Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent

Zephaniah 3:14-20

December 13, 2009

It’s a stretch here. Sing aloud O daughter Zion. Rejoice and exult with your heart O daughter Jerusalem, the Lord has taken away the judgements against you, he has turned away your enemies. From this I get to Jerusalem as the bride of the God who is coming among us? You see, the fact is I have an agenda today and the readings aren’t lining up the way I would like. My real text for today’s sermon is a line from a hymn that isn’t even an Advent hymn. The great hymn, “the Church’s One Foundation, contains the line, “from heaven he came and sought her to be his holy bride.” In this season of anticipation, I think it might be helpful to consider some of the ways in which we prepare when we are about to begin sharing our lives with someone else. Now there is ample scriptural support for the idea of the marriage of heaven and earth--of God and humanity. In passages we don’t hear today the writer of the letter to the Ephesians says quite plainly to his hearers that he applies the concepts of mutual respect and support from marriage when he speaks about the relationship between Christians and Christ. The writer of Revelation sees the same daughter Jerusalem, the one we heard about a few minutes ago in the first lesson, as the bride of the Lamb.

I looked at the letter to the Philippians that we do have today and found no help there in trying to bring in the idea of marriage except maybe the part about lots of prayer and supplication. And the gospel is no help either, though when I mentioned my dilemma to one colleague she kind of lit up and said well there is that line about the brood of vipers. I was afraid to ask for details.

Present in today’s lections or not, I will stick with this theme of marriage because it allows me to talk about preparation, which is the theme of Advent, in a way not already covered by Rebecca or Elizabeth in the last two weeks. And, you have probably all figured out by now that relationship with God, through Jesus, is what I believe Christianity to be all about. So marriage it is.

I met with a young couple yesterday to go over the plans for their upcoming wedding. This was the “which lessons and how many bridesmaids” meeting. That meeting comes after several hours of other meetings in which the couple examine who they each are as individuals and what they are bringing into the new relationship. I settled long ago on a couple of tools for these meetings that seem to lead to good discussions.

After an initial meeting in which which they talk about how they met, what they do, what they see in each other, religious background and all that, we move on to personality type and family history. I have them do a Myers Briggs test and then look at the results to see how they each might be expected to approach life and work and relationship. You probably know about the test. It sorts people into general categories according to preferences and strengths like whether we are more introverted or extraverted, like ticking tasks off a list or just kind of going at everything all at once, whether we put more stock in what we have been taught or what we feel in the moment. I tell them-promise them--that there will be times when they will look at their partner and wonder how in the world anyone can act like that or think like that or function in that way. In those moments, I tell them, it might be helpful to remember that we are each “wired” in different ways.

It will be like that with this Jesus who is even now coming to share a life with you. Some of what you hear and experience around Jesus, in the Church--in its liturgy, scriptures and preaching, in your caring for others--some of what you experience in your life together with Jesus may not always seem to fit you. That’s ok. Some of us are wired with a passion for social justice, some of us are on a life-long quest to learn to hear a small still voice speaking deep within. Some will resonate with the word “law” every time it is mentioned because they know deep in their gut that there is a right way to do things. Others will hear only the message of divine love that promises to deal with any kind of mess we can make. What I tell couples in pre-marital counseling when their Myers Briggs tests show them to be very different from each other is that it will take some conscious effort to understand each other. And….that between them, they can handle just about anything. The differences between them amount to a broader array of strengths they possess for dealing with the world around them.

I thought at this point about trying to figure out where Jesus might fall on the Myers Briggs, but it became obvious very quickly that he would be an anomaly. He loved being with people, he loved his time alone. He knew and worked from the law, and he felt deeply and responded intuitively from his spiritual center. And he knows himself pretty well. It is the rest of us who need to spend some time reflecting on who we are and what we bring to the relationship.

Couples often laugh and enjoy their growing understanding of each other as they hear revealed in the test truths they had already begun to figure out about this other person. The other big discovery meeting I have with couples involves their family of origin. I have them do a genogram, a family tree that expands on simple genetics and asks questions about the individuals and the relationships they developed. This is where we ask about divorces, strained relationships, who were the strong leaders, who told the best stories, who were the black sheep and why, that sort of thing. The genogram is another way of looking at what each individual is bringing into the new relationship. So much of what we learn about how to do life-- how to understand the people around us, how to interact with others, what to believe is happening when things go wrong--much of that we learn from the family in which we grow up. Our parents who teach us so much learned from their parents who learned from theirs.

