old Testament God”—as if God’s rough edges get smoothed out in the transition from Hebrew to Greek. We squirm in our seats when God cries out a lament over God’s people, like the one we heard in Isaiah’s love song. God’s anguish is too raw, too close for comfort.

I think this is because we sense that if God is passionate, then God must also be vulnerable. It is evident in the tears we imagine seeing on the Lover’s face as he fingers the leaves of the wild grapes.

All love comes with risk— we know this to different degrees through out our lives. One of the most profound ways I’ve experienced this risk was when Doug and I became parents. The presence of our infant son and the love we felt for him made us suddenly and powerfully aware that we had opened ourselves up to the possibility of the greatest pain we could imagine: the possibility of losing this one we loved so deeply.

To love passionately is to open ourselves – to become vulnerable to – the possibility of loss. We cannot love without also being vulnerable.

The more we pour ourselves out into love, the greater our risk and vulnerability And so God’s vulnerability is evident in the Isaiah love song not only in the experience of grief which closes out the song, but perhaps even more so in the image of the one who was digging in the soil and clearing stones: for it is the one who dares to hope, who is the vulnerable one.


The 11th chapter of Hebrews begins, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” It is the Lover working in the vineyard, tilling the soil, removing the stones, hewing a vat for the wine.

And it is the Israelites passing through the Red Sea. It is Rahab providing hospitality to the spies. It is the Great Cloud of Witnesses we surrounded ourselves with this morning—grandmothers and grandfathers, poets and public figures, prophets and midwives—who dared to make themselves vulnerable, who were passionate enough to hope for a world that would heal rather than break hearts.

Emboldened by those who have gone before us, the writer of Hebrews invites us to lay aside every weight and the Sin that clings so close so that we might be able to move unencumbered in our life of faith, indeed, into the very heart of God.

Therein lies the invitation for us this morning: Are we willing to open ourselves up to the Passionate, Vulnerable God? And are we willing to allow ourselves to be passionate and vulnerable as well? These questions are ever before us: can we lay aside every weight—even the ones which seem to define us—Can we open our hands and let go of every weight?

These questions are ultimately about our posture before the Living God.

It is no small thing to open ourselves to the presence of God in our lives. Learning to trust God, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to God’s presence, is not a once-in-a-lifetime lesson—rather it is something that must be learned and re-learned throughout our lives.

With every invitation to deeper intimacy with God, no matter how many times we have accepted that invitation before, we become frightfully aware of the risks involved in letting God in. But what a beautiful thing to consider that God is risking all for us as well!

There is perhaps no better way to allow our intimacy to deepen with the Passionate, Vulnerable Divine than through the practice of prayer.

Henri Nouwen, in his book With Open Hands writes:

Praying is no easy matter. …The resistance to praying is like the resistance of tightly clenched fists. This image shows the tension, the desire to cling tightly to yourself, a greediness which betrays fear.

Nouwen goes on to share the story of a woman who was brought to a psychiatric facility. She was very agitated, “swinging at everything in sight, and scaring everyone so much that the doctors had to take everything away from her. But there was one small coin which she gripped in her fist and would not give up,” Nouwen writes. “It was as though she would lose her very self along with the coin. If they deprived her of that last possession, she would have nothing more, and be nothing more. That was her fear.”

We are often like the woman clinging desperately to her coin, thinking it has something to do with who we are. Frightened, perhaps, that God will force us to give up what feels most central to who we are. Afraid that if we open our hands, then God will see every last little thing we’ve ever held on to for dear life. Perhaps afraid, through and through, of God’s judgment.

But Philip Bennett, in his book Let Yourself Be Loved, assures us that “The judgment of love never injures our true self; it only releases it from constriction so that we may be the person we were created to be.”

The diary of Etty Hillesum, leading up to her departure for Auschwitz in 1943, records her painful yet joyful struggle toward spiritual wholeness. She describes the process this way:

There is a really deep well inside us. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too. But more often stones and grit block the well, and God is buried beneath. Then [God] must be dug out again. (44)

Are we able to bring ourselves to trust in the presence of God? Are we able to allow the stones and grit that block the well to be carried away? Are we able to open our hands?

After all, we will need to open our hands in order to lay aside every weight; in order to be passionate; in order to be vulnerable.

“When you dare to let go and surrender your many fears,” writes Henri Nouwen, “your hand relaxes and your palms spread out in a gesture of receiving.”’


I misspoke a little while ago when I said there is no one like Isaiah who can lay bare the heart of God. In fact there is another. And the writer of Hebrews reminds us of him: “Look to Jesus [who] endured the cross.”

Likewise, Philip Sheldrake writes:

“It seems that we desperately need to recover a sense of God who is not so much ‘power and might’ as vulnerable. Jesus, the image of the unseen God, “did not count equality with God something to be grasped. But he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,” as it says in the hymn of Philippians (2:6-7).

“If we accept that both the incarnation and the cross reveal the very heart of God, then we are bound to say that the nature of God is not to cling but to be self-emptying and to be nonpossessive. God continually risks a pouring out into the cosmos.”

God meets us in our vulnerability with God’s own vulnerability. God is tilling the vineyard even now, laying aside every stone, even as God invites us to lay aside every weight.

God never stops risking God’s self in relationship with us. This is the promise of the incarnation, the cross, and the resurrection. And it is God’s invitation, a gentle invitation, not one of force or demand.

We started with the poetry of Isaiah of the Beloved, the Lover, in the vineyard. Because some things of love can only be said adequately in poetry.

So let’s close with poetry as well. This poem is by someone who peoples my Great Cloud of Witnesses: May Sarton.

The poem is called, “Of Molluscs,” and it takes us from the soil of the vineyard to the undulating waters of the ocean. As you listen to the poem, hear God’s invitation to you to surrender, to be passionate, to be vulnerable, to open yourself to the presence of God who loves you, to lay aside every weight, to be nourished on the tide of love:

Of Molluscs

As the tide rises, the closed mollusc
Opens a fraction to the ocean’s food,
Bathed in its riches. Do not ask
What force would do, or if force could.

A knife is of no use against a fortress.
You might break it to pieces as gulls do.
No, only the rising tide and its slow progress
Opens the shell. Lovers, I tell you true.

You who have held yourselves closed hard
Against warm sun and wind, shelled up in fears
And hostile to a touch or tender word—
The ocean rises, salt as unshed tears.

Now you are floated on this gentle flood
That cannot force or be forced, welcome food
Salt as your tears, the rich ocean’s blood,
Eat, rest, be nourished on the tide of love.

A Simple Rule to Save the World

A Sermon by Rev. Gregory H. Ledbetter preached on May 6, 2007
at Shell Ridge Community Church, Walnut Creek, CA

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’

And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’ Then he said to me, ‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. (Revelation 21:1-6)

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’ (John 13:34-35)

One world in which we live together, one sun shining on you and me, one ocean flows into another, one day we all will be free… (-from a song by Mike Stern)

When I was in college, this women would frequently write me letters … well, actually, it was my mom. Mom would write letters of encouragement to her son (these were the days before the instancy and immediacy of the cell phone) … these were of the “hang in there son” variety … “you can do it, son” … my mom knew that the struggles in the present had the potential of obscuring my goals for the future.

John of Patmos was also a letter writer. He was a Christian disciple living in exile on the island of Patmos … he knows how difficult things are for his fellow Christians. John has a vision and he writes it down and it becomes a great word of encouragement for Christians who are suffering persecution for their faith.

John writes in a literary style called: “apocalyptic literature” … John’s letter is alternately known as “the Revelation of John” or the Apocalypse of John. We’ve come to think of “Apocalypse” as being some cataclysmic event, perhaps because many of the writings dealt the end of the world … the word apocalypse simply means: revelation … to reveal. The word apocalypse literally means: “to lift the curtain”.

In the midst of the awfulness of their present situation, John writes to offer encouragement and a shining vision of the world as God intends it. John’s letter is written to encourage the Christians to see what he sees and to live into the vision of a world where God dwells among God’s people … where suffering has ended … where the abundance of the earth is shared by all.

As long as the human being has had self-consciousness, it has dreamed of a “world that is right” … from the idyllic “Garden of Eden” where the children of Israel imagined earth’s beginnings and earth’s first couple … to Isaiah’s great vision of swords beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks and the lion laying with the lamb … to John of Patmos’ vision of a new heavens and new earth … to Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech … to Mike Stern’s beautiful song, “One World” that we sang this morning.

