A Sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter

June 5, 2011

Acts 1:6-14

Our ministry is out there. In the world. We hear it often. This Sunday worship is where we are encouraged, fed, strengthened for our work. Out there. In the world. This is where we prepare, refresh. Here we are forgiven and empowered. Here we are called back to love, which is our work in the world. In this place we remember that we are loved and in that remembering we find purpose we can take with us as we go to our various ministries. Our ministry--the ministry of Christ’s Church--is out there. Each week in our last prayer together we say, “send us out into the world, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you.” And then we go back to our families and children, our desks, our jobs, our volunteer responsibilities, our friendships, our chance encounters with strangers. Our ministry is in the world. We say it often because our work in the world is at the core of our baptismal covenant and our faith.

What I don’t say very often is that we all have a ministry here in this setting as well. Our work out there is grounded in our common life of prayer and communion, of sharing and celebration. And because it is easy to get confused about what is sometimes called “lay ministry”, I don’t talk very often about the important ministry we have to each other and with each other in the worship we do together.

Too often in the church’s life, “lay ministry” has called to mind the work that lay people do during the service on Sunday. Chalice bearers, ushers, readers of lessons and prayers are all ministers in worship, yes, and since the arrival of the current Prayer Book in the 70’s there has been a strong emphasis on the ministry of the laity in worship. That inclusion is a great gift of what we old timers still call the “new” prayer book. It is just that with a stronger emphasis on lay ministry in worship services we have to be reminded that the real ministry of the people of God is in the lives we lead outside this room and this gathering. So I try to remind us all often that our ministry is out there. But today seems like a good day to talk about the work we share here each Sunday and what the call to love might mean for us as the community gathers to be fed.

When they went to the city, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying, Peter and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James, son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas, son of James. All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer.

One of the most basic ways we can help each other in our various ministries in the world is to show up here on Sunday. All week long we are challenged in our call to love. What is the right thing to do? Where is justice in this situation? How do I answer him? Do I really need to make that phone call? Why did I respond like that? What should I do now? Our lives are full of questions and they are full of opportunities to be a little more caring, a little more hopeful, to go the extra mile in the service of some good. Every week we will nail some of the questions we live with good answers and actions and we will stumble and struggle with others. We walk through the doors of this place on Sunday looking for grounding, forgiveness, encouragement to go back out and do it all again, maybe a little better. One of the things that can give us courage and hope and strength is knowing we are not alone, that others are struggling and succeeding and growing alongside us. Just showing up here is a sign that you expect to find something here. Showing up is a testimony to what you have found here in the past. Some of us come through the doors each week not sure why we are coming or what we hope to find, and in such times the community becomes the answer. We are all here looking for something--we walk in and see that they are all here looking for something, they must be expecting something, this must be a place of hope. Look around. The people you see right now need your presence. Showing up makes a difference.

All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer. I sometimes hear questions about the relationship between prayer and worship and service to the poor. Someone on the Vestry retreat this year asked what will happen to our emphasis on outreach at St. Aidan’s if the rector signs up for a program centered in contemplative prayer. There are always questions in parishes about whether it is ok to spend money on bricks and mortar when there are so many in need around us. We live in a tension, a good tension between the call to action and the call to prayer. We need to be serious about both.

If you are familiar with the cycle of the Church year, you know what’s coming. Next Sunday we will celebrate Pentecost, the day when Jesus’ followers were empowered by the Holy Spirit for their ministry in the world. Today, though, Luke wants us to know that as they awaited the strength and call to go out and do, the disciples spent their time in prayer. And they prayed together. In John’s gospel today we hear Jesus praying that his disciples may be one as he and God are one. Jesus drew his strength for ministry, his call, his identity from his relationship with God. He was steeped in God in such a way that he found the strength he needed for amazing acts of healing and truth telling and even suffering. I had always heard in this prayer Jesus asking that we might be related to God as he is, but his prayer is that they may be one as we are one. That suggests that the relationship meant to strengthen us for our work in the world is our relationship with this community. The relationship that identifies us as agents of God’s love in the world is our relationship with this community. The prayer life of the community fuels and feeds our work in the world.

The community needs each of us. Who knows what our contributions will be? Who knows where the next vision for St. Aidan’s will come from? Luke’s telling in Acts of the disciples gathering in prayer lists eleven apostles. Before the Pentecost story, the eleven will have elected Matthias to take the place of Judas Iscariot. The company must be complete. Everyone is needed.

