PENTECOST 10, AUGUST 5, 2007

Pentecost 10 August 5, 2007
Luke 12:13-21

A few years ago at Confirmation Camp I learned a game called WOULD YOU RATHER? The students line up down the middle of the room and then they are asked a question like would you rather kiss your brother/sister or fall in a pile of manure? It is a game based on silly choices, and the educational value comes from thinking about WHY we chose what we chose.

The game reminded me of the old Jack Benny comedy routine. A man steps up to Benny on the street, puts a gun in his ribs and says, “Your money or your life.” There’s a very long pause while Benny adopts his trademark pose of chin in hand. Finally the mugger demands “YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE!” Benny replies, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”

WOULD YOU RATHER – HAVE YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE?

In our Gospel lesson, a man wants Jesus to make his brother share the family inheritance. Rather than get involved in this family dispute, Jesus takes the opportunity to caution his listeners about the dangers of greed, backing up his warning with a story.

The story of the man and his barns brings to mind the Old Testament story of Joseph in the book of Genesis. Remember how Joseph was in prison because his boss’ wife had accused him of sexual harassment? While in prison, Joseph made quite a name for himself as an interpreter of dreams.

While Joseph is in prison, the Pharaoh is having strange dreams about fat cows and skinny cows, full and empty stems of grain. He asks his servants if they know any dream interpreter and someone remembers Joseph and they send for him.

Joseph interprets these dreams to mean that there will be seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine and advises Pharaoh to build large barns to store the surplus from the good years to help tide the country over in the bad times.

Pharaoh is so impressed with Joseph that he appoints him Prime Minister. And when things work out as Joseph predicted, the country is saved, and Egypt is able to help people from other starving countries.

Our Gospel story is similar:
1) great material blessing is followed by
2) great vision for the future
The stories begin to differ in the use to which the great material blessings will be put.

In the Joseph story, Joseph and Pharaoh use the abundance for the good of the community and for hospitality to the stranger. They store up the blessing to be used during the time of want and need, not for themselves, but for others, for the poor people of Egypt and the world; all who come in want and need.

In the story of the “Rich Fool” the farmer thinks only of himself. One scholar says that no other parable of Jesus is so full of the words Me and MY and I and MYSELF. The Greek word for I is EGO, so this story is full of EGOTISM.

God has given us what we have, not for ourselves, but for the benefit of the community and for hospitality to strangers. This is true, whether we are talking about our personal, individual goods, or the goods we hold in common as a congregation, as the church.

Everything we have, right down to the last breath we take, God has given to us. And God’s judgment of us will have little to do with what we have, and everything to do with what we have done with it.

Tithing has gone out of fashion, I suppose. At least very few people seem to do it anymore. I think tithing lost its appeal among Lutherans because if seemed too legalistic, too rule-oriented. After all, we are Gospel people, free to respond to the Grace of God as we wish.

I think this is unfortunate, for it robs us of the many blessings to be received from a proper understanding of stewardship. We have created for ourselves a Stewardship Game of WOULD YOU RATHER, a game nobody wins. We have created a false choice between two styles of giving and then acted as though we’ve been forced to chose between them.

I like easy math, so let’s use $100 as an illustration number. A tithe of $100 would be $10.

An “of my own free-will giving” attitude would say:

I have done well, worked hard and earned this money. It would be a good thing if I gave some of it back to the community. Let me examine the programs and agencies in the community to see which deserve MY hard-earned dollars. I will give them, say $10.

Now, this is a commendable and worthy attitude, but it is also not Biblical Stewardship.

A “God’s Law compels me” attitude would say,

God has commanded that I give $10 of every $100 I earn to the church. Because I am a god-fearing person and do not want to make God mad at me, I will give the church $10 of my money.

Do you see how this is a b ad game of Would you rather? One way, you feel like its something you have done; in the other you feel like God made you do it. Neither one is Biblical Stewardship.

A Biblical, Christ-centered attitude toward giving says:

God has $100 and has trusted me with it. God has asked that I use at least, AT LEAST $10 of this money for the benefit of others and the spreading of the Gospel. Of the other $90, I should use as much as necessary for my needs and I am asked to share the rest with others as I see their needs.

What we do with our possessions depends upon which of these attitudes we take toward stewardship. In his parable, Jesus reminds us that we are all going to die someday. And Jesus says, at the inevitable moment of our death, our accumulated possessions will be worthless to us.
As a matter of fact, they could be worse than useless. If the care and maintenance of our stuff has diverted us from seeing the care and maintenance of our souls; the very things we cherish in this life will have been that which has ruined us for the next.

As Jesus said, “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

God has placed in our hands all that we are, and all that we have. And the question is: What are we going to do with it, with our life and with our stuff?

Would you rather serve God or serve yourself?
That is the real WOULD YOU RATHER question.
Amen and Amen.

Pentecost 9, July 29, 2007

Pentecost 9 July 29, 2007
Luke 11:1-13

True story. Heard it on the Paul Harvey radio show a few years ago. Three year old goes with his mother to the grocery store. As they started in the door, Mom says to son, “Now, you’re not going to get any chocolate chip cookies, so don’t even ask.

She put him in the child’s seat and off they went up and down the aisles. He was doing just fine until they got to the cookie session. When he saw the familiar package, he said, “Mom, can I have some chocolate chip cookies?

I told you not to even ask. YOU’RE NOT GETTING ANY!

They continued up and down the aisles, but, like always, they had to backtrack looking for a few things and wound up back on the cookie aisle again.

Mom, can I have some C C cookies?
I TOLD YOU, YOU CAN’T HAVE ANY!
NOW SIT DOWN AND BE QUIET.

Finally, they arrived at the checkout. Junior is an experienced shopper. He knows this is his last chance. He stood up in the seat and shouted.
IN THE NAME OF JESUS! MAY I HAVE SOME CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES?

Everyone in the checkout area stared, then laughed, and then applauded. And then, while Mom stared, 23 shoppers went and bought her little boy his C C cookies, 23 boxes of them.

What was it Jesus said, “Ask and it will be given”?

In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus is talking with his followers about prayer. First he teaches them what we call the LORD’S PRAYER. Then he tells them a weird story about bothering your neighbors in the middle of the night. And he finishes up by urging them to keep at it with prayer; to search, to knock, to ask!

And what is the core of what Jesus says about prayer?
1) Do not be afraid of God.
2) Ask God for what you want.
3) Trust God to give you what you need.

As the story begins, Jesus has been praying while the disciples wait for him. When he has finished, they ask him to teach them to pray.

They have noticed that John the Baptist has taught his disciples to pray, and they want Jesus to get with the program and to teach them this secret knowledge as well. And so he does. But the prayer he taught them is probably not exactly what they had in mind.

Of course, it is impossible for us to get inside their heads and know for sure, but they probably wanted to learn the secrets to POWERFUL prayer, the kind of prayer that changes things, fixes things, gets you things you want, like Chocolate Chip Cookies.

But instead of getting a prayer that changes things OUT THERE, in the external world which they hoped to control with God’s help; Jesus teaches them a prayer that changes things IN HERE, inside our hearts and minds and souls.

Martin Luther once said that to be a SINNER is to be BENT, to be CROOKED, to be TWISTED in upon ourselves. The root of sinfulness begins in selfishness; in looking at the world as a place to get MY needs met, MY life straightened out, MY career, MY enjoyment, MY fulfillment, MY future, MY happiness.

But the prayer Jesus teaches us to pray is not MY prayer, it is OUR prayer, directed to OUR father, and it is not a prayer aimed at getting what I want. It is designed to turn us away from our wants toward what GOD wants. It is in praying this prayer that we become the people God made us to be, wants us to be in Jesus Christ.

The Lord’s Prayer is a powerful prayer, and it’s power lies in its ability to mold us into a Christlike shape.

As we pray and meditate upon this prayer throughout our lives, we discover that it constantly pulls us away from our focus upon ourselves and then bends us in a new direction; in the direction of loving God and serving others.

There are four basic sections to the prayer:

1) About God
2) About Stuff
3) About Forgiveness
4) About Trouble

1) About God. First we learn to be comfortable in approaching God, not afraid, not intimidated and fearful. Jesus, in the original text, uses the Aramaic word that means Dad or Daddy, or Papa to refer to God.

It’s hard for us to understand how shocking this was to Jesus’ disciples. We live in a very informal age. Remember, these are people who would not even call God by name, they made elaborate sentence structures to avoid it; saying things like, “the one who made the clouds and sky,” or “the one who hung the sun in the sky.” They were afraid of offending God by saying the name wrong.

In contrast, Jesus invites us into an intimate relationship with God, a relationship of love and trust, like the little boy in the store, begging his Mommy for cookies.

2) About Stuff. Jesus says, “give us this day our daily bread.” This is a reference to the manna in the wilderness, when the children of Israel were going from Egypt to the Promised Land. Remember, they were allowed only enough for each day; if they took more, it would rot before they could use it. So it is with our stuff. We are asked to trust that God will give us enough for our needs, beyond that we are not to ask or to worry.

3) About Forgiveness. This one is extremely simple and very difficult. God, who loves you as a parent loves a child, who cares about your needs and gives you the things, the stuff, you need, has forgiven you your failures and sins, every evil deed you have ever done. And all God asks in return is that you forgive each other. It’s that simple. And that hard.

4) About our troubles. Jesus is realistic, yet hopeful. What is translated here time of trial does not mean that God creates trouble in our life to test us or to trip us up or to see how faithful we are; it does mean that hard times are sure to come in every life and are difficult for us, and it is during those times that we find out how secure our faith is. In this prayer we ask that we be spared these hard times whenever possible. This is what Jesus was saying when he prayed not my will in the Garden before his crucifixion.

Having taught his disciples a basic prayer, Jesus drives home its lesson with the story about the grouchy neighbor and the noisy friend. Remember; a parable does operate on a one-to-one, this represents that, basis. The neighbor is not God and beating on doors in the middle of the night is not prayer. Jesus’ point is to be persistent in prayer; you’re not afraid of you friends, don’t be afraid of God. Ask for what you want.

