Scripture:  John 15:12-15

A couple questions for you this morning.  The first:  how many friends do you have?  Have you ever stopped to wonder?  Have you ever counted them all?  That was something we used to do when we were kids, you know—count our friends.  If you did that, maybe you even put them into columns:  best friends, second-best friends, third-best friends, and so on…  When’s the last time you stopped to actually count them? 

 A couple years ago a woman named Dr. Robin Dunbar conducted a study and determined that you probably have about 150.  Her extensive research of social networks and their relationship to the size of a mammal’s cerebral cortex led her to hypothesize that roughly 150 relationships is all that a human brain can handle.

 The research suggests that when our number of friends exceeds 150, tends to fall apart.  Why?  Our mammalian brains just aren’t big enough!  150 is about the number of true friends we can really have, which leads me to my next question.  How many friends to you have on Facebook?  [1]

 Maybe you’re really into Facebook and maybe you’re not.  Maybe you could care less about being on Facebook, but this past week you had $45 burning a hole in your stock portfolio and you had to jump in.  As of this month, Facebook has over 900 million users.  That means that roughly one out of every eight people on the planet is using Facebook. 

 Back when I was in Texas in ministry with college students, I was a Facebook hold-out.  I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.  And then I was talking to a group of students who all said the same thing—that every morning when they got up, the first thing they did—before brushing their teeth, before breakfast, and even before checking email—the first thing they did was check their Facebook page.  I realized then that if I wanted to be in touch with them—if I wanted to get an online message to them—I needed to get on Facebook. 

As a writer on Forbes’ website succinctly put it Friday night, “To those that said social media was a fad, Facebook is now accepting your apologies.” [2]

Thanks to Facebook, “friend” is now a verb.  On Facebook, it’s what you do—you friend another person, and with his or her acceptance, the two of you become happy Facebook friends.  Having friended each other, you can now view each other’s photos, write on each other’s walls, and share endless inane details about your lives with each other through status updates.  For example, on Facebook you can tell all your online friends that last night you fell asleep on the sofa watching Seinfeld reruns with a bowl of melting ice cream perched on your chest.  That’s the kind of hard-hitting, up-to-the-minute news journalism we’ve come to expect from some of our Facebook friends, which brings me to another new verb in the English lexicon—“unfriend.”  Just as easily as you can friend someone on Facebook, you can unfriend that person too with the simple click of a button.

A friend of mine recently mused, “In 2012, when you ‘follow’ people on Twitter and you ‘friend’ people on Facebook, what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus Christ, and what does it mean that Jesus would call us friends?”  [3]  To be sure, things like Facebook come with a blessing and a cost.  The blessing, I suppose, is that we can be connected and it’s so easy.  Your cousin who lives in Juneau?  You’re connected.  Your daughter who moved away to Borneo?  You’re connected.  The kid who sat behind you in third grade?  You’re connected if you want to be.  It’s easy! 

So what’s the cost?  Well, the cost—if this makes any sense—is that it’s too easy.  Through things like Facebook, we gain access to each other’s lives and it costs us almost nothing—we don’t have to work for it at all.  The cost is that it’s too easy.  We don’t have to work to be in touch with each other.  We don’t have to try, we don’t have to exert ourselves, we don’t have to be conscious of each other in such a way as to make time, commit time, take time, and actually be with each other, face to face, or even on the phone—to reach out to each other and be together. 

In an age when we friend people on Facebook, what does it mean that Jesus calls us friends?  I wonder if the 800 billion of us who use Facebook have grown accustomed to friendship as a less invasive, less demanding, less up-close-and-personal enterprise.

In our passage from John’s gospel this morning, Jesus “friends” the disciples, and make no mistake, he demands more than their casual acquaintance.   “Here’s what friendship with me looks like,” says Jesus, “not that you asked, but I’m telling you:  First, you love one another, as I have loved you.  It’s not enough to be my friend, you have to love each other too.  Second, you are my friends if you do what I command you to do.  I’m just saying this up front.  Third (and this is just a small thing, really) lay down your lives for me and for each other.  No one has greater love than this, than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 

That’s quite a friend request, isn’t it?  “Love one another as I have loved you, do whatever I command you, and lay down your lives for your friends.”  At least Jesus is clear, right?  At least he doesn’t act all casual and make it sound like friendship is always going to be fun, always going to be easy, always going to be, well, user-friendly.  At least Jesus puts all his cards on the table when he sends you his friend request and the Facebook window pops up on your screen:   “Would you like to confirm your friendship with Jesus Christ?”

Would you?  Now that you know what the stakes are, I mean.  Now that you now that Jesus doesn’t just want to know you.  He doesn’t just want you on his list, and he doesn’t just want to be on yours either.  Now that you know that Jesus could care less about small talk or about what anybody else thinks—now that you know that friending Jesus means radical love, radical obedience, and even laying down your life for others…  would you like to confirm your friendship with Jesus Christ?

With the disciples, Jesus said, “I do not call you servants any longer, but I call you friends,” and I wonder if they didn’t feel something shift inside of them—if Christ’s invitation didn’t stir something deep within and if they didn’t begin to see their own lives differently.  Friendship will do that to a person, won’t it?  It’ll make you see yourself differently—to think in new ways about your life, your purpose, and your potential. 

It’s been a real joy to be with our confirmation class this year, to grown in friendship with them,  and to wonder with them about what it means to have a relationship, a friendship, with Christ.  I give thanks to my colleague Nikki Blanks and to Molly Hall and Brooke Eisner who have also led the class.  Our six students this year have met the confirmation experience with great insight and wisdom beyond their years. 

In a little while we will join our voices in an affirmation of faith which was written by our confirmands.  In fact, it’s a sampling of their own statements of faith and I predict now that it will be a powerful tool in shaping your own sense of belief.  [4]

The blessing and the challenge that I would share this morning with our confirmation students, and by extension with all of you, is this:  Christ invites us all into deep friendship with God and with one another.  Not satisfied as a casual acquaintance or as a friend-of-a-friend,  Christ invites you, always, into deep friendship.  And in this friendship, the expectations are clear. 

First, you’ve got to love.  Love God, love others, love yourself.  Love the people who are easy and fun to love.  Love the people who you know will love you in return.  And love the people who are hard to love—even the ones who make friendship difficult, even the ones you may be tempted to call “enemy.”  Love, that’s the first thing.  To be a friend with Jesus, you need to love.

And two.  Do what Jesus commands.  We tend to not build our friendships around such demands these days.  We tend not to say that any friendship hinges on our obedience.  But Jesus is firm:  “You are my friends if you do what I command.”  Some of this goes back to love. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.  But think of some of Jesus’ other commands…Forgive everyone.  End disputes quickly.  Whatever causes you to sin, get rid of it.  Do not return evil for evil.  Don’t worry about material things.  Don’t worry about the future.  Do not judge.  Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, comfort those in distress.  Welcome the little children in your midst.   Be merciful.  As friends of Christ, we are called to do what Christ commands.

And three.  As Christ’s friends, we’re called to lay down our lives for each other.  Maybe you think you’ve never seen anybody do that, but I have, and you have too.  I’ve been in this church long enough to see you weep with each other, to accompany each other through the dark valley, to stick with each other through thick and thin.  That’s friendship, isn’t it? 

When Christ commands us to lay down our lives for each other, he creates for us a window through which we can see his own passionate heart for the world.  For Jesus, every part of this world was worth dying for, because God loved it all.  And Jesus wishes for us that same compassionate perspective. 

This morning I’ve asked Mark Paffrath to play one of my very favorite songs.  It’s called “You’ve Got a Friend,” by James Taylor.  Maybe you know this song.  I wonder if it’s a little old for our 8^th grade confirmands.  Old or new, I’d invite you all to hear it for the first time, and imagine something this time.  Imagine that it’s the voice of Christ—the one who constantly looks to call you friend.

1.  For this opening thought I am indebted to Rev. Derek Starr Redwine and his sermon “Friending,” preached at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Akron, OH on May 6, 2012.  You can read the interview with Dr. Dunbar here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/mar/14/my-bright-idea-robin-dunbar

2.  From the blog of Simon Mainwaring.  http://www.forbes.com/sites/simonmainwaring/2012/05/18/10-reflections-on-facebooks-ipo/

3.  The Rev. Mark Ramsey asked this question in “With a Friend Like This…” a sermon preached at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church on May 13, 2012. 

4.  This Affirmation of Faith consists solely of lines lifted from our eighth grade confirmands’ own statements of faith. 

I believe that God is the almighty Creator.  He is the guide to our futures, our reminder of the past, and the energy of the present—the one and only omnipotent and omniscient being that is, has been, and ever will be.  I believe God helps me through when I am sad.  I believe God helps me when I am confused.  I believe that God had one son, Jesus, who was created to spread God’s Word and prove his existence through miracles.  The spirit of God and Jesus is the Holy Spirit of all that is right and good, the unwavering Spirit.  Having a relationship with God means that you’re living—that you have a clear mind of what you’re doing and want to do—that you’re not living in the abyss, in utter darkness and despair.  

Church is a place where you can go to grieve and celebrate.  It is a place to be happy and sad.  To me, Church is people and not a building, and the people help me to understand God more.  I believe that God knows I have many questions that need to be answered and it might not always be the way I want it.  I believe that god wants me to live out my faith to its fullest extent.  I also believe that God wants me to share my talents with the world, accept others’ gifts, and be myself and proud of it.  Everything I do is to please God and to live out my life as a Christian and dedicate myself to God. 

* A big thank you to Zachary Higgs, who designed our bulletin cover for Confirmation Sunday! 

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Scripture Reference:  John 15:9-17

Someone asked me this week what we were doing for Mother’s Day.  In church, I mean.  What was I doing for Mother’s Day in worship?  I responded that every year, in some way, big or small, I make it a point to acknowledge Mother’s Day within the context of the service.  But we don’t call it “Mother’s Day Worship” I said.  After all, Mother’s Day isn’t really a Christian holy day, though for many it is a holiday.  And in reality, I said, the arrival of Mother’s Day each year brings a mixture of emotions to the family of faith.

 Some of us enjoy the chance to spend time with our mothers—take them out to lunch, go for a walk, or at least spend some time on the phone.  Some of us struggle to maintain healthy relationships with our mothers, and so Mother’s Day arrives with uneasy feelings, perhaps—regret, guilt, frustration…  Some women in our lives treasure the opportunity they have to be mothers and to be grandmothers. Others among us have lost children or found they couldn’t have children, and so Mother’s Day comes with a sting—a painful reminder of something that could not be or is no longer.  We remember those among us, too, who are caring for their mothers, making difficult decisions, holding their hands through visits with doctors, trying, struggling to do what’s best for everyone and what’s right for mom.  Mother’s Day comes and we pray for those giving care to their mothers.

So it’s not easy.  “Mother’s Day Worship,” I mean.  Because Mother’s Day comes just like most other Sundays do—jumping from the calendar into our lives with all that makes us so wonderfully and tragically human:  intimacy and estrangement, companionship and hardship, joy and loss…  So back to the question:  What do you do for Mother’s Day in worship?  (Sometimes you get into trouble with you ask a pastor a simple question.)  But here’s my answer.  I honor and affirm those who, through birth, adoption, and foster care, find themselves as mothers and grandmothers in this world.  And I honor women I know who have struggled through miscarriage, disappointment, and loss in their quest to be mothers.  I celebrate mothering today and all the ways that we all tend to mother each other in our lives.  And I choose to celebrate women I know who have made a conscious decision to not have children.  I affirm that choice and include them in my thanksgiving.

If anything, the presence of a Mother’s Day reminds us that life does not come to us as one-size-fits-all.  In our experiences of mothering or being mothered we assemble today in a symphony of varied life experience and I pause to acknowledge it all—to say to you that whatever you feel about Mother’s Day is worth affirmation.  As my mom used to say to me, “Trust your feelings, because your feelings, at least, will always tell you the truth about how you feel.” 

Would that we could all embody the best advice our parents ever gave us.  I sometimes wonder what my own children will remember me saying, and I hope it’s wiser and more eloquent than the things I actually do find myself repeating.  “Apologize to your sister!”  That’s one that keeps coming up for some strange reason in our home.  “You go back in there and before you do anything, you need to say you’re sorry.”  Have you ever said that to a child?  Say you’re sorry? 

Lately Karla and I have actually established a moratorium on telling our girls to say they’re sorry—our thinking being that we don’t want them to think that all they have to do to get out of trouble is say they’re sorry. 

What do we want?  Well… we want them to be sorry of course!  We want them to be sorry—to be so sorry that they break down and confess to their sister how terribly sorry they are and out of that sorrow to commit themselves to never doing whatever they were doing again!  Dream on, right?  Have you ever tried to command someone to be sorry?  It’s somewhere between telling them to say they’re sorry and laying on a giant guilt trip. 

I bring this up because I wonder if Jesus didn’t say something similar to his disciples.  “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”  We’ve heard that so many times maybe we’ve stopped questioning it.  I mean, of course Jesus would command his followers to love each other.  But have you ever tried to command someone to love someone else?  Did it work?  We should try that at home, I guess.  “Love your sister! You go right back in that room and before you do anything, you need to love your sister this instant!” 