And of course, if we are looking ahead to next Sunday, we will be thinking of the day when the Church caught fire and began to grow. If you know something about that tension I spoke of between prayer and action, if you want to see the Church get to work in the world, then you know we need all the help we can get. Just as our presence here on Sundays reinforces the importance of our calling and mission for those we already know, it can serve as a powerful witness to those who are looking for a way to make a difference, in the world and in their lives. Those eleven who gathered in prayer mark a beginning, but they were just the beginning. You and I are a part of the great company who have been drawn into the life of prayer and service that defined their little community.

Everyone is necessary, even people we have never met. Everyone has gifts, stories, dreams. Everyone has troubles, shames, pains. We who would love the poor and the needy must learn to love each other and ourselves. The work of the Church is nothing less than the work of love. That work begins right here where we are welcomed, accepted, and loved, simply because we are children of God. Look around one more time. That is what we share. We are welcome, accepted and loved simply because we are children of God. Let that message sink in in this place over and over again. Then you will be ready to go in peace to love and serve the Lord. Amen

A Sermon for the Third Sunday in Easter

May 8, 2011

This morning’s story of the walk to Emmaus is probably my favorite gospel story. It has everything. Clueless disciples, to help us easily find ourselves in the story. It has Jesus whom the disciples don’t recognize even when he is walking next to them, which again sounds all too familiar. And then it has this great message about how we will discover what is most important in the most unlikely ways--in a chance meeting, in the blessing and breaking of bread, and in the whispers or the burning of our hearts. This story does such a wonderful job of opening up a place of mystery and possibility around the risen Christ, that I don’t want to tamper with or set limits on its meaning by dealing with the story as a whole. I’d rather focus today on one little line in the Emmaus story. I’m interested in what the disciples said after their experience with the Risen Christ. “Weren’t our heart burning within us?” They had had a clue about who their companion was and they had missed it. I wonder if we don’t all do that more often than we know. Chances are, we could all use some practice at listening to our hearts.

We spend most of our time in our heads where we plan and calculate and solve puzzles. Our brains are marvelously crafted so that we can keep all sorts of problems in front of us at the same time, working on several levels at once. We can drive seventy miles an hour while thinking about how much fuel we still have in the car as we listen to and maybe even sing along with our favorite driving music, all while noticing that the car we are passing is the one that passed us just a few minutes ago, and oh oh, is that a blue light up ahead….. and isn’t the sun on those tree tops amazing. We rely on our brains and our thinking ability even when we we’re not thinking about our thinking ability. What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable….and think how far we’ve come since Hamlet.

We create machines as if they were extensions of ourselves, from Swiss watches to smart phones we prize that which functions swiftly, dependably and with great precision. We rely on our ability to use our heads. We expect so much from ourselves, and those around us. The one-word office sign you used to see sometimes said it all…..THINK! It is as if that is the commandment for our species in our time. THINK! Our brains can be fine tuned, taught, filled, sharpened. What a piece of work indeed.

Our hearts…..our hearts on the other hand are messy. While we can take charge of our heads and train them in the ways we would have them go, as it were, our hearts are almost by definition, unruly. They will not be tamed or taught. Hearts feel pain and love and yearning and joy. Hearts leap and break, they swell and ache. Our hearts speak to us in a language we don’t always understand, in a language we are not even sure we want to learn. Our hearts can surprise us, interrupt us in our daily routine, they can change the course of lives we have carefully put in order. Maybe the best defense we have against the messy incursions of our hearts into our ordered lives is to try to ignore our hearts as much as possible.

We can fill our time with all sorts of busy-ness in order to try to drown out the calling of our hearts. We can keep moving, drive to the store, watch TV, read the paper, manicure the lawn, twitter, read the statuses of a hundred of our closest friends, surf the internet. We can oil and tune our brains, work our way up to evil level Sudokus. We have a million ways of tuning out the voice that speaks from deep within and still it tries to get our attention like my cat scratching at the back door. “Go away, you can’t come in.” “Then I’ll just sit and stare at you through the glass.”

Of course we all live and work out of a mix of head and heart. We practice caring for others, we work at relationships, we sometimes seek out a friend or someone else to talk to, someone who can listen with us to what our hearts are trying to tell us. But in the busy, business world of high achievement, in the day to day world of simple chores, our hearts can can be drowned out by the storm of all that has to be accomplished in a day. And because our hearts are so uncontrollable, we can’t easily imagine how they can help us get our work done, so we turn up the radio and get back to work.

But here is the thing. It is precisely because we can’t control our hearts that we need to listen to them. Our hearts aren’t meant to be used as tools, they’re not meant to be trained or focused by us, they are meant to instruct us….to lead us…..to speak speak to us about deeper, less graspable things. Heart does speak its own language, and we can practice, not so much to change and shape our hearts, but to let them change and shape us. It is in our hearts that God is creating us, singing to us, whispering deep truth that we might miss unless we are very attentive. I find it interesting that the disciples who walked with Jesus that day were involved in a deep discussion about scripture and all the while they missed the message their hearts were trying to deliver. It is in our hearts that God touches us, becomes real for us, greets us.

