Sermons

June 7, 2026

Notes in the Margin: The Bottom Line

It’s hard to know where to begin an ending.  But, one thing I’m sure about: as I stand in this pulpit for the last time, I know that it matters most to me that I not talk around the edges of things.  As they say in the corporate world, let’s cut to the chase.  I want to give you the bottom line.

Today, in this “margin time” of our life together, I found myself discovering a couple of notes written in the margins of my study Bible.  The first one is next to the passage you heard from Paul’s letter to the Romans, and it’s one that I have used in just about every funeral service I have conducted.  It goes like this:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?  Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . .  No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.  For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Next to this passage in my study Bible I have written: “The bottom line.”  The bottom line is this: As the great theologian Karl Barth is said to have responded when asked to boil down his entire theology to a simple answer, “Jesus loves me; this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

I remember warm summer Iowa days, marching around the block with a hundred other children in vacation Bible school.  We carried a banner and sang, “Jesus Loves Me.”  I wasn’t sure how Jesus could love me, or why, but I felt a certain confidence about that love just as surely as I felt the warmth of that summer sun.  It was a child’s kind of faith, not very sophisticated, untried, unacquainted with what Hamlet called the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”  I stopped singing “Jesus loves me” by the time I was twelve.  My guess is that most of you did too.

We outgrew such childish things when we caught on that love is not the order of things in the world.  We distanced ourselves from such simplistic “Jesus loves me” notions when we discovered that people could die by the score from fires and landslides, as well as from suicide bombers and machine guns.  When I was a teenager, “Jesus loves me” faded from my vocabulary when I discovered that the President of the United States lived only at the mercy of whoever wanted to put a bullet through his head.  And the eternal love of Christ seems even harder to reconcile with a universe which we discovered to be subject to random chaos, whether from a hidden genetic bullet buried in someone’s DNA, or from a stray asteroid or a thickening atmosphere of carbon that could extinguish human life on our planet.  Could it be that the created order reflects the same sort of careless indifference on behalf of the Creator that one might experience from a largely absent parent?  “Jesus loves me” is nice to hear children sing, but something deep within us has come to question it.

The hurts mount.  And when we lie in our beds hoping for sleep, and staring into the darkness, the worst terror, the dread that lies beneath the anxiety of living, is the unspoken but growing suspicion that what God there is, is unavailable, and maybe coldly indifferent.  And an indifferent God is even more horrible than no God at all.

But I wonder if perhaps most of us have grown up enough to cast off the simplistic world-view of our childhood, but not grown up enough yet to appreciate the wisdom of that simplicity.  We can be so sophisticated and wise in the ways of the world, and yet so oblivious to the deepest truths about our existence.

That reality was poignantly illustrated to me at the very beginning of Dadgie’s and my ministries.  We were in classes where seminary students engaged in evaluating one another’s preaching (something most of us preachers are happy not to relive).  In one session I remember one of the students took his turn in the pulpit and preached a very simple sermon on God’s love.  The class tore it apart.  “Frankly, I found it theologically naive,” said one student during the feed-back session.

“Yes,” said another, “why didn’t he deal with the question of theodicy – of the irreconcilable nature of divine love and power?”

“What about God’s judgment against the forces of injustice and oppression in the world?” asked another.

“It seems to me,” another student said, “that to simply say ‘God loves you’ without dealing with the impact of existentialism on the modern mind is to skirt the real issue.” . . . and on it went.  By the time it was over, the student who had preached this simple “God loves you” message had been thoroughly and eloquently put in his place.  At the end of the class session, the professor, who had been increasingly silent and darkened in spirit, finally spoke.  With the hint of a tear in the corner of his eye, he looked over this collection of theological students and said, “It is so hard for us to simply allow ourselves to be loved by God.”  With that, the class was dismissed in silence.  And none of us students forgot what had happened there.

There are so many reasons, I suppose, why we find it hard to be loved by the Eternal “Ground of All Being.”  Perhaps chief among them is that we often find it hard to be loved by ourselves, and therefore, by anyone else.  One of the more valuable emphases in psychotherapy has to do with “patterning” – that mechanism whereby we repeat throughout our lives the patterns of relationship, self-image, and views of others that we internalized at an early age.  In my own spiritual and emotional journey, I have learned that one of the “bottom line” issues of life has to do with not only how we project these patterns onto ourselves and others, but how we project them onto the very Heart of Being that lies at the core of existence.  The world can be a frightening and dangerous place indeed if it seems to be inhabited by a God who is little more than an omnipresent version of those who have failed us in the past.  It’s hard to be loved by the Almighty when we haven’t learned to be loved.

Another reason that we find love so hard to receive is that we tend to regard the world in general as undeserving.  We often see divine judgment as more appropriate than love.  This is surely the case for progressive American Protestants over the past many decades.  The operative word in our tradition has been “justice.”  We demand justice for the oppressed people of the world and look to eradicate any vestiges of our own complicity in injustice.  All in all, it seems most fitting for the Almighty to be righteously indignant in the face of our human tendency toward evil.  Those, like myself, who stand in the tradition of Christian liberalism are reluctant to let ourselves or anyone else off the hook long enough to allow room for love.  If our perceptions and inclinations were all there were, this would be a cold universe indeed; one in which mercy drowns in a sea of judgment, and hope is obliterated by divine indifference.

All this talk of Divine Love can begin to seem like so much preacherly Pablum.  Most of us haven’t a clue about God – what to think of whatever we mean by that word.  But there’s great help for us in the first letter of John.  He writes: “. . . everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”  In the margin next to this verse I have written, “Best definition of God: Love.”

The bottom line is: whether you understand it or not, God loves you because God is Love.  The undeniable and consistent theme that runs through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is that, whoever, whatever God is, that Divine Heart of Creation truly loves every little speck of creation – every unimpressive and stumbling one of us!  God loves this tired old world – in fact, so much so that a man who was the greatest embodiment of this divine Love the world has ever known would give up his own life so that you and I could know what Love is.  And if you know what Love is, you know what God is.

Don’t ask me how all this works.  All I know is this: Love is never wasted.  The Divine love made real in the person of Jesus was not wasted.  That Divine Love made real in the unique individual creation that you are is not wasted.  That Love made real in our relationships here over the past many years is not wasted.  And that Love made real in your efforts to brighten one little corner of the world, the labor you put into growing in love, the years of your life and the toils of your journey are not wasted.  Love holds you close, and will not let you go.  The Heart of the Universe cherishes you and will not allow your living and your loving to be in vain.

Too many people manage to go through their entire lives without ever having felt truly loved.  Sonia Weitz was one of the fortunate ones who have known at least a moment of the rarest and most beautiful kind of love, even in the very depths of humanity’s darkest hour.  Sonia was a survivor of the holocaust.  She told a story from her days in the Plaschow concentration camp.  One night in the barracks, a little boy began playing the harmonica.  He was either a very brave or very foolish youngster, because playing the harmonica was a crime punishable by death.  In fact, another boy had been hung the day before for singing a Russian song.  Sonia went over to her father’s bunk.  In that magic moment, her father looked at her and said, “You and I never had a chance to dance together.”  He took her hand, and, in the middle of that death camp, beneath the very hand of the executioner, to the tune of an illegal harmonica, they danced.  Shortly after this her father was taken away to Mauthausen where he was killed.  She may have learned as a little girl that the world can throw more evil at you than is imaginable, but she also learned what it is to be loved, gently and courageously.  And somehow, that love was even stronger than all the death around her.  Such love, such a life, is not wasted.

So here we are; I’m about to leave you all.  That’s painful for many of you, and it is for me as well.  But it’s also part of the truth about living that we have all learned: people come and go.  Friends move on; beloved relatives die; the sea of life keeps rolling and folding one generation after another under its waves.  The pattern of beginnings and endings is pervasive.  In the vast reaches of the universe, stars are born and then grow cold.  Nothing seems to abide.  But something does.  Know this: in God’s economy, love is never wasted.

And so today no Red Sox analogies, no West Wing stories, no Frederick Buechner quotes.  Just this: for those sleepless nights when the ocean of the universe seems too large, and your own boat too small – when the futility of life seems too real, and God too distant – when your own world seems too lonely, and love too impossible – I leave you with this, the bottom line:

God loves you, and so do I.

Thanks be to God, “most of all that love has found us.”

Let’s sing it together.

May 31, 2026

On Creation and Evolution

There is, in Petersburg, Kentucky, something called a “Creation Museum.”  It is a twenty seven million dollar facility with “high-tech exhibits designed by a theme-park artist.”  It includes animatronic dinosaurs and a wooden ark at least two stories tall, plus a special effects theater and planetarium.  Some exhibits show dinosaurs aboard Noah’s Ark and assert that all animals were vegetarians until Adam committed the first sin in the Garden of Eden.  The central message of this theme park is that science has got it all wrong and that if one truly believes the Bible, one has to conclude that the earth and human beings were created in a one-week period just six thousand years ago.  Apparently, the Associated Press agrees that this is the only way to read the text of Genesis.  I saw an AP article that says this “museum . . . tells the Bible’s version of Earth’s history.”

Since this Genesis story is in our lectionary readings for this morning, and I find myself so exercised by this foolishness I simply had to take a dive into this whole business of creation and evolution.