Remember, Jesus didn’t say anything about going to a stranger in the middle of the night to ask for food. He said to go to a neighbor, a friend, someone with whom you have a relationship; someone you know and who knows you! The point of prayer is to talk with God, to be in relationship with God, to move your heart and mind and soul into cooperation with God in loving and serving the world.

The Rev. Leslie Weatherhead was a famous British Methodist preacher of about 50 years ago. He used to tell the story of his neighbor’s children, Tommy and Suzy. They lived in the English countryside, and Tommy loved to trap rabbits. Suzy was very unhappy about this and every day begged her big brother to stop being so cruel to the rabbits, but Tommy laughed her off and continued to run proudly into the kitchen with his trapped and skinned rabbits held high.

One night, their mother heard Suzy praying:
Dear God, please stop Tommy from trapping rabbits. Please don’t let them get trapped. They can’t They Won’t! Amen.

Mom was a little worried about this prayer. She was afraid her little girl would be disappointed when God didn’t stop Tommy’s traps from working. She was afraid of her daughter losing faith because of unanswered prayer. She said to Suzy,
How can you be so sure that God won’t let the rabbits be trapped?

Suzy replied, MOTHER, I AM SURE FOR MANY REASONS.GOD IS GOOD, GOD IS KIND, GOD LOVES RABBITS AS MUCH AS I DO. BUT MAINLY I AM SURE BECAUSE TODAY I TOOK THE HATCHET AND CHOPPED UP TOMMY’S TRAPS!

Jesus’ teaching on prayer is that we should pray so often, and so regularly, and so persistently that we become as familiar with God as we are our neighbors and friends. And it is within that relationship and familiarity that God changes our lives, unbends us from selfishness and evil and turns us in the direction of love and goodness.

And as a result of having had our lives changed by God, we find ourselves empowered to change the world. We embrace Christ as the way of salvation for ourselves and discover that we have become a part of the ay of salvation for the world. AMEN

St. mary Magdalene, July 22, 2007

Saint Mary Magdalene
July 22, 2007

Text: John 20:1-2,11-18

I made my first trip to study at Oxford University’s Summer Programmed in Theology exactly ten years ago. I had a wonderful time rambling around 15th century buildings in Oxford, debating obscure theological ideas with Australian nuns, African priests and Methodist ministers from Iowa.

There were two flies in my ointment though: one it was unseasonably warm that year, in the 90’s and most of England has no A/C, mostly because they don’t really need it, so I sweated through my days.

The second fly is that, well, people assumed all Southerners were Baptists. I would introduce myself; say I was from Nashville, TN. And they would say, so you’re a Southern Baptist then?

And I’d say, “No, I’m a Lutheran,” and they would look at me with a startled, quizzical look; as though I had said something as unbelievable as, “I’m a ballet dancer,” or “I’m a rap singer.”

It happened over and over again. Not just Brits, but mostly Americans and Canadians. It got, frankly, a bit annoying. But I smiled and explained about how there were Lutherans in the South and that many of them had been here a long time, etc. etc.

The night before the Summer Programme was over, we had a banquet, and we were all requested to “dress up” so, in spite of the heat, I put on a black clerical shirt with white collar and a jacket.

As I settled down to dinner, I found myself opposite a woman to whom I had explained that I was a Lutheran at least three times in the last two weeks. She looked at me and said, “I didn’t know Southern Baptists wore collars.” I said, “They don’t.” And she said, “Then why are you wearing one?” and I said, “Oh, a number of reasons: Tradition, I don’t like neck-ties, you can wear them anywhere and be considered “dressed formally,” they look good with my graying hair, etc., but the main reason I wear one is I’M NOT A BAPTIST, I’M A LUTHERAN!” And she said, “OH.”

Today’s sermon deals with issues of mistaken identity, of misunderstanding of who Christ is, and also of our misunderstanding of who Mary Magdalene was. Mary thought she knew who Jesus was, but she did not fully understand him until after she met him in the garden on Easter morning. We think we know who Mary Magdalene is, but her identity has been obscured through a thousand years of wrong assumptions and bad Biblical scholarship. And we think we know who we are, but we don’t really know ourselves until we see ourselves through the eyes of Christ.

Through the years, popular culture has made as many assumptions about Mary Magdalene as the rest of the world has made about all southerners being illiterate, barefoot Baptists who are still fighting the Civil War.

For many years, she was identified with the woman taken in adultery and with the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears. Medieval priests added 2 + 2 and got 5 and decided that Mary Magdalene was a converted prostitute, a notion that has made her the “patron saint of fallen women.” And in recent years, Dan Brown in his novel The DaVinci Code has held out the idea that Mary Magdalene was all that, and also that she married Jesus and they had a family, etc. etc.

And none of it’s true. There is no evidence in the Bible connecting her to any kind of sinfulness whatsoever. As a matter of fact, in 1969, The RC Church apologized and declared her a saint. A little late, but at least they took it back!

To set the record straight:
Her name is often listed first among the women who followed Jesus. Her name carries the same respect afforded Peter who was always first among disciples.

She was a woman of wealth who helped support Jesus and his disciples. While most disciples abandoned Jesus, Mary Magdalene had the courage to follow him all the way to the Cross. She stood beside his mother the entire time. She helped take him down from the cross; she helped put him in the tomb. (Info from “People of Purpose”)

And on Easter morning, she went to the tomb. She went not really knowing who Jesus was. Yes, he had healed her, yes she had heard him preach many times, yes, she had had many private conversations with him, yes, she knew him better than almost anyone else, but still, she didn’t really know him. For she thought he was dead. She had seen him die, she had heard him cry out, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken Me?” she had handled his dead body.
She went to the tomb that early Sunday morning knowing that he was dead.

She came to the garden that day and found the stone rolled away and the tomb empty. And, the thought of Jesus being alive did not enter her mind. She knew him as a great teacher, and friend and healer, but she did not really know who he was.

She went back to Peter and the other disciples and told them. They have taken the LORD out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.

Even after she returned to the tomb and spoke with the angels, she was still seeking a dead teacher, not a living LORD.

When she saw Jesus, she did not recognize him, she made an assumption that it was the Gardener. It was dark, it was early, who else who be out here at this time of day? Besides, even if it did look a little like Jesus, it couldn’t be, Jesus is dead.

So she speaks to him, asking for Jesus’ body, and he answers her, calls her by name, and in that moment, she knows who he is. And also, in that moment, she discovers who she herself is.

He is the LORD, the Living God of Israel, the conqueror of Sin Death and the Devil. And she is not only the beneficiary of his healing power and the recipient of his teaching in this life, but in him she has the gateway to life eternal.

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the hinge-pin of history. Without it, the story of life is one long agonizing headache interrupted by brief moments of happiness. With the Rx, all history and all of life are filled with meaning and hope.
The Rx defines Christianity, it defines us.

In his novel A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANEY, John Irving writes:

Anyone can be sentimental about the Nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don’t believe in the Resurrection, you’re not a believer.

What we proclaim, what we preach, sing and celebrate Sunday after Sunday is the promise of God that God’s love is greater and stronger than anything, even death. We revel in the joyous Good News that Christ is Risen, Christ is Risen Indeed!

But, for us, one question remains. Mary was lucky enough to meet the risen Christ in the garden, lucky enough to have her life changed by a face-to-face encounter. But what about us, we who live 2000 years later? Where can we find the Christ? How do we meet the Risen Lord?

In the movie Whistle Down the Wind, three young children stumble upon a bum sleeping in the straw in an abandoned country barn. “Who are you?” a girl demanded. The bum jerked awake, stared around in an alcoholic stupor and muttered, “Jesus Christ!” And the Children believed him.

What he meant as a curse, they took as a statement of fact and treated him accordingly. For the rest of the movie, they treated him with awe, respect and love. They brought him food and blankets and sat and talked with him and told him about their lives. Over time, their tenderness changed this man, an escaped convict who had never known such love.

Our calling today is to see the face of the Risen Christ in those around us.

The risen Christ is here in this room – we are the Body of Christ in the world.

The Risen Christ is here on this Altar in the Sacrament of the table – the Body and Blood of Christ.

The Risen Christ is most of all to be found in those around us who need love: the hungry, the homeless, the oppressed and imprisoned, the sick of body and weary of soul.

We are called to be like Mary and tell the world, “I have seen the LORD!” and this is what he did for me, I know he can change your life too!

Amen and Amen.

PENTECOST SEVEN, JULY 15, 2007

Pentecost 7 Who’s in the Ditch July 15, 2007
A few years ago this story was in a NY paper. A woman was driving home on the NJ turnpike when she became aware of a huge truck that was tailgating her and switching lanes with her. She sped up to get some distance and the truck sped up too. She slowed and moved to the right lane and he slowed and moved to the right lane right behind her. She sped up again; slowly she began to panic, driving faster and faster trying to elude the semi on her tail. Scared out of her wits, abruptly drove up an exit lamp, passing cars by getting on the shoulder, turned onto a main street almost on two wheels and darted forward, hoping to lose her pursuer in traffic. But he ran a red light and kept coming, dogging her all the way.

Near panic, she whipped her car into a service station and bolted out of the car – screaming for help. The truck driver slid into the parking lot behind her, jumped from his car and ran – not after her, but to her car; jerking open the rear door and pulling out a man hidden there with a knife in his teeth. From his high seat in his truck cab, the driver had seen the would-be rapist/attacker crouching in the back seat, awaiting his chance. He had chased the woman in an attempt to save her from the very dangers she carried with her.

In our Gospel lesson for today, the lawyer asks Jesus “Who is my neighbor?” and Jesus gives him an unusual answer, an answer that really means, “Your neighbor is exactly the opposite of who you think it is. The one you think is your enemy is really your friend.” When we hear the lawyer’s question, we usually think he is asking: “Who is the person (or persons) whom I can reasonably be expected to help when they are in trouble?” And, frankly, that is probably what the lawyer meant by the question.

