Sermons

November 24, 2024

It Ain’t Just a Big Dinner

I’d like everyone to open their red hymnals to number 18, “All People That on Earth Do Dwell.”  Keep the hymnal open in front of you as we proceed; you’re going to need it.

This simple, brief Psalm 100 that Jim read this morning may seem like rather lean gruel to feed an entire sermon, but as we all prepare to sit down to a sumptuous feast this Thursday I’d like to remind us that there is as much meaning and power hidden beneath the lines of this psalm as there is hidden in our annual Thanksgiving dinners.  In fact, I intend to argue this morning that thanksgiving can change your life, not to mention the world.  It ain’t just a big dinner.

Psalm 100 is one of the most familiar of all the 150 of them.  Many of us cut our teeth on it in Sunday school.  But it has a fuller and richer background than most of us have ever considered.  It was a sort of liturgical hymn (or, actually two hymns stuck together) reserved for the occasion of the thank offering.  In some respects, it’s a relic of the first Thanksgiving – which did not happen when the pilgrims sat down with the Indians; it happened thousands of years ago.  The thank offering in ancient Israel was a special service of gratitude to the Lord that involved a great feast and offerings.  When all the worshipers approached the Temple for the service of thanksgiving and thank offerings it was a great, solemn procession.  And as they came to the gates of the Temple, a choir at the front of the procession would sing a hymn which consisted of the first three verses of this psalm. We’re going to be that choir this morning.  I’d like you to sing the first two verses of the hymn, “All People That on Earth Do Dwell” which is a rephrasing of this Psalm 100.

[The congregation sings verses 1&2]

Then, another choral group waiting at the temple gate would sing another hymn in response (which consists of verses 4 and 5 of the psalm).  We’re also going to be that choir this morning and sing together the last two verses of our hymn.

[The congregation sings verses 3&4]

Thank you for being our two choirs.  You can put your hymnals away now.

Additionally, this psalm is a kind of creed – a concise statement of the core affirmations of Judaism.  The elements of this creed are: The Lord is God (in other words, Yahweh is the ruler of the Universe), God is the creator of all that is, we (the Israelites) are God’s people, God is good, God’s kindness is eternal, and God’s faithfulness endures forever.  This is their shared religious faith in a nutshell.

So, get this picture: there is a great feast and celebration, and all the people join in a huge procession to the Temple, the choirs sing these words antiphonally, and every Israelite knows them by heart.  They are the essence of their faith, the great affirmations that bind them together as a people.  It’s like one enormous family coming together for a Thanksgiving dinner and finding common purpose and spirit in the joy of their shared heritage.

But you and I know that this blissful oneness is extraordinarily rare around our real Thanksgiving dinner tables.  Aunt Martha who loves to hear the sound of her own voice drones on about absolutely nothing while everyone is obliged to nod approvingly while glancing at the clock.  The in-laws who are on the opposite side of the political spectrum are all there because they have to be invited, but everyone trips over their own tongues trying to avoid any potential land mines of conversation topics.  Johnny shows up with a new girlfriend who, to mother’s absolute dismay, is covered in layers of Goth make-up.  And just when everyone seems to have their annoyances and frustrations in check, Sarah speaks up and asks about leaving after dinner to go see her friend, which sets dad off on a tirade about how she doesn’t respect the family traditions, Junior jumps in to her rescue, and all the sudden we’re off to the races.  Does any of this sound familiar?

Well, the blissful picture of that ancient thank offering celebration is also not entirely on target.  In fact, there was in ancient Israel a long standing dispute between the Levitical priests and the prophets.  There were even divisions among the priests about correct interpretation of the Torah, and its applications to daily life and worship.  We see those divisions still brewing in the time of Jesus, who was himself a bit of a renegade coming from a more liberal region and challenging the Jerusalem rabbinate.  You know about aunt Martha, and the in-laws, and Johnny, and Sarah, and Junior at the Thanksgiving table, so you know that those ancient priests and prophets and their followers did not leave their differences at home when they joined the procession to the Temple.

But here’s the thing.  They did join the procession; and they did bring their thank offerings, and they did sit down together at the great feast; and they did all hear these magnificent words sung by the choirs as they approached the holy gates.  It was a time to be thankful for the Lord’s blessings, and in that gratitude they found a strange kind of unity in the midst of their not insignificant differences.

Thanks-giving cannot make us all agree.  Being thankful cannot heal every rift.  But thankfulness can bring people together around the table.  And that’s not nothing.  If people who prayed to the Almighty using different names could nonetheless find common cause in their thankfulness, and if that table of thanksgiving were large enough, maybe we could get a lot of folks around it: Russians and Ukrainians, Palestinians and Israelis, Sunnis and Shias, American Christians and ISIL Islamists.  That may sound a little like “pie in the sky” but I tell you it may ultimately be the only way we finally save ourselves from mutual destruction.  If humanity is given enough time to grow up, we just may discover that in shared thankfulness there is not only this strange kind of unity, but there is a major shift in perspective, and there is abundant joy to be found.  And that joy can conquer tyrants and all their armies.

William Willimon writes about a friend of his who “was active in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.  He helped organize churches to protest against, to march against, to defy, and to attempt to overturn the unjust, racist laws.  ‘One of our most potent weapons,’ he said, ‘was joy.  The oppressors just can’t stand for the oppressed to be joyful.  By refusing to be miserable, we were refusing to let our oppressors define us.  We took charge of things.  We turned things around and demanded to be the final word on the situation.  Joy is a powerful protest against the forces of death and injustice.”  Willimon says, “So is thanksgiving.”¹

But the unity, the joy, and the enlarged perspective that grow out of thankful hearts is not only for the high and mighty, it’s for you and for me.  As all the characters in our family dramas gather ’round the turkey and dressing we have an opportunity.  It is the chance to test out the power of thanksgiving to change our lives – to find out if, indeed, being truly thankful together helps us to affirm common ties, injects into our lives a bit of joy, and causes us to see our points of view, peccadillos, and personality clashes in a whole different light.

There’s a great Fred Craddock story from the time when he was Professor of Preaching at Candler School of Theology at Emory University.  He was asked at the last minute to teach an adult Sunday school class.  Fred was a little reluctant because he didn’t have much time to prepare but the one who called him told Dr. Craddock that it was an easy lesson, the familiar parable of the Prodigal Son.  So Fred agreed to do it.  When the class started, Craddock read the parable from the King James Version of the Bible, right down to the place where the prodigal son came back home and the father came out to greet him.  But at that point Fred continued as if he were reading from the Bible, and said, “And the father said to his son, ‘How dare you show up here after all the shame you’ve brought on this family!  You’ve made your bed.  Now lie in it.  Don’t come back here again until you’ve gotten a haircut and a decent job.’”  Craddock stopped.  There was a long silence.  Finally, someone sitting in the back row said, “Well, that’s what he should have said.”²

You and I know how the story actually came out.  There were hugs and tears, and a great big, family dinner.  It all happened because the father was so filled with thankfulness that his son was home that he could not scold, complain, or even offer a brief sarcastic shot.  His world had been changed.  He couldn’t get past his joy.  The older brother, you may recall, couldn’t get past his bitterness.  He was unable to find that thankful heart that could have changed him.  So he sat on the stoop and pouted.  He missed out on the family dinner.  Thanks-giving changes everything.

Your Board of Trustees is initiating our annual stewardship campaign.  They’ve mailed out pledge cards for the coming year.  But perhaps this time could also be used as an opportunity, as Nowell and Mike did this morning, to share our stories of life in this church family, to discover your hopes and disappointments, and your joys and celebrations.  Today, following worship we are all invited to help decorate for the Christmas season. Linda Bevan is providing salad rolls as a special luncheon treat.  Maybe we could take the opportunity to give thanks – to give thanks for one another, thanks for our mutual dedication to the work of the kingdom, thanks for the church and its ministry and mission.  We might consider our salad rolls to be a kind of shared meal of thanks-giving.  I hope you will all come and join in the celebration. And I hope that spirit of joy and thankfulness will carry all the way to Thursday and beyond.  After all, it ain’t just a big dinner.

¹ William Willimon   Pulpit Resource, August16, 2009.

² This story has been retold and adapted over time.  What may be the original version is found in: The collected Sermons of Fred B. Craddock, Westminster John Knox, 2011, p. 175.

November 17, 2024

The Be-Attitudes

Today’s Gospel reading comprises the well known “beatitudes” from Jesus’ sermon on the mount.  They’re called beatitudes because they are all regarded as statements of blessing (or “beatification,” if you will).  Nine of the verses begin “Blessed are . . .”  I’d like to offer a new rendition of the beatitudes – one that’s a little more realistic, and based on life as we know it to be:

When the leader saw the poll numbers and market potential, he went on television; and after he sat down on the set, the cameras started to roll.  Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

“Pitiful are the poor in spirit, for they fail to take pride in themselves and in their heritage.

“Pathetic are those who mourn, for their lives aren’t happy like they’re supposed to be.

“Ridiculous are the meek, for they will be crushed beneath the feet of the strong.

“Clueless are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they haven’t figured out that it’s all about wealth and power.

“Gullible are the merciful, for they will be unlikely to receive mercy themselves.

“Delusional are the pure in heart, for no one is pure any more, and we all know it.

“Naive are the peacemakers, for they will fall victim to the guns and bombs of the war makers.

“Hopeless saps are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the fate of all starry-eyed believers.

“Justified in righteous indignation are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely.  Strike out and get revenge, for your reward will be a sizable settlement for damages and mental anguish, for in the same way they persecuted others and got away with it, but not any more.

Now, doesn’t that sound a little more like it?  I mean, let’s get real – “The meek . . . will inherit the earth?”  Just exactly how is that supposed to transpire – if we all just bow our heads, and shuffle our feet, and shrug our shoulders, the terrorists are going to stop bombing us and give us flowers and kisses instead?  Give me a break.  How un-American can you get?