First, I have to confess that, in the year 2026, I find it hard to believe that this is still an issue.  Personally, I thought it was pretty much settled fifty or more years ago.  I am amazed that in these modern times, we have seen school boards putting evolutionary theory back on “trial,” and trying to put warning stickers on science textbooks to remind children and their parents that “evolution is only a theory.”  I am appalled that polls conducted by news and polling organizations over the past several years continue to show that a declining but still significant percentage of Americans simply do not believe in evolution,¹ as if evolution were some speculative notion that one could simply choose to believe or not.

If I’m going to jump into this fray, I might as well do it with both feet.  Folks, let’s get something straight.  Evolution is about as much of a dead-bang fact as you get in science.  That genes mutate and recombine in ways that pass on new characteristics to future generations, and some of these characteristics give individuals a survival advantage, and these characteristics tend to increase in frequency in the population, while those that are less advantageous decrease in frequency – in other words, “natural selection” works – is virtually unchallenged by any reputable scientist.  This process has been demonstrated and observed over and over in laboratory experiments and reflected in the fossil record of life on the planet earth to a stunning degree of certainty.  Evolution is called a “theory,” not because it’s basic tenets are in any kind of question, but because that’s the name we give to general principles in science.

Other examples of scientific “theory” are Albert Einstein’s special and general relativity, on the basis of which we are able (among other things) to understand how light from distant stars shifts in the spectrum and gives us a measurement of distance; the notion that Earth orbits around the sun is a theory; continental drift is a theory; the existence, structure, and dynamics of atoms comprise atomic theory – based on that theory, we are able to develop a theoretical construct called “electricity,” but I doubt that UL laboratories is likely soon to put disclaimer labels on our extension cords and light switches warning us that “electricity is only a theory.”

In science, a theory is a statement of general principles that explains observable, recorded phenomena, and is subject to rigorous and repeated tests.  Members of actual school boards – people who are responsible for seeing that children are educated – instead interpret the word “theory” to mean a whim that is largely unproven and subject to conjecture.  That, my friends, is a sad indictment of the state of education in our society.

Fundamentalist Christians all across America are perpetrating a hoax.  They are spending gazillions of dollars trying to convince you and your children and grandchildren that one has to choose between science and religion, between their textbooks and the Bible.  They are trying to portray science as pure atheism.  And they are organizing in election districts and school districts all across this land to press that message.

The most sense I can make of their message is that there is not one reality, but two.  There is a reality that we are somehow tricked into observing in the world around us, and then there is the reality of God’s “supernatural” realm.  I have to confess, I have never understood the word “supernatural.”  It seems to imply that there exists something that is not “natural” – in other words, not “of or pertaining to the nature of things.”  Folks, if God truly exists, then by definition God is “natural” not “supernatural.”  If there is a life beyond this one, then by definition the afterlife is “natural” not “supernatural.”  There is only one reality, and that reality must encompass everything that is, and everything that has been.  It encompasses only that which is and has been in fact, and does not encompass that which is not or has not been.  One would think that this is a priori, but apparently there are a lot of folks out there who simply can’t get their minds around it.

Why should you care about any of this?  There are two big reasons.  First of all, precisely because you and your children and grandchildren are under assault by those who would try to fool them into not believing their eyes or using their minds.  Someone has to stand up and wave their arms and say, “Whoa!”

And secondly, this matters because I’m convinced that most of us wander through our lives held back from a deeper experience of the reality of Divinity within us, among us, and beyond us by half formed religious notions and constructs in our heads that don’t really jibe with the world as we see it.  We learned in Sunday School that the Bible says God created the world in seven days by dividing waters and hanging lights in the sky, and in one quick act stuck completely formed human beings in that world.  And now, the evidence of science seems to be telling us something entirely different.  Here’s why this matters: because no matter how sophisticated and clever you are, I don’t think you can deal with that truth without some degree of internal struggle – and if you don’t face that struggle, and sift through all the information and feelings and insights with care and perseverance, I don’t think you’ll ever be totally free to embrace the reality of that Divinity within us, among us, and beyond us.

So, here’s a good starting point.  The Bible is not a science textbook, and the biblical creation story is not science.  It is not an accurate record of how the earth and human beings came to be, it is an affirmation that the Divinity of which I spoke is at the heart of the reality of people and planets, and that, because this is true, then we are best defined by our goodness.  That’s what Genesis means when it says, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”  And do you have any idea what a powerful counter-cultural statement that is to make?

When you see extremists working feverishly to find a way to destroy as many innocent men, women, and children as humanly possible, it’s hard to believe humanity is defined by our goodness.  When you see the steady march over generations of human folly acted out in war (and after a weekend when we have honored all those who have fallen in combat, we have to acknowledge that for every just and worthy war in the record of human history, there are a dozen foolish, prideful wastes of human life) – when you see our proclivity to senseless violence, it’s hard to believe we are defined by our goodness.

But that’s what Genesis unabashedly proclaims.  And it does so artfully and eloquently.  We have to give the authors of this brilliant piece of theology a lot of credit.  They described our origins in wondrously poetic and ingenious ways.  They spoke of a cosmology that was the best of which their society was capable.  They believed that because rain fell from the sky, there had to be a great sea of water above the heavens, so they envisioned a giant dome, like an upside-down bowl placed over the flat earth to keep all that water away from us.  And that’s what Genesis describes.  God placed a “firmament in the heavens” actually, the word translated “firmament” is the Hebrew word “raqiah” which means “a hammered-out bowl.”  God placed an upside-down bowl in the heavens to separate the waters that were above the bowl, from the waters that were below – that is: under the earth.  It was in this bowl that God was said to hang the two great lights, the sun and the moon.  I’m not making this up – it’s all right there in black and white.  Read it for yourself.  Anyone with a sixth-grade education knows that this is not science, and it’s not factually correct.  I’ll tell you what it is: it’s truth.  And truth is a far more penetrating and enduring thing than mere facts.  The truth about our origins is that we are created in the image of the Creator – in other words, no matter how tremendous is our fall from grace, how pervasive is our capacity for evil, the truth about our origins is that we carry somewhere within us the inextinguishable spark of divine goodness – and that means not only the good-hearted, loving, self-sacrificing, noble ones among us.  It means all the deluded, psychopathic, hate-filled people we consider enemies or criminals.  And it also means you, whether you want to believe it or not.

What does all this do to the authority of scripture?  In my view it reinforces Biblical authority in a way that literalists can’t even begin to.  When we stop tying our brains in knots trying to defend as facts the stories in the Bible, and accept its truths as a book of theology, then the Bible is freed to speak with profound relevance and incontestable authority.

So, here’s my appeal: we should spend time with the creation story in Genesis, and spend time looking at the evidence of decades of scientific inquiry, and then spend time coming to grips with the one reality that includes them both – the reality of the world we live in, a reality that includes a creative and very pervasive Creator.  And then, whenever we have the opportunity, talk to our children and our grandchildren, telling them not to settle for mindless dogma, telling them that faith means opening your eyes, not closing them, telling them that Love and Grace live within them, that they are one of the precious things that has been created in this world, and that the truth is that “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”

¹ https://ncse.ngo/vast-majority-americans-accept-human-evolution-new-survey-finds

May 24, 2026

“Jabberwocky”

“Bereshit, bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et-ha’aretz.  Veha’aretz hayatah tohu vevohu, vehosheck al p’nai tahom.  Veruah Elohim mirahefetz al-p’nai hamayim,”

“En arche ein halogos, kai halogos ein pros ton theon, kai theos ein halogos.”

Speaking in tongues?. . . or jabberwocky?

“Twas brillig and the slithy toves

did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

all mimsy were the borogoves,

and the mome raths outgrabe.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the jubjub bird, and shun

the frumios bandersnatch!”

Lewis Carroll’s poem, “Jabberwocky,” from “Through the Looking-Glass” sounds like nonsense – almost as incomprehensible as those earlier words I read.  They’re simply Bible verses read in their original languages, Hebrew and Greek.

Foreign languages sound a little like Jabberwocky at times.  We’ve all had the experience of standing in the check-out line at the supermarket and overhearing a couple from some other country speaking “who knows what language.”  It sounds like gibberish.  And they speak it so quickly.  You wonder how they can possibly understand each other.  Of course, two people speaking English also sound, to foreign ears, like they are spitting machine-gun-fire gibberish at each other.  Language separates us, and makes other people seem strange.

Some people believe that on Pentecost, as you heard in this morning’s scripture, when the Holy Spirit rested on the apostles, and they spoke in foreign “tongues,” that it was an experience of some strange, other-worldly mumbo-jumbo – jabberwocky.  If that had been the case, we wouldn’t be celebrating Pentecost today, because nothing out of the ordinary would have happened.  The whole incident would have been quite unremarkable.  Some of the folks standing around would have given each other knowing glances, as if to say, “Foreigners!”

With jabberwocky, non-communication is the norm.  It has been the norm as far back as humanity can remember.  It all started (so the story goes) when a bunch of folks living on the plain of Shinar decided to make a name for themselves and build a tower into the heavens.  God became terribly concerned that they were getting too big for their britches, so God came down to earth and “confused” their language.  We all know how the story comes out: they were scattered over the face of the earth and the great tower remained incomplete.

The legend of the tower of Babel is the story of the status quo.  It’s the familiar story of how non-communication – jabberwocky – leads to alienation and defeat.  It’s the usual pattern, a pattern that was overturned at Pentecost.  Pentecost is the flip-side of Babel.

Pentecost doesn’t have anything to do with incomprehensible gibberish – no strange sounds coming out of people’s mouths that required some specially gifted linguist to translate.  The account in Acts, Chapter 2, says that “each one (among those who were gathered from many nations) heard them speaking in their own language.”  The point of Pentecost was clear communication!  And if the church was founded at Pentecost, it was founded on clear communication.