But Jesus turns the man’s question upside down with his story. Jesus makes the question of “Who is my neighbor?” into one that asks, “Who will help me, from whom can I expect help when I am in need?” Now, when we hear a story, we usually “identify” with someone in it, we say to ourselves, “Yes, I’m like that person, that’s the way I feel or that’s the way I would act.” Truth be told, when most of us hear the story of the Good Samaritan, most of us sort of identify with the, well the Good guy, don’t we? We’d like to think we’d be like him, helpful and kind. None of us wants to be the haughty priest or the bustling Levite, religious officials too busy to care. Yes, we would like to think of ourselves as the good, kind, Mother Teresa type person, selflessly coming to the aid of a stranger.

But, I need to point out that, as a good storyteller, Jesus knew who his listeners were likely to identify with, and he knew it would not be the Samaritan. Jesus’ audience was Jewish, the foolish man in the ditch was Jewish, the Priest was Jewish, the Levite was Jewish, the robbers were Jewish, Jesus, the storyteller, was Jewish. It is a completely Jewish story. And the last person any of these Jews would identify with would be the good “Samaritan.” He was a hated enemy, an apostate, a heretic, a foul worshipper of the wrong God, an unclean person; and Jesus used him as the hero of the story. Jesus here shook up their preconceived notion of where they could look for help in time of need. Jesus was telling them that your neighbor – the one who will help you – could be the person you least expect. It could indeed be a person you wouldn’t cross the road to spit on if they were on fire. Like the woman being chased by the truck-driver. She thought he was her enemy, yet he turned out to be her rescuer, her protector, her neighbor.

When he asked Jesus who his neighbor was, the lawyer was trying to define the limits of his own love, his own ethical actions toward others. Jesus turns this upside down by establishing a love ethic which has no limits, and which does not play by previously established rules of who’s in and who’s out. Really, I think this story moves beyond whom we are required to help and from whom can we legitimately expect help. It moves from our relationship to each other into God’s relationship with us.

The man in the ditch had acted foolishly by traveling alone on a dangerous road. He did not deserve help. If he could have chosen his helper, he would have chosen either the priest or the Levite, people whose duty it was to help him. But instead, he was helped by a Samaritan, a Samaritan who helped him, freely, graciously, without any expectation of reward or of being paid back. We are the person in the ditch, and the Good Samaritan is our God. Our spiritual condition is that we all follow foolish paths at times, we all get ourselves into all sorts of ditches; spiritual, emotional, physical, mental. We are hurt and injured, lying there, unable to help ourselves. And the Gospel is that God, like the Samaritan, comes along and picks us up and dresses our wounds, and pays for our mistakes (sins) and does all of this free of charge.

We don’t like to ask God for help do we? We want to come into God’s presence looking pure and clean and whole. We don’t like it when we have to come broken and needy. We don’t like it when we have to come with remorse and repentance for foolish actions and sinful deeds. We don’t want to need free grace, free love and free tender care. We want to deserve God’s love, we want to earn it, deserve it, pay for it. We want God to reward us for being the fine folks we are sure that we are. While I was on vacation, I was driving in the mountains and I saw a little church with a message sign almost bigger that the church. The message read, “For sinners only. None others need apply.”

About 20 years ago the New York Times reported that a man went to Times Square to a line in front of the Theater box office for the play “The Real Thing.” He had two tickets to give away. They were a $60 value. He had no takers. He explained that his wife was sick and he couldn’t go to the play. Still no takers. The man really hated to see the seats go to waste. He went over to a little coffee shop across the street and pondered a while; then he came back and offered the tickets for $100 a piece and they sold immediately.

We are like that with God. We don’t want God’s handout of love, we don’t want God’s generous offer of health and hope and grace for life. We want to earn God’s love, but, but, here’s the hard part, we can’t. We really can’t. For we are the one in the ditch, we are the wounded and foolish one, in heed of help and healing.

Before the Lawyer asked Jesus who was his neighbor, he asked Jesus another question. Do you remember? He asked him, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus pointed him to the Scriptures and the man gave the right answer, “Love the Lord your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus said, “That’s right. You’ve got it.” And right here’s where the lawyer fell in the ditch,

Notice, he doesn’t blink an eye at the monumental idea of devoting his entire existence to loving God; isn’t that what all your heart, soul, strength, and mind imply? Total and complete commitment. If you give all that over to God, there isn’t much room left for TV or baseball or gardening or dating or whatever. But apparently, the lawyer is okay with that demand. It’s the neighbor business that bothers him. Perhaps this is because it’s easier to get caught not loving your neighbor than it is to get caught not loving God. It’s plain to see if you fail to feed the hungry or clothe the naked, but who’s going to notice if you don’t pray or read your Bible enough?

Jesus picks up immediately on the fact that the lawyer has skipped over the “loving God” part and gone immediately to the “who’s my neighbor” part. The man is guilty of the twin sins of pride and ingratitude. He believes he is capable of pleasing God through his own actions and he is therefore not grateful to God for God’s love and grace. He does not admit either his need or his rescue, and so he asks the question, “About whom am I required to care?” The truth is, if you get part one, {God has loved me so much and so freely that all I can do is love him in return.} then part two {the way to show my love for God is to love everybody else the way God loved me} comes naturally.

So, what is the answer to the question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Simple: “Swallow your pride and realize that God has already given it to you.” Our calling today is to live in that love, to reach out to others with that love, to be that love to the world for the sake of Jesus the Christ who gave himself for us. Amen and amen.

vacation

Sorry folks. I'm taking a (short) break. I'm on vacation in the NC mountains for about two weeks. the next time I post sermonically will be for Sunday, July 15, 2007. peace. Delmer

June 24, The Nativity of St. John the Baptist

The Nativity of Saint John the Baptist
June 24, 2007
Texts: Malachi 3:1-4, Acts 13:13-26, Luke 1:57-67 (68-80)
OPENING
Well, did you get all your “Nativity of St. John the Baptist” shopping done on time? Did you get your Nativity cards out? Did your Nativity office party go well? Boy, wasn’t it a pain doing all that decorating and putting lights on the house, particularly this time of year when its so hot and all?

What? You didn’t do any of those things for “the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist?” You didn’t even KNOW we were celebrating the Nativity of St. John the Baptist until you got here this morning? Tsk, tsk. What kind of Lutherans are you?

Well, apparently you’re the same kind as our esteemed Dean, Pastor Brady Faggart, long-time pastor of First Lutheran in Greensboro. Brady showed up at our Bible study this week with the wrong texts, had not even heard of the “Nativity of St. John the Baptist”.

Well the reason we don’t know much about it is that it is a FIXED date festival, always June 24, so it only occasionally falls on a Sunday.And because of leap years, we sometimes go 14 years between celebrations. It’s easy to forget a festival when you acknowledge it so seldom.

So Pastor Beaver attempted to enlighten us at our Pastor’s Bible Study on Tuesday. He had researched the John the Baptist day and I learned several interesting things.
I learned that it was placed on the calendar where it is to reflect bit of scripture. John said of Jesus, “I must decrease that he may increase.” Well according to the calendar in use when the date was set, June 24 when the days started getting shorter, decreasing; just as the Nativity of our Lord, Dec. 25, was when the days began getting longer, increasing.

I also learned that it is extensively celebrated in the Eastern Orthodox Church; besides June 24, they also celebrate:
January 7: The Commemoration of St. John the Forerunner
February 24: First and Second Finding of the Head of St. John the Forerunner.
May 25: Third Finding of the Head St. John the Forerunner.
August 29: The Beheading of St. John the Forerunner
September 23: Conception of St. John the Forerunner.
Here’s my question: Why can’t they keep up with his head? I mean John only lost it once, and they had to find it three times. I tried to find out more about that but came up empty. I’ll keep looking, maybe something will turn up.

One thing is for certain: all this celebrating points to the importance of John the Baptist, or John the Baptizer as some say, or John the Forerunner as the Orthodox call him, or John the Cousin of Jesus as he was probably know around Nazareth; for the Bible tells us that his mother Elizabeth was a cousin of Mary, the Mother of our Lord.

THE QUESTION?
And the question for us today is a simple one: so what? Or as my son used to say, “And why should I care?” Why should we care about and celebrate the people involved in the Nativity of St. John the Baptist? And what about their journey can help us as we move through our journey of faith?

THE ANSWER A lack of faith leads to a failure of voice, faith itself loosens our tongue.

In order to understand today’s Gospel lesson, you have to know what happened 9 months before. Zechariah and Elizabeth were, like Abraham and Sarah, quite old and childless. He was one of the priests who served in the temple in Jerusalem. He was serving on the altar one day. He was in the Holy of Holies, in the Sanctuary of the Lord, where no one but the appointed priest went, he was standing at the altar of incense when suddenly an angel appeared beside him, and scared the daylights out of him. The angel told him that he and Elizabeth would have a child, but frankly, Zechariah didn’t believe him, and said so. “We’re too old. Its not gonna happen.” So the angel Gabriel said to him, “But now, because you did not believe my words, . . . you will become mute, unable to speak, until the days these things occur.”

A few years ago I heard Pastor Jack Hayford of the Church of the Way in Van Nuys CA tell a story about his grandson Kyle. At the time Kyle was 9 years old.
Kyle had recently lost a baby tooth. In the Hayford household, the tooth fairy pays a dollar per tooth. That night, when the Tooth Fairy reached under Kyle’s pillow to recover the tooth and leave a dollar, he found not the tooth but a note from Kyle.

The note read:
Dear Tooth Fairy,
I am holding my tooth for ransom. The fee will be $20. I am doing this for three reasons:
1) I have had this tooth longer than any other and I am very fond of it.
2) It is bigger than the other teeth.
3) It has silver in it.
Signed Kyle

In the morning Kyle reached under his pillow for the hoped for $20 and found instead a reply to his note.
It read:
Dear Kyle,
Enjoy your tooth.
Signed,
the Tooth Fairy

Zechariah was like Kyle, he wanted a relationship with God, but he wanted it on his own terms. He wanted to tell God what was and was not possible, just as Kyle wanted to negotiate the terms of the release of his tooth with the tooth fairy.
The Tooth Fairy said, “I’m not playing. Keep your tooth.” God said to Zechariah, “I’m not arguing with you over what I can and can’t do. I’ll just show you while you have to stand silently by and watch.” And so it was, Zechariah was unable to speak for 9 months. And Elizabeth indeed got pregnant, and Zechariah could say nothing.