Love doesn’t work that way, does it?  Not really.  Love can be tricky that way.  A Jesuit Priest, Anthony de Mello, once described a brief teaching conversation between a student and a teacher. The student asked the teacher, “What is love?”  The teacher replied, “The total absence of fear.”  The student said, “What is it we fear?”  And the teacher said, “Love!”  It makes me wonder—can we be commanded to love?

And of course, Jesus was talking about agape love.  Agape is one of the Greek words for love and it means loving with the kind of love that God has for us.  Agape love is a cherishing and loving with a pure, selfless love.  It’s the love we see in John 3:16 – For God so loved the world...  That’s “agape” love—For God so cherished and delighted in the world with pure, selfless love…

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says, “Love your enemies.”  Part of the reason this teaching was so challenging was that Jesus was talking about “agape” love.  Jesus wasn’t just saying “Love your enemies.”  He was saying “Agape your enemies.  Cherish your enemies and love them with a pure, selfless love.”

In our reading today, Jesus refers to “agape love.”  Pure, unadulterated love.  The kind of love that God has for us.  “Love one another as I have loved you... Cherish each other, take delight in each other, love each other with a pure, selfless love.”  And this does not come as Jesus’ suggestion or as Christ’s “wise words for living,” but rather as a commandment:  agape-love one another as I have agape-loved you.

So, what was the sermon about today?  Love.  We’re supposed to love each other.  I want to acknowledge, though, that it’s not easy—that in reality Christ’s command to love with agape love is hard work if we take it seriously.  So I’d like to share two things to be mindful of as we strive to be faithful to Christ’s commandment.

First, agape love takes time. Agape love is proven in action, and not just once, but over and over, time and time again.  Agape love is a love proven in repetitive action. 

You may be familiar with one of Malcolm Gladwell’s more recent books, Outliers.  In it, Gladwell examines the ingredients that might make one person more or less successful than another.  One of his recurrent themes in the book is the “10,000-Hour Rule,” which basically states that in order to be really good at something, you have to do it for at least 10,000 hours. 

The Beatles, for example, didn’t magically materialize in London with amazing talent as a band.  Before coming to London, they played over 1,200 live shows in Hamburg, Germany between 1960 and 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time.  Similarly, in 1968, at the age of 13, Bill Gates was able to gain access to a computer in his high school, and by the time he finished college he had spent more than 10,000 hours programming. 

I think about people we know here.  How many hours do you think Jerry Buck has spent playing that organ?  With 42 years as our organist, at least 10,000.  What about Mark on the guitar, Fumi or Alejandro on the piano?  At least one of the tools for success isn’t complicated, Gladwell claims.  It’s time.  Lots of it.  With 10,000 hours of practice—that’s 20 hours a week, every week, for 10 years—with 10,000 hours of practice, you can become really, really, really good at just about anything.

What if we were to ascribe that principle to some of our spiritual practices?  What if we were to approach Jesus’ commandment to love with the 10,000 hour rule?  To be sure, Jesus’ commandment to love is a difficult one.  It’s not easy to love one another with Christ’s agape love—to love everyone with God’s agape, that pure, cherishing, unadulterated love.  It may stand as one of life’s greatest challenges—to love others as Christ loved us.  And so if we’re serious about loving, we know that we have to practice.  We have to consciously practice love.

The second thing to say about our practice of agape love is that it takes courage.  I think I’ve shared with you before that years ago I worked as a white water rafting guide in Montana for a summer.  Our rafts would put in the North Fork of the Flathead River, right on the line between Montana and Canada.  For several days we’d float down the river together.  During our training, we learned a surprising strategy for dealing with big rocks.  The river was littered with them, of course, and when possible, it was best to avoid the largest and most imposing ones.  However, should a raft actually hit a large rock in the middle of a raging rapid, the best thing for everyone in the raft was to lean toward the rock.  It’s counter-intuitive, of course, but if rafters lean away, their weight, combined with the opposing upward rush of water will surely tip the raft.

Agape love requires that sometimes too—leaning toward the obstacles that stand in our way.  Relationships can be full of obstacles that stick out like huge boulders.  And you can’t maintain a healthy relationship if your continuous practice is to always try to avoid those obstacles.  At times, you have to lean toward them—throw your weight toward the rock—acknowledge the problem, the disagreement, the frustration, the hurt… Sometimes you have to throw your relational energy toward  the obstacle so that, in fact, the relationship itself doesn’t capsize.  And that takes courage.

So love—agape love—takes time, and it takes courage.  But a word of grace, it comes to us as a command and with a promise.  Jesus says, “Love one another as I have loved you.”  Jesus reminds us that God, the Author of Love, loves us first, and so we rally our lives around sometime repeated often in this family of faith—that we are God’s children not  because we love God, but because God loves us.  Our very identities are wrapped up in a God whose love goes before us enabling and emboldening us to love as Christ loved.  Grace and peace to you in the unending and courageous practice of that wonderful love.  Amen.

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Scripture References:  Exodus 1:15-22 and Matthew 2:13-18

Well, we’ve got ourselves a Christmas story this morning.  It’s like we went down to the basement to put the plastic Easter eggs away, got sidetracked, and found ourselves sorting through a box of old ornaments.  Christmas decorations always look different in May than they did in December.  Subtract the frenzied pace of the Christmas season, the parties, the lists, and perhaps the high expectations we tend to have for that time of year… Take it all away and the ornaments look and feel so strangely out of place.  The stories, too, sound a little funny on their own two feet without the Christmas season around them to hold them up.

Of course, the trouble with today’s gospel story is that by the time Christmas rolls around, no one’s really eager to hear it.  It’s Matthew’s follow-up story to the wise men—the magi who came from the East to worship Jesus in Bethlehem.  They’d stopped in Jerusalem to ask for directions when King Herod heard about them and commanded them, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.”  The Wise Men eventually make it to Bethlehem, they find Jesus and his family, present him with their gifts, and then the Christmas story usually ends for us with this line:  “Having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.”

Silent night, holy night.  All is calm and bright, and it’s Christmas after all, so we stop the story right there, or at least fast-forward through the scary part—the part where Herod goes ballistic when he realizes that he’s been tricked by the wise men—the part where he’ll stop at nothing to prevent the newborn Jesus from ever becoming a king—the part where he orders the slaughter of all children under the age of two in and around Bethlehem.  We tend to leave that part out, perhaps, oddly, for the sake of a nice Christmas story.  But it’s there, daring us to acknowledge once again that Jesus was born into a world that truly needed a Prince of Peace. 

The way Matthew tells it, an angel came to Joseph in a dream and told him to take his family and run.  The rest of the families in Bethlehem might not have been so lucky, but their stories don’t appear in our gospel.  We’re left to wonder how things played out for them—how, for instance, the citizens of Bethlehem might have rallied to protect their babies from Herod’s soldiers.  And they must have rallied, right?  “Kill all the children under the age of two in and around Bethlehem”—that was Herod’s order.  But then what happened? 

What happened when the community figured out what was going on?  What happened once the word got around that their babies were in danger?  What happened when leaders and activists put their heads together and got themselves organized in a coalition to address the issue of infant mortality in the city of Bethlehem?  Because you know it happened, right?  It must have! 

I’ve been watching the show, Frozen Planet lately on the Discovery Channel.  Frozen Planet is a nature documentary that focuses on life near the north and south poles.  So lately I’ve become a little more fascinated with the lives of narwhal wales, polar bears, and penguins. One of the episodes featured muskoxen—these giant creatures who live in the arctic region of North America.  The muskox doesn’t look like an animal you’d want to mess with.  It’s large and wooly and it’s got some pretty intimidating horns on the sides of its heads.  Still, herds of muskoxen have to be alert at all times.  Wolves will arrive in packs and work strategically to single out a young muskox, separate it from the herd, and attack.

Muskoxen have a wonderful way of dealing with wolves, though.  When they see them coming, the largest adults form a circle around the young, facing outward.  An adult muskox weighs between six and nine hundred pounds, and so once they’re in place, surrounding their young, you can almost hear them say to the wolves, “You are going to have to look for a meal somewhere else today.  You will not get past these hooves and horns.” 

I wonder if that didn’t happen in Bethlehem, don’t you?  If parents and city leaders didn’t unite around their babies and say to Herod’s wolves, “Oh no you don’t.  Not today.  You can come at our babies, but we know how to protect them.  And you will not get through without a fight.”  This is what communities do when their babies are in danger.  They surround, protect, and fight, if need be. 

There’s an old story in the book of Exodus, in which another king, Pharaoh, tried to do away with the young.  The Israelites were living in Egypt, and they were prospering at the time, and so Pharaoh essentially made them become slaves, but when they continued to increase in number,he commanded the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.” 

Herod’s plan:  wipe out the boys and the men, and thus keep the Hebrew population small and more manageable.  And thus another coalition was born to address the issue of infant mortality.  Only this first coalition consisted of two midwives—two women, Shiphrah and Puah, who didn’t have much power or influence, but they could do two things well.  First, they could assist the Hebrew mothers giving birth to healthy babies.  Right?  They could show up at the right time to bring those babies into the world. 

But the second thing they could do was this:  appear before Herod and lie through their teeth about what was really going on!  That’s what they did!  Herod was outraged, of course, when he realized that more and more healthy Hebrew children were being born, and so he sent for the midwives and said, “What’s going on?  Aren’t you killing the babies like I told you to?”  And Shiphrah and Puah respond with this wonderful lie, “No.  You see, your majesty, the Hebrew women are strong, and they all give birth before we arrive!”  In their faithfulness to God and to Hebrew families and in their civil disobedience to Pharaoh, Shiphrah and Puah helped save a community. 

Over the past few years, our own community has been inspired and encouraged by the work of the Racine Infant Mortality Coalition, and this spring, through our Hand of Hope campaign, we at First Presbyterian have learned more about the good work being done to protect and fight for babies and their families in our city. 

And we’ve learned a few things.  We’ve learned that while times have changed since Exodus and since the time of Jesus’ birth, forces of evil and ignorance still conspire against the most vulnerable members of our society.  Poverty, racism, classism, and indifference still contribute to an at-risk culture for our youngest children here in Racine. 

But we’ve also learned that the spirits of the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah live on in the actions and commitments of some in our community, who like the mighty muskoxen have surrounded our young and organized to give them protection. 

It’s good to have Ahmad Qawi with us today.  Ahmad is the Executive Director for the Racine Family YMCA and he is the energy behind the “Focus on Fathers Program,” which has been a part of the Infant Mortality Coalition.  Ahmad, it’s good to have you back in worship with us.  You are like a mighty muskox in Racine!  Offering strength and protection to fathers and to their baby boys and girls.  Thank you for your good work and ministry. 

Through our One Great Hour of Sharing/Hand of Hope Campaign, we support Ahmad and the amazing work he is doing.  We support Tessa Brown, too, from whom we heard last week.  We support the work she is doing with mothers—helping them through healthy pregnancies and supporting them through that first year or so. 

We support Georgann Stinson, who’ll be with us next week.  Georgann is the president of the Birthing Project here in Racine, and she is working in families to nurture strong, healthy pregnancies and thriving babies and toddlers.

We continue to support Carole Johnson and the good work she has done in organizing in essentially midwifing the Infant Mortality Coalition. Carole’s passion and her belief in the power of a community coming together have nurtured a fabulous response to the problem of infant mortality in our city. 

We have good, caring midwives in our midst, friends.  And it’s our job to come alongside them, to stand with them shoulder to shoulder.  I’m grateful for our congregation’s mission committee, and for their decision to choose infant mortality as a theme for this year’s One Great Hour/Hand of Hope Campaign.  And I hope you’ll join me in praying for the amazing work being done in the coalition and supporting it all through the campaign. 

I’d like for us to close with a prayer—a prayer that will take us back to Christmas for just one more minute.  As we sing, I invite you to pray for the youngest, most vulnerable members of our society—for babies whose lives hang in the balance and who lie at the heart of concern for the Infant Mortality Coalition.  The hymn is number 47 in your blue hymnal.  “Still, Still, Still.”  Let us stand and sing together…

Still, still, still,

He sleeps this night so chill!

The Virgin's tender arms enfolding,

Warm and safe the Child are holding.

Still, still, still,

He sleeps this night so chill.

Sleep, sleep, sleep,

He lies in slumber deep

While angel hosts from heaven come winging,

Sweetest songs of joy are singing

Sleep, sleep, sleep,

He lies in slumber deep.

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“In Nothing We Trust.”  So reads the title of an article that made a splash this week in the National Journal.  “In Nothing We Trust.” It tells the story of Johnny Whitmire, a native of Muncie, Indiana, who just as easily could have been from a place like Racine.  Whitmire and his wife owned a small home in Muncie, but could no long afford to make the payments.  So they applied for and received a loan modification, which made life affordable again, but after just three months, it was canceled.  Their mortgage lender reinstated the higher payments and tacked on $1800 in fees.  This was the final straw.  Whitmire and his wife filed for bankruptcy and the bank took their home.