When was the last time you felt “blessed” because you were “poor in spirit, mourning, meek, or persecuted?”  I daresay, most of us have felt cursed when those things befall us.  How in the world did Jesus get his values so upside down?

Well, as I’m sure you can guess, I think it’s not Jesus whose values are upside down.  Here’s the big question for us: how do we get from where we are in this world, to where Jesus is?  If I could answer that question in fifteen minutes, I’d go on TV myself.  But I do have some thoughts to share with you that just might help kick-start your own thinking about it.

The first observation has to do with the reward Jesus is offering to the “poor in spirit” and those who are persecuted.  He says, “theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  He doesn’t say that they’ll get into the kingdom of heaven, or even that they will have the kingdom of heaven.  It’s present tense, possessive case.  In other words, these people have the kingdom of heaven.  All the other beatitudes have a future tense reward: “they will be comforted . . . they will inherit the earth . . . they will be filled . . . they will receive mercy . . . they will see God . . . they will be called children of God.”  But when it comes to the Kingdom of heaven, the poor in spirit and the persecuted have it.  What does it mean to have the kingdom of heaven?  I can’t say what it means to you, but here’s what it means to me.

Heaven may have something to do with life after death, but it’s the heaven in the here and now that means the most to me.  Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is, depending on how you translate his words, “within you” or “upon you”, or “in the midst of you.”  That doesn’t mean life is a blissful romp through the daffodils.  You and I have been around the block enough times to know that’s not the case.  I think it means that existence is perfect – it’s perfectly magnificent.  Yes, I know, there are 367 different kinds of suffering, and evil sometimes overwhelms us; reality bites, but, as Woody Allen said, “it’s the only place to get a good steak.”

When I was divorced, many years ago, I was devastated.  I had lost my family, I had lost my home, I had left my job.  I have never felt so alone in my life.  I was fortunate enough at the time to find a very wise therapist who didn’t try to rescue me from that loneliness, but pushed me deeper into it.  Groping around in that darkness, I discovered a resource I never knew was there – it was the comfort of simply being – being alone in my own presence.  I made an amazing discovery in that time. It is that existence is a magnificent thing, and it doesn’t require of you that you be happy in order to drink of its joy.   Pain, and aloneness, and depression, and darkness, and evil, and all the other things we fear most, are not ultimate things.  They’re part of the mix – along with pleasure, and beauty, and passion, and meaning.  And to be part of it all, to exist, to embrace existence without having to fight it or flee from it, that’s perfection.

I think that’s why the “poor in spirit” and the “persecuted” have the kingdom of heaven.  Because those on the other side, the proud and the persecutors, are so engaged in trying to hammer existence into a form that suits their fancy that they entirely miss the heaven that’s “upon” them.

Jesus is, I believe, calling us to a deeper kind of living, a kind of “submarine life’ that rides beneath the froth and foam of distractions, pleasures, and pursuits that fill our hearts.  I believe he’s calling us to an entirely different set of values than we are accustomed to.  He lifts up those who are “poor in spirit,” the “meek,” the “merciful,” the “peacemakers” as models.  He says that these people ‘get it.’  Can you imagine how far a political leader would get today advocating the values of the sermon on the mount?  He’d be driven out of office – laughed out of town.

This sermon preached by Jesus on the mountainside is his inaugural address.  It’s his “state of the Kingdom” speech, offered at the very beginning of his ministry.  And he begins it by giving us a new set of values.  They are not the values of sexual propriety, or having a nuclear family with 2.5 children, or striking down indecency on television, or defining in absolute terms the beginning or end of life.  No, what Jesus offers us are attitudes – attitudes that transcend our preoccupation with pleasure, and power, and self-protection, attitudes that reflect a deep appreciation of being.  They are “be – attitudes” if you will – attitudes of being meek and merciful, poor in spirit, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, and being peacemakers.  To develop and hold such attitudes is to move gracefully into the art of being, and to have the kingdom of heaven.

I’m sure you’ve all noticed that I usually offer an appropriate quote from Frederick Buechner in the bulletin.  He’s a great resource for inspiring and creative thinking and writing.  He died just over two years ago, and today, if you’ll bear with me, I’d like to take the opportunity to share with you some rather lengthy, but worthwhile thoughts from Buechner on the Beatitudes.

He writes: “If we didn’t already know but were asked to guess the kind of people Jesus would pick out for special commendation, we might be tempted to guess one sort or another of spiritual hero—men and women of impeccable credentials morally, spiritually, humanly, and every which way. If so, we would be wrong. Maybe those aren’t the ones he picked out because he felt they didn’t need the shot in the arm his commendation would give them. Maybe they’re not the ones he picked out because he didn’t happen to know any. Be that as it may, it’s worth noting the ones he did pick out.

“Not the spiritual giants, but the “poor in spirit,” as he called them, the ones who, spiritually speaking, have absolutely nothing to give and absolutely everything to receive, like the Prodigal telling his father “I am not worthy to be called thy son,” only to discover for the first time all he had in having a father.

“Not the champions of faith who can rejoice even in the midst of suffering, but the ones who mourn over their own suffering because they know that for the most part they’ve brought it down on themselves, and over the suffering of others because that’s just the way it makes them feel to be in the same room with them.

“Not the strong ones, but the meek ones in the sense of the gentle ones, that is, the ones not like Caspar Milquetoast but like Charlie Chaplin, the little tramp who lets the world walk over him and yet, dapper and undaunted to the end, somehow makes the world more human in the process.

“Not the ones who are righteous, but the ones who hope they will be someday and in the meantime are well aware that the distance they still have to go is even greater than the distance they’ve already come.

“Not the winners of great victories over evil in the world, but the ones who, seeing it also in themselves every time they comb their hair in front of the bathroom mirror, are merciful when they find it in others and maybe that way win the greater victory.

“Not the totally pure, but the “pure in heart,” to use Jesus’ phrase, the ones who may be as shopworn and clay-footed as the next one, but have somehow kept some inner freshness and innocence intact.

“Not the ones who have necessarily found peace in its fullness, but the ones who, just for that reason, try to bring it about wherever and however they can—peace with their neighbors and God, peace with themselves.

“Jesus saved for last the ones who side with heaven even when any fool can see it’s the losing side and all you get for your pains is pain. Looking into the faces of his listeners, he speaks to them directly for the first time. “Blessed are you,” he says.

“You can see them looking back at him. They’re not what you’d call a high-class crowd—peasants and fisherfolk for the most part, on the shabby side, not all that bright. It doesn’t look as if there’s a hero among them. They have their jaws set. Their brows are furrowed with concentration.

“They are blessed when they are worked over and cursed out on his account he tells them. It is not his hard times to come but theirs he is concerned with, speaking out of his own meekness and mercy, the purity of his own heart.”¹

I think Buechner put his finger on it. And here’s what I believe with all my heart: if I could, and you could, and followers of Christ around the globe could actually adopted these attitudes of being, it

¹Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

November 10, 2024

The Widow’s Might!