The familiar story of Babel was entirely rewritten.  At Babel the operative principle was ascendancy of self, the characteristic phenomenon was “jabberwocky,” the relational force was disorganization and chaos, and the end result was powerlessness.

At Pentecost the operative principle was the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the characteristic phenomenon was clear communication, the relational force was unity, and the end result was power – the power of devotion, the power to become the Church of Jesus Christ.

It is power that was discovered at Pentecost, a power we have long needed.  Because so many of our days are lived in the midst of jabberwocky.

Men and women seem always to be speaking jabberwocky to each other.  I don’t know if it’s our genetics or our upbringing, but we seem to be stuck speaking different languages.  Men are likely to say things like, “You want to know what I’m feeling?  I feel fine.  That’s how I feel.”  Women, on the other hand, say things like, “So, what I’m saying doesn’t make sense to you?  And I suppose if it doesn’t make sense to you then it wouldn’t make sense to anyone, right?”  A lot of the time in marriages, one of us is speaking tigalic, and the other one is speaking Swahili, I suspect.

We are also separated from each other by our theological languages.  I’ll never forget the time I was traveling through the South with my family, and a man came up to my father and said, “Brother, have you found Jesus?”  My dad said, “I didn’t know he was lost.”

I was never more powerfully reminded of the linguistic chasms between people of different faith backgrounds than by an experience I had with the other clergy in a town where I once pastored.  There had been a few incidents of anti-Semitic graffiti and fights in the schools, and we all decided to draft a pastoral letter to the community, calling for unity in the midst of discord.  I was given the task of errand boy, shuttling revisions of the letter to all of our Catholic, Unitarian, Jewish, and various Protestant brethren and sistren.  There were revisions of the initial draft; there were theological difficulties; there were linguistic and stylistic problems; there were revisions of revisions; and revisions of revisions of revisions.  So, one day, in the midst of all this, I was lamenting the arduousness of the task to the local Rabbi.  I said, “Man, this has been painful duty, trying to get this letter together,” he said, “But what a worthwhile pain – for all of us.”  And I saw his point.  What we had been agonizing over, as clergy from many different faith backgrounds, was nothing less than translation!  We were straining to hear one another’s language of faith, and to cut through the jabberwocky that divides us in order to find the true common ground.  God bless Rabbi Fertig for opening my eyes; I, for one, had absolutely no idea that I was engaged in such a noble purpose.

Words have power.  Language shapes the way we think and view the world.  Folks from Gallup Mills, Vermont, from New York, New York, from Selma, Alabama, Coffeyville, Kansas, Berkley, California, and the South Side of Chicago all speak different “languages” – if you will.  Those languages reflect the different worlds in which they live.  To some degree, they reflect different values, different priorities, different cultural standards and behaviors.  But it all comes down to language.  If we could truly hear each other’s language, we would hear each other’s culture, we would hear the neighborhoods, and the country roads, the bowling teams and the street-corner gangs.

Instead, we are frightened by the jabberwocky and gibberish we hear in the grocery store or on the nightly news.  Fear leads to suspicion.  Suspicion ultimately leads finally to that which we are also remembering this weekend: rows and rows of uniform white grave markers.

This morning, I would like for us to pray for a miracle – that, somehow, by the grace of the Almighty, people will learn to hear each other – to hear not only the words, but the context.  You never quite master a language until you master the context.  We never truly hear each other until we learn one another’s cultures – histories.

This is not a trivial undertaking.  It’s essential!  This is not a nicety, a luxury, or a sidelight.  This is the dead center of the gospel.

Many of us get nervous when we hear talk of Pentecostalism.  The Pentecostals are assumed by a lot of folks in our quiet, well-ordered, New England churches to be a kind of lunatic fringe.  But what strikes me about Pentecostalism is that it’s, first and foremost, a multi-cultural, multi-racial phenomenon.  That’s not just coincidence.  These people all claim, with us, the day of Pentecost as their defining moment.  And that moment of Spirit and power was shared by people from many different nations and languages.  The Bible says that “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs” were all together in one place, and all received together this astounding gift of being able to hear and comprehend one another.

The Church of Jesus Christ was born as a multinational, multi-cultural, multi-racial movement.  It is our heritage, our birthright, our identity.  So, we’d better be about the business of learning other cultures, other ways of thinking, speaking, relating.  We’d better be about the business of building bridges, sticking our necks out to make new friends, learn about other cultures.  We’d better be staying the course when the pleasantries give way to disagreement and misunderstanding.

If we fail in small ways, then the larger opportunities may be missed as well.  Families have been torn apart, churches have been split, wars have been fought over great differences that began as nothing more momentous than jabberwocky.

We are Pentecost people.  We have received a powerful gift.  It is nothing less than the possibility of actually hearing and comprehending one another.  And at times, by that power, it can almost be as though we were speaking each other’s languages.  And miracle of miracles, among Pentecost people sometimes even those who speak the language of middle class, middle-America, can understand those who speak the jive-talk of the South Side of Chicago.  Sometimes even those who speak the language of adolescence and rebellion can comprehend the words of parental concern.  Sometimes the language of regular people is comprehensible to theologians, and sometimes, even, visa-versa.

We are Pentecost people – no longer under the reign of Babel.  We need not be rendered powerless by miscommunication and divisiveness.  We must not be peddlers of Jabberwocky, imprisoned by smallness of vision.

We are Pentecost people – those who are the very hope for a world divided against itself.  May we live up to our calling.

May 17, 2026

Who Are You?

What is it that makes a person who they are?  It’s the difficult question that arises when you meet someone new.  How do you find out about them?  What do you ask?  The most common of such interrogatives (and one that, I must admit, I turn to myself all too frequently) is, “What do you do?”  It is as though we can learn a great deal about a person, we can paint them with an identity, if only we can ascertain what it is that they produce, what they create, what they get paid to accomplish.  This seems so normal to us that it sounds simplistically self-evident.  How else would one identify one’s self?  But it is a  purely cultural construction, and one that often does damage to our true sense of self.  That’s what I want to talk with you about this morning.

There’s a wonderful quote that’s been attributed to John Lennon.  I don’t know if he really is the source, but it’s worth repeating.  It goes like this: “When I was five years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.  When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I wrote down ‘happy’.  They told me I didn’t understand the assignment.”  That is the cultural soup in which we swim.  When a child is asked what he wants to be when he grows up, the answer is supposed to be “a fireman,” or “an astronaut,” or even “a brain surgeon.”  A child learns early on that the phrase, “what you want to be” is synonymous with the phrase “what you want to do.”  A person is defined by what they do for a living.

It’s only a small step, then, from defining ourselves by what we produce to defining ourselves by what we consume.  When meeting someone for the first time, you might not be so impertinent as to ask what kind of car they drive, or how many square feet of living space is in their home, but we all know how much of one’s identity is established by these things.  This also is entirely shaped by the culture around us.  The TV shows and advertisements make it absolutely clear what sort of car one drives, what brand of vodka one drinks, and what type of electronic gizmo one carries around if one is really among the “in” people.

It all reminds me of something I came across from a German scientist describing his experience as a school boy.  He wrote, “When I was a student in a German Gymnasium and thirteen years old, I learned a lesson that I have not forgotten. . . . One early morning our physics teacher placed a telescope in the school yard to show us a certain planet and its moons.  We stood in a long line, about forty of us.  I was standing at the end of the line, since I was one of the smaller students.  The teacher asked the first student whether he could see the planet.  No, he had difficulties, because he was near-sighted.  The teacher showed him how to adjust the focus, and that student could finally see the planet and the moons.  Others had no difficulty; they saw them right away.  The students saw what they were supposed to see.  Then the student standing just before me – his name was Harter – announced that he could not see anything.  ‘You idiot,’ shouted the teacher, ‘you have to adjust the lenses.’  The student did that and said after a while, ‘I do not see anything, it is all black.’  The teacher then looked through the telescope himself.  After some seconds he looked up with a strange expression on his face.  And then my comrades and I also saw that the telescope was not functioning; it was closed by a cover over the lens.”¹  The kids at the front of the line declared that they saw what they were supposed to see, even though there was a cover over the lens.

You and I see what we’re supposed to see.  We see a person working in an important job and we deem her to be a significant and worthy person.  We see someone driving a shiny, expensive car and we assume he is a man of substance.  We never stop to consider that there’s a lens cap on our telescope, that we are seeing things that we’re told to see, and missing the real truth about one another.

When a person’s identity is entirely wrapped up in their profession, what becomes of them when they lose a job, or when they retire?  Do they suddenly cease to be a person of worth?  That is, in fact, what this twisted culture of ours tells people.  If you’re not being what we have come to refer to as “productive,” and therefore being a good little “consumer,” then you might as well be relegated to the sidelines and disregarded.  I am here this morning to tell you, don’t buy it!  It’s a load of hogwash!  You are not defined by what you produce or by what you consume.  By twenty-first century American standards Jesus of Nazareth would be a total loser.  He didn’t have a job.  He didn’t have much of anything.  He was defined – take note of this – not by what he produced, but by who he was.  I hope I won’t be cast into the outer darkness of American society for saying this, but human identity is not about doing; it’s about being.  And the challenge before every one of us is to find our identity and worth in our being, not our doing.  That is an unbelievably difficult task.  Because to do so is to run counter to the very pulsing bloodstream of our culture.   It is to muster the courage to stand up and say “The emperor has no clothes.  There’s a lens cap on the telescope.  I refuse to see myself the way I’m told to by the world around me.”