Sometimes politicians and demagogues have enticed their listeners and followers with visions of a better world … an idealized world, but too often that world involves someone else having to suffer, having to do without. Hitler dreamed of a ideal society populated by a master race, but it meant killing off any who would pollute the bloodstream and the ideals of such a society.

Against such monstrosities of every time and every generation, a simple word … a simple rule keeps exerting itself … quietly, insistently. A different “John”, the author the Gospel of John tells that Jesus’ offered to his disciples an simple but powerful counterweight to the principalities and powers. Jesus said: “I give you a new commandment: that you love one another.”

Talk about a “candle in the wind”. Is this how Jesus proposes to “arm” his disciples against all of the horrors that John’s community was already facing when his gospel was written. “Love one another.” It’s like trying to put a volcano out by spitting into it. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?

But Jesus simple words … which get echoed by the other gospel writers … Jesus’ simple words are the fine, sharp tip of the great iceberg which is this dream of a world at peace with itself, living in the blessed company of its creator. “Love one another.” A tiny, pin-prick of a statement … three words that yet propose to change the world.

I took high school chemistry from a woman who had started her career working for 3M (I think) … Miss Carraba told about her work developing safety glass … she said that the glass she helped develop could withstand the repeated blows of a sledgehammer, it was that strong. Then she said to us, eyes twinkling, “I’ll tell you a secret … while you can’t break the glass with a sledgehammer, if you stab the glass with the point of an icepick, the glass will shatter.”

Jesus does not offer his followers a “weapon” of a conventional nature … a bigger sword, a better chariot … he doesn’t offer his followers a sledgehammer with which to go after the sledgehammers of Rome with its legions and wars and oppression … Jesus offers a tiny, pin-prick of a rule … simply that his followers would “love on another”.

You can’t out-Rome Rome … but you can out-love Rome.

You can’t force the world to conform to John’s vision or Isaiah’s vision or Martin’s vision … there’s no brute force in the world strong enough to create the peaceable kingdom … but love can. Only love can create a new city … a new world … a new creation where justice reigns, where abundance is for all people … a new creation whose gates are always open and whose light always shines; a place of great joy where the darkness of violence, exploitation, suffering and death is banished.

A new commandment I give to you: that you love one another.

Wednesday morning, I found myself sitting in an elementary school cafeteria with a couple hundred children and a surprisingly sparse number of teachers who were yet able to keep peace among the unruly masses. I was there to hear Jake Hindes’ third grade class present a musical presentation. I had no idea what the musical was about. Truly no idea.

By the time the musical had ended, I had tears in my eyes and I felt as though I’d just sat through a powerful sermon preached by a group of rapping and clapping third graders.

Together, the musical and the children declared, together is the only way we’re going to help save the only world we’ve got … we’ve got to pull together.

It reminded us of our common humanity … “You’re not that different from me.” We may look different and sound different, but underneath it all we are very nearly the same.

Let’s talk things through, the kids beg and beckoned … how can we share our visions for a better world and how can we solve the problems that beset us if we cannot talk with one another.

Jake’s line: “We must learn to communicate …”

We are the children: teach us to use our power well … they sang, and I got the sense that it was not the power that their elders wield that they sang about, but a “soul force” such as Martin Luther King spoke of, a soul force exemplified by Jesus and Gandhi and Martin King himself.

We’ve got to do better. The kids reminded us that the gap between the world we imagine—we yearn for—and the world that is is too wide. We’ve got to do better, and who better to tell us than the young ones whose eyes are not yet clouded by cataracts of conformity.

And then in a slangy, almost prophetic voice, they raised a chant: War stinks … poverty stinks … pollution stinks … wherever and however we have failed as a race to heal the world through our shared efforts—it stinks!

But these kids are no handwringers … no wailing about their helplessness in the face of such challenges … I can … you can … we can. Over and over … I can … you can … we can … I can … you can … we can.

Here I sat in a “godless, secular” (ha!) school thinking that I was hearing a musically writ large version of the vision of John empowered by the simple rule of Jesus … a simple rule that can save the world.

I can … you can … we can.

Mike Stern’s song says: “One day we will all meet our maker … ‘til that day we must do what we can to stand by each other, to love one another, every child, every woman and man … every child every woman and man.”

One world in which we live together, one sun shining on you and me, one ocean flows into another, one day we all will be free … one day we all will be free.

Love one another … it’s a simple rule that can save the world.

I can … you can … we can.

Amen.

Palm to Passion Sunday

A Shell Ridge sermon by Rev. Greg Ledbetter, preached 4/1/2007
Palm/Passion Sunday: Gifts in the Wilderness

Sermon Texts: Luke 19:28-40 and Luke 22:14--23:56

Do you remember the book: “All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” by Robert Fulghum?

Well that was soooo 20 years ago. Now it should be: “All I ever needed to know I learned on Wikipedia.”

One of the most random facts that I discovered in my extensive research is that there was a German philosopher by the name of Shubert von Stricklebachar III who is associated with Montana … I’m not making this up … would Wikipedia lie? Well, let’s not go there.

I will note, however, that your state was originally a U.S. territory and gained statehood in 1889. A hot battle was fought between the towns of Anaconda and Helena as to which locale would be the state capital. Helena won the battle, but I’ll tell you what … if Helena had not gone through several judicious name changes over its early years, the state capital would have been in … Crabtown … then, and I’m not making this up … Pumpkinville … then Squashtown … finally the name “St. Helena” was suggested … the “St.” was dropped, the HelEna changed to HELLena (it was, after all, a pretty rough and ready western outpost) … and the name finally adopted … but beating out the other favored name, “Tomah”, by only two votes. Students, I hope you’re paying attention because their WILL be a quiz.

Paying attention … this seems to be a strong Biblical concern as well … we know of the disciples continuing struggle to pay attention and stay awake … Jesus reproaches them as they snooze in the Mount of Olive … “Why are you sleeping? Could you not stay awake with me one hour???”

For the next seven days, Christians are called to “pay attention” to the story as never before … to be attentive and awake and aware to the events and the characters and the dramatic movement in the story.

I so appreciate the combining of the Palms and the Passion on this one Sunday of the year. There’s a brief, but good explanation as to how that came about on the back of this morning’s bulletin. But I profoundly appreciate this holding together of the events of the last week of Jesus’ life … this reluctance to chop the story into bits as we so often do with Biblical texts … this desire that the “big picture” and the “whole story” be laid out before us, begging for our wakeful presence and our best attention.

If there is a downside it is that is that the primary text of the day takes nearly 15 minutes to read … and I do urge you to later today or during the week ahead take your Bibles and look up the reference in the bulletin and read and reread the full text. If you are like me you will note details that you may not ever remember reading before.

One of the purposes of this extended reading and the week that lies ahead is for us to find our place in the story … to let the story enter us so that we may enter into the drama that is larger than the story … the drama that continues in its own way to this very day.

There is always the daily push and pull between the events of the world we live in and our own natural self-protective desire to insulate ourselves from their pain … their reality.

When you read the complete text you will find that the story at its simplest tells of the lethal clash between governments that will tolerate no threats to their power … and of religions that can become remarkably ingrown and self-serving and self-interested and will lash out violently at attempts to change or reform them …

And as you read, you might pause every time you come to the characters in the story … ponder about these people … who are they … what are their dreams … their flaws … and can you see yourself in them? This is yet another form of lectio divina which is a thoughtful, sacred reading of the texts that invites to stop hovering over the surface of the text and to dive in.

Let yourself into the upper room where Jesus and his disciples share a last meal together … but it’s not a placid meal … there’s trouble brewing

Follow Jesus and his disciples into the Mount of Olives and enter into the agony of his prayer and see if you can remain more wakeful than the disciples …

Watch as a crowd, headed by Judas and bristling with clubs and swords comes to bear Jesus away.

See if you have the nerve to follow the crowd to the courtyard in the High Priests house where a fire is kindled and Peter lingers just close enough to the flickering light of the fire to be recognized three times … and to deny knowing Jesus three times.

And will you stand idly by while Jesus is mocked and beaten?

Perhaps you’ll try to follow the confusing political intrigue that causes Pilate to send Jesus to Herod and Herod to return the favor and the man to Pilate. And you can add your bewilderment to Pilate’s when he concedes to the crowd’s desire that Jesus be crucified.

And perhaps the most difficult journey you’ll ever make, if you have not turned and fled with many of Jesus’ male disciples, will be the journey to the place they called “The Skull” where Jesus was strung up between two criminals and, finally, died.