You’ve probably heard enough sermons on this passage about the “widow’s mite” to choke a big, muddy pig. I’ve preached a ton of them too. They’re always stewardship sermons – sermons about how this poor woman who only had mite, gave it as an offering, and so we too should give sacrificially. Well, I’m not preaching a stewardship sermon this time, and my sermon title is not a typo. If you’ll excuse the play on words, I’d like to share a few thoughts about the might, the amazing power, displayed by this woman of faith – a power that could change your life, and change the world.
I want to begin by sharing my unshakeable conviction that what we are about here – here in this church – is the most important thing going on in the world. That may sound like hyperbole, but it’s not.
What’s the biggest problem we’re facing in our world or in our nation today? Is it a fragile, teetering, global economy in which the disparity between the rich and poor keeps growing and threatening an eventual breakdown of the social order? If so, what’s the solution? Some say it’s more government regulation, some say it’s less. Some say it’s socialism, some say unrestrained capitalism. Here’s the honest truth, as deeply as I can peer into it: no government regulation, no expanded freedom, no economic system, no “ism” can solve this problem, because every system can be beat, every regulation can be skirted, every law can be loopholed, every structure can be manipulated. The only thing that can finally bring economic justice and optimal prosperity to the greatest number of people is if the minds and hearts of human beings are changed on a massive scale, and mutual and community interests, fairness, and generosity, overshadow self-interest and greed.
Is the greatest problem we face today the overuse of resources that threatens our environment with pollution and global warming, and raises the specter of wars being fought over food, water, and land? If so, what’s the solution? Maybe we’ll find some miraculous technological fix that will allow us to continue our global population growth and increasing use of natural resources without dire consequences. But something tells me mother earth has clear limits that will be imposed one way or another. We need, at least, new minds and hearts, recalibrated to learn perhaps from our American Indian brothers and sisters to live more in harmony and partnership with the land and the trees, and the sky. We need to rethink our values, and our definitions of good life and good communities.
Is the greatest threat we face from radical religious fanatics, bent on carrying out holy war? If so what’s the answer? Will more bombs and tanks make us secure? Will squadrons of unmanned drones armed with guns and missiles do the trick? Not according to our best military and diplomatic authorities. The only way to bring security in the long run is to win the battle to change minds and hearts. And if the minds and hearts of our enemies are going to change, I suspect it’s going to involve some changing of our own minds and hearts.
That’s what we’re doing here, folks. We’re not coming up with new economic policies; we’re not inventing new energy technologies; we’re not putting forward new strategies in international relations, we’re one small outpost of a whole huge network of revolutionaries, doing the daily, weekly business of changing minds and hearts, starting with our own. It’s the only thing that’s ever going to make a real difference in this world.
And a prime example of the kind of change we’re about is a poor widow woman who walked into the courtyard one day while Jesus was hanging around by the treasury. Her story isn’t about the money she gave. It needs to be heard in the context it’s set in. Jesus had been talking about the pride and self-interest of the religious leaders of his day – the ones who, as Jesus said, “like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.” Truth is, I wear a long robe on Sunday mornings, and have the best seat in the sanctuary, and some here would say I am at times inclined to long prayers. So I, for one, need to be a little cautious and reflective about my motives and values. Perhaps we all need to.
The problem with the scribes, the ones in the long robes with the long prayers and the big gifts, is not simply that they had a bad attitude, it’s that they missed the point! Their values were in the wrong places. They thought it was all about them! They were putting their trust in prestige, their confidence in a system that set them apart with comfort and privilege, their faith only in themselves, and their money only where their mouths were, not their hearts.
I remember as a boy coming to church with a fist full of pennies on my birthday. It must be that just about every church in those days did the same thing. When it was your birthday, you brought to church the number of pennies that represented how old you were, and put them in the bank one at a time, while everyone sang, “Count Your blessings.”
How many people here did that when you were children? How many of you know the old song, “Count Your Blessings?” Would you join me in singing it? It’s just, “Count your blessings, name them one by one, count your blessings see what God has done.”
It’s good to share something, even if it’s just a song, or a memory. But we share so much more than that, don’t we? For one thing, we share in all the many blessings that are ours in this world, in this nation, in this place we live – blessings, at times, too many to count! From the simple beauty of a sunrise to the penetrating giggle of a baby, from the underappreciated gift of three meals a day to the rarely mentioned extravagance of a place to lay our heads at night. Our inheritance as children of the earth is wondrous!
We also share in the rich fellowship of this church. I doubt that there is person here who cannot testify to the joy and life-giving goodness of all the laughter, quarrels, tears, labors, and hugs that get passed around here. They’re found sometimes on these Sunday mornings in the pews or at the coffee hour. And when we take the time to sit here, look around, and count up all the blessings that are ours, we are doing an exercise in humility, we’re tempering our pride, and allowing gratitude to deepen our souls and give us generous spirits.
And so we also share the privilege of the “poor widow” – the woman Jesus pointed out who dropped her two pennies in the offering. It is the privilege of sharing in something far grander than ourselves, and having something of ultimate worth to give ourselves to. It is the priceless treasure of knowing that the power of the Spirit is loose in the world, and any common one of us can have a stake in that power and that Spirit simply by throwing the “meager weight of our existence” into the fray on the side of good.
It is the power of the widow’s pennies. Her gift was blessed by Jesus not because of the gift itself, but because it represented the fact that this poor woman “got it!” She understood. Because she gave all of what little she had, it was apparent that she had some sense of the greatness of what she was participating in, and a profound humility at the undertaking. It was clear that she was the sort who brought those last two pennies to the treasury with a quiet little smile – a smile that reflected a candle glow within: the light of joy at having found something worth giving her all to, of knowing that there were other poor widows bringing their pennies, and many more who were helping to keep the faith, proclaim the word, give hope to the downtrodden, and speak truth to power. She had discovered the profound joy of shared love, genuine compassion, living generously. And in all that there was a kind of strength the scribes could not comprehend. It was the might of the poor widow, who had found something to be part of that ignited her spirit and rekindled her passion. That, my friends, is a treasure.
The kind of example that Jesus was pointing to in the act of this woman is more than a matter of coins. It is a participation in the divine sedition of the Kingdom; and it is joining in league with all those others throughout the world whose souls have been ignited, and who come to the altar with quiet smiles to give themselves for that which is greater than themselves. Those quiet smiles and acts of simple goodness and humility are a shared experience, a communal act.
I’d like for you to think about that poor widow and her mighty act of selflessness, and I’d like you to smile. Because you are part of a powerful force in this world, a force that is greater than systems, and polices, and laws, and inventions. It is the might of widows and workers and chambermaids and children and families and fund managers and truck drivers and teenagers gaining a new mind and a new heart, learning to share a commitment to giving themselves to the cause of truth and beauty and love – the work of the Spirit of Holiness in the world. And I’d like you to consider that your choice to be here, to share in this community of faith, to sit together and weekly count and recount our blessings, is not a solitary gesture, but that it represents your participation in something grander than yourself. It represents your small piece of the Divine great design for humanity, your mighty act of changing the world, one heart, one mind at a time – beginning with yourself.

November 3, 2024

Entropy, the Internet, and the Wisdom of Disobedient Love

While everyone is anxious about what will happen on Tuesday (and for the next four years), I thought I’d extend our perspective this morning to the slightly longer view – say, about a billion, billion, billion, billion years.  Cosmologists are divided on what will ultimately happen to our universe (in fact, they can’t even agree on what the universe is).  But most agree that its fate is tied to its total mass and energy.  To put it simply, if the total mass of the universe is great enough, the whole thing will stop expanding at some point and re-collapse on itself; if the mass is just right, it will reach a steady state; or if it’s less, the universe will keep expanding and end in an entropy death.  The key ingredient in all this is really gravity.  There may be some mysterious “dark energy” at work counteracting the gravitational force of all the matter out there, but simply put, it’s gravity that will hold us together, if we are to be held together.

So what has this to do with Ruth, Naomi, and Jesus? – I thought you might be curious.  I’ll get to that in a minute.  But first, I’d like to say a few words about the Internet.  It is astounding to step back and look at our world, and how dramatically it has changed in the last ten to twenty years.  The magnitude of this change is illustrated while waiting for a table in a restaurant.  Just glance around at all the other people in the waiting area.  Virtually every single one of them has his or her face buried in an electronic gizmo of one sort or another.  Some are pulling up music to listen to, some are using two fingers and expanding menus or maps or something, some are texting or tweeting – by the way, as I was writing this, the spell-checker in my word processing program didn’t recognize “texting” as a verb (there’s an idea of how fast things have changed).  In an extremely short period of time, we humans have become “pods” in a global web of connections, ideas, reactions, images, and fads.  There are now regular segments of news programs dealing only with how the political candidates are using the Internet, and what people are tweeting about them.  This global, electronic collection of loose, sporadic thoughts puts me in mind of the myriad atoms, planets, and galaxies in the universe, all connected in some mysterious way at the quantum level, and yet all bouncing along through time according to their own particularities.  So here’s my question – and it has everything in the world to do with Ruth and Naomi, and Jesus – where’s the gravity that holds together this universe of ideas called the Internet?  What is it that might keep us all from flying off, each into an isolated world of his own making, until our culture finds its end in a communications entropy death?

Here’s my thesis for the day: there is a certain gravity to ancient wisdom – a gravity that may just be essential in holding our world together.  In our culture of instantaneous computerized stock sales and YouTube videos that claim some kind of instant authority, the Bible seems more and more like an irrelevant relic from a dusty past that’s completely disconnected from reality.  But we break the bonds of the force that ties us to our ancestors at our peril.  Truths that have stirred the imaginations and touched the depths of souls for generation upon generation accumulate over time a certain weight.  Times change and, like the galaxies that travel through the vast realms of space, the circumstances and trajectories of our lives and cultures keep moving.  Like the inflating universe, we humans keep expanding our awareness and our capabilities.  But if we are to survive in the long run, we cannot outpace the gravity of truths that abide through the millennia.

And that’s where Naomi and Ruth and Jesus come in.  In the story of Ruth, her sister-in-law, Orpah, and her mother-in-law, Naomi, it’s easy to see nothing more than a quaint tale from ancient Israel about some women who fell on hard times.  But this is a legend whose specific gravity in relation to timeless, divine truth is massive.  It’s about good and bad decision-making, and how sometimes good is bad, and bad is good, and there is a good that surpasses all others.  Naomi told her daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, to leave her and return to their home while she undertook a perilous journey to another land.  At first they both refused, saying that they would go with her, but when she insisted, Orpah made the “right” decision, the obedient decision to go home as she was told.  But Ruth disobeyed.  She refused to leave her mother-in-law, and in words that have echoed down the millennia, she said, “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.  Where you die, I will die – there will I be buried.”  There has perhaps never been a more beautiful statement of disobedient love than those words.  Ruth made the “wrong” decision, the disobedient decision, but her disobedience was trumped by a greater good, her indomitable love.  True, pure, unshakeable love supersedes all other ethics, and can transform misery into hope.  And that’s the truth that sits in the heart of this story like a great boulder, bearing sufficient gravitational mass to keep a distracted, twenty-first century life from spinning out of control.

Jesus knew the weight of this ancient wisdom.  When he was asked about the bottom line, asked to boil down all the revered laws of Moses to that which is most important, he said, in essence, love God and love your neighbor at least as much as you love yourself.  He said that nothing was more important.

There is so much that seems more important in our world.  Accumulating, achieving, creating, being entertained, (and, of course, in this election season, winning).  But, tethered as we are to our IPhones and Androids, I fear we are losing touch with one another under the guise of being more intimately connected.  I fear that we are losing ourselves in an electronic world of our own making, and therefore losing our grasp on each other.  Our culture increasingly tells us that in order to be relevant we must bury our minds deeper and deeper in this web of ideas and images, and that the highest good is whatever notion we might post online, and the most dependable word is the latest thing that a friend “liked” on Facebook.  The people of our nation, and increasingly of our world, are marching obediently to the orders of this new mandate.

But not here.  I thank the Almighty for this body of disobedient people.  Not that no one here has an IPhone or a Galaxy S IV (I’ve got my own), it’s simply that there’s something different in this community of faith than in the world at large.  It’s actually a linguistic coincidence that the measure of the magnitude of gravitational force and the celebration of the Eucharist in the Catholic church are both called “mass.”  But I like it.  In fact, in some ways I kind of wish we called our worship “mass.”  Because there is a gravity about what we do here.  By your presence and participation in this counter-cultural movement that is our church, you are declaring your allegiance to a higher ethic, a nobler value, a more enduring truth, you are affirming that some ancient wisdom found in a dusty old book indeed has value beyond reckoning.  By coming together month after month and breaking bread in the name and memory of Jesus you are affirming the priority of faith and of the tie that binds us together as children of the Most High.  By joining hands and hearts as the body of Christ you are contributing your weight to that timeless force of indomitable love, love that is the greatest rule, love that is the highest ethic, love, even in disobedience, that holds the universe together.