The prophet Jeremiah longed for some distant day when the law would no longer be something external, something written on parchment, and held over the heads of those who are deemed to need instruction.  Jeremiah’s grand vision was of a day when that law would be written “on their hearts,” when the core of what it meant to be a Jew would not be defined by an imposed tradition, but by something that lived inside each person.

And in his letter to the church at Philippi, Paul put it in his usual tortured language.  He said, “it is we who are the circumcision.”  In other words, the outward mark that carries the weight of the community’s blessing is now, in his view, something that is expressed in the very hearts and lives of Christ’s followers.  And he says, “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”  In other words, all the things that we lift up as valuable symbols of our worth have become meaningless to him.  He now regards them as “rubbish.”  He says, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death.”  I think he is suggesting that to know Christ, to understand Christ – that is to stand under the same truth as Christ – is to experience a kind of death, the death of that artificial self, defined by the culture, the self that clings to the predominant, socially accepted, outward symbols of worth.  It is to become truly and wholly one’s self, the self that you were intended to be.  And like Christ, that self has almost nothing to do with what you do that the world around you regards as worthy, it has everything to do with who you are.  In short, it’s not about doing; it’s about being.

I think that’s what Jesus was talking about when he said that he came that we might have “life, and have it abundantly.”  Abundant life is not about abundance of possessions, abundance of position, abundance of power, or abundance of image.  It’s about abundance of being.  Joseph Smith put it wonderfully; he wrote, “We are assured that Jesus came not that we may have more ‘prayers,’ or more reading of scriptures, or more pious devotions, or more of anything, but only ‘that we may live life and have it abundantly.’”² Abundant life is abundance of being.

This is a particularly important word for us men (although not exclusively so).  Men (and increasingly, women) in our culture have been almost exclusively defined by what they do.  I guess it all goes back to the “protestant work ethic.”  From the early days of our nation, men particularly were evaluated on the basis of their work, their productivity.  An idle man was considered lazy and worthless.  This distortion of what it means to be human has persisted to this very day.  That’s one reason so many men (and often, women) enter retirement with dread, and either find some way to keep working, or retreat to the Barcalounger and withdraw within themselves in a blue funk of worthlessness.  What an unbelievable waste!  What an unbelievable distortion of life!

Your worth is not summed up in what you do.  If you have a heart of compassion, you have that kind of worth that is not transient but abiding.  If you have a clear sense of self that gives you strength of character and inspires those around you, you may be the most important person in the room.  If you have wisdom that comes from nurturing a spirit of reflection and discernment, then whether you are sitting with friends, bagging groceries, or walking through a shopping mall, you are bringing to the world a priceless gift, the gift of your authentic self, a self that “knows Christ,” in other words, it stands under the same truth as Christ.

But Paul adds a caveat.  He writes, “Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”  Each one of us is a work in progress.  Extricating your true inner self from the complex layers of socially defined values is like trying to climb out of your own skin.  It can’t happen overnight.  You and I are to such a large degree the products of our culture, and attempting to grow in counter-cultural ways is enormously difficult.  It is a life-long endeavor.  I wish I were able to say I have attained this highly evolved state.  I’m not there, by any stretch, but I (as Paul said) “press on to make it my own.”

So, who are you?  Here’s my answer: you are a child of the Most High, created in that Divine image.  In the depth of your soul resides a bit of the very divine spark that called the world into being.  That’s who you are.

¹ Brunno Mueller/Shield, “Science, Truth, and Other Values,” The Quarterly Review of Biology.

² Joseph F. Schmidt, Liturgy, Edited by Gabe Huck, Liturgy Training Publications, 1994, p. 177.

May 10, 2026

Saved Through Water

Believe it or not, I never learned how to swim properly until I got to college (and stumbled upon a swim coach who took pity on me one day at the campus pool).  Up to that time, all I could do was a modified dog paddle.  I think my difficulties started when I was seven years old.  There was a raft anchored out beyond the swimming beach at Forest Lake, and swimming to the raft was considered a major rite of passage.  So one day, I screwed my courage to the sticking post and dog-paddled my way out to the raft.  I pulled myself up and sat there exhausted but triumphant.  But then, some older kid decided to have a little fun and pushed me off the raft into the lake.  All I remember was struggling and going down through dark yellow water, believing that I was about to drown.  Someone’s hand grabbed my arm and I was pulled up onto the raft.  I didn’t swim very much for years after that.  I must tell you, to whomever it was that grabbed me, I will be eternally grateful.  But I am also grateful to that college swim team coach who saw me struggling to motivate through the pool, and asked me if I wanted to learn how to swim, and I’m grateful for his gentle hand of guidance in showing me the way.  And I’m grateful that for whatever reason I wasn’t too embarrassed to admit I was floundering and to say, “Yes, I want to learn to swim.”  My relationship with water was redeemed that day.  I swim like a fish now.

We cannot live without water, and we cannot live for long in it.  We can swim, and we can float, but eventually we will tire, become waterlogged, and succumb.  That’s why, according to the ancient legend, Noah built the ark (a legend, by the way, that long predates the biblical account – going back to the story of Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim from ancient Samaria).  The flood waters were going to destroy all living beings, except those who were saved by the sturdy ship designed by God’s providence.  In our scripture reading this morning Peter makes a connection between those waters of the great flood and the waters of baptism.  He says, “. . .  God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water.  And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you – not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience . . . .”  We’ll get to that business of a “good conscience” later, but his phrase, “saved through water,” intrigues me.  He is suggesting that the water of baptism is a vehicle of salvation, as were the waters of the flood.  But those flood waters represented a kind of ultimate destructive force.  How is it that a person is “saved” through waters of destruction?  The search for an answer to that question constitutes my message for today.

I begin by relating to you the true story of a World War II pilot whom I knew well in my earlier days of ministry.  His name was Stan Manierre.  I first met Stan when Dadgie and I moved to Massachusetts about forty years ago.  I was the newly installed pastor of the Park Street Baptist Church in Framingham, and Stan was my pastor.  He was an Associate Executive Minister for the American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts (what we called an “area minister”), and one of the best pastors to pastors there ever was.  He had taken the position after a long tenure as a missionary for the American Baptists.  Stan had served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during the Second World War.  In 1944, his B-24 bomber was shot down by Japanese planes near Saipan.  He almost drowned in the sea, but he was pulled out and captured by the Japanese.  He was held as a prisoner of war for almost a year and half.  He was tortured, faced starvation, and suffered from horrible diseases.  He was filled with rage at his captors then and for a number of years after (including the year he spent recovering in a Navy hospital).  For years after the war ended and his release from captivity he prayed for vengeance, and then for years prayed for release from his inner torment.  Finally, after flailing around in a sea of emotional turmoil for five years, he came to surrender his hate and anger to God.  Stan decided that, difficult as it is to accept, there must be meaning and purpose even in the horrible experiences he had endured.  Ultimately, he went to seminary.  In 1953 he was commissioned as a missionary, but not just to any mission field; he volunteered for an assignment in Japan.  He served as an American Baptist missionary in Japan for twenty years preaching peace and reconciliation.  While there, he arranged a face to face meeting with his prison guards and forgave them.  Stan died about seventeen years ago, but the gentle compassion of his spirit touched me deeply, and his story outlives him, the story of a life dedicated to building bridges of understanding and peace.  I remember him recounting to me that horrific experience of being shot down and struggling to survive in the water.  I remember thinking at the time of my childhood experience of being thrown off the raft at Forest Lake, and the arm that reached down in the water to pull me up.  It was a Japanese hand that pulled Stan up but not to blue skies and freedom.  In a very real sense, he was not rescued from those waters of destruction, but simply transferred from one pool of death to another.  Stan was not “saved,” to use the apostle Peter’s word, until he was pulled up, with the help of Divine grace, out of his ocean of hatred and torment.  What a terrible ordeal he underwent, but what a glorious “salvation” came through those waters of peril.   Through them, he was remade into a shining example of what it is to follow Christ.

Peter reminds his readers of the waters of baptism.  But baptism is symbolically paradoxical.  It is the water of destruction and the water of salvation.  I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of this, but baptism is a kind of drowning.  When it is done in the Baptist tradition the minister gets in a big pool of water with the candidate and completely submerges the person, before pulling him or her up to a new life with Christ.  When we in this church touch the forehead with a little water it’s supposed to symbolize the same act – a submersion in the waters of destruction that mean a drowning death to our old selves, and then a rising from the waters to represent the emergence of a new self, dedicated to the path of Christ and the journey of faith.  The traditional liturgical language for this is “dying with Christ in the waters of baptism and rising with him to new life.”

I once saw a movie titled, All Is Lost.  It was Robert Redford in the haunting role of a man on a sailboat who, despite his great resourcefulness and knowledge of the sea, loses his boat, is adrift in the ocean on a life raft, and ultimately destroys the raft trying to signal an ocean liner that seems to pass by oblivious to his plight.  All of his means of escaping the waters are lost, and he is alone treading water in the dark ocean.  As he drifts downward into the depths of the sea, ready to give in to the inevitable, he looks once more to the surface and sees a light.  As he struggles to reach it, at the end of the film, a hand reaches down into the water from above and grasps his to pull him to life.  I couldn’t decide whether the hand was that of a sailor on a rescue mission or representative of the hand of God found in the final moment.  In one way, it really doesn’t matter.  The point is that when all is lost, in fact, all is not lost.  One way or another, there is a hand.