But here’s the real kicker:  one year later, Whitmire received a letter from City Hall, which contained a $300 fine for tall grass at that same home.  “The city dinged me for tall weeds at my bank’s house,” Whitmire said.  “You can’t trust anybody or anything anymore.”

Decades ago, Muncie, Indiana was dubbed “Middletown America” for all the ways it represented mainstream American views and values.  Today Muncie is a microcosm of a nation whose motto could be, “In Nothing We Trust.”  7 in 10 Americans believe that the country is on the wrong track.  Only 23 percent have confidence in banks, and just 19 percent have confidence in big business.  Less than half the population expresses “a great deal” of confidence in the public-school system or organized religion.

One sociologist interviewed in the article puts it this way.  “We have lost our gods… We lost [faith] in the media… We lost it in our culture.  You can’t point to a movie star who might inspire us, because we know too much about them. We lost [faith] in politics, because we know too much about politicians’ lives. We’ve lost it—that basic sense of trust and confidence—in everything.” [1]            

Friends, what happens to us when we can’t trust anymore?  If you think about it in terms of a friendship, what happens?  Well, when you realize that you can’t trust someone, you consciously or even subconsciously find ways to distance yourself from that person.  You spend less time in the relationship, you invest less interest in that person’s life, you dial down your expectations of what the relationship might provide…  In general, you pull away from that other person, and in so doing you insulate yourself from potential damages.  Is this what we see happening on a larger scale in our culture?

The central issue here is trust, which is hard to build and easy to tear down.  In relationships and in life, building trust takes time and energy—it requires our very best:  our best intentions and our best efforts.  For trust to exist, it has to be tended over time, through at least a little thick and thin.  But then it can be lost so easily…  What happens to us—as a community, as a culture, as a nation—when we can’t trust anymore?

Just days ago we marked the 100 year anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, and I wonder if some of the power in our memory of that event lies in our unwillingness to trust—if this image of a giant, sinking ship doesn’t somehow resonate with that sinking feeling we’ve been having lately—that we just can’t trust anymore.

Psalm 23 is a psalm of trust, and I’ve been wondering how well it works in a culture that has trust issues…

“The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want” reads a little differently.  I am my shepherd.  I will grab as much as I can and hoard it for when I might need it later.

He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters… There is no rest for me until, at the end of another overscheduled day, I sit on the couch in front of the television.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me.  I am, ultimately, alone in this world.  If I don’t take care of myself, no one else will.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.  Yeah, my cup is overflowing, alright!  Groceries, hospital bills, late fees, taxes, insurance… 

The psalm says, “Trust!”  But we are living in an age of increasing mistrust, and so it’s not that simple.  The psalmist writes, “My cup overflows!”  But in our mistrust we tend to assume scarcity in most situations and not abundance.  We feel like we never have enough time, never have enough money, never have enough energy to get it all done… 

And so this morning, I’d like to play with this image of a cup for a bit—a cup that overflows.  I remember years ago a conversation I had with a friend who’d recently gone through a divorce.  He said, “You know, the problem in our marriage was that the cup was never full.  And no matter how much I tried to fill it… maybe there was a hole in the bottom of that cup.”

Mistrust will do that, won’t it?  It’ll poke a hole in the bottom of your cup.  The cup of your marriage, the cup of your confidence in government, the cup of your belief in the general goodwill of humankind…  Mistrust will poke a hole in the bottom of that cup.  And until you deal with that issue of mistrust, it doesn’t matter what you pour in.  Leaky cups do not overflow. 

Back to the article, “In Nothing We Trust.” The implication is that we are a nation of leaky cups!  Disaffected and leaking, we are running out of confidence that we can ever be overflowing again:  that we can restore our faith in public institutions, that we can build confidence in our government, that we can find role models who will not completely self-destruct, that we can trust again… that our politicians will not fail us, that our schools will not fail us, that our churches will not fail us, that one day, the headline will not be “In Nothing We Trust,” but rather, “Our Cup Overflows.”

Friends, in every life, trust has to begin somewhere.  It has to start with something.  Nobody jumps off the bus at age 25 or 45 or 75, just ready to trust somebody or something.  Trust begins with… trust.  

Long before you can remember, when you were just a baby, trust began when you held up your hand and your mommy or your daddy took it.  It began when you cried in your crib and someone came.  Trust in your life started before you even knew what trust was.  It took shape when you fell off your bike and skinned your knee and your dad sprayed that anti-bacterial spray on it—the one that stung worse than the fall—but then you felt ok, and so you trusted. 

This past week, on Thursday, our family celebrated our “famiversary.”  It has been two years now since we’ve been home from Ethiopia with Meheret and Ezzy.  Two years.  Let me tell you:  bringing a one-year-old and a three-year-old into your family will have you contemplating the issue of trust and how it begins.  Two years ago today, with no common language, Meheret and I planted marigolds in the garden.  She was so eager to dig her fingers into the dirt, to pop those flowers in the ground, and to water them, water them, water them.  

Trust can begin in such simple, playful ways.  It seldom begins with an overflowing cup; trust simply begins with… a little trust.

Jesus tried everything he could think of to help his followers trust him.  He taught and he healed. He fed them and cared for them.  At times he just came out and said it:  “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.  The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, [and who cannot be trusted] sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—but I am the good shepherd.  [You can trust me.]”

Maybe an image that’s making sense for you this morning is that of the Leaky Cup—and so you need to think about trust starting again with something…  Could it be that you’re being led to trust Jesus a little bit more this morning?  That you are being called to trust, with just a little bit more of your life, the Author of Love and Grace?

We still find ourselves in the Easter Season.  Remember, remember, remember that Easter is a reality and not just a day.  And the reality of Easter is this:  On the Cross, God in Jesus Christ said to the world, “This is how I am with you.”  It’s not just something that I’m doing for you.  IT’S HOW I AM WITH YOU.  At the bottom of your leaky cup, where all the holes are.  Where you trust no one because that trust has been misplaced so many times, THIS IS HOW I AM WITH YOU!  May the cup of your life be overflowing with God’s goodness and love.  Amen. 

1.  http://www.nationaljournal.com/features/restoration-calls/in-nothing-we-trust-20120419

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Scripture:  Luke 24:13-35

Two very elderly ladies were enjoying the sunshine on a park bench. They had been meeting at that park every sunny day for over twelve years… chatting, and enjoying each other’s company. One day, the younger of the two ladies, turns to the other and says, “Please don’t be angry with me, but I am embarrassed, after all these years, my memory is not what it used to be.  What is your name?  I just can’t remember.”

The older friend stares at her, looking very confused, says nothing for two full minutes, and finally says, “How soon do you need to know?”

It’s strange to think of being so close to someone but still not knowing his or her name.  But it happens. It happens all the time, actually.  My wife and I occasionally have a conversation like this.  We’re sitting at some community event and she discretely points someone out whose name she doesn’t know.  “Honey, who is that person sitting over there?  Tall, red shirt, glasses…?” 

And I say to Karla, “Oh, I don’t know, and I can’t ask again, because she’s told me her name too many times and if I ask again she’ll think I’m crazy.”

Doesn’t that happen to you?  It’s the worst when you know you should know someone’s name, but it’s just not in your head.  And so you do what any sensible person would do:  you avoid going near that person at all costs!  Even if you worship at the same church!  I know for a fact—I’ll be the farm on this one—that there are at least two people here today in this room who routinely avoid each other, not because there’s any bad blood between them, but simply because they’ve forgotten each other’s names and they know, deep down, that after all this time in the same church, they really ought to know them by now.

There should be a day of amnesty for everyone in this world who has trouble with names—a day when you can just walk up to anybody and find out who they are.  But this would be terribly awkward, and it’s the real reason why, in the church, we publish a photo directory every 5 years.

In our story from Luke’s gospel this morning, two disciples can remember Jesus’ name, but it’s his face that doesn’t ring a bell.  We don’t know much about these disciples—just that one of them is named “Cleopas” and that they’re on their way from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus, seven miles away.  They’re two disciples with walk-on parts in the Bible who have a chance close encounter with Jesus not long after his resurrection.  Strangely, they don’t recognize him.  And it’s not like they’ve forgotten—like they’ve just moved onto other things:  other potential Messiahs, the weather, what’s for dinner, Dancing With the Stars…  No, their conversation is fixated on Jesus—his ministry, his arrest, the crucifixion—they can’t get Jesus out of their minds, which makes it all the more strange that they don’t recognize him when he appears.  Jesus asks them, innocently enough, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” 

Cleopas looks at him.  “Are you really that clueless?  Where have you been the past three days, dead?”  So Cleopas begins to fill Jesus in—to tell Jesus about Jesus, how he was a great prophet who was condemned to death and crucified.  “It all happened three days ago,” he says, “and now Jesus’ body is missing.”

Jesus is simply listening, taking it all in.  And then, when Cleopas is done, something amazing happens. Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, Jesus interprets to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.  Imagine that.  Imagine a seven mile walk with Jesus.  How long would that take?  Two and a half, three hours?  Imagine a three-hour conversation with Jesus, during which he explained everything.  All those mysteries of Scripture in particular and life in general.  Three hours with Jesus, during which you could listen and ask questions.  This is what Clepoas and the other disciple had on their way to Emmaus—three hours to download information from Jesus.  And the remarkable thing is that they still didn’t recognize him!

Seems like a good place, here, to pause and remind us all that this is not about information.  This—faith, church, coming into relationship with God, with each other, with ourselves—it’s not about information.  The funny thing is that we try to make it about information all the time. More and more, life itself has become cluttered with the pursuit of information.

Just ten years ago, Encyclopedia Britannica published their 2002 paper edition, a 32-volume set containing roughly 65,000 articles.  I just checked this morning, and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, had 3,929,397 articles published. [1] (That’s just the English version.  All told, Wikipedia holds 8 billion words in 19 million articles in approximately 270 languages)

In the past ten years, we’ve been experiencing an information explosion.  Accessing that information has become easier and easier.  And so it’s easier than ever, perhaps, to fool ourselves into thinking that our solutions in life will always come in the form of more information. 

The truth is often the opposite.  Granted, it can be handy to have so much information at our fingertips, but the truth is that too much information can have a paralyzing effect on us—because we can never consume it all.  No one can stay completely informed all the time. In fact, if we’re not careful, we can get distracted and lost in the pursuit of information.

Cleopas and the other disciple get all the information from Jesus, but still—they don’t see him for who he is.  Finally, they get to Emmaus, and to the place where Cleopas and the other disciple are staying, and Jesus acts like he’s going to keep on walking.  But the disciples urge him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.”

 So they invite him in.  They come in the room, put down their packs.  They probably wash their feet and rest for a bit.  But then they sit down at a table.  And Jesus takes bread, blesses and breaks it, and gives it to them.  And then, their eyes are opened, and they recognize him!

You heard that right.  Jesus appeared to them on the road, but they did not recognize him.  Jesus walked with them for three hours, but they did not recognize him.  Jesus interpreted ALL of their Scriptures for them and loaded them with information, but they did not recognize him.  Jesus was invited into their home, but they did not recognize him.  But then Jesus, still a stranger, took bread, blessed and broke it, and shared it with them.  And then their eyes were opened and they

We’re in this season of Easter now, so I’d like to convey something I’ve said about Easter before—that though we tend to think of Easter as a day, it is not a day.  Easter, rather, is a reality.  The good news of Easter is that the resurrection itself was not simply a one-time event, lodged in the biblical story of Jesus.  Rather, the Easter good news is this:  resurrection itself is an all-consuming reality that grabs us and holds onto us and will not let us go until we can see and believe that everything is now different! 

Could it not be the same for this Emmaus story?  That it is not simply a post-resurrection event lodged in the story of Jesus Christ, but rather that it shines forth as a proclamation of Easter reality?  In other words, could it be that this story of disciples meeting Jesus on the road to Emmaus isn’t just something that happened, but rather something that is always happening?  Could it be that we, too, have close encounters with Jesus every now and then, but fail to recognize him?

Now here’s where this message gets user-friendly and really difficult at the same time.Here’s the user-friendly part:  We have close encounters with Jesus every day!  The guy bagging your groceries, the homeless woman on the street asking you for spare change, the child in Sunday school who asks curious questions about God… Would that we would all stop for a moment or two each day to recognize the face of Christ in another being, to remember and celebrate that as members of Christ’s body, we are called to be Christ with and for each other—to love and serve each other as Christ did.

That’s the user-friendly part, comparatively speaking.  Now for the really difficult part.  Who is the person in your life with whom you least expect to have a close encounter with Jesus Christ?  I would argue that it’s not the stranger—it’s not the person who you barely know and with whom you can have a brief encounter and then walk away, confident that you’ve felt Christ’s presence.

I would argue that sometimes it’s a lot more difficult to experience Christ’s presence in a relationship that you think you know ALL TOO WELL.  Take that neighbor of yours, the one you see every day.  You know how he acts, because he’s right outside your window, all the time.  You know how he thinks, because he’s never shy about telling you.  You know how he votes because his front lawn is always full of signs.  You know what he believes because every other conversation feels like a sermon. 