October 27, 2024

Is Faith Enough?

Five hundred and seven years ago this Thursday, the Augustinian friar and professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg, Germany, Martin Luther, composed a list of ninety-five points of dispute with the Roman Catholic Church.  The historical tradition, although disputed by some, is that he posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg as a means of sparking a debate on the issues.  Whether he actually did post them, or just mailed them to his bishop, they were eventually printed and circulated.  The common people were inspired, and Rome was not pleased.  In short order the Protestant Reformation, that would forever alter the landscape of Christianity, was underway.  Luther had a lot of gripes with the church (as I mentioned, he had ninety-five of them).  But chief among them was his insistence on something called “justification by faith”.  Luther was taken by the Apostle Paul’s words in Romans: “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus . . .”¹ and in Ephesians: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God – not the result of works . . . .”²  So he took issue with the church’s doctrine that the only faith that justifies (or “saves”) a person is the faith demonstrated in good works and righteous living.  Luther wrote, “All have sinned and are justified freely, without their own works and merits, by His grace . . . . This cannot be otherwise acquired or grasped by any work, law or merit.  Therefore, it is clear and certain that this faith alone justifies us.”³  Luther referred to this as the “Chief Article” of his confessions.  He said, “Upon this article, everything we teach and practice depends.”⁴  Luther made it clear: faith is enough.

Now, I know this all sounds like a lot of “theological twaddle”, but it’s important stuff, for at least a couple of reasons.  First of all, I think it’s terribly important to consider what in the world it means to be “justified” or “saved”.  I know for some people this means winning a ticket through the pearly gates after death.  There’s nothing wrong with that belief, but I don’t happen to adhere to it.  I think it has to do with getting right with that Indefinable Unknowable that we often refer to as God.  For me, God is best thought of, metaphorically, as the Beating Heart of Love that pervades the Universe and resides at the Core of Being.  “Getting right” with that Heart of Love means, I think, being free to find and express love in all relationships and to live in the constant assurance of the immutable bond we have with Being itself.  In my book, that’s what it means to be saved – to be justified.

Which brings us to the question posed by my sermon: Is faith enough?  The Apostle Paul and Martin Luther both adamantly declare that it is by faith alone that we are saved.  Are they right?  Is faith itself sufficient to bring to one’s life this freedom and this assurance that I speak of?  Once again, that depends, I’m sure, on one’s definition of “faith”.  For many people, including, I daresay, Martin Luther, faith is about believing.  To have faith, by this account, means believing the right things.  For Luther faith was a free gift of God, but only given to those who believe that Jesus is Lord and savior – God’s Messiah.  This is at least one point at which I part company with Luther (by the way, there are others, including his extreme anti-Semitism in later life).  I don’t happen to think that faith has anything at all to do with believing things.  I suppose this makes me a fish swimming against the current of modern Christianity, but there it is.  I contend that people are born with faith.  It’s in our DNA.  We come into the world wide-eyed with wonder, reaching out to trust the first face we see, sometimes squawking about things not being the way we want them, but always ready to be touched by love.  It is only over time that we unlearn that faith.  We become disconnected from the center of our own Being – the very center that all other beings share – and we begin to think of ourselves as autonomous and become enslaved by our needs for power and security.

And, paradoxically enough, one’s beliefs, rather than being a source of faith, can easily become vehicles for working out those needs for power or security.  The most glaring case in point is, I suppose, the outfit that is calling itself the “Islamic State”.  They are so enslaved to their need for power that their beliefs simply become a major weapon used to exert that power.  Any group of people who don’t conform to their beliefs can quite simply be slaughtered.  And I heard a while ago about folks in India who were murdering people who were suspected of having beef in their home, or of having eaten beef.  Their belief in the sacredness of cattle makes them regard the life of a cow more highly than the life of a fellow human.  You may object that these extreme examples don’t reflect the lives of everyday Christians who hold dear such things as their belief in the inerrancy of scripture or in any of the other doctrines of their churches.  But I have to tell you that in my experience beliefs on a whole have tended to do more to separate people from one another than to bring them together; they have created more hostility and division than love and mutual understanding.

Let me explain why I think beliefs can be a snare.  As I have often said, if that which we refer to as God is truly all that is said and believed about him (or her), then that God must be beyond words, images, or any other kind of description or understanding.  Any concept of Divinity that can be visualized or comprehended by one tiny human brain is way too small to be all that we claim.  Consequently any beliefs we hold in our heads about Divine will, intentions, or strictures must, by definition, be wholly inadequate.  And to hold such beliefs with an iron grip that claims divine authority is, in my view, nothing less than idolatry – placing one’s own tiny little brain, or the tiny little brains of some church “fathers,” on the throne: a throne that can only be occupied by that great Indefinable Unknowable that we often refer to as God.  This is why in all religion we speak in metaphors.  We speak of that Indefinable Unknowable, as scripture does, as a Father, as a Mother, as an Eagle, or a Bear.  We speak of Jesus as “Son of God” and “Son of Man”, or, as the author of the letter to the Hebrews wrote, a “High Priest”.  All our religious language is metaphorical because we are intended to keep reminding ourselves that what we speak of is beyond words and beyond knowing.

So I hold my beliefs very lightly; they are not critically important.  But that does not mean they are insignificant.  Those metaphors of belief can lightly comfort us when we rest in the hands of abiding faith.  C. S. Lewis does a wonderful job of suggesting how our metaphors of belief can nurture us if we are not too desperately chained to them.  In one of the Chronicles of Narnia books, The Silver Chair, the queen of the underworld wants Puddleglum the Marshwiggle to believe that Narnia only exists in his imagination.  Puddleglum says, “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself.  Suppose we have.  Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.  I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan.”⁵  Well, I’m on C. S. Lewis’ side.

Faith is not about believing things; it is an attitude of Being that one recaptures and brings up from the depths of the soul to offer to life.  It is an unshakeable sense of connectedness to that Beating Heart of Love at the center of everything.

So, how is it that this kind of faith “saves” us, or “justifies” us?  It does so by keeping us on the path of love, by keeping us grounded and centered in that which truly matters in life – which brings peace, wholeness, harmony, and grace.  Faith heals.  It heals hearts and it heals communities.  It is a power we barely understand.  Jesus told the blind beggar, “Go; your faith has made you well.”  And this healing, this power, this grace is not simply an individual affair.  That groundedness, that centeredness, that reveals itself in trusting love, involves a participation in a Unity of Being, and we are all part of that Unity.  That is why we speak of this body of folks here as a “community of faith”.  We are held together by this mysterious thing we call faith, and each one of us is held lovingly in the hands of that faith.

Roger Alling writes about a dear friend who died at the age of 56.  Alling says his friend had been “. . . priest and rector of a fine parish for many years.  As Bob lay dying, a parishioner spread out a quilt on the parish-hall floor and, with indelible markers, she traced around the hands of all who patiently stood in long lines for the privilege of being part of this loving pattern.  Families put their hands one on top the other.  Gnarled old hands of matriarchs and patriarchs were drawn, and tiny hands of sleeping babies, a pattern made of all the hands of the whole community of faith.  And then the quilt was taken to Bob’s bed and gently laid upon him.  As he died he received the laying on of hands of all the faithful ones to whom he was so incarnately connected in our Lord Christ.”⁶

So I come to the title of my sermon, and raise the question posed at the top: Were Martin Luther and the Apostle Paul right?  Are we justified/saved by faith alone?  Is faith enough?  My answer: faith is not simply enough; faith is everything.

¹ Romans 3:23-25.

² Ephesians 2:8-9.

³ Martin Luther, “The Smalcald Articles”, in Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions, Concordia Publishing, 2007, Part two, Article 1, p. 263.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (The Chronicles of Narnia #4), Harper Collins, 2002, p. 190.

⁶ Roger Alling, David J. Schlafer, ed., Preaching as Image Story and Idea: Sermons that Work VII, Morehouse Publishing, 1998.

October 20, 2024

“The Order of Melchizedek”

I love puzzles. I used to do jigsaw puzzles — the kind with 250 pieces in a box.  Now Dadgie and I do 3D puzzles together.  But the kind that really intrigue me are the ones that play tricks with your mind.  I’ve always been able to get absolutely lost in solving a chess problem, or a tricky hand of bridge, or a crossword, or a sudoku.  And that’s why I love things like this cryptic phrase in today’s reading from the Letter to the Hebrews.  It’s a wonderful little puzzle buried in an ancient text.  The writer refers to Jesus as “having been designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek.”  And there’s the puzzle: what in the world is “the order of Melchizedek?”  A whole world of meaning is concealed beneath this one simple, arcane reference.

Stay with me through this next part, I know it can get a little deep – or at least roll up your pants legs.  Melchizedek is only mentioned once in Israel’s recorded history.  His name appears in Genesis (Chapter 14) as “King Melchizedek of Salem” and he is referred to as “priest of God Most High.”  In the Genesis passage, Melchizedek greets the patriarch, Abram, on his return from routing the enemy.  Melchizedek serves a priestly role, giving Abram a blessing, and receiving a tithe from him.  The reference to Melchizedek as king of Salem, which is an ancient name for the city of Jerusalem, and the historical roots of his name, Melchi-zedek (which means my king is righteous) make it most likely that he was a Canaanite king of Jerusalem before it was inhabited by the Israelites.  So Melchizedek was not legitimate, according to the ancient rule of succession of priests from the Israelite tribe of Levi.  Here’s the rub: Abram treats this Canaanite priest-king from Salem as a superior.  He is the only one in the narrative to whom Abram submits, even though Melchizedek was an outsider.  He didn’t belong.  His priesthood was an aberration.