What is it to be “saved through water?”  I think Stan Manierre would have told us that it happens when you are shot down, when you are pushed off the raft, when you must undergo the greatest trials and ordeals of life.  It is through that struggle that you are presented with a choice and an opportunity: will you succumb to the depths and yield to fear, resentment, isolation, and hopelessness, or will you find in that very struggle the moment of salvation that turns hatred into forgiveness, revenge into compassion, despair into hope, and war-making into peace-making?

It is this kind of life-change that is symbolized in baptism.  Peter refers to the baptismal act “as an appeal to God for a good conscience.”  But I think what the “good conscience” is all about is learning to live for love and compassion and peace – learning to live with hope.  In another place, Peter tells us to “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.”  And what accounts for the hope that is in us?  It is the knowledge that if we give our hearts to the power of love no waters can overwhelm us, but through them we will be saved.

May 3, 2026

Tripping Over the Cornerstone?

When we first built out log home in the woods, I created a garden for Dadgie.  The only problem was that beneath the two inch layer of soil in which the grass of our alleged lawn is planted there lies virtually nothing but rocks.  It’s rocks and a little sand all the way down to China, near as I can tell.  So, I dug up rocks.  I pulled them up and laid them around the garden area so that I could use them to build a stone wall around the raised-bed.  All of which is to say that when I came across this lectionary reading for today about the stone that the builders rejected, and folks tripping over it, it jogged my memory and struck a particularly resonant chord.

This passage in the first epistle of Peter is a particularly intriguing one.  He uses the image of stones in profound ways.  Peter draws upon some Old Testament references to stones to make his point.  The first comes from the Prophet Isaiah: “thus says the Lord God, See, I am laying in Zion a foundation stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation . . . .”  He goes on from there to quote Psalm 118, which reads: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.  This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.”  And finally, Psalm 8, which says: “the LORD . . . will become a sanctuary, a stone one strikes against; for both houses of Israel he will become a rock one stumbles over.”  It was really quite elegant, pulling all these references to stones together in this passage.  Peter takes a dig at the Scribes and Pharisees, who were in his day referred to as “the builders.”  He uses the Psalm to say that these “builders” rejected Christ who was the true cornerstone.  But because they didn’t recognize him for who he was, they set aside that stone and stumbled and fell over it.

The whole picture of tripping over the cornerstone captured my imagination.  It really would be a hard thing to do, you know – to trip over a cornerstone.  Even if the stone had been set aside on the ground, not put into its place in the structure, it would be a pretty large, impressive stone.  A person would have to either be in a very big hurry, or not paying any attention to where they were going (or both) to trip over such a stone.

Which takes us back to Isaiah.  Peter mistranslated the most interesting part of the Isaiah passage.  The complete quote in Peter’s version is: “thus says the Lord GOD, See, I am laying in Zion a foundation stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation: ‘One who trusts will not panic (Isaiah 28:16).’” That last phrase is referred to as the motto that’s inscribed on this cornerstone.  And the last word in the motto is the corker.  It’s the Hebrew word שוח (chush) which simply and literally means hurry.   The RSV translates it as panic, and says this motto reads: “One who trusts will not panic.”   Peter takes some liberties and translates it, “whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”  As for me, I like the original, clear Hebrew meaning: “The one who trusts does not hurry.”  I think Isaiah was onto something.  Trusting enough to not hurry is a good way to keep from tripping over something so grand and obvious as a cornerstone.

You and I hurry everywhere, along with everyone else.  Have you ever tried driving at the actual speed limit?  It’s amazing the line of cars you’ll get behind you and the dirty looks.  I think that’s one of the big reasons we get tripped up so much of the time.  We’re just too darn busy, going too many places, too fast.

I’m not a big Stephen Covey fan, but he did have some very helpful things to say.  One of them bears directly on this business of tripping over the cornerstone.  He asked the simple question, “What is the one activity that you know if you did superbly well and consistently would have significant positive results in your personal life?”¹  I’d actually like you stop with me for a few moments and consider that question. What is one thing you could be doing that would make a big difference in your life?  I’m going to take a couple of minutes here for us all to reflect on that, and try to come up with an answer.

Have you got it?  Now for the follow-up question.  If you know it would make such a great difference, why aren’t you doing it?  I submit that for most of us the reason we’re not doing the things that would make life better (more abundant) is that we’re in too much of a hurry.  Is it possible that we could be too busy with the shopping and the daily routines to pay attention to Christ and his truth?

Peter makes it clear that Christ is that cornerstone.  And I agree.  But what exactly does it mean to put Christ in the proper place in your life?  This morning we might get as many different answers to that question as there are people here.  Clearly, recognizing Christ as the cornerstone means letting go of that which doesn’t matter and taking hold of that which does matter – perhaps the very lessons that Jesus came to teach.  What matters most?  The most important thing you could be about in life (maybe the very thing you thought of a few minutes ago) is sitting right in front of you.  It sits in front of each of us like a big, beautiful cornerstone that’s been tossed aside, and we fall over it flat on our faces time after time because we don’t trust enough to slow down and pay attention.  We are too consumed with all those things that Covey says are merely urgent, and so we miss out on that which is truly important in life.  There’s a big, bold warning etched into that stone we’ve tossed aside:  “The one who trusts does not hurry.”

By slowing ourselves down enough to pay attention, we have the time and the space to reflect on what it is that truly matters in life, and how we can seize the opportunity to pursue those things that truly matter.

I learned about a woman who figured out what truly mattered.  Her name was Mary Johnson; she died a couple of years ago, but her story lives on.  Her only son was shot dead during an argument at a party in 1993 by another young man, Oshea Israel.  Mary Johnson spent the years that her son’s murderer was in prison visiting him.  She learned to see him as a human being, and Israel learned to see the young man he killed as a human being.  Their bond grew greater over the years.  When he was released from prison after serving a lengthy term they lived next door to each other, this murderer and his victim’s mother.  Her forgiveness of him changed his life.  Speaking to Mrs. Johnson, Israel said, “Sometimes I still don’t know how to take it, because I haven’t totally forgiven myself yet.  It’s something that I’m learning from you.  I won’t say that I have learned yet, because it’s still a process that I’m going through.”

“I treat you as I would treat my son,” Johnson said.  “And our relationship is beyond belief.”

Mary Johnson turned her rage and hurt into an opportunity to refocus and sort out what to do with the rest of her life.  She founded From Death To Life, a support group for mothers who have lost their children to violence.  Speaking to Israel, she said, “Well, my natural son is no longer here. I didn’t see him graduate.  Now you’re going to college.  I’ll have the opportunity to see you graduate, I didn’t see him getting married.  Hopefully one day, I’ll be able to experience that with you.”

Her support made all the difference in Israel’s life.  “It motivates me to make sure that I stay on the right path,” he said. “You still believe in me. And the fact that you can do it, despite how much pain I caused you – it’s amazing.”

And then, these remarkable words from these two: Israel said, “I love you, lady.”  And Mary said, “I love you too, son.”²

There is a woman who took the time to figure out what is most important, and it turns out to be the kind of thing Jesus was all about, and what he told us is most important: loving, forgiving, helping.  And, boy, did she love, and, boy, did she forgive, and, boy, did she help.

I love the ancient Sufi legends of the meaningful blunders of the Mulla Nusrudin.  In one of the classic tales, Nusrudin is seen by a man groping around on the ground.  The man asks the Mulla what he’s looking for, and Nasrudin says, “A key.”  So the man begins to search with him.  After a while, he looks up and asks Nasrudin, “Where did you drop the key?”  The Mulla answers, “In my own home.”  “Then why aren’t you searching there?” he asks.  Nasrudin says, “Because the light is much better here.”

We are often found looking in the wrong places for the key to life’s puzzle when it might be found right where we live – right beneath our noses.  It might be as simple as paying attention to a thought about what might be a life-changing decision.  It could be as powerful and profound an act as the lady we heard about turning the hurt and rage that one might otherwise trip over into an act of forgiveness worthy of lifting up into prominence for all to see.  But one thing is for certain, you won’t find it while you’re racing through life at seventy five miles an hour.

I hope you will join me in continuing to reflect on that question about that “one thing” that can make a big difference.  And join me in continuing to challenge ourselves to take it up.

“The one who trusts does not hurry.”

¹ Stephen R. Covey, First Things First, Simon and Schuster, 1994, p.32.

² StoryCorps, PBS, Aired May 20, 2011.

April 26, 2026

A Good Shepherd

I’d like to open a little window for you on how I go about writing a sermon.  The first thing I usually do is read the scripture passages that are listed in the lectionary (or Bible readings) for the Sunday in question.  Sometimes I don’t find much there that “grabs” me, so I move on and look elsewhere.  But often there is something in the lectionary that speaks to me.  When I’m reading through these passages of scripture, here’s what I’m looking for: anything that surprises me, anything that confuses me, or anything that makes my skin crawl.  If something like that happens, I sit up straight and take notice – I know I’ve found my sermon.