I know when Deborah was pregnant with our children, I was filled with awe and joy and excitement and I couldn’t stop talking about the wonder of it all; so it must have been torture on poor Zechariah.

But finally the day came, and the baby was born, and they go through the naming argument, and when Zechariah made a statement of faith, writing down the name the angel had told him, at that moment his tongue was loosed and he was able to give voice and words to the miracle of God that had happened in his life.

Unless we believe, deep in our souls, deep in our hearts, that God can and will love and redeem all humanity; unless we trust to the very core of our being in the steadfast and endless grace and mercy of God, we have nothing to say to the world which cannot be better said by any number of secular, non-profit, benevolent organizations.

Without that gut level willingness to throw ourselves into the arms of the divine, we are just playing church, dancing around the edges of the holy.
This issue of trusting God is at the very core of the faith. There are many of us, myself included, who have no trouble believing the Bible and the great miracles of the faith; the Creation, the Incarnation, the Resurrection. We accept this with little trouble. Our problem comes in believing that God not only loves the whole world, but that God also loves us.

We are like John Wesley who reported that one night in a little Chapel on Aldersgate street in London, that
“I felt my heart strangely warmed. I knew that Christ died for the world, but in that moment, I knew he had died FOR ME. I had known the sins of the world were forgiven, but in that moment I knew my own sins were forgiven.”

To really believe is to make it personal, to move from ideas about God to a relationship with God, to quit just discussing God to begin talking things over with God.

Zechariah knew a lot about God, but he didn’t know God, not until that day at the Altar. And until he put aside the terms by which he would be able to relate to God, he had nothing to say.

But when he laid aside all his defenses and trusted God completely, his long unused voice burst forth in song.

So it is with us. We as individuals and as a community are called upon to trust the promise of God. God has promised to love us, to forgive us, to support and sustain us through all life’s difficulties and troubles.

Do you trust God? Do you trust God’s love? Do you trust God’s care? Do you trust God’s compassion? Do you trust God’s mercy? Do You? Do You?

Because if you do, these thing are great Good News and you should tell somebody. Particularly, these things are great Good News to the millions of hurting, frightened, lonely, anxious, directionless people looking everywhere for meaning.
Like the Orthodox looking for the lost head of John the Forerunner, they keep finding something, get all excited about it, then they discover that’s not the answer, and they discard it and start looking again.

And all along, we have here, in this book and on this table, that which they are all looking for. And the shameful thing is we are too often like old Zechariah. We’ve got a zipped lip; we don’t have enough confidence in the gift God has given us to speak out to the world about the love that lives within us.

I invite you today to join in the Song of Zechariah. I invite you to feel deep within yourself the Joy of knowing that you are a beloved Child of God, of knowing that your sins are forgiven, that God cares about you, even you, and as that Joy wells up within you, let your tongue be loosed and your voice heard.
Amen and Amen.

Hymn ELW # 552 “Blessed be the God of Israel”

Peace,
Delmo

Pentecost 3, Lessons for June 17, 2007

PENTECOST 3
June 17, 2007
Texts: 2 Samuel 11:26 -12:10, 13-15; Luke 7:36-8:3
Title: “I’m Talking to YOU, yeah, YOU!”

My preaching class at Duke, which is a Methodist Seminary, was taught by a Southern Baptist; which my sons say explains a lot about my preaching. I never took a course in "Lutheran preaching" whatever that is.

This Professor started his career teaching at the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, KY. He liked to tell the story about a young Baptist man from “up north somewhere,” who came to Louisville to study at the Baptist Seminary. It wasn’t long before he secured a regular job preaching at a little Baptist Church over near Lexington.

On his first Sunday he lit into Tobacco pretty hard, smoking it, chewing it, growing it, etc. it was all the same to him, and it was all sin. After service, the head of the deacons stopped him at his car and told him that though, like all good Baptists they were, of course, opposed to tobacco, it was important to know that quite a few of the church members raised tobacco for a living and it might be well to avoid that topic in future sermons.

The next week he lit into alcohol. He did it up pretty good, with all the statistics about drunk driving and broken homes and illness, etc. etc. And again the head of the Deacons met him at his car and after admiring the sermon for a few minutes allowed as how quite a few folks in the church were employed at the local distillery and it might be best to let up on the alcohol issue as well.

The third week the preacher opened up with both barrels on gambling. He outdid himself this time. It was a scorcher. And the Deacon met him at the car one more time. Before he opened his mouth, the Preacher shook his head and said, “What this time?” Well Preacher, you see, a lot of folks, including me, work on the horse farms and we all know those horses are for racing which means gambling, so if you could . . . “

The young Pastor had about had it. “All right then. What can I preach on?” The deacon thought for a few minutes and said, “Why don’t you try Chinese Communism. There ain’t a Chinese Communist anywhere around here.”

In today’s Scripture Lessons we find three preachers who are very pointed in their preaching. Nathan takes on the King of Israel, the Great King David and points directly at him while saying “Thou art the man!” which is another way of saying, “I’m talking to you, yeah you!”

Paul holds nothing back in condemning Peter for being two-faced while Jesus directs sharp words at the rich and supposedly Holy Pharisee, saying you, you, you, over and over, making sure that the man knows that these words are pointed directly at him.
These three stories all turn on issues of human failure and Divine Forgiveness.

The Great David; a man after God’s own heart, the scriptures call him; gets himself all tangled up in a sorry mess of adultery and murder. It sounds more like something from the Jerry Springer Show than the pages of the Bible.

In Galatians, Paul tells how Cephas, the great Peter, fell victim to peer pressure and acted like a hypocrite, treating the Gentiles one way when there are no Jews around but Paul; but changing his tune when there are Observant Jews watching.

In the Gospel, Jesus is invited to dine at the home of one Simon, a Pharisee, that is, a Jewish person who is highly particular about following the Jewish religious rules and regulations, a person for whom purity in relation to God was most important.

Now Simon the Pharisee was interested in Jesus; he had heard about this self-taught country preacher and faith healer and he was intrigued and curious, but also skeptical and dismissive.

The word had gotten out that Jesus was there, at Simon’s house and people had begun to gather nearby. The dinner itself was probably outdoors, on the patio, in the backyard. It was a simple matter for uninvited guests to edge their way into the fringes of the banquet crowd. They too were intrigued and curious; they wanted to see Jesus; they wanted to hear him say something unusual, they hoped he might perform a miracle.

Suddenly a woman, traditionally, a woman of the street, a woman of the night, a working girl, but all the text tells us is that she was a “sinner”; this woman pushed herself through the crowd to Jesus.

She came to where he reclined at table, she stretched herself out at his feet, she covered them with oil, she bathed them with her tears, she dried them with her hair.
And, of course, all this sensuality, all this sexiness, all this touching was too much for Simon, who would never touch any woman but his wife, much less a woman like this, a sinner, a woman of ill-repute.

HOW COULD YOU? Simon snarled to himself, HOW COULD YOU, A RABBI, ALLOW THIS, THIS, THIS WOMAN TO TOUCH YOU? Much less all this bathing and oiling and wiping and kissing?

There are some commentators who find it extraordinary that Jesus was able to know what Simon was thinking. C’mon now. I mean, if looks could kill, the one Simon gave Jesus would have wiped out a neighborhood. You didn’t have to be divine to know what Simon was thinking. It was written all over his face.

Jesus looked at Simon and must have chuckled a little to himself as he told a story that put Simon in his place. Two men owed the loan shark money. One owed $500, the other $50. Neither could pay. The shark forgave the debt of both. Who will love him more, Simon, who will have more gratitude, more devotion? Of course Simon said the one who was forgiven much.

Jesus then calmly pointed out to Simon that the woman had simply done for him, for Jesus, what Simon himself, as the host, SHOULD have done.

She was not a good woman and she knew it. She knew she needed a lot of love and forgiveness. Unlike Simon, she had no lifetime of doing the right thing to cling to, she knew she was in trouble and needed help.

When she heard Jesus tell of repentance and acceptance into the Kingdom of God, when she heard his stories of love and forgiveness, when she saw him touch the untouchable and love the unlovely; it struck a chord deep within her soul. She really heard his words, not as ideas but as truth; not as religious concepts but as spiritual realities.

She really heard it and believed it and knew herself to be loved and forgiven by God. Only one who knew that she had been forgiven much could respond with such great gratitude and love.

Simon couldn’t hear it because he didn’t think it applied to him. My mother tells a story from the time she only had three children and I was the “baby.” I was about three. We had the “red measles.” Mama says the old family doctor saw us in the examining room, which was the front half of his house in Ararat, VA. He grunted a few times, and then prepared his needle. When I saw him come at us with that needle, I started yelling out while holding up two fingers, “Just them two’s sick. Just them two’s sick!”

Not me, Jesus. What you’re saying doesn’t apply to me. I’m not sick. I’m not a sinner. I don’t have hurt and pain and incompleteness. I’m a good person. What you’re saying applies to other people, not to me. That’s what Simon thought. Until Nathan pointed the finger at him, and shouted out Thou art the man, that’s what King David thought. Until Paul confronted him, that’s what Peter thought. Not me Lord. Only them people are sick. Not me. Go save the Chinese Communists and leave me alone.

Our capacity to forgive others comes only when we recognize how very much we have been forgiven by God.

Our capacity to love others comes only when we realize how very much we have been loved by God.

Our capacity to live fully comes only when we realize how very much Christ living in us is what true life is.

This woman, this sinner, this one who washed Jesus’ feet; she loved much because she was aware of her need and of God’s healing. She loved much because she knew she was much loved.

We too have been much loved and much forgiven. It is our duty, it our calling, it is most of all, our extreme pleasure, To spread into all the world, the love and forgiveness of God, and the joy to be found in Jesus.
Amen.