Sometimes a couple will look at a family tree and notice a pattern, something like for four generations mom was the strong rock who held the family together in tough times. That’s an important kind of thing for the prospective bride to know if it is true about the guy’s family. It tells her something about what may be expected from her in her new role, even if the groom swears he would never expect her to shoulder more than her share of the load. What we expect from the people around us has a lot to do with our experience, especially our early experience. And though such expectations play a huge role in our interactions with others, we often don’t name them or ask where we formed them unless we find ourselves having trouble in a relationship. That is why I ask couples to spend some time looking at the messages that guide them before they get married.

It is the same with Jesus. I hear from people all the time who see Jesus as disciplinarian or judge. I know people who were guided by parents who wanted them to excel in life, people who hear Jesus pushing them, admonishing them to do more. Who Jesus is in relationship with each of us will be colored by our experience of others. Jesus is seen and spoken of by the Church as authority figure, teacher, exposer of hidden truths, God, victim. Any of those roles might connect in good or troubled ways with our upbringing. One way of preparing in Advent might be to ask ourselves about our expectations of Jesus--who he is or might be in our lives--and then ask how we came by those expectations and whether they still apply. New beginnings deserve a fresh look with as much wisdom and insight into ourselves as possible.

I really only have a couple of wedding sermons. By the time we get to the big day there isn’t a whole lot left for me to say to the couple. One thing I do say and I say it to you on this third Sunday in Advent, is that you are about to become a part of a new creation. What is being put together here is something that has never been seen in the world before. You may think a lot of people have forged a new relationship with Jesus, but no other has been exactly what yours will be. The two of you will call new gifts from each other, and you will each become more in relationship with this other one than you could ever have been on your own.

Jesus is coming. God is jumping into the messy business of being human in order to be related to us in a new way. What do you bring to that new relationship? What have you learned? How have your expectations been shaped. Can Jesus be a friend and companion? Teacher and guide? Trusted? Loved? As I read the stories, that seems to be what is being invited in the advent and birth of Emanuel, God with us.

Sermon for the Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

Sunday, November 15, 2009

1 Samuel 1:4-20

It is good to be back among you today. As you will see this week in the e-news, Elizabeth has a new blog where she is posting sermons and that sort of thing, and so I was glad to be able to read what she had to say last week in her sermon. I smiled at the part where she said that I had set her up to preach on that story about the widow who gave her last coins. I was supposed to preach on stewardship and I had left town right in the middle of the stewardship drive and left her with that story.

Well I thought maybe karma had caught up with me this week when I found myself needing to preach on the story of Hannah pleading with God about wanting to have a baby. I mean anyone can talk about the widow’s mite, but when it comes to talking about the deep desire to bear a child, come on. Elizabeth was there when we set the preaching schedule. I’m not sure who was set up.

We have today the story of Hannah, a familiar story in which Hannah, who has not been able to bear a child pleads her case with God. She promises that if God will grant her request, she will offer the child back to God for a life of service in the temple. God does give Hannah a child, the great transitional leader of Israel who ushers in the period of the monarchy, Samuel. And in a part of the story we don’t have today, Hannah does indeed return to the temple with young Samuel and offer him back to God. It’s a great story and a familiar motif. God creates life and possibility where none existed before.

I wondered too, if I had been set up because the men in today’s story are so clueless. Listen guys--and here I do mean guys--take a lesson from today’s story. When Hannah pours her heart out to her husband about the angst of not being able to have a child, he says, “awe come on honey. Aren’t I worth a whole lot more to you than a bunch of kids?” If you aren’t sure what’s wrong with his answer, call me on Monday and we’ll find a time when you can talk…..with Elizabeth.

Then Eli, who really was a good guy, sees Hannah praying in the temple, and because she is so agitated that she is actually moving her lips as she pleads with God, Eli jumps quickly to the conclusion that she is drunk.

All I can say is, Careful out there fellows.