Well, that’s what happened when I was looking at the lectionary readings for today, and it happened big time!  I was reading this lovely little story that Jesus was relating about the sheep and the shepherd.  It’s such a familiar image, it almost lulled me to sleep.  There’s the sheepfold, and the sheep, and the good shepherd whose voice the sheep recognize and follow.  We all know who the good shepherd is, right?  We’ve read it in the psalm: “ The Lord is my shepherd.”  We’ve seen it in paintings and stained glass windows – Jesus leading sheep and carrying lambs.  We remember Jesus referring to himself as the good shepherd.  So, in other words, I was pretty far along with the image of the sheep, and shepherd, and the sheepfold when I got to where the gospel writer said, “Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.”  They didn’t understand? You’ve got to be kidding.  What does it mean, “they didn’t understand?”  You’ve got sheep and a good shepherd – it’s us and Jesus.  What’s not to get?

Then I got to verse 7.  Jesus says, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep.”  I stopped for a minute and said, “Wait.  You’re the gate?  I thought you were the shepherd.”  Then, he says it again in verse nine, as if he were answering my question, “I am the gate.”  I put the Bible down and said, “Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.”  That’s when I knew there was a sermon in here somewhere.

It’s very comforting to think of ourselves as the sheep and Jesus as the shepherd.  I like being a sheep.  I like the idea that Jesus is in charge.  I like to think that if I go astray, he’ll come looking for me.  Like a sheep, I may not be the brightest bulb in the box, but I don’t have to be very smart if Jesus is leading me and showing me the way through life.  You know: “his rod and his staff, they comfort me.”

But if Jesus is the gate, what does that mean?  Where does it leave me?  And – wait a minute – who’s the shepherd?

“The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep.  The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.  When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.”

So there is a shepherd.  The shepherd comes in and the sheep hear his voice.  Let’s see, Jesus says:

“Whoever enters by me [“me” being the gate] will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.”

“Whoever enters by me will be saved.”  It’s the shepherd he was just talking about entering the sheepfold by the gate.  That’s when it hit me.  We’re the shepherd!  You and I.  We’re the shepherds.

Do you have any idea what this does to me?  Do you have any idea what it does to centuries of comfortable thinking about what it means to be a Christian?  It’s all out the window.  If Jesus isn’t the shepherd, then we’re not just sheep.  We don’t have the luxury of wandering along blissfully nibbling at whatever blades of grass happen to get in our way, knowing that the Good Shepherd is out there looking after us.  We don’t have the luxury of being followers – knowing that we don’t have to step up and take responsibility ‘cause it’ll all work out OK anyway.  We don’t have the luxury of placidness, timidity, or ignorance!  We’ve been left in charge!

We’re not the sheep.  It’s the rest of the world out there who are the sheep.  And they’ve been placed in our custody.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it!  If you’ve been thinking church is just a nice place to come on Sunday mornings and forget all your troubles and maybe hear a good sermon if you’re lucky, this is bad news!  You’ve been given a job!  If you’ve been thinking that religion is a spectator sport, and that faith is a comfortable way of patting yourself on the back, this is bad news!  You’re in the game!  If you’ve been thinking that this is a good place to hide from the world and all its problems, this is bad news!  The world is your sheepfold!  If you’ve been thinking that folks pretty much get what they deserve, and if someone out there is raising a child in poverty or addicted to crack cocaine then at the least they’re bringing their troubles on themselves and don’t deserve any of our attention, and at most they’re someone else’s problem – if that’s how you see it – this is bad news!  When just one of those lambs out there goes astray, it’s your job to leave the ninety nine behind and go find him and bring him back!  If you’ve been thinking that what goes on here inside these walls is what church is about, that it’s about us and our families, and who makes what decisions that affect us, this is bad news!  Church isn’t about us and ours, it’s about whether and how we reach beyond these walls, and whether and how by our example we teach those who come after us to have their hearts focused beyond themselves as well.  If you’ve been thinking that the work of the missions committee is a nice thing for some folks to get involved in, but it doesn’t happen to be your “thing,” this is bad news!  The church is mission, or it is nothing.

I don’t know about you, but all that gives me the willies.  If I’m the shepherd and the world is the sheep, I don’t even know where to begin.

Well, I know you’ve been waiting for some good news, so here it is: Where you begin is right here.  Sometimes we call this a church, but it’s actually a shepherd’s school.  Sometimes we call this a sanctuary, but it’s actually a classroom.  Sometimes we refer to those doors you came in this morning as the doors into the church, but they’re actually the world’s gate, and they open into the fold where your shepherding takes place.  We start from here because this is the locus of the “body of Christ,” and he told us that’s where the gate to the sheepfold is found.

In truth, the lines between shepherd and sheep get a little blurred.  And that’s good news too.  Because sometimes you get to shepherd others, and sometimes you’re the one shepherded.  Sometimes you enter the fold and call and lead, and other times you go out and find pasture.  Yes, you may have been given a big job, but you don’t have it alone.  You’re part of a whole community here of shepherds and sheep.  And there can be emotional, relational, and spiritual rewards beyond your imagining to be found in sharing this ministry we’ve been given.  You might be thoroughly amazed at how life-changing, how fulfilling, how enlivening it can be to be truly engaged with dear friends and companions in doing something that makes a real difference in the lives of people around you.

There’s some other good news here.  We’ve all been in a number of coffee hour conversations about our church – wanting to see it grow and become healthier.  There’s nothing wrong with that; our hearts are in the right place.  The question is: what do we do about it?  If our response is that we need a better “marketing plan” or a way to make ourselves look better, we’re missing the point.  Jesus makes it clear that the sheep (those who are out there in that sheepfold beyond our doors) will respond to shepherding – to genuine caring and authentic ministry.  Jesus says that the sheep will not follow the voice of strangers.  The strangers he is referring to are those who sneak into the sheepfold by some other means.  In other words, those whose very presence is based on a lie.  Those beyond our doors who are hungering for truth will not ultimately respond to the hollow marketing of bad judgment and the dishonest appeal to fear that so often characterize the messages they hear from “religious” types.  Your friends and family members and colleagues and neighbors are longing for someone to speak to them who enters through the front door.  The world is hungering for an authentic word.  And when they hear it they will respond.

I was in a restaurant some time ago.  I noticed a group of young men at a table near the bar.  They were sitting and talking with little enthusiasm, and with a posture of resignation that made them seem to be glued to the chairs.  Finally, one of them got up to leave.  I overheard another one say, “See you tomorrow night,” as he walked away.  I began to envision this group as the same sort of bar stool “fixtures” that were portrayed in the TV show Cheers – you remember, the place where “everybody knows your name.”  Somehow, in real life, though, they didn’t seem funny, charming, and romantic like they did on TV.  They seemed only empty, a little sad, and no less lonely than those who go to places where nobody knows their names.

People need more than a place “where everybody knows your name.”  They need to recognize the voice of the one who calls to them, and trust it as the authentic, compassionate word of hope that points their empty and sometimes troubled spirits in the direction of wholeness and meaning.

You touch the lives of more people than you often know.  In every conversation at a table, in every chat across the backyard fence, in every casual encounter while pushing a grocery cart you have an opportunity to truly touch the heart of another person.  And the by-product of such encounters of grace is that the lost ones are found, and more sheep are led in and out through the doors of the sheepfold, and the world is that much better a place.

Yes, you are often a sheep – sometimes gone astray, often in need of shepherding, but you are also an ambassador for Christ, a purveyor of hope and possibility, a friend indeed, a light in the darkness.  More than that, you are one who comes in and goes out by the gate of the sheepfold, one whose voice is recognized, a good shepherd.

April 19, 2026

“But We Had Hoped”

Thinking of all the bombs dropped and missiles fired in Iran and Lebanon, destroying lives by the hundreds (and how we thought for a brief moment it might be done, only see it continue), I was reminded of how I myself am acquainted with grief.  I have lost everyone in my original nuclear family except one brother – my mother and father, my older brother, my sister – and now my wife — all gone.  I am acquainted with grief.  And I know that none of you have been spared the weight of pain in the face of loss when someone dear to you is gone.  And, I can only imagine the darkness that fell over the lives of those families and neighbors left behind in our current war-torn lands.

So we can empathize with Cleopas and the other disciple on the road to Emmaus.  They were walking with a posture that is all too familiar to you and me – head down, feet shuffling, eyes practically glazed over by the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”  It was an undeniable part of human experience in the time of Shakespeare, and it is so today.

When greeted by a stranger on the road who noticed their forlorn discussion, these disciples recounted the litany of their woes: how Jesus, who was a mighty prophet, had been handed over, condemned to death, and crucified.  You can hear the familiar ring of crushed dreams and broken hearts in these words, and in their pitiful lament, “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”

Oh, what a deep and well-known chord those words strike in our hearts: “But we had hoped . . .”  They are words of defeat, words of resignation.

“But we had hoped that the folly of racial hatred and discrimination could yield to the power of dream, that as people of all races and nationalities shared a common purpose and destiny, they could come to respect and value one another, that no one would be denied opportunity in our land because of the neighborhood in which they were born, or the color of their skin.”

“But we had hoped that America could live in peace, and that wisdom could prevail among global leaders, and a sense of mutuality and striving for the common good could mark international relations.”

“But we had hoped that our investments would be safe and productive, and provide us with the security we need for the future.”

“But we had hoped that our family, or our church, or our community would realize its potential.”

“But we had hoped that our jobs would be fulfilling, that our children would be successful, that our dreams would be materialized.”

There are at least two life-changing lessons to be learned from the plaintive cry of these two woebegone disciples.  The first is that perhaps it would serve us well to be more discerning in that for which we hope.  They were looking for a redeemer of Israel, and thought Jesus just might be the man.  Unfortunately, their hope did not run deep enough, or carry far enough.  They were expecting a revolutionary leader who would rally the zealots and overthrow the Roman oppressors.  The redeemer of Israel was standing right before them, but they were looking for the wrong sort of redemption.