Pentecost 2: June 10, 2007

PENTECOST 2 June 10, 2007
TEXTS: I Kings 17:17-24, Luke 7:11-17 TITLE: He Had Compassion
My Grandpa Reid Chilton was a great storyteller. A lot of his stories were about his Uncle Green Arrington, a farmer and Primitive Baptist preacher up in Surry County. Grandpa told a story once that went like this:

I recollect once, when I was living with Uncle Green Arrington that this lady died that had real bad arthritis, you know like your Grandma’s got, the kind that doubles you up. Well, we didn’t have no undertaker around, so they just laid her out in a pine box and tied her down with twine and had the funeral the next day with Uncle Green preaching.

Now Uncle Green, he was mighty big on that Second Coming stuff, you know the trumpets blowing and the dead rising up out of their graves and floating off into the sky to meet Jesus. I never did put much stock in it myself, but Uncle Green was big on it.

Anyway, he was preaching this woman’s funeral, over to the Holiness Church in Ararat, and he was getting pretty hot about the trumpets blowing and bodies coming up out of the ground and all, when this young’un who was waiting out side for his folks went up to this car there, first car this child had ever seen, and it had one of them horns on it like you squeeze and it blares out, and the boy squeezed it and it blared out real loud and about that time the corpse’ strings broke and that woman sat right up in the coffin and well, there was general mayhem in that church after that, people running for the door and diving out the windows, and some crying out their sins, which most of their neighbors were surprised to hear about, especially right there in the HOLINESS church.

About that time in the story, grandpa would stop and look at me and wink and say, “Which just goes to show that folk ain’t no where near as anxious to meet Jesus as they say they are.”

Two of today’s Scripture lessons deal with miraculous returns from the dead, with unbelievable, incredible stories of corpses being brought back to life through the power of God. Each story has a widow, an only son, and an act of compassion by a man of God.

It is difficult to know what to make of such stories. While Grandpa’s story was just that, a story, and the Elijah text is a bit open-ended, never really saying the young man was dead, only that “the breath had gone out of him,” Luke is very clear and straight-forward: the man was dead. So dead, in fact, that the people were on their way out of the city to bury him. Coming out of the gates of the town, the body is preceded by a group of professional mourners, playing on cymbals and wailing like Banshees.

Jesus and his followers would have been expected to step aside, to clear the way, like we pull off the road when we meet a funeral procession, one last act of respect for the dead and for those who mourn them. But they didn’t, because something happened inside of Jesus, something Luke tells us about in a few spare words:
He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow; . . .when the Lord saw her, He had compassion for her and said to her, “Do not weep.”

A sonless widow in First Century Palestine was very likely doomed to a life of poverty. With no man to provide for her and no social security or life insurance or inheritance or employability she was like Blanch Dubose in A Streetcar Named Desire; dependent upon the kindness of strangers. Her future looked desperate, perhaps hopeless.

HE HAD COMPASSION,

and so Jesus reached out and breaking a religious and societal rule, and shocking all those around, he touched the funeral bier, the platform on which the dead man was being carried.

Then he broke the rules of science and common sense and commanded the young man to get up, to come to life, to return from the dead; and miracle of miracles, he did.

After Jesus’ Baptism, the Spirit drove him into the Wilderness to be tempted by the Devil. One of those temptations was to feed the world by turning stone into bread. There in the wilderness, Jesus realized that fixing every human hurt was not to be his mission; indeed that miracle working and signs and wonders would be a diversion from his primary calling; which was to proclaim the Kingdom of God. So, he purposely held in his power, restrained himself.

Throughout his ministry opportunities for healings came to Jesus, but he didn’t go looking for them. Every time he worked a miracle it happened because of those three little words:

HE HAD COMPASSION

It’s interesting to me how many people don’t believe that, don’t believe that God is love, that God is forgiving and kind and merciful. Too many people in the world believe that God is anxious to send us all to Hell, that God has plans to send Holy Warriors to Earth in to wipe out the evil doers in a grand final battle. And if you don’t think a lot of people believe that, check out the popularity of the Left Behind series of novels.

In the story about Elijah, the woman turns on the prophet with the assumption that God has come to her house with judgment and punishment:

Verse 18: “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son!”

In the Gospel lesson, when Jesus worked his miracle, the immediate response of the crowd is FEAR, like the people in grandpa’s story who, when the thing they had prayed for and preached about happened, fled in terror and distress.
That HE HAD COMPASSION, is the most important thing we can say about Jesus, and about God. In the midst of a world in which everyone is afraid of their own shadows, and, if they believe in God at all they believe God to be either remote and uncaring, or cruel and vindictive; we in the church have been called to witness to the fact that HE HAD COMPASSION.

Brothers and Sisters, we live today in a world full of fear and war. We are afraid of rising gas prices, we are afraid of failing health care systems, we are afraid of immigration and disease and forest fires and drought and drugs, and, and, and . . .
It has been a long time since I have seen this country, and indeed the world, so depressed and sad and frightened and on edge about the future.

And into this bog of sadness and sorrow, we the church are called to imitate our Lord and find ways to break into the cycle of fear and violence with words and acts of hope and assurance, words and acts of compassion and healing.

Now, that is a mighty tall order isn’t it? What can one little church do? What can one little Christian do? In the face of all this hurt and pain, who am I? Those must have been the sorts of questions a little Albanian nun asked herself over 50 years ago when she found herself in Calcutta, one of the worst and most hopeless places in the world.

And what she decided to do was to do what Jesus did in our story, she had compassion on the one right in front of her. She dealt with the need she was given and did what she could.

She began to pick up the dying beggars off the streets of Calcutta and to give them a decent place to die. That was it.

She washed their wounds and their bottoms, she cleaned their sheets and their latrines. She fed them, and bathed them and turned them on their pallets when no one else would touch them. She had compassion, one dying person at a time.

We are called to have compassion, to preach compassion, to teach compassion, to live compassion. We are called to break whatever rules and taboos and cultural barriers necessary to let the world know that God is not harsh, God is not out to get them, God is not punishing them for their sins, God is Love, God is steadfast, everlasting, never-ending love. God is reaching out into the midst of our fear of death with an offer of life, of life eternal.

HE HAD COMPASSION.

He had compassion then, and he has compassion now.

Open up your hearts.

Let God love you.

Open up your arms.

And show God’s love to the world. AMEN AND AMEN.

June 3, 2007: Holy Trinity; Friedens Homecoming

This is pretty late because I have been at Synod Assembly, and because tomorrow is Friedens' Annual Homecoming Service. For those unfamiliar with this Southern, Rural church Custom it is pretty much a Family Reunion of all those who grew up in the church and moved away with those who grew up and never left with those of us who are just here now participating. It also has the feel of a Celebration fo the church's history, etc. Huge worship service and potluck dinner. And, because I'm the new pastor, I'm the "guest" preacher this year. So here's the sermon, but it's pretty localized in some ways. Peace, Delmo