If you have paid close attention to the characters that have surrounded you as you made your way through the events of the story, you’ll notice that there are quiet figures who keep reappearing … they are women and they are not the “Daughters of Jerusalem” whom Jesus addresses, but women from Galilee … the women disciples who are so often and so easily overlooked … but when the events of that awful day are over, who is it that stands beside the cross unafraid to be affiliated with “the King of the Jews” … unafraid to minister to his broken body that had been laid in a borrowed tune.

Perhaps when we read a story and enter in and seek to pay attention, we do well to note those who don’t clamor for our attention, those who quietly persist, those who are faithful even in the face of danger.

Among the gospel writers, Luke, who is the author of this morning’s gospel texts, elevates the visibility and the status of women. When the others have fled and Jesus has died, who alone remains faithful? Male followers of Jesus take note: Luke says that it is the women who have followed Jesus from Galilee—one of Israel’s backwater regions.

Speaking of women from “backwater regions”, if you did not sleep through Montana State History you may remember the name: Jeanette Rankin. Jeanette Rankin is one of the most famous Montanans, though I’m sure not universally loved.

Jeannette Rankin was the daughter of a Montana cattle rancher and was the first woman in U.S. history elected to the United States House of Representatives and the first female member of Congress. She was—take careful note—a Republican and a lifelong pacifist. She was the only member of Congress to vote against United States entry into World War II and one of fifty to vote against World War I Additionally, she led resistance to the Vietnam War.

Are there any women from Montana here this morning who are registered voters? Well, you can thank Jeanette Rankin who fought for your right … but when she voted against U.S. entry into WWI, a number of her suffragist speaking engagements were canceled.

If it is the women who stand out in our reading of Montana history and in our reading of Luke’s gospel, if we are still in a state of awareness, paying close attention, we might ask ourselves: “Who is missing?” “What is the most populous group in Jerusalem that receives no mention, captures no attention, but who will surely suffer the most from the action their elders?

THE CHILDREN! … Where are the children???

Peeking out of doorways, hiding in the shadows, the children are always nearly mute witnesses to the actions of their elders that they will one day have spend the remainder of their adult lives paying for.

In the Old Testament we read that the “sins of the fathers are visited upon the children into the third and fourth generations”.

There must have been a mystical connection between the Iroquois and the ancient Israelis because the Iroquois Nation of North America lived by the belief that said:"In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations,"

Perhaps it was acting out of a similar belief that moved Jeanette Rankin to vote against war—any war—on behalf of the many future generations of children who would have to pay appalling tolls for their parents and grandparents inability to “seek peace and pursue it”, as the psalmist declared.

There was a young man who served as a Mormon missionary in Serbia in the late 1970’s. Some dozen years later, war broke out in the area. It was the early 90’s, and Yugoslavia splintered into warring factions with Serbs, Croatians and Bosnians hating and butchering each other. It broke the young Mormon missionary’s heart. The young man’s name was Kurt Bestor. What came to Kurt--haunted Kurt--were the faces of the children he had known. "Those children didn't hate anybody," he said. "They didn't care about who owned the land, or who had the power or the money. These are adult neuroses. They just wanted to have a mom and dad and a place to play …”

The song that welled up out of Bestor’s heart is called “The Prayer of the Children” … and the song asks its listeners if they are paying attention to pain of the children around them.

Can you hear the prayer of the children?

Can you feel the hearts of the children?

Can you hear the voice of the children?



And while the song is about Bosnia and Serbia and Croatia, the same song could be written about the children of Israel and Palestine whose faces we saw in our Lenten movie series … indeed, it is a song for ALL children who live their lives under the threat of danger and death because their elders have not yet learned how to live by the simple tenets of their faith.

[The Helena High School choir now sings]

The Prayer of the Children

Can you hear the prayer of the children
on bended knee, in the shadow of an unknown room?
Empty eyes with no more tears to cry
turning heavenward toward the light.
Cryin' Jesus help me
to see the mornin' light of one more day,
but if I should die before I wake,
I pray my soul to take.

Can you feel the hearts of the children
aching for home, for something of their very own.
Reaching hands with nothing to hold onto
but hope for a better day, a better day.
Cryin' Jesus help me
to feel the love again in my own land,
but if unknown roads lead away from home,
give me loving arms, 'way from harm.

Can you hear the voice of the children
softly pleading for silence in their shattered world?
Angry guns preach a gospel full of hate,
blood of the innocent on their hands.
Cryin' Jesus, help me
to feel the sun again upon my face?
For when darkness clears, I know you're near,
bringing peace again.

Dali čje te sve dječje molitve? (Serbian)

Can you hear the prayer of the children?

Dear friends, from California and from Montana, let us each and let us all dream and hope and pray and work for that new day where children many generations removed from ours can reap the sweet fruits of our labor and our love and not the bitter fruits of our warfare and our weakness.
Amen.

The Fragrant Gift: Memories of Loving Service and Salvation

A Shell Ridge Sermon preached by Rev. Greg Ledbetter, preached 03/25/2007
Fifth Sunday in Lent: Gifts in the Wilderness

Sermon Texts: Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; John 12:1-8

Hear this additional reading from the Song of Songs, Chapter 2:

10My beloved speaks and says to me:
‘Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away;
11for now the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
12The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtle-dove
is heard in our land.
13The fig tree puts forth its figs,
and the vines are in blossom;
they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away.

Close your eyes and “come away with me” for a moment … I want to appeal to one of your senses:

Where do you remember the smell of bread baking? Grandmother’s or your own mother’s kitchen? A favorite bakery? Remember the smell of tearing open a fresh-baked loaf, the fragrant rising up in your face.

How about the smell of fresh-brewed coffee wafting through the house in the early morning.

Do you know the smell of the rain on warm asphalt after a long dry spell?

Who do you remember that smoked a pipe, nasty to taste, but so wonderful to smell. Or was there a loved one who wore a memorable perfume … or cologne … a fragrance that was bracing or intoxicating.

Have you worshipped in a cathedral where the censor is swung and the rich, pungent smell of incense fills the air.

Have you knelt down and dug in the soft, warm earth and smelled the very smell of life? Or buried your nose in the first apple blossoms of spring? Or dragged your fingers through the rosemary or the lavender so those fragrances can be held close to your nose?

How about the smell of a Christmas home … the steamy rich smells coming from the kitchen … the fragrance of the Christmas tree … or remember walking into a Christmas tree lot as a child or an adult surrounded by hundreds of fragrant trees?

Have you walked along the seashore and stood facing into the wind just taking in the tanginess of the salt wind?

If you wish, you may open your eyes now. And if someone could go get me a slice of warm bread slathered in butter, and a mug of fresh Peet’s coffee—French roast--that would be wonderful.

Our sense of smell is a remarkable and wonderful thing. Our experience of life is made rich and deep and full by our ability to experience the wonders of creation with our noses.

Humans can smell, but I have to wonder what it would be like to have the olfactory capabilities of my dogs.

I often catch Sparky, our 7 year old male Jack Rusell, sitting in the open back sliding door … just sniffing the wind … his nostrils flaring and sampling whatever there is to be sampled.

Whenever I have been around another dog, when I get home my are immediately all over me, sniffing me up and down to trying to figure out what foul beast I’ve been two-timing with.

And yet as glorious as their smelling apparatus seems to be, it is equally strange. Every time Jan and I go for a walk above Borges Ranch, when we get up to where the cows graze and wander amongst the final results of that grazing, Sparky and Biscuit are out in the field … splashing on the stinky green perfume … “Yeah, baby … you know that you like it!” We have to drive with the windows down on the way home.



I am trying to remember when I last have heard a conscious reference to our olfactory senses within the context of worship. How is it that something that is so powerful a part of our everyday experience is so completely absent in our worship of God together?

Smells and odors and fragrances have incredibly deep religious roots … nearly all ancient religions, including the religion of Israel, burned incense or sacrifices in the hopes that the smell produced was pleasing to God … these “holocausts”, as they were called, symbolized the devotion of God’s subjects … God’s people … the phrase, “a pleasing odor”, occurs repeatedly throughout the Hebrew scriptures, our Old Testament. You may recall, however, that the prophet Amos lambastes the people and their faith for thinking that “pleasing odors” were what God really wanted … that they were any kind of substitute for the weightier matters of justice.

You know already that our worship in this season of Lent has gently pushed and pulled us into new ways of being present to God and God being present to us in our times of gathered worship. Our tongues have been tantalized this Lent with the flavors of Apples, honey, figs, bread and wine. And we began the season with the usual application of ashes to our hands and foreheads, but this year the ashes were infused with the oil of lavender … ashen crosses that were not only visible, but also fragrant reminders of our frailty and mortality. The lavender was also intended to remind us of the promise and possibilities that are present even in the midst of great difficulty.