John Wesley said of his profound experience of deepening faith, “my heart was strangely warmed.” St. Augustine said “our hearts are restless till they rest in thee.” And Mary treasured the promise of God delivered by the angel in her heart.

We don’t have to choose between head and heart, we have been given both because we need them. It’s just that since we spend so much time in our heads, most of us could use some practice learning the language of our hearts.

So…. and I hate to say this as the days are getting pretty and the beauty of nature is beginning to call, but I am beginning to understand those who tell me that they can be with God in their gardens just as easily as they can in church. In the quiet of such times we have a chance to listen deeply, to be aware of the one who is always with us. I have no doubt that many people encounter God in the garden or at the beach. They say the same thing about golf, but I don’t believe them. I’ve played golf. Learning to recognize the language of our hearts involves spending some time in solitude. If we can commit just some of our time to being present, available to God--if we take our hearts out for a walk or sit with them in silence or let them fall open as we pull wild onions, we, like those disciples on the road, may discover our divine companion right there beside us, known, familiar, greeting us as friend. We desperately need the council of the voice only our hearts can hear. Only by giving our hearts some room in our days can we ever come to trust them. Only by believing in our hearts can we come to know that the messages they would bring us are as important as anything else in our day.

“Were not our hearts burning within us” they asked. Would that it were so for all of us.

A Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter

May 1, 2011

Today we have the story of Thomas. One of my favorites. I have always loved Thomas the skeptic, the pragmatist who isn’t going to be taken in by wild stories and emotional outbursts. Thomas who’s motto is, “seeing is believing.” My people come from the show-me state so I’ve always liked Thomas because his story suggests that there is room in this faith of ours even for people like me.

So...every year on the second Sunday of Easter I get to go off about the great contributions doubters and skeptics have made to Christianity down through the ages. I like to use this Sunday to remind all you doubters and skeptics in the congregation that you--that we--are a necessary part of the mix, that we are welcome here and needed.

So when I realized I was preaching this Sunday, I was all ready to get on my soapbox again and do my doubters-are-faithful-too routine. But then something happened and I find myself paying attention to Thomas in a new way this year. I’m not even sure after all these years if this story really has that much to do with doubt and skepticism. Maybe it has more to do with how difficult it can be to reveal and claim our deepest longings, and to hold any hope that they might be realized.

Mary and I have this great new screened porch with a couple of rocking chairs. That porch and rocker have already made a great difference in my spiritual life. It’s a great place to sit and meditate and read. A place for thinking about sermons. Recently I have been reading a collection of articles written for the Shalem News by Gerald May. The Shalem Institute here in Washington has provided support for contemplative living and leadership for thirty years. They train lay people and clergy in deepening their personal spiritual lives and connecting that spirituality with their work in the community. Gerald May was a teacher, mystic, and writer in the area of contemplative theology and psychology. I have been reading the articles he wrote for Shalem because I will be doing some work with Shalem over the next year and a half and I want to find out more about what I am getting into.

As I was reading the other day, I found myself pulling back a bit from the words on the page. Something there was a bit uncomfortable, and I soon realized it had something to do with his talk about love. May was talking a lot about love. He used the word a lot. He was talking as if love was really at the heart of everything. He was speaking in such a personal way about love that I thought I was hearing things I shouldn’t be hearing. And then I heard myself ask a question that surprised me. I asked, to no one there on my back porch, “do guys really talk like that?” Now let me assure you right now that this isn’t going to be a sermon about men and feelings and the need to open up and all that sort of thing. I just mention the reaction because it surprised me. Soon I was thinking about all the ways that love can mean trouble. I thought about all the ways that love can change the landscape of one’s life and realized that I was going to have to get past some barriers if I want to get serious about deepening my spiritual life.

Thirty years ago, before I started courting Mary, I got my pilot’s license. I had a couple of friends who flew for the airlines and who owned little planes. We would sometimes spend a whole Saturday out by a little grass strip, tinkering with engines and wires and such and flying over the farms and fields of northern Mississippi. One of my flying buddies, Jim, reacted when I told him about Mary. I said I had started dating someone and was in love. He said, oh that’s too bad. “Love’ll really screw up your flying.” And of course he was right. My relationship with Mary really cut into my flying time. I haven’t flown in over twenty years.