As is often the case, though, I have discovered once more that God and the lectionary are good, and that when they lead me into places I had not thought to go, there is often some learning to be found there. So having been warned off by Elkanah and Eli, I went looking for some other way of connecting Hanna’s story and came, strange as it may sound, to her desire to bear a child.

Mary and I were away last week, traveling with our old friends John and Mackie Rice. Many of you know John from his time among you when I was on sabbatical five years ago. When I say John and Mackie are old friends, that really isn’t accurate. They are family--my closest family beyond Mary and Margie. They kind of adopted me forty years ago and we have shared our lives ever since.

I met them when I was a druggy kid of sixteen, serving for the first time as counselor at church camp. My home life was a mess and my family of origin was, in those days, pretty much coming apart. The Rices befriended me that week and kept in touch afterward through letters and an invitation to visit them at the other end of the state where they lived.

I was delighted to hear the next year that John had accepted a call to a church in my city. That meant they would be close. I had pretty much given up church in my teen years, except for camp, but these folks were not about church, they were friends. I was glad to have them in town.

I was really glad to have them there one night when I was a freshman at Memphis State. That night I ended up having a bad experience with something recreational I had taken and John came out after midnight, clergy collar and all, to help me out and talk me down. As we headed out of the dorm parking lot, we walked toward Central Avenue and when we reached the street, John put a hand on my shoulder and said very seriously, “it’s time to make a decision.” “Yes?” I answered in a trembling voice. He smiled and said, “Are we going to walk into the road or turn onto the sidewalk.” In my altered state of consciousness, I was pretty sure he was talking in code, so I came back with a reference to one of Jesus’ sayings, trying to hold up my end of the conversation. “Let’s take the narrow one,” I said. The rest of the night included some story telling and a little preaching and some talk about Jesus, but what stuck with me was that question--that call for a decision. And whether John intended it in his question or not, his black suit and collar, and his talk about Jesus that night left me knowing that the decision I was being offered had something to do with where and how my life would be shaped. And, I knew the question had something to do with God, and the Church, and my place in that Church.

It was in those days that I chose to really be a part of this family we call the body of Christ, the one we all belong to. It was then that I chose for myself, not because someone else had signed me up. I think I understood, even then, that if my life was to bear fruit, if I had any chance of becoming a whole, complete person, those things had their best chance in this place I was being invited to belong. I had wondered as my home life became chaotic in my teen years what sort of life I would have. My hopes and dreams were set against a background of uncertainty. There was much I hoped was possible in my life, but I couldn’t imagine how those possibilities might come to life in the setting where I found myself. Looking back today, I see that as the time when I discovered my need for a place in the body of Christ. That was when I made a shift in my thinking about Church. I saw church no longer as a set of obligations I had to fulfill, but as a community that might be able to nurture in me and call forth from me that which I only hoped might lie within.

Soon I was sitting with the children’s chapel kids on Sundays at John’s church playing my guitar and singing songs about Jesus and Moses and Abraham, all those folks who had found their true calling in and among the people of God. Oh I didn’t understand at the time that that was who they were, people who had found their lives in this community. I didn’t pay much attention to the words of the songs in those days, it just felt good to be singing and to have been asked to offer something I valued. But as the community around me became a reference for me--began to figure in the decisions I was making about my life--I came to realize that the life I was discovering among them really kind of belonged to them. More and more, what I was receiving from and in the community of the faithful I was offering back to that community,a nd most of the time, pretty gladly.

It was many years before I began to understand that the cycle of receiving and giving back is what Christianity is all about. All my life I had seen the bread and wine we offer be taken, broken open, blessed and shared. I had heard the words of the offertory sentence after the Peace calling us to offer ourselves in a similar way. But it is only in looking back now that I can see the rhythm of that cycle at work over time, creating us, calling forth gifts, knitting us into the body of Christ where our lives are defined by our relationship with God and the people around us. Die on Friday, shout with joy on Sunday. Give your life away and get it back in spades. That’s the gospel.

Hannah longed for a child, and when that child was born she understood him to be a gift from God. And so she returned to the temple and said, “here he is God. He’s yours.” All that wanting , hoping, and now the giving back.