Residents of the middle-east, walking that very road to Emmaus, continue to make the same mistake today.  They are looking for peace, but believe “peace” means achieving all the rights, privileges, gains and ambitions that their own side desires in the conflict, rather than mutual sacrifice.

You and I have the same problem.  We hope for personal gain and prosperity, but think that such gains are monetary in nature, instead of having to do with growth in wisdom and spirit.  We hope for peace and security as a nation, but think that it means only achieving our own short term national interests, instead of pursuing the betterment of life and the maximization of opportunity for all peoples.

Perhaps the first thing to learn from these two travelers who Jesus called “foolish and slow of heart” is that we must give adequate attention to the substance of our hope.  If we are careful and discerning, we may discover that a trustworthy object of hope has been disclosed to us already.  If we hope for large budgets and worldly success, or victory and domination by our side, our kind, our race, our people, we will likely in the end be frustrated.  If we hope in our own lives and institutions for things of the spirit such as wisdom and compassion and understanding, and in our world for common purpose, mutual effort, and recognition of a shared fate, our hope is grounded in that which transcends the smallness of our vision, and abides when lesser dreams collapse.

But there is another lesson from this encounter with Jesus; it is found in the startling revelation to these despairing travelers.  The fulfillment of their hope came to the disciples in the last way they ever expected.  The stranger they met on the road, the very one who seemed so out-of-it and unaware, was himself redemption incarnate.  The realization of our hopes comes not only as a redefinition of that hope, but often as a profound and utter surprise.

When the world has beaten us down, and the darkness falls like an anvil, at the very point of our greatest despair, there may be in store some unparalleled wonder of transformation waiting to unfold.  Madeleine L’Engle said, “The strange turning of what seemed to be a horrendous No to a glorious Yes is always the message of Easter.”¹

Too much living is being wasted because we are waiting around for something better, or even worse, have already given up on life.  But life is a treasure.  Jesus taught that lesson more powerfully than any other.  And the resurrection is the exclamation mark on that message.  Our lives need to be lived as statements, testimonies to the inestimable worth of being alive, beacons to assist any lost souls out there in finding the abundant life that was the cornerstone of Jesus’ message.  How many of us commit the tragic sin of living as though we were already dead?

Frederick Buechner tells the story of encountering such a lost soul while grocery shopping with his wife.  He said, “I was on one side of the store and she was on the other, and over a shelf of breakfast cereal and cake mix I said, ‘Don’t forget the cream,’ and she said, ‘All right, but don’t you forget you’re trying to lose weight,’ and I said, ‘Oh well, you only live once.’  And . . . the woman at the checkout counter [who had overheard the conversation] . . . said, ‘Don’t you think once is enough?’  That was it.

“It was a mild jest,” Buechner acknowledged, “and I laughed mildly. . . but . . . I had a feeling that what by some rare chance I had happened to hear was a human being saying something like this: ‘People come and people go, most of them strangers.  I’m sick of them, and I’m sick of myself too.  One day’s very much like another. . . I’ll live my life out to the last, and I expect to have good days as well as bad.  But when the end comes, I won’t complain.  One life will do me very nicely.’  Then somebody plunked a bottle of something down on the counter and the cash register rang open and the check-out clerk with her hair damp on her forehead said, ‘Don’t you think once is enough?’”²

Don’t live as though life were a burden to be carried, an ordeal to be endured.  You have already been granted a fulfillment of your hopes.  You have been the recipient of an abundance of lessons – so many things you have learned the hard way.  You are a finer, and greater person now than you were some years ago.  What are you going to do with all the lessons that have cost so much for you to learn,  curl up in a corner somewhere and die?  Why not take your life experience and go share it with others?  Why not give your heart for the sake of the Good News?  Why not give the last ounce of your being, the last breath in your lungs to make your world a little better place?

When you go from here, may the sun shine on your face.  May you hear the death defying songs of birds, and sense the struggle of tiny bright flowers breaking through the earth.  May the wonder of Christ’s love, the power of his ministry, and the mystery of his resurrection overtake you.  But even when the sun does not shine, and when it seems that darkness reigns and hope is gone, be alert; look for the wondrous surprise of grace, the miracle of opportunity that is waiting to be revealed.

You have witnessed the power of resurrection in hearts and homes the rest of the world has given up on.  So carry the message of hope.  Go into your own corner of the world and testify to the power of resurrected dreams and lives because of the love of Christ.

You have seen the new life of peace break down walls and melt cold wars.  So proclaim the resurrection.  Go to the dark places of hatred, discrimination, hopelessness, and fear and give voice to the irrepressible force of redeeming grace.

You have known the promise of a newborn baby’s cry and the victory song of those who are redeemed by love.  So offer a word of hope.  Go to the ones who have given up; go to the ones with empty hearts who live on the brink of despair; go to the very chambers of death and  proclaim life!

¹ Madeleine L’Engle, The Irrational Season.

² Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark, 1981.

April 12, 2026

“The Mouse in the Piano”

I was recently reminded of a story that apparently first appeared in the London Observer some time ago: It seems there was “a family of mice who lived all their lives in a large piano.  To them in their piano-world came the music of the instrument, filling all the dark spaces with sound and harmony.  At first the mice were impressed by it.  They drew comfort and wonder from the thought that there was Someone who made the music – though invisible to them – above, yet close to them.  They loved to think of the Great Player whom they could not see.

“Then one day a daring mouse climbed up part of the piano and returned very thoughtful.  He had found out how the music was made.  Wires were the secret; tightly stretched wires of graduated lengths which trembled and vibrated.  They must revise all their old beliefs; none but the most conservative could any longer believe in the Unseen Player.

“Later, another explorer carried the explanation further.  Hammers were now the secret, numbers of hammers dancing and leaping on the wires.  This was a more complicated theory, but it all went to show that they lived in a purely mechanical and mathematical world.  The Unseen Player came to be thought of as a myth.

“But the pianist continued to play.”

That’s a true story.  It may not be strictly fact.  But it’s truth, if ever truth were told.

Many years ago, a debate about creation and evolution raged in this country.  I’m sure most of you have seen Spencer Tracey in the Hollywood version of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” that threw Darwin’s theory of evolution into a court of law.  And there are, to this day, a number of “creationists,” as they’re called, out there still waving the flag and sounding the charge whenever evolutionary theory is revised to meet the evidence of archeological finds.  But for the most part, the great debate between evolutionary theory and creationism is considered a relic of the past.  The majority of us who still believe in the “Unseen Player” are not flustered by the discovery of vibrating wires and hammers.  We concluded long ago that there can still be a Creator even if the ancient imagery of molding human beings out of clay is removed from the history books and assigned to the realm of poetry.

But before the human race brushes the dust off its hands from this debate and moves on, I’d like to offer a word.  I’m not entirely convinced that we’ve put the trauma of the Scopes Monkey Trial behind us.  In fact, I fear that those of us who still hold fast to an ancient biblical faith while nonetheless clinging to a modern scientific world-view may have lost something precious along the way.

This morning’s Old Testament lesson is the second of the two creation stories in Genesis, the dry, barren wasteland story (as opposed to the watery chaos story of Genesis 1).  This is the account in which God formed human beings out of the dust of the earth.  The picture of God on whatever hands and knees God was supposed to have making a clay doll that would be the prototype of the human race is very old and ingrained in my mind.  It goes all the way back to my Sunday School days in Ottumwa, Iowa.  And in the light of decades of archeological evidence, and hours of magnificent film footage about the dawn of humanity, it leaves me a little anxious to offer disclaimers.  Such as, “Of course, I really don’t believe that God got down on hands and knees to make people out of mud, you understand.”  The problem is not in the disclaimer itself.  Most of us would probably agree about that.  The problem lies in the anxiousness, the eagerness to explain, frankly, the embarrassment.  In his letter to the Romans, Paul refers to it as “being ashamed of the good news.”

There’s good news in this story.  It is the news that, no matter how many vibrating wires and dancing hammers we may discover, there is indeed a Great Pianist at the keyboard.  And in a world that so often seems entirely too cold and hard and alone, that’s good news indeed.  It’s time we stopped being embarrassed about it.

All of which brings me around to this familiar story from the Gospel of John in which Thomas doubts what his fellow disciples say about seeing the risen Christ, until that is, he sees and touches him himself.  Rereading it this time I was struck by the final words of our scripture selection: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.  But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

That final phrase, “. . . that through believing you may have life in his name” struck me as never before.  “Having life” is a very familiar biblical construct.  It’s on the lips of Jesus several times, perhaps most notably when he says that he “came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”  And John uses this concept throughout his gospel.  Starting with the opening words, “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people,” to Jesus’s words, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” and then these we heard this morning at the end of the gospel, John makes it clear that the point of Jesus’s ministry and the reason for writing his gospel in the first place is that people may “have life.”  And you may be surprised to hear that after over fifty years of theological education and pastoral ministry I found myself asking: What in the world does that really mean?  I’m alive; my heart beats and I’m breathing and walking around.  Clearly there must be something deeper being suggested.

That deeper meaning has, I believe, everything to do with our story of creation and those dancing hammers and wires.  John is telling us that God (whatever, whomever it is that we call “God”) is life – a special kind of life.  And that life can dwell within us.  John says that we can have that life by “believing.”  And considering what is meant by “believing” takes us back to the story of doubting Thomas.  He was one of those mice in the piano who scoffed at the notion of a great Unseen Player.  He was not about to accept anything that he could not verify with his five senses.  But somehow in a miraculous moment he was able to find an absolute connection between his faith and his senses.  Wouldn’t you love to be able to do that?  I believe you can.  I said as much to someone once.