THAT’S the one with whom you’re going to have trouble experiencing the living presence of Jesus Christ. Or let’s take it inside, to your own home, that place where perhaps you’ve run out of surprises and secrets for each other, where maybe you really do think you’ve got the other inhabitants all figured out.  Your parents, your children, your spouse or partner, your siblings…

Could it be that sometimes the fact that you think you’ve got your loved ones all figured out shelters you from the Christ-filled surprises they might have for you?  In your family?  In your church family?

Friends, I want to close today with a very simple thought.  THIS IS WHAT BEING CHURCH IS ABOUT.  Opening our eyes to Christ’s presence as we break bread with each other and with others in our world.  Or even this:  close encountering Christ in each other as we open our hearts to each other—baring to one another and sharing the bread of our hope, our pain, our laughter, our grief.  

May God empower us to keep breaking bread together.  May God empower us to break bread with the world around us.  And may our eyes be opened to Christ in our midst.

Amen.

1.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons

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Scripture:  Mark 16:1-8

There’s a great parable about an old man who used to meditate each day by the Ganges River in India.  One morning he saw a scorpion floating on the water.  When the scorpion drifted near the old man he reached to rescue it but was stung by the scorpion.  A bit later he tried again and was stung again, the bite swelling his hand painfully and giving him much pain.  Another man passing by saw what was happening and yelled at the mediator, "Hey, stupid old man, what's wrong with you?  Only a fool would risk his life for sake of an ugly, evil creature.  Don't you know you could kill yourself trying to save that ungrateful scorpion?"  The old man calmly replied, "My friend, just because it is in the scorpion's nature to sting, does not change the fact that it is in my nature to save." 

Today, friends, we celebrate that it is in God’s nature to save.  And so death is not the final answer.  There is more to this life!  Today we celebrate Christ, the One who has shown us God’s way of saving us—of reaching into the waters of our existence and saving us, even to the point of death on a cross.

Today we celebrate an empty tomb.  And, of course, that empty tomb might be easier for us to celebrate than it was for Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome.  They had arrived that morning to do what mourners did at that time—to anoint the body, to tend the grave.  They were there, understandably, because where else was there for them to go?  It was over!  Whoever Jesus was, whatever he did, however he made them feel… it was all over, and his betrayal, arrest, torture, and horrific death left them numb—paralyzed with grief.  If they were here today, we might label their condition as “post-traumatic stress disorder.”  How could it be anything else?  What word, other than “trauma” could sum up the weekend they’ve just had?

The three women arrived at the tomb.  And it was open!  The stone had been rolled away, and they could walk right in!  Can you imagine what they were thinking?  I wonder what they thought they were going to see in there—if maybe they were bracing themselves for something terrible…  Grave robbing was not uncommon in those days.  “Who’s been in here?” they wondered.  Thieves?  Vandals?  Romans?  What did they do?  What did they take?

But there sat this young man.  An angel?  And he said to them something that Jesus had said so many times:  “Do not be afraid.”  But at this point, they’re beyond fear.  They’re speechless.  So the man tells them:  “Jesus of Nazareth is not here.  He has been raised!  Go now, tell his disciples that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.”

And then they did a curious thing.  They went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.  And now I want to share something with you that most people don’t find out until they go to seminary or maybe take a “Bible as Literature” class in college.  Mark’s gospel ends right there!  That’s the last line of Mark:  “They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”  THE END!

The oldest and best manuscripts for Mark’s gospel end it all with Mary, Mary, and Salome afraid and running away.  It’s almost as if Mark’s gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, concludes with a cliffhanger!  Will the women share what they’ve seen?  Will they come back at some point?  Will they even go to Galilee to meet Jesus?  Mark doesn’t tell us.  “They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” 

Now, quick side note:  this didn’t last long.  The way Mark ended his gospel—it didn’t last long at all.  Less than 200 years later, Christians said, “We can’t have one of our four gospels end with, ‘They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid’!”  And so some more suitable endings to Mark were written, just eleven more verses, complete with conversations with Jesus and much less afraid women.  But what does it tell you, that Mark saw fit to end his gospel with, “They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid”?  What does it say to you, that Mark chose to end his story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection with scared women and absent disciples?

When I was a kid, my dad took my brother and me to see Flash Gordon.  The movie ends with Flash Gordon crashing his ship into the palace of Ming the Merciless, defeating Ming and saving Earth.  The final screenshot, though, focuses on the magical ring that had been worn by the evil villain.  An unidentified hand picks it up and the words, “The End?” (with a question mark) fade onto the screen, followed by the maniacal laugh of Ming the Merciless.  I was ten at the time, and my brother was eight, and for us, this was most certainly good news!  The battle was not entirely won, Ming the Merciless was still out there somewhere, and so the end was not really the end!  Our minds ran wild with possibilities for the next Flash Gordon adventure. 

Had Mark produced a film and not written a gospel, his last screenshot might have been “The End?”  No evil laugh, of course—simply an invitation to imagine the empty tomb as a beginning.  Winston Churchill famous line during World War II applies:  “This is not the end.  It is not even the beginning of the end.  But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”  For Mark, the end of the beginning is the fact that the tomb is empty.  The empty tomb is the great question mark, boldly confronting what we thought we understood about death’s final victory.  As Frederick Buechner puts it, “Death is not the end.  The end is life… Existence has greater depths of beauty, mystery, and benediction than the wildest visionary has ever dared to dream.  Christ our Lord has risen.”  [1]

The End?  The tomb is empty, and so now we are challenged to question the forces in this world that would attempt to smother or contain life.  Tombs of loneliness and fear, tombs of doubt and painful resignation…  Christ’s empty tomb invites us to imagine these other tombs empty too.  So friends, let’s consider the end of the beginning, and let’s talk about a few more empty tombs this morning…

Garrett Keizer is a minister in Vermont, and he tells this story of conducting a Saturday night Easter Vigil service in his little church.  This past week, we gathered for a Taize service of prayer and worship on Wednesday night, then our Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services, but we did not opt for that fourth helping of church this week.  Still, some churches do, and Keizer’s church did.  And on that quiet Saturday night, only two people showed up. 

Keizer did what any minister would do, hopefully.  He lit the Easter candle and said a prayer.  “The candle sputters in the half-darkness,” he writes, “like a voice too embarrassed or overwhelmed to proclaim the news:  ‘Christ is risen.’  But it catches fire, and there we are—three people and a flickering light—in an old church on a Saturday evening in the spring, with the noise of the cars and their winter-rusted mufflers outside.  The moment is filled with ambiguities of all such quiet observances among few people in the midst of an oblivious population in a radically secular age.”

But then, one of the three, a woman who has survived two rounds of chemo for breast cancer stepped forward and lit her candle from the Easter candle and she said—louder than it needed to be for that small circle—“ALLELUIA!” 

And the other man in the group, clutching his one year sobriety chip in his pocket, lit his candle, and proclaimed even louder:  “Christ is risen, indeed!” [2]

The tomb of cancer having the last word was empty.  The tomb of addiction’s grip was empty.

I was eleven when my grandmother died, and I was in college when my grandfather’s second wife passed away.  So I guess I was getting old enough to start understanding the losses he had been dealt through the years.  I was maybe twenty-two when I drove out to see him in his home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  I don’t know what I expected to see—a man consumed with grief?  I suppose for a time he was.  But at one point I remember sitting with him at the kitchen table, chatting.  The conversation rolled from one thing to the next, and then it came to an alto in his Methodist church choir, who had attracted my grandfather’s attention.  Helen was her name, and she would eventually become his third wife.  But long before that happened, Grandpa and I sat there in the kitchen and he told me about driving home from church and intentionally going out of his way just to drive by her house.  Occasionally, he said, he’d go ‘round the block.  Why?  So that he could drive by her house again.  “Oh my goodness,” I thought, “My Grandpa has a school-boy crush on a girl from church!” 

The tomb of life being over with grief was… empty!

The tomb of no more love was… empty!

The tomb of never again was empty!

If you’ve lived long enough, you know that there are tombs of all shapes and sizes in this world.  I bet we could go around the room and name at least a hundred of them right now.  Like the tomb of my-best-is-never-good enough, or the tomb of pretending nothing’s wrong for the sake of a “healthy” relationship.  Or how about the tomb of knowing that you’re just not loveable?  Or the tomb of believing that you can’t make a difference, no matter how hard you try?  Sometimes the heavy stone gets rolled in front of one of these tombs and life gets trapped for a time.  The tomb of fear, the tomb of anxiety, the tomb of lost ambition…

The Easter Good News of Mark’s gospel is an empty tomb and a wonderful, life-affirming question mark, calling into question all powers of death and darkness.  Because Christ’s tomb was empty, our tombs and all the tombs of this world can be empty too.  Life does not end with death.  Life gives way to more life!  Death is not the end, but rather the end of a beginning.

And so, friends, Easter is not an event; it is not a day—it is a reality that defies death’s finality and permeates life’s eternity.  The Easter Empty tomb is the question mark and the exclamation point that says “yes” to God, “yes” to humanity, and “yes” to life and all of creation.  Happy Easter, friends, in grace and in peace and in truth.  Amen!

1.  Frederick Buechner “The End is Life,” in Bread and Wine:  Readings for Lent and Easter.

2.  This story comes from Thomas G. Long’s “The Dream Church,” in the Austin Seminary Bulletin, 2004, but I received it in an Easter morning sermon, “Eye to Eye,” preached by Mark Ramsey on April 24, 2011 at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church in Asheville, NC.

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This is a dramatic reading of Mark 14 and 15 that we used on Palm Sunday.  We began the service with a palm processional and our children led the congregation in singing a Hosana chorus, but then we quickly turned the service toward the passion with this reading. Next year I'll try to remember to provide a link to it early in Lent so that it can be useful for congregations looking to try something a little different. 

“Proclaiming the Passion”

Palm Sunday, 2012

READING - Philippians 2:5-11

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.  Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

PRAYER OF ILLUMINATION 

God, once again our journeys have brought us together in this place of sanctuary.  Now as we gather around these living words, transform us.  Free us from fears and perceptions that limit.  Open our lives to new possibilities, new ways of being and believing, new habits of love and grace.  Help us to courageously name what is good and beautiful and true.  Call us, once again, to the cross—to that place where our lives encounter your presence.  Amen.

READING                                                                                                      Mark 14:1-11

Narrator #1:  It was two days before the Passover and the festival of Unleavened Bread. The chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to arrest Jesus^* by stealth and kill him; for they said, ‘Not during the festival, or there may be a riot among the people.’

Narrator #2:  While Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper,^* as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head.  But some were there who said to one another in anger,

Judas:  ‘Why was the ointment wasted in this way?  For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii,^* and the money given to the poor.’

Narrator #1:  And they scolded her.  But Jesus said,

Jesus:  ‘Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me.  She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial.  Truly I tell you, wherever the good news^* is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.’

Narrator #2:  Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them.  When they heard it, they were greatly pleased, and promised to give him money. So he began to look for an opportunity to betray him.

Narrator #1:  “Let us now observe a time of silent confession”

SILENT CONFESSION

ASSURANCE OF PARDON 

What can separate us from the love of God?  Nothing. “Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.” 

Be assured:  you are endlessly loved and boundlessly forgiven.  Friends, hear the good news of the Gospel

All:  In Jesus Christ we are forgiven!

SUNG RESPONSE:  “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” verse 3

What language shall I borrow to thank Thee, dearest friend,

For this, Thy dying sorrow, Thy pity without end?

O make me Thine forever; And should I fainting be,

Lord, let me never ever outlive my love for Thee.

SACRAMENT OF HOLY COMMUNION - Mark 14:12-21

Narrator #2:  On the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb is sacrificed, his disciples said to him,

Disciple:  ‘Where do you want us to go and make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?’   

Narrator #2:  So Jesus sent two of his disciples, saying to them,

Jesus:  ‘Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him, and wherever he enters, say to the owner of the house, “The Teacher asks, Where is my guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?”  He will show you a large room upstairs, furnished and ready. Make preparations for us there.’

Narrator #2:  So the disciples set out and went to the city, and found everything as he had told them; and they prepared the Passover meal.  When it was evening, Jesus came with the twelve.  And when they had taken their places and were eating, Jesus said,

Jesus:  ‘Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me.’

Narrator #2:  They began to be distressed and to say to him one after another,

Disciple:  ‘Surely, not I?’

Narrator #2:  He said to them,

Jesus:  ‘It is one of the twelve, one who is dipping bread^* into the bowl^* with me.  For the Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that one by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that one not to have been born.’

INVITATION TO THE TABLE       

Narrator #1:  Those who sat with Jesus during that last supper formed an unlikely cast of characters.  One would soon betray him.  Another would soon deny him, and another would soon doubt him.  To be sure, they had little idea what was going on.  Still, Jesus invited them to sit at Table with him, and he shared this meal with them.  He shared with them his body and his blood—his very life poured out for them, that they might know the depths of God’s love.

Friends, you, too, are invited to this Table.  Maybe you feel strong in your faith, and maybe you don’t.  Maybe you have your doubts, your questions, your reservations.  Perhaps you’ve not taken Communion for a long, long time.  Or perhaps you’ve done this so often that you’ve stopped thinking about what it truly means to you.  In any case, you are invited to this Table—not because of who you are, what you’ve done, or what you believe—but because of who God is, what God has done, and because of God’s love for you.  Friends, welcome to Christ’s Table.