HOLY TRINITY SUNDAY, HOMECOMING June 3, 2007
Texts: Proverbs 8:1-4,22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15
Title: God’s Covenant of Grace
Week before last I went to Nashville for a Conference called the Festival of Homiletics. Homiletics is the technical/academic term for preaching. Most Protestants refer to what I doing right now as a sermon. Catholics, Episcopalians and some Lutherans call it a homily. I asked my preaching professor at Duke what the difference between a sermon and a homily was and he said, “About 10 minutes.” That’s why I preach homilies on Communion Sundays and Sermons the rest of the time.
Anyway, when I was in Nashville, I heard Dr. James Forbes preach. Forbes is Pastor of the Riverside Church in New York, and grew up in eastern North Carolina, the son of the Bishop of a small Pentecostal group called the United Holy Church of America, Inc. Dr. Forbes came to Duke while I was a student there and taught a special short course on preaching. He taught us that in preaching one has to take last things first. That is to say, you have to figure out where you want to end up in order to take people there.
He had us compose a one or two sentence summary of the POINT of the sermon before we started writing the rest of it. So here goes, last things first. Here’s the point:
WHEN GOD SPEAKS, THINGS HAPPEN. GOD HAS SAID, “I WILL BE YOUR GOD AND YOU WILL BE MY PEOPLE.” THE ONLY QUESTION FOR US IS THIS: “HOW DO WE GO ABOUT BEING GOD’S PEOPLE?”
This is the golden thread, the red line, the recurring theme, the constant refrain, that runs through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. God has chosen us to be God’s beloved people. God has spoken this relationship into being, God is love and has told us both that we are loved and that we are to love one another.
THEOLOGICALLY, this is known as the COVENANT OF GRACE.
I first became aware of the idea of covenants when I was a little boy reading Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. In the second chapter, entitles, “Our Gang’s Dark Oath,” Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and some of the other boys sneak off in the night to a cave by the Mississippi River where by candlelight they follow foolish rituals Tom Sawyer had gotten from reading adventure novels and they signed a pact in blood to keep the existence and name and ceremonies of the club secret.
After I read that, I gathered my little brother, two cousins and a neighbor boy in the old chicken house; where we stripped to the waist and covered ourselves with war paint and signed a covenant in blood. (Well actually, we used red magic marker, I can’t stand the sight of blood.) We also put a sign on the door that said, NO GIRLS ALOUD, spelled A-L-O-U-D.
The Bible is full of Covenants, each of which is a variation on God’s original I WILL BE YOUR GOD AND YOU WILL BE MY PEOPLE covenant. It began in Genesis, when God spoke the world into existence, God said, LET THERE BE LIGHT, and there was light. God said,
LET THERE BE A FIRMAMENT, LET THERE BE WATER, SEAS AND OCEANS LET THERE BE FISH AND BIRDS AND ANIMALS AND SUN AND MOON AND STARS
And because God said it, it happened.
God spoke Adam and Eve into existence, and then God spoke the First Covenant, the first agreement of love, into being. God gave them the run of the Garden, with one condition, a condition which they broke when they ate of the tree of the knowledge of God and Evil.
Covenants run through the Old Testament. God proclaims covenants with Noah and Abraham and Moses. The prophets continually remind the people of their Covenants, their agreements with God, and God’s agreement with them.
And the people continually imitate Adam and Eve and break the covenants. And God continually punishes, then forgives, then renews the Covenant of Grace, the Agreement of Love.
One of the great, but seldom read, books of the Bible is a parable, a short story, about the making and breaking of covenants. It is the book of HOSEA.
Hosea is a prophet, a preacher, a man of God, who does a very strange thing. He marries a prostitute named Gomer. You will not be surprised to learn that Gomer is not a particularly good or faithful wife. She really doesn’t get this marriage thing; especially the part about one woman /ONE MAN! She runs around on Hosea constantly.
And Hosea always forgives her and takes her back. This is not intended as instruction on being a long-suffering, emotionally abused spouse. It is a story about our unfaithfulness to God, about our failure to keep up our end of our Covenant of Grace with God, and about how God continues to love us in spite of our failures.
I knew a Methodist Minister in the Nashville area who got moved one year at Annual Conference. (That’s what they say, “GOT moved”, because the Bishop tells them to move, they have no real choice.) He was moved from a church he loved to a church he didn’t particularly care for, and which did not particularly care for him.
I used to see him occasionally at the Cokesbury store downtown, and every time I saw him he was griping about the church. (Ya’ll don’t gripe about the preacher do you? Of course not!) Anyway, one time I saw him he was happy and smiling and had a spring in his step, so I said, “Things must be better at the church.” He said, “Not really, they’re still the same mean old bunch, but I’ve just gotten reconciled to their sorriness!”
Well, over the years, God has put up with a lot of sorriness from the human race, but instead of just resigning himself to our constant state of sinfulness, God decided it was time for a New Covenant, a New Testament, a New Relationship.
The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the basis for this New Covenant of Grace, this New Agreement of Love , signed in the Blood of the Cross. Paul says in our Second Reading from Romans:
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand . . .
And from the time that Jesus came forth from the tomb and the Holy Spirit descended upon the gathered people of God in the Upper Room, God’s people have bound themselves to each other in Covenant Communities called Churches. They have responded to God’s New Covenant by saying to one another and God,
We accept God’s invitation and call to be the people of God. Before God and this company, we bind ourselves together as children of God, pledged to love and serve God, to love and serve one another and most especially to love and serve the world.
Now, I know of NO Christian Religious Community which has ever been able to perfectly keep and obey this Covenant. I also know of no Christian Religious Community which does not base its life together on some such agreement.
I grew up going to Slate Mountain Missionary Baptist Church. When I heard the word Homecoming, that’s the first place I think about. It was a simple one room building, cinder block painted white. Inside it had plain white walls, clear glass windows, bare light bulbs dangling from the ceiling.
In the front there was a pulpit, a communion table, a piano and three large wooden chairs. (I thought they were for the Father, the Son and The Holy Spirit. Turns out they were for the Preacher, the Deacon and the Song Leader.)
There was only one decoration on the walls. Behind the pulpit, above the taller middle chair, inside a wooden frame and covered with glass, hung what looked like a large version of the Declaration of Independence. It was the Church Covenant, first signed by the founding members in 1903 when they started the church. Using a lot of religious words, it basically said:
Because God has loved us, we bind ourselves together as a community of love in a Covenant of Grace. We are called to be a place where everyone is loved because they are a child of God. To attain this end, we pledge our prayers, our possessions and our presence to Almighty God and to each other.
Some 262 years ago, a group of German immigrants found their way from the war-ravaged lands along the Rhine River across the Atlantic to Pennsylvania and then down the Great Wagon Road across Maryland and Virginia to this very spot. They came more for economic and political opportunities than for religious reasons, but that does not mean that their faith was not important to them.
Though they were used to a world in which the State Church had existed for hundreds of year, and where University educated ministers were lined up waiting for a call; they adapted to their circumstance of being in a new land with no state church and no preachers.
They banded together in Communities of Lutherans, electing lay elders and deacons to care for their spiritual and practical needs, and though we have no copy of it, we can be sure they wrote themselves a Covenant of Grace with each other, committing themselves to the worship of God, the Proclamation of the Gospel, the Celebration of the Sacraments and the love and care of one another.
They had no building, no organ, no property, no Sunday School rooms or Fellowship Hall or Church Office. What they did have was a promise from God, I WILL BE YOUR GOD, AND YOU WILL BE MY PEOPLE.
Believing God’s promise, they bound themselves together as a Covenant Community of Grace. And everything we see around us today, not just the buildings but the ongoing community which has sustained 262 years of mission and ministry, was built on that promise and from that covenant.
So, I started this sermon with the question, “How do we go about the task of being God’s people?”
And the answer is: Believing God’s promise, we covenant together to seek and follow God’s Will, to listen to and obey God’s Word and to love and care for God’s People.
I invite you today to renew your commitment to that covenant, God’s Covenant of Grace, revealing God’s undying love for each and every one of us. Amen and amen.

PENTECOST SUNDAY; May 27, 2007

PENTECOST SUNDAY May 27, 2007

Texts: Acts 2:1-21, Romans 8:14-17, Jn 14:8-17

Verse 2: Suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.

In the fall of 2004, Hurricane Ivan hit the Gulf Coast with a fury that did not peter out until it reached the NC mountains. I know, I was there.

I had a group of young pastors in to Hinton Center for the First Parish Project. It was their first week together. They were from all over the country.

It had been a good week, a getting to know you week, but on Thursday night, it became a very interesting week indeed. It had been raining all day and we knew a hurricane had hit the Gulf, but we were in the mountains, for God’s sake. We were safe.

After dinner, I went out and sat on the Hinton porch and looked at the rain on the lake, trying to do some last minute program adjustment my coworker, Mollie Stewart. Suddenly, I realized what was happening right in front of my eyes. Mollie, I said, look at that, little tornados, water sprites, dancing across the lake. And waves. Big waves. We don’t have waves on mountain lakes.

Then it really hit. Trees bending toward the earth, electricity going out, roofs lifting up. Light pole breaking off 5 feet in the air, power lines dancing around on the ground.

And, in the midst of that, I had a stupid attack. David, who worked at Hinton, had tried to go home and failed. He came into the kitchen and said there was a tree down across the Hinton Road, the only way in and out of the Retreat Center. For some reason, David and I decided it was vital to get that tree off the road, in the middle of the hurricane.

So we got a chain saw and loaded a couple of young pastors in my old Jeep Cherokee, (Herb from South Dakota and I think John from Kentucky, I don’t remember who else was along.) We drove down until we got to the place where the trees had fallen across the road and began to work.

The wind was blowing, the rain was falling, the trees were slick, we made some progress on one and moved up to the next one. And then; well it’s kind of confusing but I’ve never been so scared in all my life, before or since.

The wind started blowing in a particularly hard and swirling manner, and the trees around us began to twist and twirl in the air and to crack and moan and make noises both mournful and threatening and looking up into the twisting tree tops was a vertigo inducing experience; and suddenly I and all those with me knew ourselves to be in mortal danger and we ran to the seeming safety of the car.

And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.

And here’s my question. If the Holy Spirit is indeed like a “violent wind,” like an untamed hurricane or a sudden and destructive tornado, what makes us think we want it in our lives? We say we want it. In the United Methodist Church we sang,
Breathe on me Breath of God;
It’s a comforting image; like a baby sleeping on your chest, or a wife or husband curled up, dozing at your back, breathing a sweet gentle breath.

Or we sing, (remember this one);
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me,
Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.
That ones best if you sway and hold your arms up.
Spirit of the Living God, Fall afresh on me.
(Close your eyes)
Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.

Or, how about this one:
There’s a sweet, sweet spirit in this place,
And I know that it’s the spirit of the LORD

You know that do you? I wish I could be so sure, then maybe I wouldn’t be so afraid. For you see, the scripture says that is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God, and I think our scriptures show us this fearfulness very clearly. I don’t think the Spirit is all that sweet and gentle. Indeed I think the Spirit is a lot like my Mama.

Let me tell you what I mean by that. When I was a young teenager, 13, 14, 15, Mama and Daddy went to work in the Cotton Mill to supplement the family income. Up until then we got by on just the tobacco crop. They still raised the tobacco, they just did it after work and on weekends, and expected a lot of help from their children.

They would leave for the mill around 6:30 AM. They would leave us a list of things to get done, some around the house, most in the fields. They got home around 3:30. We tried to figure out how long it would take to get the jobs on the list done, then we always waited until the last possible minute to get busy.

One day, we had done nothing on the list. It was about 11:00 or 11:30. We were drinking Kool-Aid and eating peanut butter on cracker sandwiches and watching the Dialing for Dollars movie on Channel 8 out of High Point when:

“. . .suddenly, from the kitchen door there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind and it filled the entire room where we were sitting . . . “

and the name of that wind was Mama and she was some kind of mad. She had gotten sick at work and came home early, and instead of finding her children busy about the business she had left them to do, she found them sitting around, doing nothing.

Mama roared into the den, the fly swatter she had grabbed off the hook by the kitchen stove in hand. She drove us out of that house, across the yard and up the hill, into the fields where we were supposed to be hoeing tobacco. We danced into that field, you know. Mama’s hand on the back of your neck, swatting at your legs and behind, while you stretch your feet and bottom as far away from her as you can get.

Yes, brothers and sisters, I believe the Spirit in Acts 2 is a whole lot more like my Mama on a bad day than any sweet, sweet spirit, any gentle breath of God, we might conjure up.

It was fifty days after Easter. And the disciples had done very little in that time but hang out with Jesus, spending some quality time with their Risen Lord. Then he left, really left, ascended into heaven left.

And before he went, he told them to get busy, he told them in Acts 1: 8, “you will be my witnesses . . . to the ends of the earth.” And then he ascended. And after he went up, an angel came to them and said, in essence, “Quit standing around. Get busy.” (Vs.11)

But, they really hadn’t been doing anything yet. And as our story opens, they were all together in one place, probably drinking first century kool-aid, i.e. watered down wine, and munching on fig and bread sandwiches, looking out at the crowded city streets, which are, after all, more entertaining than a TV movie.