As I wondered about my reaction to Jerry May’s articles, I began to think about love and how much trouble it can be. I thought about all the great love-is-hard songs. Great country moaning songs about the pains of love. Folk, country, rock…..Love is a hard waltz…..Love Hurts….and the songs of encouragement….Give yourself to love…. If you listen to the radio at all, or read or are awake on the bus, you know that our culture talks about love all the time. It fascinates, frustrates, wounds and woos us. We can’t let go of the idea that it holds something we need…..that it can make us...complete us.

And…..

We are smart, self-reliant people who know enough to protect ourselves. We have all been fooled at some point and we aren’t going to be taken in easily. Loving too quickly can expose us to pain. Loving too broadly might demand too much of us. Love is...and I love this word...fraught. Some of us discover the depths of love for the first time when it is lost, a death...a leaving. Having loved someone to the brink of sobriety, a relapse exposes love’s danger. Love makes us vulnerable, so we tend to be cautious. We are advised to be cautious. But if everything does depend on our opening up more and more to love, then how do we ever get there? In our Easter story, Jesus helps us by giving it all up first. The story is that Jesus loves us until it hurts, until it does him in completely, and in the end that ultimate kind of love is redeemed.

So as I pondered my reaction to Mays writings, I was put in touch with how much I long for the call to a deeper level of love….and….I was very aware of my defenses against that same love. And then I thought about this sermon and looked at today’s story from John’s gospel. There stood Thomas, not unbelieving, but torn between his deep hope that there might be some truth in the others’ story about the resurrection that there might be something real to answer his longing--caught between that hope and the habit of protecting his heart from disappointment. Sometimes the strength of our hesitation is directly proportional to the depth of our longing. And then something finally tips. For Thomas it took a lot of help and an invitation from Jesus. Touch me. Feel my side. Your longing is not in vein.

So that’s where I was as I turned the corner with this reading. Thinking about that invitation from Jesus. Wondering where this sermon would end up. I went back to my rocker read a little further. Instead of telling you about what I read, I just want to read it to you.

May says about this piece: At the end of a Shalem, Psychology/Spirituality Day I read some words that seemed to be whispered by God to me.

I know what is inside your heart.

I see your courageous impotent love, and your fear,

and the tears you would cry if you could.

And I do so love you.

I feel how you hate your own selfishness.

When you see the poor ones in the street,

I melt as you detest your defenses against them.

I feel your deep heart-secret:

You wish you would not run away

but could embrace those poor ones, kiss them,

love them completely, caress their souls.

And I do love you so.

I know how you feel, deep, so deep,

when you bar your doors and secure your house

and invest your money and try to enjoy your possessions.

I know your dis-ease, your unrest,

And I love you.

and I drink from your discomfort, and find it good.

No, it is not guilt, nor shame;

I know the tastes of them, and spit them out.

It is your impotent love, your stifled love, your helpless love,

your yearning love that feeds me,

Yet I starve, I thirst. With you.

You are so rarely aware of me,

how I embrace you as you read the morning paper,

My arms cradle you, my breath is on your hair

as you listen to the news.

I know your unspoken feelings, for II am closer to your heart than

you are now or will ever be.

I feel your love, screaming out against injustice,

bleeding, wounded from the pain of others,

love become revulsion when the agony is too much,

The starving children, the hungry homeless, the tortured innocent,

and all the broken, broken hearts.

You cannot bear it, so I must

almost alone.

I drink up what I can from your love

in little sips, but I starve, thirst, and ache for you.

And I love you and cry for you when you cannot,

And I love you and cry in you when you must turn away

and go about your business.

ANd qwhen you can cry, I kiss your blessed tears

and drink them.

You feel my pain, you see my beauty,

You ache for my goodness,

And that is me, loving you and birthing in you,

Again and again, coming to you

in utter surrender.

Oh how I wish you could know

How completely I am surrendered to you,

For if you knew that, even just a little,

You could not help but surrender to me.

Your love would awaken

And we would become a mountain spring and a sparkling ember

And we would grow, into river and flame,

into ocean and lightening

Cleansing, searing, burning, renewing the earth.

Your love would grow wings of power and wisdom

And together in unbearable passion we would fly and die and fly again;

Our courage would encompass the heavens.

Knowing nothing but our love we would look

straight into the heart

of every broken being, every creature,

every plant and mountain

And live in them and caress their wounds,

and bring them nourishment,

and die for them and with them.

We would be relentless, my love.

We will be forever.