PRAYERS OF THANKSGIVING AND INTERCESSION and LORD’S PRAYER    

SHARING THE BREAD AND THE CUP  -  Mark 14:22-25

Narrator #1:  While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, ‘Take; this is my body.’

Narrator #2:  Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it.  He said to them, ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.  Truly I tell you, I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.’

THE SHARING OF THE COMMUNION MEAL

PRAYER AFTER COMMUNION

Narrator #1:  Loving God, in this sacramental meal, you call us to remember Christ, to remember his life, his sacrifice, his death, and his resurrection.  Today, on the Palm Sunday, we remember Christ’s willingness to enter Jerusalem, even though it would cost him his life.  We remember, too, that in the midst of his own pain and loss, he fully embodied your loving welcome for the disciples.  May we be strengthened in this meal to do likewise—to face the pains and hardships of this world and to meet with your complete, patient love.  May this meal strengthen us for worship and service.  Amen.

READING  -  Mark 14:26-42

Narrator #2:    When they had sung the hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.  And Jesus said to them,

Jesus:  ‘You will all become deserters; for it is written, “I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.”  But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.’

Narrator #2:  Peter said to him,

Disciple:  ‘Even though all become deserters, I will not.’

Jesus:  ‘Truly I tell you, this day, this very night, before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.’

Narrator #2:  But he said vehemently,

Disciple:  ‘Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.’

Narrator #2:  And all of them said the same.  They went to a place called Gethsemane; and Jesus said to his disciples,

Jesus:  ‘Sit here while I pray.’

Narrator #2:    He took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be distressed and agitated.  And he said to them,

Jesus:  ‘I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and keep awake.’

Narrator #2:    And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him.  He said,

Jesus:  ‘Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.’

Narrator #2:  He came and found them sleeping; and he said to Peter,

Jesus:  ‘Simon, are you asleep? Could you not keep awake one hour?  Keep awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.’

Narrator #2:  And again he went away and prayed, saying the same words.  And once more he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy; and they did not know what to say to him.  He came a third time and said to them,

Jesus:  ‘Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? Enough! The hour has come; the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.  Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.’

Congregation sings:  "Stay With Me," a Taize song 

Narrator #1:  Immediately, while he was still speaking, Judas, one of the twelve, arrived; and with him there was a crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders. ⁴⁴Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying,

Judas:  ‘The one I will kiss is the man; arrest him and lead him away under guard.’

Narrator #1:  ⁴⁵So when he came, he went up to him at once and said,

Judas:  ‘Rabbi!’

Narrator #1:    and kissed him. ⁴⁶Then they laid hands on him and arrested him. ⁴⁷But one of those who stood near drew his sword and struck the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear. ⁴⁸Then Jesus said to them,

Jesus:  ‘Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest me as though I were a bandit? ⁴⁹Day after day I was with you in the temple teaching, and you did not arrest me. But let the scriptures be fulfilled.’

Narrator #1:    ⁵⁰All of them deserted him and fled. 5They took Jesus to the high priest; and all the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes were assembled.  ⁵⁴Peter had followed him at a distance, right into the courtyard of the high priest; and he was sitting with the guards, warming himself at the fire.  ⁵⁵Now the chief priests and the whole council were looking for testimony against Jesus to put him to death; but they found none.  ⁵⁶For many gave false testimony against him, and their testimony did not agree.  ⁵⁷Some stood up and gave false testimony against him, saying,

Narrator #2:  ⁵⁸‘We heard him say, “I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands.” ’

Narrator #1:  ⁵⁹But even on this point their testimony did not agree. ⁶⁰Then the high priest stood up before them and asked Jesus,

Narrator #2:  (as High Priest)  ‘Have you no answer? What is it that they testify against you?’

Narrator #1:    ⁶¹But he was silent and did not answer. Again the high priest asked him,

Narrator #2:  (as High Priest)  ‘Are you the Messiah,^* the Son of the Blessed One?’

Narrator #1:  ⁶²Jesus said,

Jesus:  ‘I am; and
“you will see the Son of Man
seated at the right hand of the Power”
and “coming with the clouds of heaven.” ’

Narrator #1:  ⁶³Then the high priest tore his clothes and said,

Narrator #2:  (as High Priest)  ‘Why do we still need witnesses? ⁶⁴You have heard his blasphemy! What is your decision?’

Narrator #1:  All of them condemned him as deserving death. ⁶⁵Some began to spit on him, to blindfold him, and to strike him, saying to him, (shouting) ‘Prophesy!’

The guards also took him over and beat him. 66While Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the servant-girls of the high priest came by. ⁶⁷When she saw Peter warming himself, she stared at him and said,

Narrator #2: (as Voice)  ‘You also were with Jesus, the man from Nazareth.’

Narrator #1:  ⁶⁸But he denied it, saying,

Disciple:  ‘I do not know or understand what you are talking about.’

Narrator #1:  And he went out into the forecourt. Then the cock crowed. ⁶⁹And the servant-girl, on seeing him, began again to say to the bystanders,

Narrator #2: (as Voice)  ‘This man is one of them.’

Narrator #1:   ⁷⁰But again he denied it. Then after a little while the bystanders again said to Peter,

Narrator #2: (as Voice)    ‘Certainly you are one of them; for you are a Galilean.’

Narrator #1:  ⁷¹But he began to curse, and he swore an oath,

Disciple:  ‘I do not know this man you are talking about.’

Narrator #1:  ⁷²At that moment the cock crowed for the second time. Then Peter remembered that Jesus had said to him, ‘Before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.’ And he broke down and wept.

15As soon as it was morning, the chief priests held a consultation with the elders and scribes and the whole council. They bound Jesus, led him away, and handed him over to Pilate. ²Pilate asked him,

Pilate:  ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’

Narrator #1:  He answered him,

Jesus:  ‘You say so.’

Narrator #1:    ³Then the chief priests accused him of many things. ⁴Pilate asked him again,

Pilate:  ‘Have you no answer? See how many charges they bring against you.’

Narrator #1:  ⁵But Jesus made no further reply, so that Pilate was amazed.

“Please join me in the responsive reading, as it is printed in your bulletin.”

6Now at the festival he used to release a prisoner for them, anyone for whom they asked. ⁷Now a man called Barabbas was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection. ⁸So the crowd came and began to ask Pilate to do for them according to his custom. ⁹Then he answered them,

Pilate:  ‘Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?’

Narrator #1:  ¹⁰For he realized that it was out of jealousy that the chief priests had handed him over. ¹¹But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release Barabbas for them instead. ¹²Pilate spoke to them again,

Pilate:  ‘Then what do you wish me to do with the man you call the King of the Jews?’

Congregation:  ‘Crucify him!’

Pilate:  ‘Why, what evil has he done?’

Narrator #1:  But they shouted all the more,

Congregation:  ‘Crucify him!’

Narrator #1:  ¹⁵So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified…

Silence – the bell tolls 39 times…

During this time of silence, the church steeple bell is tolled thirty-nine times, reflecting the traditional number of lashes given to Jesus.  As we prepare for this Holy Week, let us be mindful of Christ’s love and sacrifice.

Mark 15, selected verses: 

Narrator #2:   Then the soldiers led Jesus into the courtyard of the palace; and they called together the whole cohort.  ¹⁷And they clothed him in a purple cloak; and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on him.  ¹⁸And they began saluting him, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’  ¹⁹They struck his head with a reed, spat upon him, and knelt down in homage to him. ²⁰After mocking him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him out to crucify him.

²²They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means the place of a skull).  ²³And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh; but he did not take it. ²⁴And they crucified him, and divided his clothes among them, casting lots to decide what each should take.

25It was nine o’clock in the morning when they crucified him. ²⁶The inscription of the charge against him read, ‘The King of the Jews.’ ²⁷And with him they crucified two bandits, one on his right and one on his left. ²⁹Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, ³⁰save yourself, and come down from the cross!’ ³¹In the same way the chief priests, along with the scribes, were also mocking him among themselves and saying, ‘He saved others; he cannot save himself. ³²Let the Messiah,^* the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe.’ Those who were crucified with him also taunted him.

33When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. ³⁴At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice,

Jesus:  ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

Narrator #2:  ³⁵When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, ‘Listen, he is calling for Elijah.’ ³⁶And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, ‘Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.’ ³⁷Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. ³⁸And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. ³⁹Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’

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A little over a year ago, I preached a sermon called "Resistance," and featured a poem that a friend of mine, David LaMotte wrote called "White Flour." You can jump to that sermon here. But today I was really excited to learn that "White Flour" is becoming a book!

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Scripture:  John 3:14-21

John 3:16 is that verse that pops up everywhere.  T-shirts, signs in the stands at football games, quarterback Tim Tebow’s anti-glare eye black…  Over the years, Christianity’s belief in the power of one verse to get the word out seems to have coalesced around John 3:16—“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” 

I’m always curious about aspects of our faith that find their way into mainstream culture and even become “brands” unto themselves.  Whether it’s John 3:16 under-eye makeup, or What-Would-Jesus-Do bracelets, or whatever, I’m curious about slogans and items that double as fads and faith statements, mainly because their purpose seems to be to radically simplify a wonderfully mysterious message. 

But this is in some cases what passes for serious Christianity:  take the Bible, ignore its historical context, rush through its literary craft, completely disregard its authors’ original intent, and cut right to the chase, which is to funnel the whole of Christianity down the narrow tube of “Are you saved or not?”

That’s what some people really want to know, isn’t it?  I don’t mean to oversimplify my brothers and sisters in Christ who tend to oversimplify the Bible, but for some, it all boils down to that question:  Are you saved? 

The other day I visited the website www.AreYouSaved.com.  A good reminder of what I’m addressing here:  The site asks, “Are you ready for eternity?  NOW is your opportunity to be saved, and know for sure you will be in Heaven…  You have a choice to make... whether you accept the free gift of salvation, and spend eternity in Heaven, or reject your opportunity, and spend eternity in Hell.  Your answer will decide where you spend eternity...  Are You Saved?”  Well, there you go.  Simple, straightforward… faithful?

I think we can and should be suspicious of those who would turn faith into a simple litmus test–yes or no, in or out, saved or unsaved.  And yet I think I get it.  This world is complicated enough already.  Humanity’s daily grind is laced with uncertainty and ambiguity.  So wouldn’t it be nice if faith, at least, could be simple?  If we could just take John 3:16 and turn it into a simple recipe for faith and salvation? 

Perhaps, but I think that Scripture in its entirety resists confinement in simple equations, as does our faith tradition.  So many times in his ministry, Jesus was striving to pry his listeners away from small-mindedness, away from close-mindedness. 

In John’s 3^rd chapter, he’s in conversation with Nicodemus, a leader among the Pharisees, one who was accustomed to having all the answers to all the litmus tests of faith—to knowing for sure who was “in” and who was “out.”  Jesus’ message for Nicodemus was revolutionary.  Take the phrase, “For God so loved the world,” for example.  This was a mind-blowing verse for Nicodemus!  God loves the world—the whole world!  Not just people who’ve got it “right.”  Certainly not just Pharisees, but everybody.  Jews and Gentiles, and Romans, Babylonians, Egyptians…  This would have been a radical challenge for Nicodemus to hear and understand. But that was Jesus—always pushing, always expanding people’s understanding of God’s presence in the world—a world that, for Jesus and Nicodemus, really understood the perishing part. 

Nicodemus knew all too well what a perishing world felt like.  When we think about Nicodemus’ reality, we should bring to mind, perhaps, current events in Syria.  Violence and chaos… In New Testament times, Nicodemus and his people, the Jews, were living another chapter in a long book of suffering and loss, this time at the hands of the Romans.  They knew what perishing felt like.

My girls are with their mother in Kaleidoscope right now, but what I am about to say would send them into stitches.  Jesus says to Nicodemus that those who believe in him may not perish but—and this is a big but… this is the part they’d love.  No matter how serious the conversation is, the phrase “and this is a big but” always derails it.  But this is a big but—a huge but!  It’s the crux of the whole thing—that God doesn’t want anyone to perish but to have eternal life.

Ages come and go, and this is always God’s desire, I think—that we not perish, but that we know eternal life.  And our stories may differ today, but we know what a perishing world feels like too…

Fred Craddock was one of the legendary preachers of the 20th Century, and he swears that this actually happened to him.  He was visiting the home of one of his former students, and after a wonderful meal, the young parents excused themselves and ushered the children off to bed, leaving Fred sitting in the living room with the family dog—a large, sleek greyhound. 

Earlier that evening, Fred and the children’s father had been watching the kids roll around on the floor, playing with that dog.  “That’s a full-blooded greyhound there,” the father had told Fred.  “He once raced professionally down in Florida.  Then we got him.  Great dog with the kids, that greyhound.”

Well, with the kids and their parents upstairs, Fred was sitting alone with that dog, and the dog turned to Fred and asked, “This your first time to Connecticut?” 

“No,” Fred answered.  “I went to school up here a long time ago.”