“And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting .”

And, as the rest of the story tells us, that wind gave them a job, and the ability to do the job, and then it drove them out into the street so that they would get busy doing that job. Which is why the Holy Spirit, the mighty and powerful wind of God, is more like an angry Mama than any sweet baby or gentle lover.

And, on this Pentecost Sunday, 2007, that Holy Spirit is after us. It is after us to get out into the world with the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ. It is after us to get busy with what we have been called to do, it is after us to quit worrying about being together in one room and to start worrying about going out together to witness to those in need of God’s love.

It is after us to look around us and see who it is that we know or know about who needs to know about the love and grace and forgiveness of God in Christ.

It is after us to know that the reason that we know that someone needs to know about Jesus is that it is our job to tell them or show them that love.

It is after us, and the only question right now is this:
Are we going to go voluntarily,
or is Mama Spirit gonna have to make us?
Amen and amen.

Easter VII - May 20, 2007

EASTER SEVEN
May 20, 2007

Texts: Acts 16:16-34 Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21 John 17:20-26

Sometimes the things we hear in church are hard to understand, particularly when we’re little.

When I was a kid, I thought the song said, “Through the night, with a light, from a bulb.” Sang it that way until I was in High school.

Did you hear about the little boy who was praying the Lord’s prayer and said, “And forgive us our trash baskets as we forgive those who put trash in our baskets?” Actually, that works as well as trespasses.

And in THE FAMILY CIRCUS cartoon one Sunday, the little girl is shown in church, angelic look on her face, singing joyfully, "Amazing Grace!. . .How sweet the sound that saved a WITCH like me.” Witch, wretch, as my grandfather used to say, “Close enough for government work.”

Today’s Gospel lesson is taken from Jesus’ prayer at the Last Supper. In it, he prays for the unity of the church. It is a prayer that is somewhat difficult to understand because of John’s convoluted style of writing. But the key point is that Jesus desires for us to be one, to be unified, to BE the new body of Christ in the world.

We can, perhaps, grasp more easily what John is getting at and its implications for our life of faith by looking closely at the Prayer of the Day, what used to be known as the Collect. It was called that because it was intended to COLLECT together the theme of the lessons, especially the Gospel, and to thereby set the tone for the worship, to help us focus our spiritual attention on this one thing on this one day. So, get out your bulletin or your insert out and look with me at this prayer. It has four inter-related petitions and we’ll take them each in turn.

(O God, form the minds of your faithful people into one will. Make us love what you command and desire what you promise, that amid all the changes of this world, our hearts may be fixed where true joy is found, your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
Evangelical Lutheran Worship, p. 35)

1) O God, form the minds of your faithful people into one will. This is really antithetical and counter-cultural to how we modern Americans think about ourselves in relation to community. We are rugged individualists. We conceive of community, of society, of politics as competing ideologies, of wills in conflict, of pushing forward our own agenda, our own way, our own desires so that what we want becomes what the community wants. WE, humanly, achieve commonality of purpose through persuading others to see it our way, or by being persuaded to change our minds, or by being forced to buckle under due to economic or relational pressure.

But in this prayer, we look for something different. We ask to become one with one another by allowing God to shape our minds, our thoughts, our opinions into conformity with the will of God. This is not something which is achieved through human agency and human effort, and it does not come about because of politics or pressure, either of the religious or secular type.

It happens because we turn ourselves over to the will of God and allow ourselves to be shaped, mentally, emotionally and most importantly, volitionally, by the
truth and love of God. It starts with praying with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, “not my will, but thine be done.”

2) Make us love what you command and 3) desire what you promise. (Repeat)

I was ordained to the Gospel ministry the first week of June 1977, at Methodist College in Fayetteville. The Rev. Dr. Joseph Thomas of Cleveland, Ohio, an African-American United Methodist Bishop, preached the ordination sermon. There were 25 of us being ordained that night. He said several things in his sermon which proved important to me in the last 30 years, but the most important thing he said was this,

“We lay on hands to bestow the Holy Spirit because you are desperately going to need her. You will want to go where you want to go and do what you want to do and if you are to be a servant of God, you must allow God to shape you to his will and his way.” That’s what he said, I wrote it down.

But we would rather God command what we love and promise what we desire, just the opposite of what the prayer says. That is why so many churches are bending over backwards to “give people what they want,” as one pastor so bluntly told me. It reminds be of the dishonest tailor my Daddy used to joke about. He installed colored lights above the mirror to enhance the color of the suits. When someone would try on a suit, the tailor would whisper to his wife, “Man wants a green suit, turn on the green light.”

We spend way too much time turning on green lights instead of preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We are called to shape our wills to the will of God, not to reinvent God in our own image.

As long as we continue to willfully seek our own way by our own methods, we will remain divided and not as one or at peace. It is only by sincerely praying this prayer that we will begin to move toward the unity God wills for us, the oneness with God and each other that Jesus prayed for.

The heart of this prayer and of this day is in the last petition: 4)that amid all the changes of this world, our hearts may be fixed where true joy is found, your Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Our looking around for places that will give us what we love and will fulfill our desires is ultimately a search for that which can only be found in Christ.

Blaise Pascal said, "There is a whole in the heart of (humanity) which only Christ can fill."

And Saint Augustine said, "Thou made us for yourself, O, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee."

All our loves and desires are but pale imitations of the real thing that we seek; peace with God and each other. And there is only one way to achieve these things, and it is no ACHIEVEMENT at all.

It is rather a receiving, an acceptance of God’s Grace and Love and Will in our lives. Until we let go of the striving and seeking and searching; until we turn our hearts away from the illusory and vaporous allures of this world, until we turn our attention to the true spiritual treasures which only God can give; we are doomed to a perpetual striving after and attaining of that which does not satisfy.

The only thing that will make us whole is Christ;
the only thing that will bring us true joy is Christ;
the only thing that will bring us together is Christ;
the only thing that will connect us to God is Christ;
the only thing that will save our very souls is Christ.

Paul and Silas in jail knew the true Joy that is Christ, they were beaten and threatened and locked away, but they sang and prayed, because they had God in their heart.

The Psalmist lived in dangerous times among dangerous people, but he knew true Joy, because he had God in his heart.

Old Elder John, marooned and isolated on the desert Island of Patmos, knew the true Joy that is Christ, and he wrote of the rapturous joys of an eternity with the Lord, b/c he had God in his heart.

And Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, not only by Judas, but by all of us, was able to gently pray for us and our unity. As he went out to face his death, he was able to go forth in confidence, because he had God in his heart, he knew true joy.

We are called today to turn away from the pursuit of false Gods and temporary solutions; to put behind us those things which not only do not satisfy, but actually hinder us in our pursuit of Holiness.

We are called today to sincerely, with every fiber of our being, with ever bit of our heart, mind and soul, pray the Prayer of the Day, and to mean it, to genuinely seek to have God change, transform, alter our will so that we will what God wills.

Pray it with me:

O God, form the minds of your faithful people into your one will. Make us love what you command and desire what you promise, that amid all the changes of this world, our hearts may be fixed where true joy is found, you Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
Amen and amen.

Easter VI - May 13, 2007

I have no sermon for you this week. My mother had her knee replaced and I was back and forth to the hospital in Mt. Airy ( a two and a half hour round trip) and spent all day yesterday getting her out of the hospital and taking her home to the farm and getting her settled, etc. And my son came home from college this week, (he's 21 today) and I've got a Lutheran Men in Mission work day and a 6 o'clock wedding and I'll write a sermon sometime. If i get it done before 8:00 AM tomorrow, I'll post it.

A good cartoon: Dennis the Menace. Dennis and his pal Joey are leaving the house with big, freshly baked cookies in their hands. Mrs. Wilson is in the background, wiping her hands on her apron.

Joey says, "I wonder what we did to deserve this?"

Dennis replies, "Listen Joey. Mrs. Wilson didn't give us cookies because we're nice. She gave them to us because she's nice."

Peace,

delmo

Well, I came up with something. here it is.

Easter Six May 13, 2007
Texts: Acts 16:9-15,
Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5,
John 14:23-29

I am focusing on the lesson from Acts this morning, on Paul and the twists and turns of
fate (?), God’s will (?) which led him to Philippi, to a riverside prayer meeting and finally to the home of a woman named Lydia, who became the leader of the first church in Europe.

As the story opens, Paul is a very frustrated man. His first missionary trip had gone well. He had gone out from his base in Damascus into the eastern part of Asia Minor, what we now call Turkey, with his partner Barnabas, a gifted preacher and trusted friend.

But his second Missionary Trip was so far a bust.
First, he and Barnabas had had a falling out, a big argument over Mark. Mark had gone with them part way on their first journey, then got homesick and went home.
Now, Mark wanted to go on this trip and Paul wouldn’t hear of it. No second chances. Barnabas insisted, Paul said no way, and finally, Barnabas went out preaching with Mark and Paul picked up a new partner, Silas.

All of this is a pretty good reminder of two things.
1) Church fights and disagreements are nothing new, we’ve always been that way, and though Saint Paul is one of our most revered leaders, neither we nor the Bible make him out to be perfect after his conversion. Christianity at its best is an honest faith that admits that we are all sinners in need of a forgiving and loving God.
2) As a Portuguese proverb puts it, “God draws straight with crooked sticks.” Our modern way of saying it is that God “took lemons and made lemonade.” As a result of this spat, there were twice as many mission teams on the road, two instead of one. One of my professors at Duke was a Baptist. He liked to say that there were so many Baptists because they were good at fighting and bad at Math, “We multiply by division!” Truth be told, the same can be said of Lutherans. Look at us: two Churches named Peace five miles apart, because of a church fight here at Friedens.

Anyway, Paul’s mission trip got off to a rocky start; they were going to the western part of Asia Minor this time. But they couldn’t seem to get anything going once they got there. Silas had a vision in which God told them not to preach in Asia, and Paul’s going, “Well okay, but what do we do?”