Then, in Psalm 110, we find this reference: “The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, ‘You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.’” The psalm appears to be praising some ancient, Judean king and acknowledging his lineage back to old king Melchizedek, and, interestingly enough, affirming his role as not only king but a priest – even though he was not a Levite – because Melchizedek was regarded as a priest.  Our author here in the Book of Hebrews is picking up on that language in the psalm, and saying that Jesus has the legitimacy of being directly sanctioned by God for all time as high priest on behalf of us all, even though he did not have the inherited authority of the Levitical priesthood.

So, we made it through the weeds.  Here’s the long and short of it: the Canaanite king, Melchizedek was exalted by the Israelites as a king and priest of their own.  The people who believed so whole-heartedly in the power of a name that they would not even pronounce the name of God essentially “adopted” this foreign ruler, with his non-Levitical name, as an embodiment of divine authority.  And that’s the “order of Melchizedek” according to which Jesus is regarded as “high priest.”  It’s the order of an adopted foreigner, an illegitimate pretender to the priesthood, to whom the greatest patriarch of the faith submits himself.

In the classic novel, Bread and Wine, by Ignazio Silone, the priest, Don Benedetto says that sometimes when the world goes crazy God must hide and appear only under strange guises and with assumed names.  Talking to his former student Pietro Spina who had returned to fascist Italy from exile disguised as a priest, Don Benedetto says that God also may appear in the midst of their troubled circumstance in disguise.  “It would not be the first time.” says Don Benedetto, “that the Lord has been forced to hide Himself and make use of an assumed name. As you know, He has never attached much importance to the names men have given Him; on the contrary, one of the first of His commandments is not to take His name in vain. And sacred history is full of examples of clandestine living. Have you ever considered the meaning of the flight into Egypt? And later, when He had grown up, did not Jesus several times have to hide himself to escape from the Pharisees?”¹

Don Benedetto then relates the story of Elijah hiding in the cave, who didn’t hear God in the wind or the earthquake or the fire but only in a “still, small voice.” He tells Pietro that you have to be on the lookout if you are going to hear God. God may only be present in the unexpected.

“I too,” Don Benedetto says, “in the depth of my affliction have asked, where then is the Lord and why has He abandoned us? The loudspeakers and the bells that announced the beginning of new butchery to the whole country were certainly not the voice of the Lord. Nor are the shelling and bombing of Abyssinian villages that are reported daily in the press. But if a poor man alone in a hostile village gets up at night and scrawls with a piece of charcoal or paints ‘Down with the war’ on the walls the Lord is undoubtedly present. How is it possible not to see that behind that unarmed man in his contempt for danger, in his love of the so-called enemy, there is a direct reflection of the divine light? Thus, if simple workers are condemned by a special tribunal for similar reasons, there’s no doubt about which side God is on.”²

So Don Benedetto reveals the solution to our cryptic puzzle: The divine power that fuels the very soul of the universe makes its appearance in the least expected ways.  Like the foreigner who serves as priest to a patriarch, Jesus came on the scene as a humble servant, washing the feet of others.  He said to his disciples, “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.”  The Power of Divinity shows up, as Don Benedetto suggested, in every act of mercy, of crying out against injustice, of opposing oppression and violence, and in the quietest and least noticed of acts of grace.

There was a newspaper story some time ago about a mother and her little daughter caught beneath the rubble of a collapsed building after an earthquake in Armenia.  It was terribly cold, and they were trapped under these huge slabs of concrete for a week.  The little girl got more and more thirsty, but there was no water.  So the mother found a broken piece of glass and cut her own finger, telling the child to suck the blood from the cut.  The girl was still thirsty and begged her mother, “Please Mama, cut another finger for me.”³  Well, they did survive and were eventually rescued, but it’s hard to let go of the cry of that little girl, asking her mother to cut another finger.  After the fact, doctors opinions were divided about whether the blood from her mother’s fingers actually saved the little girl’s life, but that misses the point.  The television broadcasts are likely in a situation like this to focus on the workers who spent a week digging through the rubble to get to these two, but when all the details come out, it’s clear that the mother’s quiet compassion, steadiness, and willingness to sacrifice are the real story.  It’s easy to pay attention to the hype and miss the real, common heroes in life.  It’s easy to look at leaders and celebrities in the media and discount the simple acts of love or the quiet voice of reconciliation that are reflections of divinity itself.  It’s easy to praise those in our own circle of familiar faces and stories and pass over the gentle face of a foreigner who may, if we yielded ourselves, serve as a priest of the Most High.

Like us, the disciples got all caught up in trying to figure out who’s winning and who’s losing.  Mark says they came to Jesus and implored, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.”  We love to watch the presidential debates and follow the latest polls to find out who’s on top, and vicariously, whether we’re among them.  But victory is not always what we expect it to be.  Jesus knew that.  He knew that what constitutes triumph in the eyes of the Lord is generally a far cry from what we usually pump our fists in the air over.  He said to his disciples, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.  But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.”  This is entirely contrary to the values of our world – the values of our culture.  All around us we hear the echoes of a society terrified of weakness and hungry for triumph.  The media posts and newspapers celebrate prosperity, the television promotes acquisition, our conversations around the dinner table are about achievement, our debates over the back yard fence are about how we measure success, and everyone wants to win.

Can you imagine how Jesus would do in the presidential election?  We want a leader who tells us how great and powerful we are, and how prosperous our lives can be, not one who calls us to sacrifice and servanthood.  Jesus has got the wrong message for our time.  His poll numbers would fall through the basement.  There’s no way he could adhere to the focus group generated talking points.  Dadgie caught a great line from Jim Wallace in an issue of Sojourners Magazine a while back.  He pointedly noted that, “Jesus didn’t say, ‘What you have done for the middle class, you have done for me.’”⁴

So who is Jesus?  He is a priest according to the order of Melkizedek.  It is an order that every tired, over-stressed, seemingly insignificant one of us is summoned to enlist in.  It is the order of a woman who bleeds to save her daughter’s life.  It is the order of a man who scrawls a revolutionary message on a wall in the middle of the night.  It is the order of one who foregoes the shady deal, or declines the opportunity to knife his coworker in the back – who stands on principle and sacrifices an opportunity for advancement or loses his job.  It is the order of a teenager who loses favor with friends for refusing to do drugs, or join in taunting an unpopular kid, or cheat on a test.  It’s the order of a nation that puts human rights above trade imbalances and oil prices, or principles of compassion and cooperation above pure national interests.  It’s the order of every lowly one of us who finally grasps what Jesus was trying to teach and live out among us, every one who chooses the difficult road, who lives in the great and proud tradition of an ancient, Canaanite priest-king, an alien, who offered what he had, and reflected in a simple gesture Divinity itself.

¹ Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine, Signet Classics, 2005, p. 222.

² op cit. p. 223.

³ John-Thor Dahlburg, Associated Press, December 29, 1988.

⁴ Jim Wallace, How to Choose a President, Sojourners Magazine, November, 2012, p. 15.

October 13, 2024

If You Have to Ask the Price, You Can’t Afford It

Jesus would never have made it as a church pastor.  By any estimation his ministry was a public relations disaster.  Church growth experts and media consultants agree on one simple rule for success: “Don’t give people what they don’t want.”  But Jesus was apparently not as savvy as the sound-bite wizards and church growth gurus of our day.

Along the road in his ministry, Jesus made a number of stops and committed a number of terrible gaffs.  For instance, the one that was recounted in the 14th Chapter of Luke, in which he was being pursued by great numbers of people, all excited about his power and potential.  And what did he do?  He “turned on” the crowd and came forth with this little gem to lead the six o’clock news: “If anyone comes after me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

George Buttrick, writing in the Interpreter’s Bible, says that Jesus’ words here were so stern that “the crowd was winnowed.”  If I had been on Jesus’ board of deacons, I would have begun to pull my hair out.

And this little beauty from today’s scripture reading:  A very wealthy man (obviously a fine prospect to get involved in the movement) came up to Jesus and expressed an earnest desire to get more involved.  He had been a virtuous and exemplary individual, keeping all the commandments,  and he was asking what more he could do to gain this “eternal life” that Jesus was talking about.  And what does Jesus do?  He scares him away by telling him (of all things) that it would cost him everything he owned!  He told him to give it all away!

At that point, Jesus’ board of trustees would have joined with the Stewards and started a movement to throw him out.

Of all the things to say!  To tell a prospective member with fine credentials and a sincere, intelligent question, that the cost of discipleship is so high that he can’t possibly afford it!  What in the world could he have been thinking?

George Frederick Watts has painted the sad shuffle of that young man as he walked away from Christ.  In the painting, all we see is his back.  He is stooped, as though carrying a heavy burden.

He came to Jesus unburdened by the plight of the poor, and left with the weight of the world on his shoulders.  He came to Jesus with a simple, careless question, and got more than he bargained for.  He came to Jesus confident of his righteousness, wanting to know the price of divine approval.  Jesus told him, in essence, “If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.”

I have a confession to make; I don’t like Jesus’ answer any more than did the man who walked away.  When I was little, I learned that putting my hand into the cookie jar meant getting a spanking, and doing the dishes meant being praised.  All my life I have believed that hard work and faithfulness counted for something.  If the divine realm is at all fair, there should be some kind of larger reward for those who commit themselves to larger devotion.  There is a difference between Adolf Hitler and Mother Theresa!  If there’s a heaven, she deserved to go there if anyone does; if there’s a hell, he deserved to go there if anyone does.  When I want to know what it takes to be counted among the good, I want to know!  Don’t tell me it’s impossible!

I see people who are good, and loving and faithful.  I can point them out, the ones who really have a way of knowing and caring about others, the ones who genuinely feel the hurts and respond to the needs of others, the ones who come through when the chips are down.  There are truly good people in this world.