It happened when I went to a therapist for a while for a pain in my shoulder.  The therapist and I regularly got into philosophical/theological discussions.  One week, he was moving my arm around and asking me how I would respond to someone who says that the source of my faith is not, as I assert, an experience of being connected to something greater that lies at the Heart of Being, but simply the work of electrical signals between neurons in my brain originating from inner desires and hopes.  I said that my response would be: “What’s the difference?”

And here’s my point: I have not climbed out of the piano and been able to behold the Unseen Player with my own eyes; nor have I touched the hand and side of the risen Lord.  But I have found a kind of “believing” that lies deeper than “believing in” something (whether that is God, or Jesus, or miracles, or the Bible).  It is a believing that wells up from one’s core, lives in one’s atoms and molecules, and simply sits there as an awareness.  It is a special kind of life, an abundant life that finds wonder in every atom of Being, every second of participation in this great expanse of Reality.  It is life experienced as divine.

This world is so lonely.  It is so hurt and broken.  It is adrift in a sea of indifference and callousness.  You and I have some very good news to tell, and it is this: the universe is indeed filled with music, divine music that can lift your spirits, music that can mend broken hearts, the music of an Artist so wondrous and mighty that it can change the world.

Do not be deceived.  The battle about creation and evolution is not over.  It has merely gone underground.  It has worked its way into the collective subconscious and taken up residence in our souls where it eats away at the underpinnings of our faith.  The contest is not about whether God fashioned people out of clay.  It is about whether those of us who pursue the truth will have hearts of clay.  It is about the prospect of holding an ancient biblical faith and a modern scientific world view in more than apologetic tension.  It is about freely, and boldly, and happily proclaiming to a bruised and confused world that there is an Artist, after all, at the keyboard, not “out there” somewhere, but pervading all the universe, dwelling in the neurons and sinews of our very being.  And we know it because it lives within us and we have touched its hands and side, if you will; we hear its music in every breeze as if from a great piano.  It’s about saying to those on the brink, “Don’t give up!  There is life to be had – life in abundance!”

April 5, 2026

Standing Under the Resurrection

We’re pretty smart, we human beings.  If you want proof of how smart we are, just open the newspaper any morning.  You’ll find out that we can accelerate protons around a 17 mile long tube at near the speed of light and smash them into each other with the force of 7 trillion electron volts; we can analyze the mitochondrial DNA of a 40,000 year old finger and determine that it came from an individual who was part of an entirely unknown branch of the human family tree; we are on the verge of creating nanorobots, little molecular machines injected into cells to repair them; we’ve got people on the way to the moon – we’re pretty smart.

We are the smartest species that ever lived.  In fact, we’re so smart that we’re capable of burning up the ozone and filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.  We’re so smart that we are learning how to improve on the design of human beings by monkeying with their DNA and adding robotic parts.  We’ll soon be able to put computer chips in people’s brains to make them even smarter.

And since we trust in our intelligence so thoroughly, we are naturally skeptical of anything that we don’t understand.  If we don’t understand it, then, we naturally conclude, it’s hogwash – since, after all, we’re so smart.

But what is it to “understand” something?  Literally, it is to “stand under” that thing.  In other words, we place ourselves in a position relative to the thing that puts us in the same “sphere of being” with it.  If we can “stand under” it, so we suppose, we can breathe the same air it breathes, wrap ourselves in its reality, and know its workings – kind of bottom side up.

In fact, we become so convinced of our ability to “under-stand” things and know them, that we become truly convinced of our knowledgeability.  I speak from experience on this subject.

I have learned to at least attempt to keep to myself my own assurance about the things I know.  But in truth, I could hardly count the number of times that I’ve heard a little inner voice saying something like, “well, I’m surprised that person doesn’t know that; I know that,” or, worse yet, “Maybe I should explain how this works.”  And then I have to try to keep from getting red-faced when I discover that I didn’t really understand the thing at all – when I find out that the other person was right about it, and I was wrong.  It’s humiliating, and not a little disconcerting.

Now, those of you who know me well know about this little character flaw of mine.  But let me hasten to add that I’m not alone.  Truth be told, each and every one of us gets through our days primarily by moving from one thing we “understand” to another.  We understand how the things in our world work.  At least we know that when we turn the key the car starts, when we flip the switch the light goes on, when we turn the knob water flows from the faucet.  And we project this understanding onto the workings of the rest of the world.  We “know” what the President and Congress should do about Iran and I.C.E. and whatever else is in the news.  We “know” what’s wrong with schools in America, or that the problem with violence among young people is that they spend too much time on the Internet, or that the problem is the availability of guns, or a lack of parental supervision, and . . . on it goes.

You see we’re smart.  We “understand” things.

All of this is by way of introduction to a confession I wish to make.  Here it is: I really don’t like preaching on Easter Sunday.  There.  It’s out.  (And, by the way, I suspect I’m not alone among the clergy).

It’s not that I don’t love the beauty of the hymns, and the Easter story, and the flowers in the sanctuary.  The truth is, I don’t like the feeling of not being able to understand something.  I don’t like feeling like an idiot.  And the honest truth is: I don’t understand the resurrection.  It’s not something I can get my mind around.  I’ve never seen anyone rise from the dead, and the idea of someone doing it goes against every twenty-first century, modern scientific, rational bone in my body.  When you’re alive, you’re alive; and when you’re dead you’re dead.  Let’s admit it; most of us here this morning basically see life the same way.  There’s living and breathing, and then there’s being dead, and not breathing. And in spite of what any of us may believe about the afterlife, none of us have ever seen anybody get around that one.

So here I stand before you, trying to preach to you about something I don’t even understand.  It’s a feeling that makes me squirm a little.

The only comfort I can take in the task is to recognize that I’m not alone.  In fact, I’m in pretty good company.  The followers of Jesus couldn’t quite connect with the experience rationally either.  Starting with the first one at the tomb, Mary Magdalene.  She found the tomb empty and, being a rational, thinking person instantly “understood” what had happened.  She ran to the disciples and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”  Then, after the others came, looked for themselves, scratched their heads, and left, She found herself alone again outside the tomb.  The risen Lord appears right before her eyes!  And, being a rational, thinking person, she “understands” him to be the gardener.  There’s no other explanation that makes sense.  It had to be the gardener.  It took the experiential equivalent of a sledge hammer to break through her rational-critical mental construct.  Jesus had to speak to her, and call her by name.   “Mary,”  He said.

That’s when Easter finally happened.  It was when the first person Jesus encountered was knocked off their rational-scientific, wise and knowing, “understanding” pins, and left weeping and celebrating, head-spinning, and reeling by something they could not in a million years comprehend.  That’s when Easter first happened – when it happened to Mary in the garden.

You see, Easter isn’t a theological argument; it’s not a three point hypothesis.  That’s why I have so darn much trouble preaching about it.  Easter is an event – more than that, it’s an event that doesn’t make sense.

I have come to be a firm believer that the trouble I have preaching about Easter is not an accident.  I’m supposed to have trouble preaching about it.  I’m not supposed to make sense out of it.  I’m not supposed to be able to put it neatly into a few profound theoretical assertions a three-point message.  Easter is something that is supposed to upset you.  Easter is something that is supposed to surprise you.  Easter is something that is supposed to bewilder you.  And if it doesn’t leave you bewildered, I think it hasn’t happened to you.

It’s such a funny game we all play on Easter Sunday.  We all sit here together, singing the hymns of the season, proclaiming, “Christ is risen, indeed!”  as though it were all so annually predictable and routine.  We all listen to the Easter message, and struggle within about how we come to terms with this story about a man rising from the dead, when none of us has ever seen such a thing, and some little part of us even may find it a bit hard to swallow.  And we all politely keep our inner struggles about it to ourselves by smiling and wishing each other a “happy Easter.”  We each think there’s something wrong with us because we can’t quite get our minds around the resurrection.  So we don’t let on about it.

Well, guess what!  You’re supposed to be confused!  You’re supposed to be a little baffled.  You’re supposed to go away shaking your head and saying, “I don’t know.”  That’s what Easter is about!

Easter confounds you.  Easter unsettles you.  Easter turns your rational mind inside out, and grabs you by the shirt collar and shakes you until you have to admit the thing that none of us ever, ever wants to admit: we don’t understand.

And when we reach that point, I imagine the Lord of heaven and earth sitting back and saying, “Precisely.  You don’t understand.  Now, there’s something we can work with.”

You see, Easter is not something we “understand” in the way we generally consider understanding.  Easter is something we “stand-under” in the same way we stand under the rain.  It’s not something to be grasped, or comprehended, or “worked out;” it’s something that simply happens to us.  It’s being jerked outside of the manageable, predictable box we live in from day to day and being seized by the Spirit of Christ.  And if it happens to us that way, if it happens to us the way it happened to Mary and to the disciples, it leaves us stunned, shaking our heads in disbelief. And then, mouth agape in awe and wonder, that’s when Easter happens.

My wish for you this season is that you will be confused.  My hope for you this Easter morning is that you will leave here scratching your head and saying, “I don’t get it.”  My prayer for you today is that, in the stillness of your bewilderment, you will hear a quiet voice speaking your name, and Easter will happen to you.