Gerald May in Living in Love, 2008 Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation

Sermon for Easter Vigil, 2011

Matthew 28: 1-12

In this morning’s Washington Post, David Waters asks what seems to be a very strange question. He asks whether ordained people should seek public office. “To put it bluntly,” he says, “the question is can ordained people serve God and government.” David used to write for the Commercial Appeal in Memphis where I read him often. These days he lives in our area and writes on religion for the Post, including a blog where I’m sure his question has been tossed around all day. The flaw in his question is so basic that when I read the teaser for the blog I was surprised he had asked it. My guess is he was fishing for a particular answer and he posed the question expecting to slyly sit back and let his readers make his point. Being an old-fashioned newspaper reader, I’ll probably never go to the blog, but I am glad he printed the question in the version of the paper that lands on my lawn. It feeds right into what is speaking to me this year in Matthew’s telling of the resurrection. But we’ll get there in a minute. First I want to deal with David’s question.

The question suggests that faith orders the lives of ordained people differently than it does the lives of lay people. Otherwise, he would have asked whether people of faith can serve in the government and of course, we all know they can and do--thank goodness. The question he asks suggests that somehow clergy have a more pressing commitment to the moral and ethical demands of their faith than those who are not ordained--that somehow people with collars are more deeply formed Christians than those without collars. Well I’m here to tell you that just isn’t the case. If I thought that was how this business worked I’d be out of here tomorrow. The vows that clergy take have to do with specific service in a specific capacity among the faithful. The vows that might--that should--affect the way we approach our public lives and our work are the ones we will hear and renew this evening. I know we just sprinkle water on people’s heads these days, but the symbol of the water represents a full-immersion rite that makes us Christian from head to toe. You will never be any more Christian than you are when you are baptized.

So my answer to David’s question is, Yes. Of course ordained people can serve God and Government. This faith of ours belongs in the world. In fact, everything we do here in this place of worship is meant to fuel us and feed us so that we can live our faith well when we leave here. That seems to be the message for this evening, for we hear tonight that it is out there, in the world where we can expect to find Jesus.

Three times in the resurrection story we just heard Jesus’ followers are told that he will meet them in Galilee. Not here, but out there. Not right now, but out in their future. Tell them to go, he says, I will meet them.

Years ago I read a commentary that suggested Galilee was not the best of neighborhoods. Some people in the gospel story ask about Jesus whether anything good can come from such a place. I have had some fun over the years playing with the idea that Jesus was from the wrong side of the tracks. This year, when I looked up Galilee in another source, the Oxford Companion to the Bible, the Oxford folks made a point of saying there was no basis for thinking Galilee was some sort of unappreciated backwater. Galilee, they said, was home to many devout Jews as well as Gentiles, it was known for good and abundant produce, and in the first century after Jesus it became a home to schools and communities of pious Jews. They made Galilee sound like a pretty ordinary place, not much different from anyplace else in that part of the world at that time. I felt a little sad reading that because I had always liked the other version, where Jesus had that rebel-outsider stain to heighten his irritation of the rich and proper. Jesus told his disciples, go to Galilee and I will meet you there. And Galilee turns out to be nothing special at all. Maybe that’s the point.

Tomorrow we will fill the room with flowers and sing great hymns of praise about the amazing thing that God has done in raising Jesus from the dead. Tonight, though, we are told that our meeting Jesus is yet to come and we are told that meeting will take place in the most everyday parts of our lives. Matthew, Luke and John all tell stories in their gospels about Jesus appearing to the disciples. Mark’s gospel, the earliest, has several endings in the ancient texts. The shorter and supposedly older version has no appearance of Jesus. Just a young man sitting in an empty tomb telling the disciples that Jesus would meet them later in Galilee--out there, in the plain old, ordinary world where they would live their lives, where we live our lives.

I am persuaded by those who say that the stories of the resurrection appearances in the the gospels have a lot to do with the experience of the early Church. I can imagine people discovering the truth of that simple message--you will meet Jesus in the world--and telling all kind of stories. I have stories of meeting Jesus, of being loved better than I deserved, of being called out of myself by another’s need, of being challenged to amend my life, of being touched by awe. I have had heated, impassioned, intimate conversations with someone nearby and unseen, real and present. I have been surprised by Jesus in the the strangest, most ordinary moments. I’m pretty sure Jesus has asked me for spare change, and I know he has asked me to contact my congressman. Out there. In the real life world. Do Christians belong out there in the real world. We have been sent there by the one who promised to meet us there. We had better run for office and more.

So, Robert, Grant, Vance. The good news is that being baptized tonight won’t keep you from becoming president some day if that’s what you want to do. Being baptized will make you a Christian, though, as much a Christian as anyone can every be, just as much as a bishop or even a pope. And the promise that Jesus makes to you as the water is poured over you is that you will encounter him, in this moment yes, but most importantly, in the life that lies ahead of you. Keep your hearts and minds and eyes open and you will see him. In Galilee. In the plain old every day world. JB

Sermon for Palm Sunday

April 17, 2011

There is a lot going on here today. First we welcome Jesus into town with great flourishes of palm waving and music. The celebration doesn’t last long though, for as soon as we are in our seats the tone of the day shifts as we hear Isaiah’s suffering servant say that he has “set his face like flint” knowing he will not be put to shame. Then Paul tells us that Jesus humbled himself and emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. And then comes the story we all know, the story that is so difficult to listen to and to hear.