Today we join Jesus who is sharing a meal in the home of his beloved friends, Lazarus and Martha and Mary. These are the disciples whom Jesus loved, and we can only imagine the extraordinary warmth of feeling that radiated around that room … the conversation … the lingering eye contact in between the words … hands clenched together and kisses exchanged. I would have to think that the love poetry of the Song of Songs aptly described the love between Jesus and his three friends from Bethany.

We who gulp our meals on the run have nearly no sense of the kind of meal that Jesus and his friends shared. These were long, lingering, drawn out affairs. A whole evening would be spent around the table … food coming and going, conversation ebbing and flowing, wine passed and poured and drunk.

I’m remembering my trip to Israel during the summer of my sabbatical … Jordan and I had flown to Tel Aviv where we picked up our trusty little Hyundai and headed into the hills of Galilee. We finally found the little village of Ibillin where one of Israel’s great peacemakers, Father Elias Chacour had founded a school that welcomed Arabs and Israelis, Muslims and Jews. It was dusk when we pulled into the compound of the school on the side of a dusty hill. A woman pointed to where we could find Abuna, as Father Chacour is known. We climbed the stairs to the second floor of an apartment building … walked through the door into a brightly lit, but empty room. At the back of the room was a door and through the door we could hear voices. We opened the door and stepped out into a garden, olive trees and grape vines trailing overhead … and there in the middle of the garden sitting around a long table laden with food and candle and wine was Abuna and his friends. They looked up and greeted us and welcomed us to their table. I was put at the head next to Abuna while Jordan was seated next to some young teachers from the school. Our glasses and our plates were filled … and as our stomachs were filled, so also our hearts became full. The meal and the conversation lasted as long as we did. Finally, we wiped the crumbs of baklava from our lips, took the last swig of wine and took leave of a most memorable evening.

It was just that kind of evening, long, lingering, intimate, that Jesus shared with Lazarus and Martha and Mary and their friends. And at some point in the evening, as the affection between these friends swelled, Mary slipped away for a moment and returned with a gift that she had purchased for just this occasion. It was an exotic and expensive perfume. And this particular perfume was well-known, in the context of the Song of Songs, as a symbol of the intimate nature of the Bride’s love. Mary took the nard and anointed Jesus’ feet with it and wiped them with her hair. And John tells us that the house was FILLED with the fragrance of the perfume.

This is one of those scriptural occasions when our modern sensibilities simply fail to convey the depth and meaning of the actions being described. In our silk stockings and hand-stitched loafers, we have nearly lost our awareness of just how filthy human feet could become when treading through the waste and sewage of dirty and muddy streets. When guests entered a home, the host would provide water for the guests to wash their feet in … or in a wealthy home, a servant would wash the guests’ feet. It was the first act of hospitality, and possibly the most intimate.

When a loved one washed your feet or anointed your feet, it took on the meaning of an act of loving service … it was a way of expressing one’s affection at an incredibly deep level. By anointing Jesus’ feet with expensive perfume, Mary expresses her love of Jesus in the most profound way possible. It is an act of loving, devoted service by the one—a woman follower—who might be considered Jesus’ foremost disciple.

But Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet has another connotation, as well. It’s interesting to note that the Greek word for “dinner” used to describe the meal in Bethany finds its only other usage in describing Jesus’ last meal with his disciples … the last supper. It is at that supper that Jesus speaks to his disciples of his impending departure … his death. At the dinner in Bethany, Mary is not only offering to Jesus an act of loving service, she is also anointing Jesus as a preparation for his burial that is to come.

I can’t help but think of scenes from the movie several of us watched together last night. Paradise Now was the fourth and final movie in our Lenten Cinema Series … it tells the story of two young Palestinian men from the West Bank, friends from childhood, who have agreed to serve on a suicide bombing mission. The night before they are to depart, they are verbally and spiritually prepared for their mission … for what is to come. They gather in a rough-hewn hall around a table in a scene that surely was intended to evoke DaVinci’s famous painting of Jesus’ last supper. 13 Palestinian fighters seated around a table for what will be at least one of the young men’s last supper. And in what appeared to be a sacred ritual, the young men’s bodies are lovingly bathed by the ones who are preparing them for their mission. And as awful and horrific as their actions will be … you get the very strong sense of the sacred feeling and sacred intent of the actions of all who are involved in this event … this deadly mission.

This meal shared by the Palestinian fighters is only a few miles from the place where, some two thousand years earlier, Jesus shared his meal with his friends in Bethany and, later, with his disciples in Jerusalem.

I have to believe that for John, the evoking of the Bethany dinner and the way that the fragrance of the nard FILLED the room is more than just a poetic mention … a literary device. In recent years, scientists have begun to trace the connection between smell and memory. It is said that it may be that smells can evoke our very earliest memories.

One of my aroma-related earliest memories includes living in Hawaii as a child … upon our return from a mainland visit, I rmember getting off the airplane and being festooned in leis … surrounded by the intoxicating aroma of cascades of plumeria blossoms.

While at Linfield College, I worked at Lon Dee Florists … I frequently drove a delivery van full of funeral arrangements … and I remember the overwhelming smell of the stocks in the arrangements … even to this day, when I smell stocks, it is the smell of funeral homes and hushed voices and death that I recall.

Is it John’s intention—the author of the gospel—that the evocation of this room filling fragrance of nard … of this exotic and expensive perfume is to recall us to the memory of this meal among beloved friends? And to recall us to this act of hospitality and loving service that is also a tear-tinged anointing of a loved one who will soon die? John’s gospel is highly artful, and I believe that John wishes for our “spiritual noses” to tingle and twitch and come to life with rich memories of Mary’s act … and to let the memories remind us of what it means to lovingly turn and tend to Jesus our Lord.

Perhaps we find ourselves finally back at the real purpose of Lent … which is to draw us once again into a closer, more loving relationship with God … and with Jesus our Lord. If it takes a pound of pure nard to do it, John tells us that it’s a price worth paying.

And yet perhaps Lent serves an even more fundamental task than drawing us into a closer, more loving relationship with God.

All this talk of smell and memory reminds me of something I remember Rod Romney saying. You may recall that Rod pastored the Lakeshore congregation and Seattle First Baptist before retiring a few years ago. I remember Rod saying that our task in life and faith is less to “be saved” our task is to remember that we have always been saved … at the deepest levels of our individual and shared memories, we may find deep archetypal memories of the God who has always loved us and loved all, the God who has wooed us from when we were in the womb and when we were being “fearfully and wonderfully made” …

It is not a thunderclap of searing salvation that we need as much as a memory as old as mountains and as soft as the sound of our mother’s voice singing us to sleep and as silent and sure as flowers in the meadows in the spring.

And perhaps as we sink and settle down into that deep loving, saving memory we will hear whispered into the imagination of our hearts the ancient love poetry of the God who love us:

[Song of Songs, Chapter 4]

I am for you, my beloved, like an orchard of pomegranates
with all choicest fruits,
henna with nard,
14nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon,
with all trees of frankincense,
myrrh and aloes,
with all chief spices—
15a garden fountain, a well of living water,
and flowing streams from Lebanon.

Hear the voice of God who says: “I am your beloved and you are mine.”
Amen.

A Prodigal Family Portrait: Love that Welcomes

A Shell Ridge Sermon by Rev. Greg Ledbetter, preached 3/18/2007
Fourth Sunday in Lent
Gifts in the Wilderness: The Prodigal Gift

Scripture: Luke 15

Kids say the darndest things. This was the name of a TV show started by Art Linkletter and kept alive by Bill Cosby. One boy said on the show: “A Christian should only have one spouse. This is called monotony.” At Shell Ridge, we could produce our very own “Kids say the darndest things” based on the children’s message, alone.

But, alas, not all of the things that children say are memorable for their cuteness. Some are memorable for the inner pain they cause (though I’m pretty confident that the pain kids are capable of causing is far out of proportion to the knowing intent of their words). How about this “darndest thing”, a far more difficult one: “I hate you! I wish you were dead!” I’d be surprised if any parent hasn’t heard one variation or another on these words from the fruit of their loins and wombs. Yesterday in the park at the peace march three of us stood in a circle and, as I looked at us and realized the challegnes we each faced and thinking that the two in front of me may not have been introduced, I said, including myself in the mock introduction: "troubled parent meet troubled parent meet troubled parent." If the child’s “I hate you” is the equivalent of being stabbed with a blunt, plastic Playskool knife, the words can hit us like a Samurai’s sword. It can feel like our guts are all splayed out on the sidewalk.