“Well, I guess you heard…I came up here from Miami,” the greyhound said.

“Oh yeah, you retired?” Fred asked.

“No, is that what they told you?  No. I didn’t retire. Let me tell you.  I spent ten years as a professional racing greyhound.  That means ten years of running around that track, day after day, seven days a week—chasing that rabbit.  I raced chasing that rabbit for ten long years.  Then one day, well, I finally caught up to the rabbit.  It was a fake!  I had spent my whole life chasing a fake rabbit!  I didn’t retire that day—I quit.”  [1]

We know what a perishing world feels like.  It feels like chasing a fake rabbit—like going through the motions, like muscling our way through each day and each decision, never certain, maybe, where it’s all going, but just trying to keep up, to keep pace. 

Occasionally, though, we do catch up and have a moment to realize that what we thought we were chasing—it isn’t real anymore.  Money, fortune, security, the prospect of being “right”—it’s all a fake rabbit, and we’re perishing in our race to catch it.

Have you ever caught the fake rabbit?  Sure you have.  The fake rabbit is the six-figure salary that doesn’t make you any happier than you were when you were newly married and poor as dirt. 

The fake rabbit is the first day of retirement, when you realize that, without work, you’re not really sure who you are anymore. 

The fake rabbit is the victory after a long argument that still leaves you frustrated and mistrustful. 

The fake rabbit is the new furniture, the bigger house, the more expensive car… 

The fake rabbit is the world telling you you’re wonderful when deep down you can’t believe that you’re even good. 

Sometimes, though, you have to catch the fake rabbit to know what you’re really after.  Sometimes you need to look perishing straight in the eye before you can begin to wonder what eternal life looks like. 

Jesus says, “My heart-filled hope for you is that you don’t perish, but that you have life—eternal life.”  That’s the good news of the gospel—and what makes that news all the more sweet and life-giving is that eternal life does not rest in some far-flung future, after life and after death.  But it begins now.

Granted, for some, this conversation about perishing and eternal life is one of final destination, but time and time again, we see Jesus in the gospels making it about the here and now.

Christ, God’s presence in the world, sees you perishing now—perishing through loneliness, through depression, through loss, through fear and anxiety… And God’s promise of eternal life does not operate like an insurance policy, to be cashed in at a future time.  It begins now.  Eternal life is about life now—this moment, this second, this breath, even.  For God so loved the world, that even this moment in the world is a moment of eternity.  Thanks be to God! 

1.  A widely used Craddock story that I received from a Mark Ramsey sermon, “Two Worlds,” preached at Grace Covenant Presbyterian in Asheville, NC.    Fred B. Craddock, Craddock Stories, edited by Mike Graves and Richard F. Ward, (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001), pp. 106-7.   28 October 2007

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Scripture:  John 2:13-22

Someone recently shared a little cartoon drawing with me. The cartoon is a picture of Jesus,and he’s standing on a rocky outcropping, and gathered around him are disciples, and beyond them, a much larger crowd.  It’s a classic scene from many a Renaissance painting.  But the caption above has Jesus saying, “Okay everyone, now listen carefully.  I don’t want to end up with four different versions of this!”

This morning our text comes from John’s gospel, a gospel story that is, in fact, quite different from the other three in the way it conveys the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.  The gospel begins with this scene where Jesus storms into the Temple and turns over the tables of the moneychangers.  This is an episode that doesn’t occur in Matthew, Mark, and Luke until the very end of Jesus’ ministry, just days before the crucifixion, but in this gospel, John chooses to put this story near the very beginning—a glaring indicator that John is telling the story of Jesus Christ quite differently from the others.

You see, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—each one of them in his own way was painting a picture of Jesus for the early Christian movement, and in some subtle ways and not-so-subtle ways, those pictures are distinct, one from the next.  In truth, we’re no different today.  We, too, paint our own pictures of Jesus.  

I remember when I was a kid, in our Sunday school class room, there hung a picture of Jesus that many of you have seen before.  It’s a picture of Jesus’ head.  He’s Caucasian, of course, with long-flowing hair, and he has a sort of doe-eyed, serene expression on his face and he’s sort of looking off camera in a very innocent way. 

This is an image of Jesus that is in keeping with lots of others that we tend to hold in our minds. Like that one of Jesus with a bunch of children gathered around him.  Jesus is welcoming the children.  Or maybe the one of Jesus walking through a rolling, green countryside with a lamb draped over his shoulder.  Or maybe it’s Jesus laughing, or Jesus compassionately reaching out to heal someone.  These are the kinds of images that make for good, nursery-friendly and church-fellowship-hall-appropriate artwork, depicting the ministry of Christ. 

It’s good for us to remember that the gospel writers were also holding in their minds their own images of Jesus.  And when we look at John’s gospel, it’s significant to remember that he leads with a story about Jesus that just might not be so warm, kind, or welcoming.  John leads with this story about Jesus, who enters the Temple in Jerusalem, only to find that it’s full of people selling animals—cattle, sheep, doves… and that there are money changers there too, seated at their tables.  He makes a whip and drives them out.  He flips over the tables and shouts, “Get out!  This is not a marketplace!”

There will probably always be folks who look to this story in the gospels and claim that nothing should ever be bought or sold in a church on Sunday morning, but I want to inject a little context here, because this was no church lady bake sale here.  When we read about livestock and moneychangers in the Temple, we shouldn’t be too quick to associate the scene with church fundraisers and raffles. No, what was happening in Jesus’ day was quite different.  Actually, it was a pretty clever racket.

Let’s say you and your spouse traveled to Jerusalem during the Passover, and with you, you brought an appropriate sacrifice to God, as was prescribed in the Hebrew Scriptures.  So maybe you brought a ram and two turtledoves to offer in the Temple.  Well, when you arrived at the Temple, guess what happened?  A priest met you at the door and it was his job to “inspect” your sacrifice to make sure that it was of a high enough quality to be acceptable. In many, many cases, the animals were rejected.  Maybe the priest would claim that they were too old, or that they weren’t the right size, or that they had spots or blemishes.  “But don’t worry,” the priest would say, “we just happen to have our own hand-picked selection of sacrificial animals right over here.”  Never mind the fact that the markup on rams and turtledoves for sale in the Temple was significant—you had two choices, leave, having done nothing according to the Scriptures, or pay through the nose and upgrade your offerings.

So you get out your money to buy your replacement ram and turtledoves.  But guess whose face is on your coins?  Caesar’s.  And they don’t accept Roman coinage there at the Temple.  “But don’t worry,” the priests says.  “We’re a one-stop shop!  You can exchange those coins for our Temple currency over here at the money changing tables.”  And, of course, there’s an exchange rate. 

As church fundraisers go, this was a pretty lucrative scheme.  Jesus shows up and he can barely stand the thought of the Temple being used in this way.  He becomes unglued, unhinged, unmanageable!  He grabs some cord and makes himself a big ol’ whip and starts cracking that thing, driving the animals out.  He even brazenly approaches the moneychangers’ tables, whip probably still in hand, and starts dumping out their coins, all over the tables, rolling all over the floor.  And then he does them one better—he just upends the tables themselves. 

Can you imagine it?  The sound of these heavy, long wooden tables smacking the Temple floor as Jesus flips them over, one after the other?  Can you picture the scene?  Turtledoves escaping from overturned cages, sheep bleating and running everywhere, cows roaming around, poor peasants, nonchalantly stooping down to retrieve the coins skittering across the floor, priests calling for the guards, disciples wondering just what they’ve gotten themselves into.  And Jesus with a whip flailing around over his head a la Indiana Jones, shouting at the top of his lungs, “Get this stuff out of here!  My Father’s house is not a marketplace!”

This is not “Jesus loves the little children” Jesus.  This is not “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” Jesus.  This is not Jesus the blesser, the healer, or the peacemaker.  This is not the Jesus who shows up and offers constructive criticism.  This is Jesus the agitator!  The renegade—the upheaver!  He’s angry, and he’s not afraid to show it.  And in fact, he goes ballistic. 

In this scene, Jesus is like that kind of strange, distant relative who tends to make a scene wherever he goes, and who shows up at the family reunion, and no one’s really sure what he’s going to do.  He’s out of hand, hard to handle, hard to predict…

This is not the Jesus who encourages us to be nice, and it’s not the Jesus who gives us a pat on the back for trying hard or for doing a good job.  This is the Jesus who shows up in the temple of our lives and sees our brokenness, our sin, our willfulness… and will not tolerate it.  This is the Jesus who makes Christianity awkward. 

Some of you might remember the name John Fife.  In 1992, he was elected as the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA), and so he spent the year leading and serving in our denomination, traveling throughout the country and around the world, speaking a churches and Presbytery meetings, encouraging congregations and offering the Church vision and hope. 

This is the kind of guy John was, and still is:  At the end of a long day in any given town, when church members asked him if they could give him a ride to his hotel, he would inform them that, in fact, if there was space available, he was going to stay at the local homeless shelter.  And so he would invite his hosts to drop him off there, and he would make the assumption that people knew where the shelter was to begin with, and that they actually had a relationship with the clients there, and that they cooperated with the folks who were working with people who were homeless in their community.

Sometimes Jesus makes Christianity awkward. Sometimes Jesus refuses to believe that we don’t know what’s going on.  Sometimes Jesus makes the assumption that, in the Temple of our ordinary lives, we regularly show compassion for the poor, and when we don’t, he turns over the tables of our indifference and makes our Christianity feel awkward. 

You may remember this incident in rural Pennsylvania a couple years ago, when a gunman took a one-room Amish school house hostage and eventually killed five of the students before ending his own life.  It was awful, of course.  And for a time, television crews invaded that small community and the country watched transfixed, as these Amish families dealt with the tragedy.

First, some elders visited Marie Roberts, the wife of the murderer, to offer forgiveness.

Then, the families of the slain girls invited the widow to their own children’s funerals.

Next, they requested that all relief monies intended for Amish families be shared with Roberts and her children.

And, finally, in an astonishing act of reconciliation, more than 30 members of the Amish community attended the funeral of the killer.

You see, sometimes Jesus makes Christianity awkward.  He shows up in our local “temple” of An-Eye-For-An-Eye and overturns the tables of our desire for vengeance and our unwillingness to forgive and drives out our broken sense of what’s “fair” and what’s “right.” 

Christianity would be a whole lot easier if Jesus never did things like this:  If he never showed up in your Temple of “I’m right and she’s wrong” and drove out your unwillingness to forgive.  It’d be easier if Jesus didn’t step into our Temple of “Every Man for Himself” and chase away our belief that we get what we deserve.  Christianity might be a whole lot easier if Jesus didn’t barge into the Temple of our nation’s military might and ask, just one more time, how our past and current campaigns gel with his command to love our enemies. 

But the truth is that sometimes Jesus makes Christianity awkward.  Of course, sometimes Jesus comes to you as a comforter, a healer, a compassionate presence.  But sometimes Jesus walks through the doorway of your life and asks you, point blank:  “My dear and good friend, what doesn’t belong here?”

I wonder if you can imagine Jesus doing that right now.  For the moment, don’t worry about the whip or the tables clunking over onto the floor. Just imagine Jesus entering through some doorway in your life and taking a good look around.  And imagine Jesus asking himself—asking you—“Hmmmm… what doesn’t belong here?” 

Does it feel a little awkward to imagine Jesus doing that? 

It’s ok. 

Sometime Jesus makes Christianity feel awkward. 

But here’s the thing.  You have a choice. You can shut Jesus out, or you can join him.  You can make a whip, even, and help Jesus drive out those things in your life that you know are not in keeping with the person God has called you to be.  Amen.

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Scripture:  Genesis 17

The word Genesis means “beginning” and the Book of Genesis is a book of beginnings.  We don’t know for sure, but many scholars today believe that this first book of the Bible was written during the sixth century BC, roughly 550 years before the birth of Jesus.  The people of Israel were living in exile in Babylon, and working there in captivity, they were separated from their land, their culture, their temple in Jerusalem… It became essential for the Israelites to understand and celebrate their history, from its very beginning, and so it came about, during those long years of Babylonian exile, that our faith ancestors told and retold the stories. 

Genesis, the beginning, the story of the Creation, of covenants, of legends like Abraham and Sarah…  And we can well imagine that as the stories were collected and told and retold, and as this book, “Genesis,” took shape, the people of Israel, though they were far from home and small in number, grew to understand themselves as a nation of God’s promise and hope.

Aren’t there times when we all wonder about our origin?  What child has not, at one time or another, snuggled up to her parents and asked to hear her story of birth?  What child hasn’t wondered about his first months of life, or those first years, lost to vivid memory?

We have a box at home, and it’s growing.  It contains baby toys and jumpers, teeny tiny footie pajamas and soon, once they’re completely outgrown, the Ethiopian dresses that our adopted daughters were wearing when they were presented to us at a coffee ceremony in Ethiopia.  That box tells a story of beginning, and in various ways, our girls are already joining the items in the box with pictures, stories, and vague memories.  Why?  Because our beginning—our Genesis—says a lot about who we are and where we’re going. 