How many of us have discovered gifts in this place. How many of us have found our true selves here or have seen enough to believe we will. I have seen the faith community call forth from its members undiscovered gifts of leadership, music, listening, passion for justice, deep concern for the welfare of others. I have watched people discover in this place the ability to persevere, to trust, to network, to dream, to make and keep friends. All these fine gifts serve us well in all aspects of our lives, but how often do we remember who gave them to us. Hannah knew. And what she had desired more than anything she gave back.

If you are wondering about the stewardship sermon, and have notice that I haven’t said anything today about numbers or percentages, I can explain. The deeper I find myself in this community of faith and trust, the harder I think it would be to speak in terms of ten percent or anything near that. I’m pretty sure the number we should be using is more like a hundred percent. And if you think you haven’t heard a stewardship sermon this year, give me a call and we’ll set up a time to chat.

Sermon for All Saints Day

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9

I am thinking this All Saints day about one of the least saintly people I have known. Oh, that’s really not fair, who am I to say who is or is not a saint. I guess that is best left up to the Church, which is of course people, like you and me, or to God who would certainly be expected to have the final word on Sainthood. Fortunately for all of us, I think God is a bit more generous in assessing our worth than we tend to be with each other, or ourselves. But the guy I’m thinking of really was a piece of work.

Buz was a life-long member of a church I served right after seminary. He was a bit of a legend, what is sometimes euphemistically called a character. When I got there, Buz was in his seventies, and I’m sure I heard only a tiny sampling of the stories about him that had piled up over the years. There was the one about him racing out to his hunting cabin to cover up the wall decorations because someone in his hunting group had invited the bishop to go hunting with them. There was the story about the time he was mugged on his front porch and proceeded to cuss the mugger out and order him off his property. Amazingly, Buz survived and wasn’t mugged. To say that he never embraced political correctness in much of any category you want to talk about, would be to sugar coat the truth. The way he had always seen things was just fine with him and everyone else could just live with that or leave him alone. Before I arrived, the church had decided that smoking would no longer be allowed inside any of its buildings, except of course for Buz. He just wouldn’t put up with such a rule. On Sunday mornings, he would arrive early for church and take his place at a table in the parish hall where a sexton would bring over the “Buz” ashtray and a cup of coffee. A lot of folks in that church kind of shook their heads when they mentioned Buz, but he was one of them. A part of the family. For as long as anyone could remember, he had organized the Shrove Tuesday dinner, and for years after he was gone, the dinner was named in his honor. Probably still is.

I’m thinking of Buz today for a couple of reasons. He stands as a reminder to me that not everyone who belongs to this communion of saints we celebrate today is the sort of person we would necessarily call saintly. Oscar Wilde once said that, “Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future.” Some of the Church’s saints have pretty checkered pasts. St. Augustine’s faith grew out of the painful realization that he was not capable of living the virtuous life he wanted to live. St. Paul said in a letter that the good he wanted to do he could not do, while the evil he would have avoided came easily. He didn’t say those words about his life before Christ, but of his life as a disciple and leader in the fledgling Church. He was certainly among “the saints,” which was his term for those, who through membership in a worshipping congregation, belonged to the body of Christ, but Paul, who was a leader among the saints, knew that he was not able to live a “saintly" life.

Saints--the best saints, even the “saintliest” saints--are human, flawed, real people whose lives are not any easier than anyone else’s. I think that the difference between them--those famous saints--and a lot of the rest of us, is that they know their situation. They somehow come to depend on the generosity and love-driven optimism of God. They come to trust in the possibility that God believes we are capable of more than we can imagine, that our loving can compete with our selfishness, that our compassion can grow up in us right alongside our fears. Think of the stories we have about Peter, Peter who denied Christ, Peter whose understanding of what Jesus was about was so flawed that Jesus had to call him down for tempting him away from his mission. Peter became the saint. “On this rock,” said Jesus, “I will build my Church.” The “saint” saints are people just like you and me who learn to rely on the grace of God….to believe in the grace of God. I think they might tell us that we can’t appreciate the gift of grace if we are too confident about our own goodness. Saints are empowered by God as they discover their inability to make any progress on their own. They entrust their lives, their hopes to God and somehow everything turns. Things start to happen in lives that have become conduits for the creative work of love in the world.