Sometimes a child will not only say “I hate you”, but may actually be angry enough to run away. I remember my brother ran away once. He didn’t get very far. Unfortunately, he came back and I had to give back his toys. But do you remember the little nine year old boy from Dallas, I believe it was, this past winter who drove a car and got on an airplane by himself just to get away?

We can probably all understand the desire to “get away” … as I look out at you, it’s hard for me to identify anyone here who isn’t an awfully long way away from where you started … Africa … Australia … England … El Salvador … Rhode Island … Connecticut … Philly … Nebraska … Georgia “Hot-lanta” … Oregon. While there are a few “born and bred” Californians in this room, there aren’t many. Most of us here left home at some time in our lives and so far, we haven’t gone back … at least to stay.

Paul Hardwick’s Lenten photo on the bulletin cover speaks of what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey” … and the hero in this instance isn’t someone who performs superhuman feats or a courageous soldier or someone who sinks the game-winning basket. The hero is one who willingly and fearlessly embarks on a journey of body and soul … a journey that does not have a clear path or intended outcome … except that the journey is necessary to “make” the person, to help the person flesh out and test and fulfill the person’s potential.

Alex spent the last several weeks working on his family’s genealogy and I was reminded of some of my ancestors’ journeys, including the Harris branch of my family from whom I take my middle name … the Harrises who came out in the 1850’s on the Oregon trail in covered wagons to Oregon and a new life. They separated from their family of upbringing and never went back.

The hearers of Jesus’ story understood that kind of journey even if they’d never made their own because their earliest faith ancestors, Abraham and Sarah, had heard God’s call come to them in the land of their upbringing which was a whole long way from where they finally ended up.

The hero’s journey is a journey of separation and self-discovery and fulfillment of one’s potential. We could even say that clear marks of that journey are present in Jesus’ own life and journey. Leaving his home … dwelling in the wilderness … ending, finally, in Jerusalem. And all along the way, a deepening sense of who he was and his purpose in the grander scheme of things.

Well, we can only get so far into the mind of the younger son in Jesus’ story. We don’t know all the reason for his desiring to leave, but we do know the implications. By demanding his inheritance, he declares his father symbolically dead, metaphorically dead. He’s not saying, “Dad, can I borrow a few bucks so I can go sow a few wild oats?” He’s saying, Dad, I’m gonna get my share when you die anyway, so let’s cut to the chase. I’m never planning to see you alive again, so give me what’s mine and let’s be done with it.”

If you think it hurts for a sputtering four year old to say: “I hate you. I wish you were dead,” try having a full-grown adult child say that to you. We are meant to understand that it probably would have wounded the father less if the son had died or if the son had killed the father.

We’re not completely clear on the father’s rights, but in the story, he complies with the younger child’s request. By the laws of that time, the older son got two-thirds of the inheritance, so the younger so takes his third and goes as far away as he can. And again, everything in the story is said in such a way as to help us understand that if the father is “dead” in the eyes of the son, so too, the son is “dead” and utterly forgotten in the eyes of the father … and of the family … and, indeed, in the eyes of the community in which the family lives. “Do you have any children?” someone might ask. “Just one son.” “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” “No, I’m an only child.” Gone. Vanished. No trace. End of story.

The family enterprise has been hit hard by the loss of one-third of its capital, but it will survive … it will go on.



Try as they do, though, the family cannot help hearing bits and pieces of the exploits of the still very much alive younger brother. Bits of juicy gossip trickle back and are whispered around the edges of the community … the kid brother’s getting every bit of bang out of the old family buck that he can. One night he’s helping Britney shave her head … and the next night he’s denying being the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby. Oh, it was a riotous time. If it was possible to be hurt more deeply by someone who no longer existed, I’m sure the family’s pain and dismay grew ever deeper.

Whether the family knows or not, we know that the younger son blows his wad in record time and great was his fall. The party’s over and there’s nothing to show for it but an empty coin-purse and an even deeper emptiness that comes from looking back at home and relationships from across an unbridgeable divide. It was as though he’d been thrown into a prison without bars.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent the last days of his life in a prison with very real bars … and barbed wire and machine guns with hair triggers. From the place of his confinement from which he would never escape except by death, Bonhoeffer wrote: I am “restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage, struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat, yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds, thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness, … powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance, weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making, faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?”

Utterly destitute in body, mind and soul, the younger son “comes to himself”, Jesus’ story says. He comes to himself. Whatever had been separated and split and torn apart within finally comes together and finds union. Maybe the first major stage of the hero’s journey is complete.

British psychologist, R. D. Laing used to say “breakdown is breakthrough” … and perhaps this was the shattering event for the younger son that allowed him his wholeness. Perhaps we can think of our own shattering moments, our own breakdowns which have paradoxically led us more deeply into our own selves, our own truth, a new wholeness. We are, after all, at our best, cracked beings that let in the light of God.

The young hero turns … he turns away from the pen of swine, his filthy grunting brothers who had been the only ones to share their food with him , their fodder … he turns away and begins the hardest journey … the journey home, but not home, exactly.

He knows what he has done … for good or ill, for right reasons or wrong … he knows the implications of his actions. He knows that even if he can map a route back to the place of his upbringing, it will not be his home to which he returns. And you sense that for the younger son, that is OK. He seems to understand that he has effected changes that he cannot undo and his has a peace about accepting his new place in the scheme of things, a place without the old comforting privilege … a place of servanthood.

Do you see any of this journey, this pilgrimage in you? In your life and movement? Has there been a time of particular awareness that you really goofed … really blew it … but also a willingness to take full responsibility for your actions … for your journey no matter what far country it led you through?

At this point of the sermon, let’s pause and recall that Jesus’ story—the story of the so-called “prodigal son” is the third of three stories told in response to this: the Pharisees and scribes were grumbling … bellyaching because Jesus seemed to prefer the company of the impure and the outcast, the whores and pushers and petty thieves to the pious and proper scribes and Pharisees. Maybe their personal feelings were hurt … maybe they liked Jesus and wanted to be liked in return, but more at stake was that, on the one hand, Jesus seemed to pass himself off as a Rabbi who claimed an unusually close relationship with God, yet, on the other hand, how could anyone who was close to God have any kind of proximity to those whom God hated … whom God ignored … whom God cursed … because of the filthy, reprobate lives these human vermin lived. “Thank you, God, that I am not like these wretched … people” was a prayer a Pharisee might be heard praying.

Who gets to speak for the mind of God? Well, Jesus makes his case. But he doesn’t argue with them in a conventional manner, but sits down and tells a story … and then another story … and, finally, another.

The first story tells of a shepherd who should have been fired, if not executed, for leaving 99 of the 100 sheep under his care to go out and search for the one wandering lamb. Not even the best shepherd brings back all of his sheep alive … which shepherd would go in search of one lost sheep while leaving the 99 others untended? On earth or in heaven, what kind of economy is this? No matter, the shepherd finds the lamb, puts it over his shoulders and calls his neighbors together to celebrate. Ludicrous.

The second story is like the first … a lost coin instead of a lamb … a woman now instead of a man … the house is swept and searched carefully until the coin is found … and rather than privately expressing her thanks, the woman calls together a block party to celebrate her good news. Bizarre.

Strange behavior that gets even stranger in the third and final story. And if these were merely stories told in no particular context, Jesus would be thought of as an eccentric … an odd duck in a pond full of odd ducks.

The stories tell of things of seemingly nominal worth that aren’t worth a lot of risk or lost sleep if they cease to exist. But Jesus is helping to cast God in a new light—God who takes all of creation seriously, not just part … God who takes all of the human family seriously, not just some … God who takes riotously outrageous JOY when the disparate parts and pieces of God’s creation come back together in a unified whole.

It’s tempting to make the father in the story “God” … it’s an easy allegorical jump … and even if we stoutly resist turning Jesus’ parables into allegory, we can yet see that the father who runs out to greet his son who was lost and is now found hints in a fleshy way at the God of all creation whom Jesus thinks the elder son Pharisees and scribes have seriously misunderstood.

Let’s listen in on some of the language that is used in the story. Throughout the first two-thirds of the story, The story refers to a “father who had two sons” … the reference is always generationally vertical … father/son … son/father … it is only when the elder son comes back from the fields to find a wedding-like celebration going on that he is told: “Your BROTHER has come …”.