And I know my own strengths and my own weaknesses.  I know how often I tend to be insensitive, to not hear, not think, not follow through.  I know that there are some things I can do well.  And what I want is to do them well enough!  I want to do the things I’m good at in such a way that they make up for the things I suck at.  And I only pray that those things are enough!

I want to make a mark with my life, because otherwise I might just come to the end of my days having lived without consequence!  And I can’t bear that – I can’t bear the possibility that I will end up just being a waste!

So don’t tell me there’s nothing I can do that’s enough!  Don’t tell me the price is far too high for me to pay it!  Don’t tell me that the search for personal worth and value is a waste of time!  Because then I’d have to walk away with a dagger in my heart, and the weight of the world on my shoulders.

Jesus shows no mercy to those of us who want desperately to be good enough.

In one way or another – in our church work, in our relationships, in our professions, in our community service – we keep trying to measure up.  We keep asking through our efforts the question: how much is enough?  And Jesus says simply: Trust me; you can’t afford it.

You can work your whole life to be the best person you can be.  You can wear yourself to death caring for others, making your mark, growing in strength of character, and you will never be enough!  You will never be good enough, you will never be kind enough, you will never be important enough, you will never be sincere enough.  There is no way out of this bad news about life – no way –

. . . except surrender – to surrender to the truth of your insufficiency, your inadequacy, your common lot with all others, your utter dependence on grace.  And, in the sort of irony that is always the Lord’s way with us, that’s enough.

That’s the simple truth of the well-known story of the prodigal son.  After trying his hardest to go it alone, after taking all the gifts he had been given, and letting them carry him as far as he could go, after crashing into the limitations of being human and weeping over his failure, he miraculously discovered that all he had to do was turn and say, “Here I am.”

Paul Hoon writes, “The God of the twelve basketsful also is the gratuitous God of Israel who leads the people into a land where they shall eat bread without scarceness and where all they have is multiplied.  He is the God of the Psalmist who speaks of a stream of living water, of a table prepared in the midst of one’s enemies, and of a cup that runneth over.  He is the God who . . . when [people] lack the wine of life’s joy, bids them – as Jesus in Galilee – ‘Fill the water pots,’ and ‘they filled them up to the brim.’  He is the God who does not merely run to welcome home the prodigal son but who does so much more than he needs to, who brings forth a robe and a fatted calf, and causes music to play.  He is the God who, even after [humanity has] forsaken and crucified him, yet prepares a breakfast of bread and fish on a lakeshore, and calls: ‘Come and dine’.”¹

Hoon has it right.  This is not “cheap grace.”  With apologies to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the gracious acceptance of abundant life is not merely “cheap,” it is absolutely free!

So, are loving and caring and contributing and trying pointless?  Hardly.  Grace simply means that we do these things not for any gain or benefit or merit, not because it will earn us something, not because our efforts will somehow finally allow us to measure up, but because by the grace of the ageless divine embrace, we are freed to love because he first loved us, we are freed to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, we are freed to rejoice in hope, to be patient in tribulation, to be constant in prayer, to contribute to the needs of the saints, to practice hospitality.

One of the great frustrations of life is that we only seem to get answers to the questions we ask.  And we waste a lot of time asking the wrong questions.  So long as we keep asking what must we do to be worthy, to be of value, we will continue to get the same answer Jesus gave the rich young man: If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, reflecting on his term on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, addressed those at a dinner held in his honor, “. . . what is to show for this half lifetime that has passed?” he said.  “I look into my book in which I keep a docket of the decisions of the full court which fall to me to write, and find about a thousand cases . . . many of them upon trifling or transitory matters, to represent nearly half a lifetime . . . Alas, gentlemen,” he said to those assembled, “that is life . . . We cannot live our dreams.  We are lucky enough if we can give a sample of our best, and if in our hearts we can feel it has been nobly done.”²  This, from one of the most distinguished jurists of all time.  The price of worthiness is indeed out of reach.

So, as the time approaches for our annual stewardship campaign, some of you, aware of our church’s great financial needs, may be wondering: how much should I give?  How much is enough?  Truth is, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.  I hope the board of trustees does not resign en masse if I give you a surprising answer.  The good news is this: the water of life, the wine of salvation, the milk of Divine loving kindness, these things are priceless!

The word of the Lord, from the prophet Isaiah:

“Ho, every one who thirsts,

come to the waters;

and he who has no money,

come, buy and eat!

Come, buy wine and milk

without money

and without price.”

¹ Paul Waitman Hoon, The Integrity of Worship: Ecumenical and Pastoral Studies in Liturgical Theology, Abingdon Press, 1971.

² Extract cited in J H Wootten, Creativity in the Law (1972).

October 6, 2024

Another Thing I Wish He Hadn’t Said

In last week’s sermon I dealt with some words of Jesus that I told you I wished he hadn’t said.  The truth is, there are a number of things that I stumble upon emanating from the lips of Jesus that I can hardly believe are coming out of his mouth.  I landed on another one these “things I wish he hadn’t said” in today’s reading from the gospel of Mark.

I have read these verses before — the ones about anyone who divorces and remarries being an adulterer — and usually I have just quickly kept reading.  Looking for something a little more uplifting and theologically or spiritually satisfying.  As most of you are well aware, I have been divorced and remarried, and I’m not particularly fond of what Jesus has to say on the subject.  In fact, I wish he hadn’t said it at all.

I suspect I’m not alone.  Howard Clark Kee, writing in the Interpreter’s Commentary on the Bible, talks about Matthew’s account of this saying of Jesus.  In Matthew, the words are a little different.  Jesus’ blanket condemnation of divorce and remarriage is softened a bit in the Matthew account.  Here, a person is given the right to divorce on the grounds of unchastity.  Kee sees this as a tinkering with the words by the early church.  He describes the more lenient account in Matthew as a “setting aside of the unconditional rejection of divorce and remarriage in Mark 10, which was surely the teaching of Jesus himself.  Matthew shows that the early church was not able to live by the radical demands of Jesus, but had instead to modify them — as it thought — practicable.”  If Kee is to be believed, folks have been having trouble swallowing these words of Jesus all the way back to when they were first written down.

It’s interesting to note, that, in the same book of commentary, Lindsey Pherigo, commenting on the Mark passage says almost the opposite – that “this account represents a Gentile Christian adaptation of Jesus’ original teaching . . . Matthew 19:9 more accurately represents Jesus . . .”  Apparently, neither commentator wants to claim these words, in the gospel they are dealing with, as the words of Jesus.  I bet there are a lot of folks who just plain wish he had never said this.

But, as much as I dislike this saying of Jesus, I have come to regard it as among the best of Biblical arguments in the debate about homosexuality and the church.  That statement obviously requires a little explaining.  So, here goes:

Whenever I hear someone quoting scripture to support their condemnation of gay and lesbian people, I tend to think I’m not hearing a reasoned scriptural position so much as a bit of proof-texting to support a deeply held personal feeling based on a strong cultural taboo.  But whenever the subject of homophobia comes up, what I hear from those anti-gay Christians is something like this: “Oh no, this isn’t about homophobia.  It’s purely a matter of being faithful to scripture.  The Bible says it’s an abomination, and that’s all there is to it.  I’ve met a lot of gay people; I’m not homophobic.  I just follow the Bible.”

The only problem with that argument is, well, this morning’s scripture reading.  If it’s all simply a matter of following scripture, then if folks are going to go into a rage about immorality and all those people who flaunt the moral laws of God, why is it I never hear them talk about this one?  I think they must kind of skip over it too, the way I’d like to, hoping nobody will notice.  Which is pretty wise for those among our more conservative brethren and sistren, since probably 40% of their constituents are divorced and remarried.  It’s one thing to stand up and rail against the evils of those kind of people, whoever they may be, but when you start saying such things about such a large percentage of your constituents it gets a little more dicey.

The point is, it was the Apostle Paul who said that “men [being] consumed with passion for one another” was “unnatural.”  Jesus never said a single word about homosexuality.  But it was Jesus himself who said that if a man divorces his wife and marries another he commits adultery!  I personally would put a lot more stock in the words of Jesus than in those of Paul – Paul, who also said that women should keep silent in church – Paul, who condoned slavery.  No, this condemnation of those who divorce and remarry comes from Jesus himself.  So, my point is this: if it’s not about homophobia, and it’s purely a matter of faithfulness to scripture, why aren’t the Southern Baptists throwing all those “remarrieds” out of the church.  I mean, here are people who are, according to Jesus, living in an adulterous relationship.  They are unrepentant.  And worse, they’re “flaunting” it!

I realize that all of this doesn’t do anything to get me off the hook.  As a divorced and remarried man, I’m still hanging out there dangling in front of these words of Jesus that I’d like him to take back.

There may be a few of you sitting out there who are thinking, “boy, this really is a problem.  I’m glad I’m not divorced and don’t have to think about it.”  Well, guess what, I’ve got a few for you to consider, too.

Do you think you might have ever said or done anything that may have been hurtful or a “stumbling block” to others — particularly children?  Have you ever said anything like, “Johnny, what’s wrong with you?  Why did you do such a stupid thing?”  Or, strike out at a child in anger, unintentionally communicating that he or she is of lesser value or unacceptable?  Have you ever wondered if such brief thoughtless moments have had any cumulative negative impact on them?

Listen to what Jesus said about that: “Stumbling blocks are sure to come, but woe to him by whom they come!  It would be better for him if a millstone were hung round his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to stumble.”  Welcome to the club.

Jesus had some very harsh language for any of us who may have felt we had sufficient justification for anger at our parents.  He administered a scathing blow to those who soften the commandment to honor one’s father and mother.  He shouted at them, and called them hypocrites!

And when I read through the rest of scripture, I find things like Paul saying that those who are immoral or idolators, or greedy will not inherit the kingdom of God.  What does that say about every one of us sitting in this room — every person who has grown up in America, a nation built and flourishing on the primacy of greed, and the idolatry of power, wealth, youth, and possessions.