It’s not a very pleasant thought to entertain, but the reality I know and understand is that my daughters may one day find themselves in exile.  It happens to us all, that we become estranged from our origin, that we venture off and somehow lose track of who we are and who we’re called to be. 

It’s easy to get lost in this world—to pursue life in a certain direction only to find that “life” there doesn’t fit just right.  And so we find ourselves in exile and that exile can look like a lot of things.  Maybe exile is a pattern of destructive habits.  Maybe exile is a relentless pursuit of riches.  Maybe exile is a persistent pattern of broken relationships.  Whatever it looks and feels like, a hope we can cling to when we’re in exile lies in our beginning.

A hope I have as a parent is that if one day a daughter of mine finds herself experiencing exile, she can remember her beginning—her Genesis in a family that loves her and celebrates her strength and beauty and intellect.  Because exile can be tricky, and the question that looms large when we’re in exile is “Who am I, really?”

That’s the question the Israelites were asking in Babylon.  “Who are we, really?”  Away from home, away from our familiar routines and cultural practices, away from the land of our fathers…  Who are we now that we are in exile from all that we knew?  It’s not an uncommon question to ask…

Prior to seminary, I was a middle school language arts teacher.  In one of the towns where I taught, about thirty percent of the student body was Hispanic.  This was an old steel mill town in Illinois, and during the 70’s and 80’s a good number of the Hispanic families that had been on the move as migrant farmers, stopped and settled down, taking more stable jobs in the mill.  And so this little town in Illinois developed a vibrant Spanish speaking, Mexican community. 

One of the enchanting things about middle school is that as a seventh grader, you receive something that you did not have in elementary school—a locker!  A small, private cubby hole in the world, where you can lock up not only your books and backpack, but also various expressions of your identity:  magnets and posters, cut-outs and stickers.  Granted, there were always students whose lockers contained no element of personal identification, other than a pile of disheveled papers at the bottom that grew with each passing week and eventually had to be condemned.  But most students decorated these small corners of the world with at least a little pride, and such was the case with our Hispanic students, who almost to a person, adorned their lockers with Mexican flags. 

This alone might not have been much of an issue, but much to the ire of two or three teachers in the building, the Mexican middle schoolers were speaking Spanish during their free time.  In the halls between classes, outside, and during lunch.  Little conversations here and there in Spanish.  And I should say now that I had the good pleasure to work with lots of wonderful teaching colleagues during my time as an educator.  But the sad truth is that a few of them were downright paranoid.  If they’re speaking Spanish, they must be plotting something devious, otherwise, they’d speak English so we can all understand!  This was the strange conviction that developed in the minds of these two or three teachers, who then turned their misguided attention to locker décor, and moved to ban the display of Mexican flags in the school. 

Fortunately, their small-minded efforts got them nowhere, and unfortunately, they failed to understand a very human desire, that we all wonder, “Who are we, really?”— that we all long to discover and connect with our stories of Genesis—that we are enlivened and empowered when we can connect with our beginnings, especially when we are having that experience of exile. 

It may be that a small handful of Spanish speaking kids in a white community find great and wonderful power in the Mexican flag and the Spanish language, and it may well be that a small handful of Israelites in a Babylonian community find great and wonderful power in the story of Abraham and Sarah and the Hebrew language. 

In both cases, the story of a Genesis is more than a story—it’s a symbol of deep and meaningful identity.  When our faith ancestors, the Israelites, lived in Babylon, they didn’t work for themselves—they worked for the Babylonians.  They spent their long days using Babylonian tools to pick Babylonian crops that would be sold in Babylonian markets.  They built roads and walls, temples and aqueducts—and it was all for the glory of Babylon. 

But at night, they met in their homes, and together they built something just for themselves:  Genesis!  Their story of beginning!  Their legend of faith and their collected tales of covenant with the Almighty God!  And I can imagine that if they’d given the book a longer title, it could have been “Genesis:  We Go Way, Way Back.”  We may be new here to Babylon.  Our culture here may seem insignificant, but our story goes back to the beginning.  Indeed, we go way, way back.

So when we read in Genesis 17, where God changes Abram’s name to Abraham, which means “Father of Multitudes,” and says to him, “I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you”—when we read that scripture, we should remember the Israelites who stayed connected and alive because of their shared story of Genesis:  We Go Way, Way Back.

And now the so what.  I mean, it’s nice and all to acknowledge this piece of history—to sort through the details of how the Book of Genesis was eventually compiled in the context of exile.  It’s significant, even, to develop an understanding of how the figure of Abraham meant so much to our faith ancestors living in Babylon, so far from home.  But what does it mean for us today? 

I would suggest that something faith-filled and wonderful happens when we, too, lift up and celebrate our shared stories of beginning.  We live in a fragmented world, a fragmented nation, a fragmented state, and some of us live in fragmented families.  Red, blue, conservative, liberal, rich, poor, haves, have-nots, us, them…  The list could go on and on, there are just so many ways that we lack cohesion in our world today. 

Sometimes I wonder if God doesn’t somehow look at the human family and see us all living in exile—warring nations, walls that separate, deep, dark suspicions that keep us mistrustful and apart.  It’s almost as if the whole human condition is a condition of exile:  a self-imposed exile from peace, exile from trust, exile from stability for us and our children. 

Our generals and politicians treat the symptoms of this exile with warships and government sanctions, but we can faithfully suspect that more lasting solutions lie in our ability to think and believe differently—and perhaps especially in the number of ways we can say to ourselves and each other, “We go way, way back!”  The bonds that unite us lie in our Genesis—our beginning, and the truth that we are always more alike—and more connected—than we think we are. 

I had a strange but remarkable experience with Meheret, our middle daughter, just a few months after she came home from Ethiopia with us.  She was four at the time, and she and I were playing in the living room.  Wrestling, actually.  And in the tickling and wriggling away, Meheret’s elbow suddenly popped.  Well, Meheret started to scream the top of her lungs, like we’d never heard her scream before.  I instantly became convinced that I’d somehow broken or dislocated her elbow, and within minutes, Karla and I were off with her to the hospital.  Driving in the car, she was howling from the backseat and Karla was hunched over her, trying to sooth.  I drove, feeling like “the father of the year,” so frustrated with myself for being so careless.

It takes us about ten minutes or so to drive to All Saints, though it seemed like forever, and by the time we arrived, Meheret’s crying had subsided.  Stopped, even.  I parked the van in the lot in front of the emergency room and went to the back seat.  Karla and I were scratching our heads.  Do we take her in, or don’t we? 

So I started to play with Meheret, asking her to push against my hands with her feet, and then with her good arm, and then with the arm that had been hurt.  I did it all playfully, acting like she was the strongest little girl in the world, and by the end, she was laughing.  She was fine.  What a relief! 

Karla said to me, “Well, maybe her elbow just sort of popped out or something.  That used to happen to me when I was a kid.”

I looked at Karla and said in all seriousness, “Well, she must’ve gotten that from you.”

I had no idea what I’d said until I saw Karla looking at me with a funny grin on her face.  Meheret is adopted.  She was born in the heart of Ethiopia, in a land thousands of miles away from Karla’s Dutch Wisconsin family line.  And yet in that moment I so thoroughly believed in our family connection that I lost sight of the facts.

But friends, sometimes the truth is better than the facts.  And the truth is that we all go way, way back—that the bonds that tie us together are stronger than the lies we’ve been led to believe that keep us apart. 

There’s a scene in Genesis 15 where Abram goes outside and God says, “Abram, look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then God says to him, “So shall your descendants be.” That’s a courageous story to remember when you’re living in exile—when your numbers are dwindling and your future is uncertain.  But that is our story, and it says that we are family – that we are all connected children of a common Genesis.

I want to challenge you this morning to never underestimate the power of that story—the power of our common Genesis.  If you doubt it, then try this.  Next time you’re in a heated argument with someone, if you are able, change the subject and see if you can somehow start talking about where you were both born and what childhood lives were like.  You don’t have to go back to the dawn of time, just to your own Genesis here on the planet.  Could it be that when you return to the argument, you see one another differently?

Next time you find yourself tempted to hate someone, or to consider someone your enemy, could you stop to imagine your common Genesis—the fact that you were both born to parents who held you and nursed you, and wanted the very best for you.

I’m not naïve enough to believe that such a practice will solve all our problems, but I do believe that much of our sin and brokenness as a human family lies in our alienation from one another—our inability to see and believe that, in fact, we do go way, way back, and that laced through our common ancestry is God’s promise of love.

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Scripture:  Mark 1:9-15

I majored in English education at the University of Illinois. In high school, I had the good fortune of having a couple really talented English teachers who helped me develop my skills as a thinker and a writer, and so by the ripe old age of 19, I was sure that this was a real strength of mine. 

 One of my first courses at U of I was Survey of British Literature I.  Our textbook for that class was so thick and the pages so tissue-paper thin, I had trouble believing that there was going to be a Survey of British Literature II that spring.  Our professor loved each and every page of that book and from day one it was clear that she was going to push us.  “No problem,” I thought.  True, a “C” in Plant Biology might come as a gift from God, but this is English!  I can handle this!

Confidently, I tackled my first writing assignment for the class—a five or six page paper on something like the image of the “hero” in Beowulf.  I got right to work and proudly submitted my first ever college paper.  Seven pages!  I can’t be sure, but I have a feeling that as I strode forward after class that day, my face wore a certain smug satisfaction that this, indeed, was going to be a gem for my professor, that she would read it once or twice and then gather her family around the hearth that night and bedazzle them with the insights of one of her new freshmen students—this Ben Krase—who so brilliantly and succinctly identified the complexities of Beowulf’s heroic persona, as no other student during her long tenure had been able to do.

When I got the paper back the following week, there was nothing on the first page.  No marks, no scribbles, no notes in the margin.  Nothing.  Hmmm.  Interesting, I thought.  I opened it to the second page.  Nothing.  And the third.  Nothing!  No comments, no corrections, no double-underlined phrases, no stars indicating what an insightful author I was.  I turned to the fourth page and there I found a red line drawn horizontally across the middle of the page.  Next to the line, my professor wrote these two words:  “Start here.”  In other words:  “Skip the flowery language.  Nix the repetitive mumbo-jumbo.  Ditch the breathless on-and-on about how you’re going to make a point and just do it.  Cut to the chase! Tell me what your thesis is and get on with it!”  My pride wounded, my choice of major slightly in question, I started over.

I bring this up to draw a contrast to Mark’s gospel.  Mark does not wait three pages to finally make a point.  Instead, he begins chapter one, verse one and hits the ground running.  Unlike Matthew and Luke, Mark doesn’t say a word about Jesus’ birth in his gospel.  It’s almost like there’s no time—he can’t wait to get into the big story.  But once he’s there, it’s full speed ahead! 

• Snapshots and images flash from the get-go.
• Jesus’ baptism is just 3 verses in Mark’s gospel. 
• His wilderness temptation for 40 days and nights – just 2 verses.
• Jesus calling his first disciples—just 5 verses. 

By the twenty-first verse of Mark, Jesus is already hard at work, teaching, preaching, and healing.  Indeed, Mark’s first chapter plays like a trailer for an action film—rapid fire, image after image, no time to lose. [1]

 ¹²And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.  ¹³He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

 If we could take the gospel writer Mark and imagine him as a college freshman, turning in chapter one for a grade, we can well imagine what kind of comments he’d get in the margins...

•  Who is this character, “Spirit” and what is his or her motivation? 
• It’s not enough to say Jesus is in the wilderness.  You have to describe the wilderness.  Make us as readers feel like we’re there. 
• “He was in the wilderness”?  Use action verbs, active voice!  (He languished in the wilderness.  He persevered in the wilderness.)
• Who is this “Satan” person?  Develop your characters more! 
• What kind of wild beasts? 
• How did the angels wait on Jesus? 
•  Don’t tell me.  Show me!

Sometimes I think Mark assumes that we already know the details—that when he says, “tempted in the wilderness for forty days,” his readers respond, “Oh, well, we all know what that’s like.  Sure, a month or so out in the wild, with nothing to eat, wild animals roaming around… we all get that.”  The problem is, of course, that we’re usually not quick to make that connection.  If I were Mark’s professor, my comment in the margin of his gospel might be, “Mark, your readers want and need to connect with you, but to do that, you’re going to have to invite them in a bit more.” 

 So, perhaps on Mark’s behalf, I’ve started to wonder about day twenty.  Jesus was in the wilderness for forty days, says Mark.  That’s a long time.  It’s a whole month, plus ten days.  A long time to be away.  A long time to be alone.  A long time to feel tempted.  Forty days. 

 The way the gospel reads, I suppose it’s easy to imagine Jesus, after his baptism, trekking off into the wilderness, winding his way around bushes and boulders, looking for a good spot to sleep for the night.  It’s relatively easy to imagine him setting off, and I suppose it’s kind of easy to picture Jesus at the end, coming back into town, ready to begin his ministry.  He looks tired and hungry, sure, but the ordeal is over, and especially in Mark’s gospel, there’s so much to do next that we don’t dwell on the forty days.