We know well the furious, raging response of the elder brother … his father’s other son, who insulted his family, declared them as good as dead, squandered his inheritance in disgusting ways has now come home to spend the elder brother’s inheritance. The fatted calf is the elder brother’s fatted calf. To the father who is seeking to placate him, the older son refers to “this son of yours”. He absolutely, steadfastly refuses to acknowledge kinship, brotherhood. “This son of yours!” ‘He may be your son, but he’s not my brother!’

The father will not bed dissuaded: “My son” he calls him, “my Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found." ’

This brother of yours. Whoever is the son of the father is also your brother. Whoever is a child of God is also our sibling, our brother, our sister, a part of our common family.

This parable comes at the very center of Luke’s gospel. It is the final of three terse stories told in quick succession. It comes at a time when the very nature of God’s being and the nature God’s love is at stake. The stories, and in fact, all of Luke’s gospel, seem to being asking the question: which version, which image of God shall we take to be true: the God who nurses the elder son’s self-righteous anger, or the God who sprints into the desert to welcome his lost son. Jesus clearly stands over against all of the religious authorities of his faith and his day in declaring that God is the God of the loving welcome.

It is the elder son in us that makes us persist in naming the parable “The Prodigal Son” which is a reference to the younger son’s profligate behavior. But in fact, the “prodigality” in the story is far less in the younger son’s exploits than it is the father whose love is so deep, so boundless, so durable that against all reasonable behavior and all conventional culture and understanding declares that being in relationship trumps whatever it is anyone has done in their past.

But there is another part of our human nature … roots of bitterness that dig their way into us whenever we feel that God is too good to others and not good enough to us. Typically, we want mercy for ourselves and justice—hard justice—for others. But Jesus’ stories call for us to celebrate with God because God has been merciful not only to us, but to other as well, even to those we would not have otherwise accepted into our fellowship.

A Jewish story tells of the good fortune of a hardworking farmer. The Lord appear to this farmer and granted him three wishes, BUT with the condition that whatever the Lord did for the farmer would be given double to his neighbor. The farmer, scarcely believing his good fortune, wished for a hundred cattle. Immediately he recieved a hundred cattle, and he was overjoyed until he saw that his neighbor had two hundred. So he wished for a hundred acres of land, and again he was filled with joy until he saw that his neighbor had two hundred acres of land. Rather than celebrating God’s goodness, the farmer could not escape feeling jealous and slighted because his neighbor had received more than he. Finally, he stated his third wish: that God would strike him blind in one eye. And God wept.

If God weeps when we are priggish and cold in our welcome, if God gasps and groans from the depths of God’s being when we are misers of mercy and pinchpennies of grace … if God weeps and groans at these, let us simply try and imagine God’s joy … God’s celebration … God’s divine elation … when we come to ourselves … when we experience a complete breakdown of the old attitudes and opinions that keep us from fellowship with the rest of the human family … when we realize that it is WE, YOU and ME, and not only the despised “other” that are the lost sheep that God so diligently seeks, that we, YOU and ME, are the lost coin that God, like a great cosmic homemaker, sweeps and cleans until we emerge from the dirt and brokenness of our tidy little lives … that we, YOU and ME, are the both the younger AND the elder son, each lost so nearly irretrievably in his own way, yet never quite beyond the joyous grasp of the galloping father who runs out to welcome and embrace us and welcome us back to FULL membership in the FULL family of God. It is when we come to ourselves and know ourselves to be brother and sister to each other and to all that we finally complete our hero’s journey, that we become, at last, whole. When we finally realize that “we are one”, that we ourselves become “one” as well.

And so, I invite you at last to enter the feast … to come out of the shadows or out of that far land where you have taken yourself or where any reluctance to embrace another or even your own self has taken you. Come from that place where you are to the feast that is, even now, being prepared for you. It is a feast of the land that God has given to us and to all. It is a feast and a land brimming with all of the good gifts—the produce of the land—that God seeks to give to God’s people.

And let us proclaim that the name of the one who prepares the feast is “amazing grace” and “wondrous Love” … it is that amazing grace and wondrous love that welcomes us … and welcomes all.

And so let us one and let us all say and sing with our lives and our decisions, our love and our ministry: “Let us build a house where love may dwell, and ALL may enter in” and let us all say and sing with our lives and our decisions, our love and our ministry: “… all are welcome … all are welcome … all are welcome in this place.”
Amen.

The Abundant Enough

A Shell Ridge Sermon by Jennifer W. Davidson preached March 11, 2007
Third Sunday in Lent: Gifts in the Wilderness

Sermon Texts: Isaiah 55:1-19; Psalm 63:1-8; Luke 13:1-9

We are now, already, at the half-way point of Lent, believe it or not. It has been a somewhat unusual Lenten season this year, as we have immersed ourselves not in penitence and self-denial but in the promises of God:

Through all of Lent we are keeping in mind God’s comforting words spoken by Isaiah: “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” We have listened to the flowing water in our fountain, and we have allowed ourselves, perhaps, to be drawn into the wilderness time, at the least to remember the occasions when we have been in the wilderness places of life—and to remember the gifts that God provides even where all seems desolate, lonely, and lost. “A way in the wilderness; and rivers in the desert.”

On Ash Wednesday a number of us gathered around the fountain and saturated ourselves with God’s promise that “You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.” The first Sunday in Lent we lavished ourselves in apples and honey as we remembered God’s promise to the Israelites to lead them to a land flowing with milk and honey. Last week we feasted at the banquet table of communion as we renewed our confidence, along with Abraham, that we will see the goodness of God in the land of the living.

Our hunger comes in many different forms.

Elliot was about three years old when I found myself suddenly overwhelmed one morning by all that I needed to do in order to properly equip him for this world. I must have made the mistake of venturing “up the hill” from our humble, seminary housing apartment in the Mt Airy section of Philadelphia to the prestigious, wealthy enclave Chestnut Hill only a mile or so away—though light years in terms of income and class--along Germantown Ave. Occasionally Elliot and I would ride the bus up the cobblestone street and debark at the neighborhood-built, all-wooden playground. After a hearty playtime, sometimes we would walk on up to the shopping district, gazing in the windows of the boutiques, and occasionally stopping for a coffee and apple juice at Starbucks.

I must have picked up the Parents Express newspaper on our latest excursion on a beautiful spring day—and I found myself on this particular morning before work paging through the dozens of pages of advertisements for children’s day camps being offered around the Greater Philadelphia region that summer. The choices were endless, but the cumulative effect, at least on this particular Mom, was that I would hopelessly fail my son if I didn’t sign him up for one of these Summer day camps immediately.

There was the Settlement School, where he could begin his life as a musical prodigy; or maybe he needed to develop his physical prowess in this dog-eat-dog world and I ought to sign him up for Soccer or Baseball camp (or both!). Maybe he needed to get a headstart (hardly a headstart already at age three, the newspaper seemed to imply) in computers—and I should send him to the camp to teach him programming. Or, given that there was hardly a day that Elliot went without wearing a cape, maybe I should send him to Drama Camp. Weren’t acting lessons long past due for this three-year old?

The longer I sat considering these options, none of which we could afford in the first place, the more discouraged and depressed I grew. And the more Elliot’s future seemed to loom before me in grey colors of misspent potential. It was clear to me on this particular morning that his could hardly be a childhood future full of lazy summer days, reading by the open window, playing hide and seek until dark with the neighborhood kids, shaping mudpies, playing street hockey, or seeing who could make the longest skid marks in the streets with their bikes (as my childhood was)! No, it was clear to me on that morning that if I didn’t send Elliot to camp that very summer to develop and hone some important life skill—and not only that summer but every summer after that, no matter what the tuition might drain out of us—well, then I would fail him as a parent.

It was all too much, but somehow we were going to have to figure out a way to pull it off—if we wanted our kid to have a rosy future, not a grey one, some competitive chance at making it in this society.

I’d no sooner resolved myself to this thoroughly depressing acceptance of reality, when I glanced up and saw my kid, still only three years old, hungrily gazing up at me—all packed up and ready for daycare. Doug’s hand was on the door as they were hurrying off for the day. Elliot looked at me a bit confused and asked me glumly: “No breakfast today, Mom?”
I hope I never forget that day—when I got so overwhelmed by the pressure to provide the best future possible for my child that I completely forgot to take care of him in the moment he needed me. I sent my kid off to daycare that day without his breakfast. I knew his teacher kept oatmeal on the ready for the families that mismanaged their time on any given morning. He would be okay. But for me, the lesson was stark. I was so concerned with the future, I forgot to be present to the moment.

I tossed that Parents Newspaper into the recycling immediately after Elliot and Doug left. Elliot would be all right with lazy summer days, I decided, just as I had been when I was growing up. What he needed was a family that cared about him here and now. And in every here and now to come. That would be abundance enough.