One of my favorite theologians, a crusty old Baptist preacher named Will Campbell used to say that the gospel wasn’t all that complicated. He said it is simply this: “we are all bastards loved by God.” I think maybe becoming a saint involves figuring out that simple truth. We are all bastards loved by God.

Saints are known for their ability to love others, to give up for the good of others something they might by rights claim as their own. They have given up riches, health, freedom, often their lives so that others might have health or life or faith. Understanding their need of God not only aligns them in proper relationship with God, but with their neighbors as well. The saints give what they have because they know we are all in this life together and that the gifts we have been given are to be shared. Sainthood involves a kind of humility that fortunately can be learned just by living. It involves having to say at some time about something we really care about, “I can’t Jesus, I hope you will.” That’s when things start happening. That’s when stories get told and names get written in books. Saints become extraordinary people by knowing they aren’t all that extraordinary. Will Campbell had it right.

I told you there were a couple of reasons I was thinking of Buz this All Saints Day. The other reason is I’m pretty sure this reading from the Wisdom of Solomon is the one I screwed up at his funeral. With a couple hundred of his family and best friends in the room, I went to the lectern at the appointed time and opened the book. I read right through to the line where I left out one little “t” and brought down the house. I spoke very clearly as I said, for though in the sight of others they were punished, their hope is full of immorality. I’ve heard laughter during the homily at a funeral before, but never during the first reading. Someone near the front said to a neighbor, “yep, he’s here all right.” Several people commented later that the slip was just Buzz playing with us.

It is still my favorite funeral story. I’m sure some of you have heard it. Everyone appreciated what may have been a Freudian slip on my part, but they also appreciated anew Buz’s sense of humor, his determination not to go down without a fight, his independence and maybe even his ability to define himself quite apart from what society was doing all around him. In a way, those are all saintly qualities. Those qualities were brought up often in the hours and days after the funeral and applied to Buzz in a way that seemed pretty generous. We aren’t just baptized into the communion of saints, but held there by the other members of that community who claim us no matter what, and who see in us sometimes more than we see in ourselves.

I’m sure they are still telling stories about that man and smiling, laughing sometimes, shaking heads, wondering out loud how he got away with some of what he did. And I’m sure the stories are told with a good measure of love by people who knew him to be one of them--like them in ways they would rather not discuss, and with them each Sunday in hope that somewhere in the universe there is a power that can help us. Maybe saints are just people who have figured out who they are--people who know that Will was right. We are all bastards loved by God.

JB

Sermon for Sunday, October 11,

The nineteenth Sunday in Pentecost.

Mark 10:17-31 The story of the rich young man who asks Jesus what he must do to gain eternal life.

Discovering that we cannot accomplish everything we think we should be able to do can be a great gift.

I have driven over to Easton Maryland on the Eastern shore the last two Thursdays to take a painting class from a painter whose work I had admired. I walked in the first week, not knowing anything about the class or the people in it, or really anything about the instructor. I had expected him to do some kind of demonstration or spend some time talking about his ideas of painting, but he just set up a still life and said get to work. Everyone else in the class had already been working with him for some time, and if there was some demonstration time, I had missed it. So I picked up my brush and started painting, and all of a sudden, my goal in being there shifted rather drastically from wanting to learn something new to not wanting to look like a rank beginner. I kind of listened to what the instructor said as he came around to critique our work, but I found myself caught between trying to paint as I have always painted on the one hand and trying to follow the suggestions he was making on the other. Caught between the desire to be seen as competent and the desire to learn, I have now driven home twice from the Eastern shore with nothing to show for the journey. All I have managed to do is mess up a couple of perfectly good canvasses. I was in a bind, caught between wanting look like I already knew what I was doing and wanting to learn something I did not already know.

That’s kind of where the young man is in today’s gospel story. He comes asking what he must do to get into the kingdom. The technique he understands is one of accomplishment. The course Jesus is offering is about something else altogether.

The young man finds himself in a bind when Jesus’ answer is too much for him to take in--when the answer seems to involve not a new step in the process he understands, but a whole new process. Who ever heard of giving everything away.