Then Paul had a vision; a vision which called him to go to a new place, a place he had never thought of, a place and a ministry which had never crossed his mind. God showed him a “man of Macedonia” that is a Greek, pleading with him to come over the sea and bring the Gospel to that land.

Macedonia had been the kingdom of Philip, the father of Alexander the Great. From there, young Alexander launched the war machine that conquered the known world several hundred years earlier. The city to which Paul and Silas went was Philippi, named after Alexander’s father.

On the Sabbath, Paul and Silas went looking for the Jews. That was always their missional starting point. They went to people they were familiar with, hoping to get a hearing. There was obviously a very tiny Jewish community in Philippi, for they had no synagogue, no house of worship, so they met in good weather under the trees, down by the river.

Notice the text says, “outside the gate.” Many towns of that day had laws that forbade foreign religious practices within the city, for fear of the wrath of the gods, so people like the Jews had to go outside the gate to pray. And there Paul and Silas found them; at least they found the women.

Isn’t it interesting? A man spoke to them in the vision, but it was the women who were at prayer. Or perhaps there were both men and women at the meeting, but it was only the women who were open to hearing something new.

Anyway, Paul and Silas sat down there and shared with these women the Gospel. Verse 14 is so important I want to read it to you in its entirety, look at it with me:

A certain woman named Lydia, a worshipper of God, was listening to us; she was a dealer in purple cloth. The LORD opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul.”

There are several things in that verse I want to focus on.
First “a worshipper of God.” This indicates that she was not Jewish, but was interested in the Jewish religion, in particular that she was interested in a faith focused on God, community and morality rather than the ancient cult’s mix of war, fertility, prosperity and revenge. She was a person primed to hear what Paul had to say.

Brothers and sisters, we are surrounded by unchurched people who are ready to hear the gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ. We live in the midst of a people who are dying of spiritual thirst and we have the Living Water they need.

There are Lydias all around us; good, moral hard-working people, who are looking for something more in their lives, who are anxious and eager to be a part of something real and honest; people who need to know what God in Christ has done for them; and the question is
“Do we see the vision, do we hear the voice calling us to reach out to them with Christ?”

Second thing in this verse:
“The Lord opened her heart to listen “
Many times we fail to realize that God is the one who leads people into the faith, not us. We are simply God’s instruments, his tools, for saving the world. God does it, not us. One of the things that means is that we don’t have to worry so much about knowing the right thing to say, or finding just the right time, or developing a correct outreach strategy.

And, you know what, it’s really not that hard. It’s just telling the truth about your faith to another person, and inviting them to come and be a part of the community of faith with you.

In the April 23 edition of Time magazine, in the business section, there is an article called WORD ON THE STREET. It is, in part, about the fact that the “word on the street,” the “buzz,” “word of mouth” is the most powerful marketing tool around.
Here’s a research statistic, When it comes to brands, consumers say they’re influenced by people, not by ads.

56% reported trying a new product because of recommendations of friends or family,
10% because of TV ads, 9% newspaper ads, 6% radio ads.

Think of what this means for how important it is for us to personally share our faith story with our friends and neighbors. There is a scripture verse that is often translated How shall they hear without a preacher?

Because we’re used to thinking of the “preacher” as a clergyman, a pastor, we fail to recognize that it’s talking about us, all of us. What it really says is How can they hear without someone to tell them the Good News? We are called to be that someone to each other, to our family and friends.

Lydia responded to the Gospel. And she shared it with her family and soon she and her household were baptized. We don’t know how soon this took place, how quickly she converted, but notice how the conversion had a ripple effect, first Lydia; then her household, those nearest and dearest to her. As a wealthy woman, a household would have included personal family, plus quite a few servants and several children.

From this beginning there came a church, the church the letter to the Philippians is written.

Christianity is not a strictly private or personal religion; it is a corporate and communal one. Even the God of Christianity; lives in a community of three: the Trinity; the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit.

Dr. Paul Tournier, A Swiss Christian Psychiatrist, said,
There are two things we cannot do alone. One is to be married; the other is to be a Christian.

We need the church in order to be Christian, if for no other reason than that we cannot love and learn to be loved alone.

It is within the daily bump and grind of living and working together as the people of God that we find out what it means to be forgiven for our failures, praised for out efforts, appreciated for our virtues, prayed for in our sorrows, helped in the midst of our troubles, and loved in spite of ourselves. We need each other in order to practice and learn to be truly Christian.

The loving activity of God in community has been focused on making that community bigger; including all humanity through all time in the expanding family of God. The story of God is the story of ever widening circles of active love, moving always outward to bring more people into relationship with God and each other.

It is our call today to join in God’s missional outreach, to become a part of bringing more and more folk into the household of God. We are called to be Lydias today; people who hear the Good News and share the Good News in all that we say and do.

Amen and Amen.

Easter 5, New RCL texts for May 6, 2007

EASTER FIVE
May 6, 2007

Texts: Acts 11:1-18, John 13: 31-35

Title: LOVE ONE ANOTHER

My grandma Hubbard had a brother whose name was James. Uncle James was quite possibly the most worthless and trifling human being I ever met. He was mean to his wife, ignored his children, avoided honest work like the plague and was known far and wide as the biggest and most brazen liar in Southwest Virginia.

One day Grandma and one of her many grad-daughters were sitting on the front porch; rocking, shelling peas and gossiping about Uncle James. The young woman maintained that James was beyond hope and a serious embarrassment to herself and every other member of the family. She filled Grandma in on his latest episodes of public sorriness.

Grandma just rocked and shelled and nodded and listened and finally she said, I’m sure everything you say is true. Still, Jesus loves your Uncle James. The Granddaughter turned red in the face and sputtered,I doubt that, I don’t think even Jesus could love Uncle James. Yes child, Grandma said, Jesus loves everybody and Jesus loves your Uncle James.

Then she stopped rocking and shelling and sat perfectly still, while she stared off across the hills. ‘Course, she said, almost to herself, that could be ‘cause Jesus don’t know your Uncle James as good as we do.

IN today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus commands us to love one another. But Grandma has put her finger on the crux of our problem with that commandment; some people are genuinely hard to like. How in the world are we to be expected to love them? How can Jesus order us to do something so difficult?

Part of the problem is that, in our minds, we confuse Like a lot with love. We think love is just like taken to the highest degree. This is because in our culture, love is almost always associated with romantic love, what in Greek is designated by the word EROS. So to love is to have intense feelings of affection for. How can that be commanded, we think. The heart falls in love, feels what it feels.

Or, we associate it with friendship, philea, as in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. And again, this is a natural thing; we like some people and others we don’t. We get along with some people, with others we don’t.

Marriage is usually a combination of eros and philea, as well it should be. Friends we make along life’s way, people we just like being around, this is most philea, affinity and affection. All this is natural and cannot be commanded. But what we’re talking about here is agape, self-sacrificial love. This is love that has to do with how we act toward one another, not how we feel about each other.
Feelings are, in many ways, uncontrollable. You can’t help liking some people more than others, just like we like some foods and dislike others. Me, I love Pinto Beans and can’t stand cooked greens. I love the Braves and hate the Yankees, not personally, you understand. Same dynamic for Carolina and State. Nothing serious, just emotions. But, God calls us to move beyond our likes and dislikes and behave in a loving manner to all people.

This is the point of the story in Acts. An observant Jew didn’t eat certain foods and didn’t associate or eat with uncircumcised people who ate unclean food. Peter has a vision of being commanded of God to eat of the unclean food, then going to a Gentiles house to preach and eat.

Gad wants Peter to understand that all people are God’s people, that all races and colors and types of humanity are God’s humanity and are to be included in God’s Community of Faith. Peter’s feelings did not matter to God. Peter’s actions did. God was concerned only with how Peter acted toward those to whom God was sending him.

And, that’s what matters to God about us. God is calling us to love one another. God is calling us to act with love toward all those around us. Like Peter, we are being called to move beyond our comfort zones in terms of whom we relate to, and how we act toward them.

True story. It was a few days before Mother’s Day. Her 9-year-old son came into her bedroom where she was working at a desk and said, “Mama, would you read this. It’s my school essay for Mother’s Day.” This was a woman with a Master’s Degree in English. She grabbed a red pencil and went after that essay with a vengeance. When she finished correcting the spelling and grammar, she called her son and said, “Here you go. ”

She was quite pleased with what a “good mom” she was, so helpful with the homework, interrupting her own work, to be available to her children, etc. etc. So, she was totally unprepared for the moment when her son took the paper, now marked up in red, from her hands and stared at it with a dumbfounded look on his face. Then his little 9-year-old chin began to quiver and his lips began to shake and a tear began to run down his cheek and he said, But Mama, I didn’t want you to fix it. I wanted you to like it.

The Mother said later: That was the day I learned that the loving comes before the fixing; that the caring creates the relationship in which change can occur.

All too often, we give our children and our spouses and our friends and our loved ones and the man on the street the message that if only they’ll get better and improve and change and get fixed, then we will truly and completely be able to love them.

One marriage therapist I know says most marriages that go wrong start going wrong at the wedding, when the groom looks out and sees three things: the aisle, the altar and her; and the bride looks up and sees the same three things; the aisle, the altar and him. And if they’re both thinking I’ll alter her/him, there is real trouble ahead.

For the Gospel equation is different; the love comes first. Which is why Grandma was wrong about Uncle James. Jesus did love Uncle James, but not because he didn’t know him very well, but because he knew him completely and totally and cared about him in spite of what he knew; Jesus loved him because God’s love, Jesus’ love, is not determined by the worthiness of the object, but by the character and intentionality of the one who loves.

It is God’s nature, it the very core of God’s being, to love. Love is what compelled God to create us in the first place. Love is what makes God sustain us, Love is what brought Jesus to this earth, Love is what Jesus taught and lived every day of his earthly life. Love is what took Jesus to the cross and love is what Jesus left behind to bind us together.

And not one of us deserves that love any more than Uncle James did. But all of us have received it, and all of us are called to share it, pass it on, spread it around, we are to love one another, just as Jesus has first loved us.

Amen and Amen

Peace, Delmo