This morning we have the offer of great abundance from the hands of God in Isaiah 55:8 “Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!” Here is a true invitation to fullness of life, and all of it gift!

Just as God’s promise of a land flowing with milk and honey came to the Israelites while they were wandering in the wilderness, after their exodus from Egypt and their liberation from slavery, so this promise recorded in Isaiah comes to God’s people just as they are preparing, once again, to embark on a long journey—this time heading back to the Promised Land after generations of being in exile. Truth is, many of the exiled Israelites weren’t too sure this was good news. They’d gotten comfortable in their new land, and many of them felt settled there. Though they were in exile, they only knew of the so-called promised land from the stories of their grandparents. Going home wasn’t really going home for them. It was going to a place they’d never seen; a place that had been ransacked and destroyed years before; a place they would need to rebuild from the ground up: from city walls to the walls of the temple, everything lay in ruins back there.

God’s promise, in this case, is only good news for those who were indeed thirsting: for those who had no money to buy what they needed to eat. But many of the Israelites at this time seemed to have enough money to waste. Abundant enough money that God is compelled to ask them, through Isaiah: “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and labor for that which does not satisfy?”

The question continues to have resonance today. At least it does for me. That morning, when I imagined Elliot’s future, all looked bleak. Because suddenly I’d gotten completely swept up in the belief that in order for Elliot to succeed in life, there were certain things we had to do, ways we would be compelled to spend our money in order to invest in our child’s future. My hunger for his success in the world obscured my ability to perceive his actual hunger in the moment for the nourishment he needed to grow that very day.

Thomas Merton called such desires social compulsions which are manifested in the continuing need for success and approval caused by the lurking fear of failure. As a result there is a steady urge, a compulsion, to prevent failure by gathering more and more things to oneself: whether more work, more money, or more friends. All of this acquisitiveness is done in an effort to bulwark ourselves; in an effort to keep ourselves from truly facing the hunger within.

Henri Nouwen points out that one of the main enemies of the spiritual life is greed. When our sense of self depends on what we can acquire, then greed flares up when our desires are frustrated. The more work, the more money, the more possessions, the more people we can pull into ourselves, then the more we are able to make a case for our success in life. Unfortunately, these are exactly that which does not nourish us and what does not satisfy.
Far from it, in fact. Because in our consumerist society we are kept in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction and desire. It is to our economy’s benefit that we are always dissatisfied with what we have. The lure of new and supposedly improved draws us irresistibly to the mall on Saturday, or to i-tunes, or Amazon from the comfort of our own couch. A consumerist economy, such as the one in which we live, thrives when people spend their money on that which does not satisfy. Because if we were to realize that we had enough already, and abundantly so at that, then what would become of the Gross National Product?

This past Wednesday evening, a group of about twelve of us gathered in the sanctuary to experience contemplative prayer together. We started our time out by reflecting on the wisdom of the Desert Mothers and Fathers. These were women and men who lived in the desert of Egypt beginning in the third century. They modeled their spiritual lives after Jesus’ time in the wilderness (from which we have the temptation narrative that opened us into our Lenten journey this year) and Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist—about whom we read in the gospel of Luke this past Advent.

Not a lot survives from these Desert Mothers and Fathers, but we do have collections of their sayings which, when taken together, form what is called a Desert Spirituality.

A man named Arsenius is one of the most highly revered of the Desert Fathers. He lived from the mid-third to early fourth century, for fifty five years in solitude, in the desert of Egypt. Once a Roman educator who had considerable wealth and status, Arsenius gave all of that up in order to descend into his own sense of hunger for God’s presence in his life. When one morning he prayed, “Lord, lead me into the way of salvation,” he heard a voice saying to him in response: “Be silent.”

To descend into silence, as some of us experienced this past Wednesday, is not really the easiest or most comforting thing to do. In fact, it can be deeply unsettling. Because when we descend into silence, when we seek to clear out the constant noise, the clutter, the never-ending wordiness of our lives—we are often forced to confront precisely the things we’ve been keeping ourselves so busy to avoid! Our own sense of emptiness, our own profound hunger for God’s healing presence, our own unquenched thirst for God’s living, loving waters.
Our psalmist this morning surely had descended into that silence before: “My soul thirsts for you,” the psalmist writes: “My flesh faints for you. As in a barren and dry land where there is no water.” To know our need for God as a deep and aching thirst, to know our desire for God as a terrible, longing ache—these are not comfortable places to be. And very often, when we begin to practice a form of prayer that does not fill up the space between God and us with an endless stream of words, requests, and petitions—then we are forced to confront that terrible longing, that yawning ache for God.

Years later, when Arsenius asked a second time: “Lord, lead me to the way of salvation,” the voice that spoke to him not only said: “Be silent,” but also “Pray always.” Henri Nouwen writes that:

To pray always—this is the real purpose of the desert life. Solitude and silence can never be separated from the call to unceasing prayer. If solitude were primarily an escape from a busy job, and silence primarily an escape from a noisy [world], they could easily become very self-centered forms of asceticism. But solitude and silence are for prayer. The Desert Fathers [and Mothers] did not think of solitude as being alone, but as being alone with God. They did not think of silence as not speaking, but as listening to God. Solitude and silence are the context within which prayer is practiced.

The command that Arsenius hears is the very same invitation that God extends in our Isaiah text: “Incline your ear, and come to me, listen, so that you may live.”

This is the marvelous wonder of God’s love for us: it is in the experience of our hunger that we are fed; it is in the realization of our thirst, that we know it quenched. So much so, that the Isaiah text equates listening to God with eating well: in verse 2 God says: “Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.”

In fact, it is the same for the psalmist who writes: “My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips when I think of you on my bed, and meditate on you in the night watches.”

In our hunger for God, we are fed. In our listening for God, we eat well. In the silence of our prayers, our souls are satisfied with the richest of feasts.


Listen and Eat. Taste and See. Be silent. Pray always. The Desert Mothers and Fathers literally walked into the desert and remained there for year after year. Carlo Carretto, who became a desert monk in 1954 at the age of 44, acknowledges that not everyone is called to a desert life. “But if you cannot go into the desert,” he writes, “you must nonetheless ‘make some desert’ in your life. Every now and then leaving others and looking for solitude to restore, in prolonged silence and prayer, the stuff of your soul. This is the meaning of ‘desert’ in your spiritual life.”

A final image: a fig tree that has yet to produce fruit. An impatient land owner. And a compassionate gardener. The landowner, frustrated by the fig trees aberrant behavior, demands that the tree be cut down. The landowner, like John the Baptist in Luke 3, has no patience for trees which do not bear fruit. And like John the Baptist, he urges the use of the axe, which even now lies at the roots of the tree. But the gardener, like the Compassionate Christ, has other plans: “Another year,” he pleads.

And in that year, we get the sense, this gardener will lavish that tree with more tender loving care than that fig tree has ever known before. He will nourish it, dig around it, love it, and urge it to fulfill its potential. I like to think of that year ahead as the tree’s wilderness year: the making of the desert, the abundant enough in the life that fig tree.

We don’t know the end of this fig tree’s story. But that’s because the ending is not the important part here: it is the tending, the listening, the tasting, the hunger and the thirst, it is the abundant enough of God’s lovingkindness that is the real story here.

Be silent. Pray Always. Be hungry. Eat richly. Taste and See that God is good.

The Girl Before a Mirror

A Shell Ridge Sermon by Rev. Angela Yarber (preached 2/25/2007)
First Sunday of Lent--Gifts of the Wilderness: The Gift of Life
National Eating Disorder Awareness Week

Text: Luke 4:1-13 Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness

"Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, “If you are the Child of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”

Let’s be honest. The question we’re all wondering: was Jesus on the Atkins diet? “One does not live by bread alone.” Was it the insatiable need to count carbs that led Jesus into the wilderness, escaping the temptation of sandwhiches, pita pockets, tortillas, and sourdough bread bowls? Or was bathing suite season lurking just around the corner and Jesus wanted to retreat into the desert for forty days of “hot yoga,” certain that the sun, heat, and plow position, combined with utter starvation, would burn off those extra unwanted pounds?
Sacrilege! Blasphemy! Jesus didn’t struggle with such things! How dare we apply our contemporary struggles, our American and privileged concerns onto the Christ, Jesus, Messiah, Co-Sufferer. Jesus wasn’t concerned with such things…was he?