And if I haven’t hit you yet with one you’re guilty of, trust me, I could stand up here for the next hour quoting scripture, and sooner or later, I’d getcha.

Now, I realize, you may be thinking that I just shifted the focus again, because I didn’t want to keep dealing with this saying of Jesus about divorce.  It hits a little too close to home.  Maybe it’s true.  I have to confess, of all the sins I find listed, and all the commandments, and rules and restrictions, I find myself reading this one from Jesus, and just wishing he hadn’t said it.

Well, I have some bad news.  Try as I might, I haven’t found any way around these words of Jesus.  I haven’t been able to do the exegetical shell game of Mr. Kee and Mr. Pherigo, and say that the words in Matthew aren’t the original words of Jesus, so they don’t count, and coincidentally, the words in Mark aren’t either.  I’m afraid I’m stuck with Jesus’ condemnation.  And, I’m sorry to say, so are you — stuck with whatever it is in this book that you are guilty of.

Now, I realize preachers aren’t supposed to be hitting people over the head with the Bible in this age of enlightened positive thinking.  We’re all supposed to feel good about ourselves.  We’re supposed to stand in front of the mirror every morning, and say, “I’m capable.  I’m creative.  I’m competent.  I’m a winner!”  And church is not supposed to be a place where we have all our positive self-image ripped to shreds.  Someone told me once that one of the terrible things he remembers about the church of his youth is how he walked out of church every Sunday feeling like he had been beat up.  Nobody likes that.  In fact, I agree!  I don’t want to walk out feeling like I’ve just beat up on myself!  But I still can’t just ignore these words of Jesus, and pretend he didn’t say them.

So what’s the point?  Simply this: I have only one plea: guilty as charged.  But at least I’m not alone.  So do you.  That puts every last one of us in a kind of club together — or a family.  It’s a family of sinners.  It’s a club for everyone who stands guilty — convicted.  And that’s all of us.  And we are bound together in that family, as William Sloan Coffin said, because of our “. . . inability to separate ourselves from each other through judgement.  And that is no mean bond.”

You see, the more I read scripture, the more convinced I become that there is an evil that transcends the evil of divorce and remarriage, or the evil of adultery, or the evil of failing to honor father and mother, or the evil of causing a child to stumble, or the evil of greed, or the evil of idolatry.  When I read the teachings of Jesus, I realize that he saved his most devastating and scathing words for those who separated themselves from others through judgement.  He said, “Judge not, lest you yourself be judged.”  He said, “Take the log out of your own eye, before commenting on the speck in your neighbor’s eye.”  And for their hypocrisy and self-righteous judgments, he called the Pharisees a bunch of snakes!

I think the teachings of Jesus and the words of scripture are not intended to leave us feeling self-satisfied.  I think the point is we’re supposed to feel just a little beat-up.  We’re supposed to be right there with the disciples when they find their heads spinning from it all and finally say to Jesus, “Then who can be saved?”  We’re supposed to be right there, so that we can be ready to receive his answer, “With God, all things are possible.”  We’re supposed to know our need of grace, so that we can stand shoulder to shoulder with all of our fellow human beings under the shelter of that same grace.

Loren Eisley, the great naturalist writer, told of coming upon a remarkable sight one afternoon while on one of his excursions in a barren desert valley in the western United States.  A huge blacksnake had coiled itself around a hen pheasant.  The bird was struggling to free herself.  Eisley watched for a moment and saw the “bloodshot glaze” deepen in the bird’s eyes, but finally knew he had to intervene.  He describes how he arbitrated the matter:

“I unwound the serpent from the bird and let him hiss and wrap his battered coils around my arm.  The bird, her wings flung out, rocked on her legs and gasped repeatedly.  I moved away in order not to drive her farther from her nest.  Thus the serpent and I, two terrible and feared beings, passed quickly out of view.

“Over the next ridge, where he could do no more damage, I let the snake, whose anger had subsided, slowly uncoil and slither from my arm. . . . which throbbed from his expert constriction.  The bird had contended for birds against the oncoming future; the serpent writhing into the bunch grass had contended just as desperately for serpents.  And I, the apparition in that valley — for what had I contended? — I who contained the serpent and the bird and who read the past long written in their bodies. . . . I had struggled, I am now convinced, for a greater, more comprehensive version of myself.”

Eisley made a great discovery by holding the bird and the snake — containing them within his experience in an instinctive act of grace.  He knew himself to be as mortal and struggling as they, and so shared his life with them for a brief moment, and found his own world was made larger.

That’s what grace always does.  It allows us to touch one another, hold one another, contain within ourselves something of each other’s life.  Because it is only when we know ourselves to be equally mortal and equally in need, together breathing the same fresh air of Divine infinite love and forgiveness, that we can truly enter into each other’s experience.

And for what?  Perhaps, in Eisley’s words, “for a greater, more comprehensive version of ourselves.”

September 29, 2024

Prophets All

I feel compelled to offer a disclaimer at the outset.  The plain truth is, I don’t like the message I am about to deliver today.  This is a sermon being preached to the preacher, and it makes me uncomfortable.   Jesus said a lot of things that I wish he hadn’t, and this is one of them: “Whoever is not against us is for us.”  The implications of that are staggering, and the end result doesn’t set well with my basic make-up.  Now that I’ve got that off my chest, let’s get on with it.

Before explaining all that, I think I need to back up and talk about the way things would be in the world, and in the church, if I were in charge.  First of all, if I ran the show, people would be rational.  Nobody would cut me off on the highway, and if I wanted to move over in front of someone, they would slow down and let me in.  Everyone would have a clear sense of appropriate boundaries.  People would stick to their own turf, and not interfere in mine.  Now, that just all seems to make sense, doesn’t it?  For instance, take those who choose to believe in a strict code of moralism.  That’s fine with me, but if the world worked the way I wanted it to, they wouldn’t be allowed to try to influence public policy with their moralism – while those of us with more moderate, and more reasonable approaches, would of course have tremendous influence on public policy.  And, by the way, things would be a far sight different in church, too.  If I were in charge, I’d be in charge.  People would do things my way.  Important issues I’d get to decide, and the insignificant and tedious stuff other people would take care of.  That’s what I mean – everyone would know their place.  It would all be so reasonable.

That’s why I started to have trouble right off the bat when I read this passage from the book of Numbers.  The Lord God gives a commandment to Moses.  Now, the Bible makes it clear that God really is in charge.  And a commandment from God is – well – a commandment from God.  So God told Moses to get all the officers and elders together at the tent.  And when Moses did this, scripture says the Spirit of God came and “rested” on all of them.  Now that’s a beautiful thing.  I love it when a plan comes together.

But here’s the catch.  These two guys, Eldad and Medad, didn’t go to the tent.  They stayed in the camp.  Now, they were bona fide, registered, card-carrying elders and everything, but they didn’t follow orders.  So the Spirit of God came and rested on them right there in the camp.  Some of the folks got wind of this and were understandably upset.  All the elders were supposed to gather at the tent.  The Spirit of God thing was supposed to happen there, and these guys were in the wrong darned place!  Now, here they were prophesying and doing their thing just like the elders who did what they were told.  Joshua is my kind of guy.  He spoke right up.  He said to Moses, “Stop these guys!”

I’m with Joshua.  These fellas were breaking the rules.  And not just Moses’ rules.  These were the Lord God Almighty’s rules!  It was God who said, “all elders are to be at the tent.”  They weren’t at the tent.  So how does Moses deal with these rule-breakers?  He says to Joshua: “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit on them!”

Now, if you’ll pardon me, that stinks.  Moses just changed the rules in the middle of the game.  He told all the elders to get to the tent.  And when these two didn’t do what they were told, and got the Spirt poured out on them in the wrong place, Moses just said, “wouldn’t it be great if all the people were like them!”

Now, here’s what really burns me.  As if all that weren’t bad enough, Jesus takes the whole thing even farther.  When some guy started going around casting out demons in Jesus name, John tried to put a stop to it.  Understandably.  This clown was not one of the disciples.  He hadn’t been part of the crowd, probably hadn’t ever even met Jesus.  He didn’t have the proper authorization – no credentials – no seminary education – no Clinical Pastoral Education – no Ministers’ Council membership card!  Just who did he think he was?  And how did Jesus deal with this crisis?  He told them to leave the guy alone – let him keep it up!  And he tops it off with this beauty: “Whoever is not against us is for us.”

Excuse me?  Do you have any idea what the ramifications of that statement are?  It means that the distinctions among us get awfully blurry. It means the apathetic and uninvolved are part of the good guys.  Now, that really burns my beans.  Jesus doesn’t even seem to understand how things work.  In my tidy little world where people act reasonably, the rule is that those who opt out, who become indifferent, who put on a cheap show that’s “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” are playing for the wrong team.  The rule is: non-involvement and carelessness are just as bad as active opposition.  The rule is: whoever is not for us is against us.  Just listen to our country’s historic leaders – either you’re a supporter of the United States and whatever war we are in at the time, or you’re an enemy of freedom.  Jesus has got it all turned around.  He obviously just doesn’t get it.

Here’s my problem: If you listen to Moses and Jesus, you get the idea that there aren’t really hardly any rules at all.  It sounds like they’re saying that so long as it turns out OK, it doesn’t matter if you do what you’re told, or wear the right uniform.  It sounds a lot like situational ethics to me.