One minute we are hailing Jesus as king, inviting him into our lives and the next we are standing with the crowd yelling “crucify him.” I find it a little hard to get my bearings on Palm Sunday.

Maybe it will help to remember what this faith of ours is about on the larger scale before wading into the stories of the day. What seems to me to be the center of the Christian message, the good news that we are to spread into the world in word and action is this: that we are all loved by God who will never quit working with us to love us into being the best people we can be. That kind of sums it all up for me. I find room in that explanation for sin and forgiveness, transformation, spiritual awakening, solidarity with the poor, self-giving--all of those are a part of God loving us into being new, more complete, more God-grounded people. The gospel is about love and change. I think it is that “change” part that sets the stage for what happens here today.

Now when I say that God loves us into being the best people we can be I assume that we have a good ways to go--that we are not and will not be, in this life at least, the best we can be. I also suspect that the best out in front of us--what we may yet become--involves becoming what we may not even be able to imagine. Maybe we will find somewhere down the road that we are made happy by things we would rather avoid at this point in our lives. Who knows, maybe growing into the full stature of Christ--that’s how Paul talks about our being changed--maybe growing into the full stature of Christ could even involve becoming the kind of people we don’t really like right now, or becoming the kind of people we think are silly. Maybe we will become like people who are on the other side of the political spectrum or whose religion seems strange to us. One of the concerts we had here at St. Aidan’s featured the group, We’re About Nine. In one song the speaker is explaining to a friend that, yes, he has changed in unexpected ways. He says, “the people we called obnoxious, the ones that we thought were funny, live the dreams that I aspire to now.” The trouble with change is that it doesn’t happen to us until it happens. And, when it comes right down to it, most of us are more comfortable with what is familiar than with the idea of moving to some new place we’ve never been. Change means losing something we have known and most of us don’t sign up quickly for change and loss.

Jesus rides into town, hailed as a king. He ends up outside the city on a cross.

Sometimes it is easy for us to embrace the idea of Jesus, or growth, or spirituality, or changing our lives, but then comes the reality that in order to move in any of those areas we have to give something up. Some part of ourselves has to die in order for the “new” to come. A little “God” in the areas we want to improve is one thing, but a god who wants to weigh in on our whole life can be troubling. C.S. Lewis likened God to a dentist. He said we go in with some problem we want taken care of and that part goes ok, but then the dentist starts poking around and picking at other teeth we’d just as soon not have to work on. As soon as the pain we came in with is gone we want out of the chair. Dentists, though, are by nature concerned with the whole patient. So is Jesus. The people who welcomed Jesus wanted something, but in the end, they weren’t sure they could take what Jesus had to offer. That seems to be the theme of Palm Sunday and the theme of our lives as we work in the tension between the old life an the new one.

Of course part of the story is that the Jesus who ends up on the cross is the emissary of the one who is determined to love us into being. Jesus is living out to the extreme the transformational relationship of love he had heard about all his life. That love was the heart of the faith in which Jesus grew up, the faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Jesus went to the cross knowing about the patience and persistence of the God of love. Those who had known him and who saw him die came to understand that Jesus embodied the love of God in a way no one had before. Even Jesus was called to change, to leave his old life behind in hopes of living a new and promised life.

The good news is that God is determined to love us into being, that we will be changed. The hard news is that we will be changed, and sometimes the cost--to God and to us--of bringing about that new life is almost to much to imagine. JB

A Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent

March 13, 2011

So if you’re a Christian, raise your hand.

That’s good.

Some hands flew up. Others came up a little more slowly. Some of you, I’m sure, might have thought it was a trick question, as in ‘what comes next if I raise my hand?’ I asked Mary last night how many hands would go up if I asked that question and she said she thought everyone would raise their hands. This is a pretty safe place, maybe the safest place in all of our worlds to claim our identity as Christians. We all have some idea of what we are about in this setting. We can be reasonably sure that the people around us are here for reasons similar to ours. This is the place where we come to remember our life in God and our connection to God through Christ. We come not just because we are Christians, but to mark ourselves as Christians again so that at the end of the hour we can head out into the world again, newly confident in our identity as Christians. This identity thing is so important for our spiritual lives and for our work in the world, but living into even an identity we have chosen can be difficult.