When we want to see ourselves as capable, able to accomplish what is needed--when we want that, and we want to learn, to become something more than we are right now, we are in a bind.

Wanting to see ourselves as able leads us to feel good about our abilities, we may conjure up enough confidence to believe that we can get along. We are often respected by those around us. We may become very self sufficient. Those things all sound good, but wanting to be capable in the world has its costs too. We may not ask for help when we need it. We may limit our efforts to the familiar and never discover our own limits. Valuing competency may diminish our ability for compassion by making us unable or unwilling to understand those whose limits are exposed by failure.

Wanting to learn and become more than we already are also holds its promises. Wanting to learn can lead us to ask good questions, it can lead to growth and new experiences. We may even discover new talents. But the cost of wanting to learn something new can involve things like having to discover that some of what we think we know is wrong. In order to learn we must be willing to be led, to work in an area we don’t understand and in which we may not be comfortable. If we seek learning, we may even discover that we just can’t get it this new thing--we may not have the right talents or personality. We may, in fact, discover our own limits. Wanting to be seen as competent and wanting to learn new things can put us in a bind.

The good news about living in such a bind is that that is where life is richest and most interesting. It is also where life is most challenging, in part, because it is where we learn new truths about ourselves.

It would seem obvious that becoming capable, able to do what needs doing would involve learning what we don’t yet know. Sometimes though, what we don’t know is so beyond our understanding that we can’t see it from where we are. Sometimes learning can feel a lot like dying to an old way of life and being raised into a new one.

I work on the committee on priesthood in Virginia, and I had the pleasure of meeting with some candidates for ordination on Friday. One of those candidates was coming back to the process after being sidetracked by some life issues for a few years. She was engaging and bright, young, thirty maybe, and listening to her, everyone on the committee knew she was changed. She had grown and was speaking from some sort of new grounding and wisdom that only enhanced one who had already been a very strong candidate. When asked about her personal life, she told of a relationship she had worked very hard to reconcile that had none the less failed. And then she spoke the key to her new found wisdom. She said, “it was the first thing I ever worked at and couldn’t do. The first time I had tried and failed.”

The discussion that followed involved the committee listening in awe as she talked about the flood of learning and questioning that had accompanied that failure. It had been painful and difficult; and it had been rich, filled with promise and the opening of new possibility.

Discovering that we cannot accomplish everything we think we should be able to do can be a great gift. Which brings us back to the rich young man in Mark’s story.

Several years ago I asked a group of folks to write sequels to this story. They broke up into small groups and wrestled with what they thought Jesus might say or what the young man might tell his friends when he got home, that sort of thing. I eventually wrote a sequel of my own and stumbled upon what still, after many years, speaks what I believe to be the heart of this story.

So the young man goes away sad and Jesus tells his friends that nothing will be impossible for God.

In a few weeks, Jesus and his friends are traveling through the area again, and the same young man comes up to Jesus and says, “I did it. I gave everything away. Am I ready?” Jesus looked at him and loved him and said, “That is terrific. Congratulations my friend. There is something else you might do, though. What I think you should do now is go and tell everyone who ever hurt you that you forgive them. Oh yes. And you have to mean it.” Again, the young man went away sad.

A couple weeks later, he returned. Again, he found Jesus and said, “I did it. It wasn’t easy but I did it. I forgave them all.” Jesus smiled a big warm friendly smile and said, “Good. Good. You know...what you could do now is go find someone who is very sick, someone whose illness scares you, makes you uncomfortable. Tend their sores, comfort them, sit up through the night and care for them.” The young man went away again, but then returned having done what Jesus asked.

And so it went until one day the young man went away and did not return. The weeks went by, then a couple of months.

“I’d better go see about him,” Jesus told his friends. So he went looking and finally found the young man sitting alone under a tree.

“Hey what happened?” asked Jesus. “You were doing so well, working so hard.”

“I give up.” said the young man. “No matter what I do it’ll never be enough to get me into heaven. I give up. I quit!”

Jesus took him by the hands and stood him up. He looked him right in the eyes and slowly smiled the biggest smile the young man had ever seen him smile.

“Well done, good and faithful servant,” said Jesus. “Now you are ready for the kingdom of God.”

JB