Well, as much as I like my world to be tidy, I’m starting to wonder if Moses and Jesus were onto something.  We live in an increasingly, sharply divided world.  The middle ground seems to be disappearing faster than Florida’s coastal wetlands.  There are hardly any purple states in America.  They are mostly only red and blue.  No one is allowed to support a reasonable compromise for the Israel/Hamas crisis.  You are either in for the long, bloody haul, or you’re a cut-and-run coward.  There’s no place in the lexicon for sincere believers who question authority, and sometimes even question their faith, you’re either a raging fundamentalist, or you’re part of the atheist, liberal elite.  Most frightening of all, there’s less and less ground to stand on for those of us who see the Spirit of Divine power at work in all times, and all lands, and all hearts.  Vast numbers of people in this world are being drawn to see their own faith (be it Muslim, Christian, or Jewish) as the exclusive abode of God’s promise, and those of all other faiths as infidels, terrorists, or hate-mongers.

Increasingly, our beliefs and actions are prescribed and proscribed by those who assume authority, be it political, ecclesiastical, or ideological.  And growing numbers of hot-blooded and hot-headed supporters are blindly following their pronouncements.

It’s a very dangerous world.  And maybe, just maybe, what we need is someone taking a sledgehammer to our rules, mucking up the fine, sharp lines we draw between ourselves, and scattering power around among the powerless like Johnny Appleseed planted trees.

That’s a bit of what is being suggested in these scripture passages.  I mean, once you let the Spirit have free reign to just do whatever the heck seems good in any given situation, you have anarchy.   And maybe, just maybe, we need a pinch of anarchy these days.  Maybe just enough to remind us of our common humanity, and our shared frailties.

I’d like everyone to be like me, and see the world the way I see it.  And when I look around and see other kinds of Christians (Catholics and other Protestants, fundamentalists and evangelicals), and when I see people of other faiths (Jews, and Muslims, and Buddhists) growing in power and getting all excited about their faith, it makes me a bit uncomfortable.  I start to worry that maybe they’ll just take over, and I’ll become obsolete.  It’s like the Spirit isn’t paying any attention to the boxes I’d like to put it in.  And I confess, it makes me nervous.

But when we conceive of the power of that Spirit being loosed in people of faith all over the globe to build a new spirit of love and truth, it’s a pretty darned impressive vision.  Isn’t it?

I’d like my world to be tidy, predictable and reasonable.  The way to make a world tidy, predictable and reasonable, is to have very clear rules, and make sure everyone follows them.  And mostly those rules have to do with ensuring that I can get my way to the greatest degree that fairness allows. It’s as simple as that.  But the more I read the Bible, the more I get the idea that the Spirit of the Lord has a little anarchy in its system.  The more I read the Bible, the more I get the feeling that that Spirit doesn’t like rules so much as faithfulness and results.  The more I read the Bible, the more I get the notion that the Lord of Life wants every single person to be empowered to speak life-changing words, come up with world-shattering ideas, and turn things upside down.

I’m not real happy with it, because it makes my life a whole lot more complicated.  But I have to admit, in my best of moments, I sit back and simply shake my head in awe at those who claim the power to live out and act out a vision that the Spirit has given them. In my best of moments, I marvel at the rebirth of faith that I see around the globe, from third world countries, to Asia, to Dallas, to Boston.  In my best of moments I forget about the rules I’d like to see put in place, and the world the way I’d like it to work, and I say, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit on them!”

September 22, 2024

Making Your Mark

There may be some of you out there who don’t know that I’ve written a book.  I say that some of you may not know about it, because I’ve certainly done my best to get the word out.  I bring it up whenever I can.  You see, I don’t want anyone to know about this, but I’m actually quite proud that I’ve written a book.  I’ve become quite expert at finding ways to subtly work it into a conversation.  For instance, someone may be discussing the economy or the weather, and I very adroitly say, “Did you know that I’ve written a book?”  This is not just vanity, mind you.  Well, it’s not entirely vanity.  Actually, it may be mostly vanity.  Ok, it’s vanity.

I wrote the book for a lot of reasons.  First and foremost, I guess, it’s because I had a bunch of things inside that I wanted to say.  I didn’t even care much at first if it ever got published.  I just had to get some of this stuff down on paper.  I know I’ll never be the writer that Nowell is, but it wasn’t long before it became clear to me that a major part of doing this thing was that I wanted to leave something behind that was important – you know, when I’m gone.  It was Ben Franklin who said, “If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.” Well, that’s the real hook – when you start to think that maybe you’re going to write that book that becomes a classic and changes lives, and somehow you’ll find your place in history because you’ve made such a significant contribution to the library of human consciousness.  Not that I have delusions of grandeur or anything.  Well, maybe a few.  Ok, I’m delusional.

Wouldn’t we all love to find a way to “make our mark” on the world?  With the elections coming up, I think of all those people who have chosen to run for office across our land, from town councilors to US Senators to candidates for the Presidency.  And it strikes me how these are not extraordinary or superhuman beings; they’re real live people who have, at some point in their lives, made a decision to step forward and try to make a difference.  There are certainly those who are trying to make a mark in the world and going about it in the wrong way – Vladimir Putin and Nicolás Maduro among them (not to mention a few political leaders in our own country).  But for every public figure who is using his position to exercise his dysfunctions, there are a dozen more, I’m convinced, who are genuinely doing their best to have a positive influence in the world.  I think at some level we all hunger to have just a little of that feeling.

OK, so maybe I’m not going to write the book that makes the New York Times best seller list and alters the course of human history, but I’d like to at least leave something behind.  Maybe someone, a hundred and fifty years from now, will pick up a dusty copy of my book in a yard sale and read it, and it’ll be meaningful to them, and something I did will survive in some small way into the future.  Maybe you won’t become President, but you’d like to stand for something that matters, and try to be part of improving society just a little (or perhaps even one little corner of it), so that your influence will outlive you.  Maybe you won’t command armies and have nations rallying to your side, but you’d like to be in charge of something – a working group, or a committee – or at least have someone listen to you, and feel that your opinion carries some significance.   Even if it’s just vicariously, we’d like to be part of a team that wins the World Series or the Super Bowl, or to be part of the nation that is, as many of us are fond of saying, “the greatest country in the world.”  In one way or another, most of us would like to “make our mark.”

So, when we read about the disciples of Jesus arguing on the road about who was going to be named “disciple emeritus”, and who was going to get their book published, it’s a cinch to walk along beside them and join the fray.  That’s where you and I fit in this story.  Maybe we’re not quite as blatant about it as they were (actually arguing over who will be the greatest), but we have our own ways of competing for prominence, or position, or just trying to be memorable.

I picture Jesus being almost amused as he overheard the disciples arguing and jockeying for position.  I picture him being almost amused when you and I yearn to “make our mark” in the world.  He said, “‘Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.’  Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking the little one in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’”  It seems that there is a different ledger in which the true marks of our worth are made.  It is the Lord Almighty who pays attention to our greatness and validates it.  But that greatness in the eyes of the Lord has nothing to do with being prominent citizens, getting books published, or even having opinions that get listened to.  The enduring marks that we leave in the Divine register are things like helping and serving another person, visiting a lonely soul to bring a word of hope, welcoming a little child into our midst, and taking time to listen to her story with eager ears.  These are the marks of greatness that assure us a place in the noblest of histories.  These are the shining record of our existence that outlive the sun and the stars.

William Willimon, the theology guru at Duke University, tells of learning something about being the least and the greatest.  He says, “While in seminary, I learned of the death of an uncle who was killed in a crash while flying his private plane.  Being near my aunt’s home, I was summoned by my family to go to her side and to minister to her in her grief.

“Though a young seminarian, I had received some training in pastoral care and thought I might be able to bring some comfort to her and the family.  I had handled similar situations while serving as a pastoral intern the year before.

“My aunt has a son who is mentally retarded and was about ten years old at the time – Joey, we called him.  He didn’t understand fully what had happened to his father, but he saw his mother’s grief and felt instinctively the need to reach out in some way to comfort her.  In his room Joey took out a few crayons and a sheet of paper.  he drew her a picture.  It wasn’t very well done, but Joey put his best into it and you could easily tell what it was meant to depict.  In the picture were three objects: an airplane, a rainbow, and a cross.  Joey took the gift to his mother and said, ‘Here, Mama.  I made this for you.’  Then he went back to his room.”

Willimon says, “Even in my relative inexperience in pastoral matters, I had the good sense not to try to wax theologically about what had happened.”  Joey had said all that needed to be said.

You and I are not asked to be brilliant.  We are not expected to become world leaders.  We are not called to be bright or articulate or witty or charming.  We are not encouraged to win, or to achieve great things, or create monuments to ourselves.  We are given with this great gift of life a simple opportunity to serve others, and welcome children, and open our hearts in love, and thereby be acknowledged for the only kind of greatness that truly matters in this world.

I’ve seen you out there.  You’ve stopped into the church when you thought no one was around so you could take care of some little problem, or clean up a mess so someone else wouldn’t have to.  It’s been noticed.  When you’ve offered a word of encouragement to someone who needed a boost, you’ve been overheard.  You’ve been found out.  That special mission you’ve quietly supported, the child you took time to listen to, the cause you fought for, the loving energy you put in to that committee project – it hasn’t gone entirely unseen.

Don McCullough relates a wonderful story about Winston Churchill: “During World War II, England needed to increase its production of coal. Winston Churchill called together labor leaders to enlist their support. At the end of his presentation he asked them to picture in their minds a parade which he knew would be held in Picadilly Circus after the war. ‘First,’ he said, ‘would come the sailors who had kept the vital sea lanes open. Then would come the soldiers who had come home from Dunkirk and then gone on to defeat Rommel in Africa. Then would come the pilots who had driven the Luftwaffe from the sky.

“‘Last of all,’ he said, ‘would come a long line of sweat-stained, soot-streaked men in miner’s caps. Someone would cry from the crowd, ‘And where were you during the critical days of our struggle?’ And from ten thousand throats would come the answer, ‘We were deep in the earth with our faces to the coal.’’”¹

My message this morning is this: those gallant ones among you who are striving not for recognition, who are giving yourselves to others daily in service and love, who are “deep in the earth with your faces to the coal” are the truly great ones among us, and you will leave your mark.

¹Don McCullough, Waking from the American Dream