A few weeks ago I spent a day praying and chanting and talking about faith with a group of clergy from many traditions up at the Shalem Institute in the city. As we began the day we went around and introduced ourselves and were asked to give our name, what faith community we belonged to and one other important thing about ourselves. When my turn came I told them my name and I mentioned this community and then I told them I was a painter. I don’t think I’d ever actually used those words to describe myself before. I said, “I’m a painter.” I had gone to Shalem hoping for a safe place to spend a day just being part of the congregation. I was hoping for the kind of spirit-friendly setting where unspoken ideas and truths find their way to the surface and are met by grace. I was a little surprised at myself as I heard the words coming out, I am a painter.

Though I have painted most of my life and was an art major for a while, I have never called myself an artist or a painter. Several reasons come to mind. I have always thought you had to be a good painter, maybe a commercially successful painter to call your self a painter. I have admired the works of painters and wished I could be one, but the gulf between my work and theirs always seemed very wide. I sometimes paint out in public, I set up my easel along the trail and paint the marsh or I go downtown and set up. People walk up to me when I am painting and for some reason--I mean they see the paints and the canvass and all--they will ask, “are you a painter?” I guess I figure if they can’t tell at that point then I must not be one so I usually say something like, “Oh I paint a little on my day off” and try to move them along. I think too that I have thought being an artist would make painting easy. If I were really an artist, I wouldn’t be scraping this onion off the canvass for the fifth time trying to get the color in that shadow right.

I have always been able to see the reasons I shouldn’t be called an artist and I had somehow come up with the idea that that identity would be conferred upon me by others or in response to the wonderful work I hoped to do someday. What I heard that day at Shalem was my own voice claiming the identity of artist, knowing somehow that claiming that identity was a necessary beginning to growing into it. Maybe I was able to say that about painting because I had gone there knowing I needed to give some attention to growing into my identity as Christian.

Maybe it is true that there can be no separation between who we are and who we are becoming.

If our identity as “Christian” is an unfinished business, not just a description of who we are but also of the life to which we aspire, then we need to be reminded from time to time that becoming who we are takes some effort. We are at the same time Christians and we are not yet finished becoming Christians. The identity we have taken on is one we must live into intentionally. The season of Lent reminds us that we still have work to do.

We hear in the readings today just how hard it can be to live into the identity we have chosen. Adam and Eve discover honoring a relationship isn’t automatic, that we humans are quite capable of choosing to do the exact wrong thing, even with our eyes wide open and in the best of situations. Paul is sure that there must be something in our DNA that causes us to miss the mark when we set out to be the people we know we want to be. And Jesus knows that even the desire for good things like food and safety and some power over our lives can lead us into danger. In the seasonal cycle of the Church year we are reminded today that it is time to apply ourselves, take stock of where we are and do whatever it takes to fit ourselves for the next part of our journey. Welcome to Lent.

The main reason I wanted to talk about identity today is that in this season of Lent we will be hearing as we always do, quite a bit about sin. I think sin reads differently for people who understand that they have at the same time already claimed their identity and are also living into that identity. We have all probably heard that sin separates us from God. Scripture doesn’t seem to bear that out. In the stories of our faith God just doesn’t give up. That is the message of our tradition. Sin does, however, show us where we need to be working. Lent isn’t the season of realizing that we are somehow cut off from God and in need of salvation. It is the season in which the God who has called us into our true lives pulls up alongside us on the path and asks, “how’s it going?” God may listen for a while and then ask again, “No, really, how’s it going?” expecting us to get honest about our answer. There may be sins and omissions of which we are not proud, but the promise of Lent is that checking in and getting real about our lives is a part of moving forward. We have all promised to follow Jesus. We have all promised to live into the God life. Lent asks us, How’s it going?

Maybe I was helped in claiming my artist-hood at Shalem by my reading the writings of some of the great artists. Robert Henri, the Amercian painter in his fine book, The Art Spirit, and Twyla Tharpe the great choreographer, in her book The Creative Habit, both say the same thing. In order to call yourself an artist, you have to know yourself to be a student. To be an artist is to be in the process of becoming an artist. So I ask you now, who in this room is still learning to be a Christian. Amen.