Today we enter into the season of Lent, a time when we remember Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness: 40 days of fasting, heat, temptation, and perhaps fear. At Shell Ridge we are focusing on the Gifts of the Wilderness in the days to come, a time when we recall our own days in the desert, what we learned there, what we needed there, and what provided strength there. Have you ever been in the wilderness? Do you recall spending time in the desert? And, no, I don’t necessarily mean the literal desert or wilderness, though trading stories of camping and hiking is something I love to do. I mean those metaphorical times in the wilderness, the symbolic days in the desert. What did it feel like? Were you hungry, hot, tired, tempted, and a little afraid? What was it that gave you strength during those dry days, your symbolic stream in the metaphorical waste land? We’ve all had our times in the desert, and so did Jesus. Perhaps it was a time when you lost your job, or went through a divorce, or moved far away from family and friends, or watched a loved one suffer and die. These wilderness times are hard and often painful to remember. But we’ve all had our times in the desert.

This morning I would like to share with you some of my wilderness time. Like your time in the desert, it was hard and often painful to remember. One of my heroes in homiletics, Barbara Brown Taylor, describes preaching as “spiritual exhibitionism,” where you lay it all on the line, when you are spiritually naked in front of eager and hungry hearts. And so, at the risk of “baring it all,” so to speak, will you journey with me into the wilderness? It may be hard, painful, or uncomfortable. As we journey, however, remember that we do not brave these desert roads alone: we are on this path together and have a Co-Sufferer by our sides.

Today is, not only the first Sunday in Lent, it is also the beginning of National Eating Disorder Awareness Week. Did you know that 80% of women in America struggle with a sub-clinical eating disorder? This may not be a word with which you are familiar; we hear about anorexia and bulimia and binge eating and over eating, but what’s a sub-clinical eating disorder and how on earth do the majority of Americans have it? You see, a sub-clinical eating disorder is when an individual is constantly worried about food, eating, appearance, calories, exercise—when food and appearance consume one’s thoughts. For me, this notion is best illustrated in Picasso’s painting Girl Before a Mirror. I remember looking at a picture of Picasso’s painting with a child. The child said that there are two girls in the picture. Interesting: the title is Girl, not Girls, Before a Mirror. One girl. One reflection. But her reflection does not really seem to mirror what she looks like, does it? Rather, the girl, like 80 % of American women, looks into the mirror and cannot clearly see her reflection, but a distortion of it—one that is not pretty enough or skinny enough or good enough. Perhaps the girl Picasso was painting compared herself to all the models that grace the covers of magazines, or television, or movies. Perhaps the girl before Picasso’s mirror looked at her reflection with tears in her hungry and wanting eyes and wondered, “Why can’t I look like _______?” Maybe she was struggling with Body Dysmorphic Disorder. At one point or another we’ve all been Picasso’s girl, Picasso’s person before a mirror, where our eyes could not see our reflection clearly, but instead saw one that was less than, worse than, unworthy to see beauty reflected in the mirror. Such was the case for the majority of my adolescent years.

I’d like to share a story with you, a story that stems from one of my days in the wilderness. A story of a time when I was convinced, like Jesus, that “one does not live by bread alone.” Once upon a time there was a college cheerleader named Angela. Now before you pass judgment on this chipper cheerleader, allow me to elaborate. She was not your typical cheerleader—ditsy and airhead were not a part of her vocabulary. She was actually a star student. 4.0 in the religious studies program. That’s right: religious studies. Not only was the cheerleader a good student, but she was a youth minister at a local church, leading bible studies, mission trips, and camps for teenagers. I suppose it’s safe to say that this cheerleader was an oxymoron. However, despite her paradoxical tendencies to defy stereotypes when it came to the brains or morals of the typical cheerleader, this college student found herself struggling with her reflection, much like Picasso’s girl before a mirror. She had always been a dancer, gymnast, and performer, living her life in a leotard…surrounded by mirrors…on stage for all the world to see…every flaw visible for critique. So, maintaining weight was always an issue for the college cheerleader. In fact, she’d battled anorexia for many of her middle and high school years. But now she found herself in college: studying to make straight As, serving as a minister at the “wise” age of 20, and battling to balance on the quivering hands of her bases that threw her tiny body into the air in cheerleading stunts. The smaller you are, the higher you fly. So, the I cheerleader counted calories and exercised, aware that her 5’5” frame probably did not need to weigh so little. To make matters worse, the cheerleader was a perfectionist. As a performer, her life was always on display and her new-found faith taught her to imitate Christ, to be perfect as her Heavenly Father is perfect, to deny herself, take up her cross and follow Christ. And so, she did. Perfectionism and self-loathing are recurring idioms in disorder eaters. Like the female monastics that lived hundreds of years before her, she denied herself, took up her cross and followed Christ.

In Michelle Lelwica’s stirring book, Starving for Salvation, she quotes a young anorexic’s words, “The whole life is like you are carrying a cross—something heroic, something that is very difficult and demands admiration. I felt [that] doing something that was not hard was quite inconceivable; it would be lazy and despicable.”

So, the cheerleader took up her cross and followed a path that led only to emptiness, hurt, hunger, and a countless number of emergency room visits.

On game day, the squad was required to eat a meal before the game. “You can’t cheer on an empty stomach,” coach said. So, the college cheerleader polished off 6 Saltine crackers and a glass of water. Like, Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror, she stood in front her reflection, running her hands over her bony ribcage and protruding hipbones. She did not see an emaciated body staring back at her, but instead saw arms that needed toning, obliques with too much fat, and a waistline that could use some more sit-ups. She saw a hypocrite: “how can I preach to my youth that they are made in the image of God, beautiful and beloved, and struggle so much with what I see? I am not worth the space my body takes up. Furthermore, I am succumbing to patriarchal and materialistic trends that I find oppressive. Why won’t this go away? A girl who was raised in the projects was not made to deal with such a privileged problem. This is my choice, my disorder. Just make it go away,” she thought. So, as she did after every meal, the cheerleader retreated to the bathroom to hold back her hair and force her finger down her throat. When she was finished she brushed her teeth, smoothed out the pleats on her uniform, wiped the tears from her eyes, and smudged cherry-red lipstick across her mouth. As she gathered her thoughts before walking to the gym, she glanced over to her dorm room bed to see her Greek homework laying unfinished and sighed at the thought of post-game studying. She closed her notebook, and reached for her Greek New Testament. And the words of Ephesians 2:10 caught her eye: αυτου γαρ εσμεν ποιημα. “You are God’s workmanship, God’s ποιημα.” This word for “workmanship” in Greek is the word ποιημα from which we derive our English word for poem. You are God’s poem, Angela.

The college cheerleader returned to the bathroom, reopened her cherry-red lipstick and scrawled across her mirror in large letters: αυτου γαρ εσμεν ποιημα, promising herself and the God who created her that she would get help for her disorder. Strength in the wilderness. A stream in the desert of disorder.

You are God’s workmanship. One day, God wrote a beautiful, magnificent poem and titled it Katy, Greg, Eliot, Maura, Willis, Frances. As an artist creates a masterpiece, imbuing each detail with handiwork and care and intentionality, so God has created each of us. God’s fingerprints are all over you. Whether you see your reflection in the mirror and smile, or whether you look, like the Girl Before a Mirror, and see a distortion of that reflection, God looks at you and cries out, “If you could only see yourself through my eyes, you would marvel at the sight.”

So, one does not live by bread alone…but a little bread sure does help.

During this time of year, let us be mindful of those who may still find themselves in the desert. Let us remember that there are those in our world and perhaps here in this place that are struggling in the wilderness, even today. May we be a people that offer streams in dry lands. May we be a church that provides strength in the midst of heartache. If you are in a dry and hungry place, we invite you to take heart. Here is a place where you may find refuge in the wilderness. Here is a place where the living water never runs dry, no matter your situation in the desert. The road may not be easy, but it is one that we commit to taking together. And as we walk hand in hand along these desert pathways, let us remember that One has gone before us and walks beside us still, giving hope and peace and strength for the journey. During this season of Lent, let us be refreshing agents of hope in wilderness, a source of rest in the desert. During this week, may we be mindful of the concerns of struggling men and women around us, who look at their reflections, like Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror, and are unable to see the beauty with which they are created.

As Tony Morrison reminds us in her novel Beloved, may we learn to love our flesh, no matter how others perceive it. As Cele proclaims in Alice Walker’s novel turned musical, “I am beautiful!” And even as pop icon Christina Aguillara sings, may we recall that “we are beautiful no matter what they say.” You are beautiful, beloved, and worthy in the wilderness and in the promised land. As the one who created us and sees us wholly tells us, “you are made in my image and that is good.”
Amen.