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

February 6, 2011

Matthew 5:13-20

I come to you on this Super Bowl Sunday with what I’m sure will come as good news to many of you. I’m sure many of us are wondering, after hearing Jesus talk about the law today in Matthew’s gospel, how we could in good conscience watch the game tonight. I know it was troubling me. I mean when Jesus says that every letter and stroke of every letter of the law still counts the implications get kind of personal and pervasive. Of the over two hundred laws laid down in the pentateuch only one seems to apply to tonight’s game, but it sure sounds like a stopper. The book of Leviticus tells us clearly that it is an abomination to touch the skin of a pig, so the thought of cheering on a bunch of guys whose goal is to not only touch the pigskin, but to take possession of it, hold it tight, steal it from the other guy and even lie on top of it every chance they get seems a bit over the line. Knowing that those who observe the law faithfully might feel a bit uncomfortable about watching the game tonight I have done a little research. No, I didn’t go back to the Torah to look for loopholes. I simply googled footballs and pigskin and I find that footballs haven’t been made out of pigskin for many years so enjoy the game. Just make sure the hot dogs you’re eating while you watch are Kosher. Or you might want to skip the hot dogs and look in Leviticus a few verses before that one about the pigs. There you will find a list of which flying insects you can eat and which are forbidden. You’ll be glad to know that locusts, crickets and grasshoppers are all on the ok list.

“For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.” These are some of the most troublesome words in the gospels. They are problematic for many reasons.

First, no one follows them. No one even tries. Once in a while some preacher or debater will haul these words out to support the importance of one of the Levitical laws they like, but Jesus’ words about not one letter of the law passing away are always used selectively by such folk. The laws don’t allow any work on Saturday or the wearing of clothes made of two different fabrics. We too often debate which of the laws Jesus must have been talking about while we stand there in our hush puppies wearing cotton, wool and polyester. We don’t live these words. We really couldn’t.

They are also problematic because they are a part of scripture and we are supposed to take scripture seriously. How can we just dismiss such unambiguous teaching?

And maybe most confusing aspect of these words is that while Jesus seems to be saying here that all the old rules still apply, he will, in next week’s reading and the next, cite one of the old laws and then go on to say that there is a better way. “You have read in the law, you shall give an eye for an eye, but I tell you to love your enemies.” Today’s lines are a problem because they don’t seem to fit what we will hear Jesus say next. Some commentators think the lines we hear today are offered to help us know that Jesus is not just tossing out the ancient laws when he starts saying “you have heard this, but I tell you this.” But there seems to be more going on here.

Jesus and his followers were a problem for the Jewish community. They were seen as violating the sabbath since their day of worship was not the last but the first day of the week. They were accused of being lax about keeping fasts and rituals--the kind of accusations we hear in the story about the disciples picking corn on the sabbath. And they associated with the ritually unclean, and with outcasts. Jesus answers these concerns by saying he has not come to set the law aside, but to live it, to accomplish it. And then he goes on to say that he expects an even greater adherence to the law than that expected by the pharisees and the scribes, those who were most concerned with conscientious observance of the law. Jesus, like the prophets before him, like Moses who gave the law, was not calling for anything new, but for the a return to the foundation of the law, a covenant of love and respect for God and neighbor.

The first law in Moses was just that. I will be your God and you will be my people. We will walk together. In the lesson from Isaiah today we hear that the fast God requires is not sack cloth and ashes but justice and deeply held and acted-upon concern for the needy. Jesus speaks of those who follow the letter of the law when he calls for a righteousness that exceeds that of the pharisees. As always, Jesus calls for changed hearts that live out love of God and neighbor without having to focus so much on the rules, and that sometimes trumps the rules.

Learning to love our neighbors is like learning to ride a bike, or to paint or play an instrument. There are all kinds of rules and principles and good advice on how to do those things. There are scales to learn, music theory, color principles, keeping your feet on the pedals, looking down the road and not at your feet. Behind all of those simple-yet-complex activities are deeper principles of physics, logic, science. And yet doing any of those things well means at the moment they are happening, all the details are forgotten. Fingers fly over strings, colors fill canvas, spokes sing as we fly down the hill.

Jesus does not discount the principles by which we are shaped into people of God. He affirms today the importance of those laws. But Jesus won’t stop there. He brings us to the place where we have to forget about our feet and about pedaling and just trust centrifugal force and our sense of balance and go.

This week in the class on Marcus Borg’s Embracing an Adult Faith, Borg said at one point he didn’t have to believe in God he said he knew God. As he said that, heads nodded around the room. He spoke of having come to know God through experiences of God. I am pretty sure Jesus is suggesting not just in today’s lesson , but throughout the gospels, a new way of coming to that kind of knowing.

At some point we are just supposed to know what it is to love God and neighbor. To know. Not necessarily to understand, but to know. To have it just flow from us because it is in us. Jesus seems to be saying again and again that learning love…..that coming to know God living in us around us and working through us...is something we must come to through experience.

And what kind of experience will bring us this kind of knowing?

Practice, says Jesus. Feed the hungry, house the homeless, free the prisoners, forgive each other, heal the sick, help your neighbor carry their load, turn the other cheek…...the list goes on.

It is clear from the gospels themselves that Jesus’ was passionate about opening up his audience to a new level of participation in the God life, the life for which we were born. Amen