 So I wonder about day twenty.  Almost three weeks in.  By this time for Jesus, the novelty of being out in the wild is long gone.  If there’d been some aspect of wilderness temptation that seemed thrilling or exotic to begin with, it’s worn off.  Twenty days anywhere can start to feel like forever.  And at day twenty, there’s still twenty days to go.  No immediate end in sight.  The worst might not be over!  Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness may only take up two verses in Mark’s gospel, but in truth, on day twenty, it feels like an eternity.

Now it’s worth remembering something about Jesus here, and it’s something that I’ve said many times before.  Jesus was human.  He was really human.  True, we understand Jesus as God, too, but Jesus was also human.  And this means that he felt pain, felt temptation, felt isolation, felt fear…  Jesus was not God in a human costume, wandering around the earth, pretending to know what it feels like to be human.  Jesus in the wilderness was not God masquerading in human form, pretending to know what it’s like to come to day twenty—to be so far in that you forgot what life was like before day one and to be so far gone that you can’t imagine making it to day forty. 

 Ultimately, for Jesus’ life and death to mean anything, Jesus had to be human, and human he was, which means that his temptation in the wilderness was really a temptation.  The trial was really a trial.  The long lonely nights wondering if he’d wake up in time to wave a torch at a wolf looking for an easy meal were really long, lonely nights.  Jesus’ day twenty was really a day twenty—a real human day lost to fear, hunger, and loneliness.  Mark is so brief in his description, but from the beginning of the gospel, it’s there—that Jesus has been through a day twenty. Just like the rest of us.

Xernona Clayton was a good friend of Martin Luther King Jr.  She tells a story about Dr. King’s day twenty during the Civil Rights Movement—about the only time he ever said he was afraid.  The movement was at its peak, and King and others were preparing to march in Selma.  On March 7, 1965, marchers there had been beaten severely by the police, and King and others were scheduled to show up for a march on the 9^th in response.   He called home to talk with his wife, Coretta, but Xernona was there, and she picked up the phone.  “I think this is one time I’m afraid,” he said.  “I don’t think I’m going to come back from Selma, so please promise me you’ll take care of Coretta and the kids… but don’t tell her.”  [2]

That’s a “day 20 conversation.”  Too far in to remember what life was like before the trial, before there was no going back, but too far away from the end to imagine that it’ll be over any time soon. 

 And we’ve been there.  Day twenty is a day in the middle of your battle with cancer.  When you can’t much imagine the days before day one—when it’s hard to remember “life before cancer,” when you had other worries that seem so small now that you’re fighting for your life.  And day forty seems so far away—so long to go before hope, before remission, before a cure… 

 Day twenty is a day in the middle of separation and divorce.  When you can’t remember what all led to this.  When you can’t recall a time when there was a hope of keeping it all together, working things out.  Day twenty is a day of lawyers and accusations and trying to imagine life on your own, but oh, day forty is still so far away.

Day twenty is a day, oh, about a month after the funeral.  The pictures are still up but the cards have stopped coming in.  Life around you is picking up the pace, getting back to normal, but you can’t remember what normal is anymore, because he’s gone.  She’s gone.  And on your day twenty after the funeral, day forty is nowhere in sight because you can’t imagine that the grief will ever subside.

Day twenty falls somewhere during the fifth or sixth year of caring for an aging parent—somewhere after the 50^th doctor visit and the sixth or seventh tour of an assisted living home.  Day twenty comes when you best memories of your mom or dad feel completely overshadowed by the daily battle with Alzheimer’s.  And day forty? Well, is there hope for a day forty?

Day twenty is a day in the midst of depression.

Day twenty is a day of questioning in a season of doubt.

Day twenty is a day of day of dealing with a past that haunts you.

Day twenty is a day of addiction, a day of pain, a day of self-judgment…

Haven’t you ever had a day twenty?  A day of endless trial?  A day of just surviving? 

 Maybe your day twenty is just another day in a life that’s so busy, you never have time to stop, to plan, to get your life in front of you and think about what’s next—another day in the car—another day of keep-your-nose-to-the-grindstone?  And maybe you’ve got a second to wonder, “What did day one look like?  How did I get into this mess?  How did the life I wanted to live slip away so suddenly?” 

 Friends, today is the first Sunday of Lent.  We’re not at “Day Twenty” quite yet, but the season of Lent reminds us that Jesus has lived in the darkest corners of our own lives—that Jesus was really Emmanuel—God With Us, living with us in our full humanity.

The Good News of the Lenten journey is news that God will never abandon us—that God promises to accompany us through the valley —that God will always be there with us on our Day Twenty.

This is, by the way, the Good News of Jesus Christ: That in God’s love for us, God will not and cannot abandon us… That God suffers and dies with us, and through it all, EVEN ON DAY 20, God announces hope and victory.  Amen.

1.  This insight was gleaned from the sermon, “Transgressive Healer,” preached by Renee Roederer at Pasadena Presbyterian Church on February 12, 2012.  You can find it here:  http://www.ppcyoungadults.blogspot.com/2012/02/sermon-transgressive-healer.html

 2.  As heard on the Tavis Smiley show, “Memories of the Movement, Part 2.”  February 25, 2012

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Scripture:  Mark 9:2-10

The title for today’s sermon comes from a line that C.S. Lewis wrote.  “You do not have a soul. You are a soul.  You have a body.”  Simple, straightforward.  But we often get it the other way around, don’t we?  We often suppose, without thinking about it too much, that we have a soul—or that we have a spirit, as if somehow the spiritual aspect of our being is an add-on, an addendum to what would otherwise be a normal, functioning human existence. 

Or maybe you’ve put it this way before, perhaps in describing yourself to someone—I have a spiritual side.  I like soccer, the British version of The Office, quilting, skydiving… and oh, I have a spiritual side too.  Lewis would say, “No, no, no!  You don’t have a spiritual side.  You are the spiritual side!  You don’t have a soul.  You are a soul.”

Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations With God, puts it this way:  “[We] think of [ourselves] as humans searching for a spiritual awakening, when in fact [we] are spiritual beings attempting to cope with a human awakening.” 

Our bodies don’t have spirits.  We are spirits, and we have these bodies; we are spirits attempting to cope with this “human awakening.”

Today is Transfiguration Sunday, which I’m sure you all had marked on your calendars, along with some good-ol’-fashion Transfiguration Sunday afternoon activities followed by the traditional Transfiguration Sunday dinner, right?  It’s the Sunday before Lent begins, and since this Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, today we remember the story of Jesus, Peter, James and John, and a mountain-top experience they had.  As Mark tells it, Jesus led them apart from the group and up a high mountain. 

Have you ever climbed a mountain before?  If you have, then you know that the experience will quickly put you in touch with the fact that, while you may be a soul, you indeed do have a body!  Sore legs, less oxygen, shortness of breath, cramps in the side, blisters in your boots…  there’s nothing like a good, long climb to put you in touch with the fact that you have a physical side.  But, if you pick the right mountain, then there’s nothing like a good climb to put you in touch with your spirit. 

Back in my twenties, I took about three days to take a backwoods Montana trail up to the Continental Divide.  The trek was long and the final assent was arduous, painful…  At least half a dozen times, we came over a rise in the earth and thought we were at the top, only to find that the trail continued up, up, and up—that we weren’t quite there yet.  By the time we eventually reached the summit, we were completely exhausted—sore and depleted physically. But then something happened those last thirty or forty steps.  The pain faded away and our spirits lifted.  On our way up, we’d caught a good view here and there,but now, finally on top, north, south, east, west—we could see forever. 

For a little while, there were no words to describe it, so instead we all just laughed.  We laughed!  Have you ever heard it said that laughter is the language of the soul?  Well that’s what our souls did when they recognized the grandeur of that moment—they laughed!

Not many people know the name Tenzing Norgay, but in 1953 he was part of a team of explores that accompanied Edmond Hillary to the summit of Mount Everest.  This was the first ever successful ascent of Everest, and in the end, after months of careful planning involving hundreds of people, only Tenzing and Hillary would reach the top and they would only be able to stay there for about fifteen minutes. 

During that time, Hillary took a picture of Tenzing—the first of human being standing at the top of the world.  In Tenzing’s autobiography, he writes that he had offered to take Hillary’s picture as well, “but for some reason he shook his head; he did not want it.”  (Man of Everest) 

Some have speculated that Hillary didn’t trust Tenzing to use the camera properly, but I wonder if Hillary wasn’t having a spiritual experience.  I wonder if Hillary didn’t imagine the picture that was sure to hit the papers—of a human body standing atop Everest—and decline:  no more pictures, for in that moment he was so much more than a body—he was a spirit.

I say all this because in the gospel story, Mark writes that Jesus led the disciples up a high mountain, and I wonder if that climb brought their own spirits to attention. It’s worth noting that Jesus often created meaningful moments with his followers in nature.  The sermon on the mount, or in Mark’s gospel, the sermon on the plain, teaching on the shore, or on a boat out on the sea of Galilee, remote landscapes and hilltops… 

Again and again in the gospels, Jesus healed and taught and ministered in these remote places, and one cannot help but wonder that Jesus himself was simply captivated with the beauty of it all—and that he understood that our spirits come alive in such places.

High up on that mountain, Jesus’ own spirit came alive to his friends.  And perhaps this is another case in the gospels where the human story told with human language fails to capture what really happened.  Dazzling light, Jesus shining brightly, and along with him, Moses and the prophet Elijah, a voice from the clouds… a moment of spirit coming alive.  Don’t try to take a picture—just watch, just experience.

 But Peter can’t.  He tries to take a picture.  He tries to capture the moment!  Peter—the disciple we can most often count on to get carried away or to overstep in his eagerness to be helpful or do the right thing.  Peter says to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.  You know, for posterity sake.  Say cheese!” 

It’s sort of funny to think that in that moment Peter was ready to gather tools and wood and whatever other materials he’d need and then take the time to build three dwellings.  But that’s a natural response.  To the presence of spirit—not body, but spirit—that’s a natural response. 

If you don’t think so, then try this sometime.  Next time you’re completely alone with someone you love—with a spouse, a parent, sibling, child, friend—try this experiment.  Sit close together and stare at each other.  Just stare at each other and make sure you’re looking into each other’s eyes!  Do it for five seconds, then ten, then twenty… a minute, two, three.  How long do you think you’ll last?  I’ll about guarantee what will happen.  One of you will look away.  Or if you don’t look away, you know what you’ll do—you’ll laugh!  One of you will start to giggle and laugh.

Why? You can tell me later, but I’m going to guess now that the intensity of looking at another spirit directly in the eyes is usually too much for us—it’s like a bright, dazzling light.

Now you might say, “Well, it’s uncomfortable looking into someone else’s eyes that long.”  But I’d put it this way:  We are not bodies.  We have bodies, but we are spirits.  And when we sit still together long enough, we sense that truth and the awesome purity of that experience causes us to do one of two things:  look away or giggle!  Laughter is the language of souls and when our souls collide, how can we not laugh?

Lewis Smedes wrote:  “You are deep, unfathomably deep.  You cannot be a shallow person; God does not make shallow people.  You can, if you choose, close your own mind to the depths within you.  But you cannot be shallow.”

But something happens when we realize how deep we are—when we recognize the spirit in each other—or the spirit in ourselves.  We look away.  We laugh.  Or we try to make the other person laugh, which is another way of stopping the moment, looking away.  Or like Peter we busy ourselves making dwellings—keeping ourselves good and distracted so that we don’t have to stand in the brightness for too long.

The way the writer describes Jesus on that mountain is to say that his robe became white – dazzling bright—whiter than any bleach on earth could make it.  It’s worth remembering that robes in that day got pretty dirty.  Folks didn’t throw their clothes in the laundry every other day like we do today.  And it wasn’t like Jesus was traveling around with two or three changes of clothes.  The robes he wore, and the robes the disciples wore, got dirty, dusty, dingy.  But there on the mountain, Jesus’ robes turned a bright, dazzling white. 

One way to read the transfiguration story is to say that the disciples caught a glimpse of Jesus’ spiritual side.  Seeing yourselves from the perspective of the spirit within will help you to remember why you came here and what you came here to do.”

Might that be our experience too?  Sometimes we look at people and all we see are their bodies…

That body with cancer

That body addicted to alcohol

That body looking through the dumpster for something to keep, to sell, to eat…

That body driving that car and pulling out ahead of me

That body talking and never listening

Sometimes we look at ourselves and all we see is a body…

A body that doesn’t do what we want it to do

A body that’s broken

A body with Parkinson’s

A body that needs to be taken care of

A body for which you use words like “ugly” or “undesirable”

A body that is unwanted

A body with 15 or so unwanted pounds

A body that is aging

And it is SO EASY to get caught up in our bodies.  But we are not bodies.  WE HAVE BODIES.  We are SPIRITS.  And could it be that your spirit, my spirit, his spirit, her spirit, the spirit of the one next to the dumpster… that our spirits radiate with wonderful light, that our spirits ache to shine forth, to be dazzling to each other, to fill our lives with goodness and laughter, if we would but take time to see each other—and ourselves—as we truly are.

May your life and the lives of those around you be blessed with a mountaintop or two this week, and may your spirit shine forth with joy and with laughter!  Amen.

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Scripture:  Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 and 3:1-8

I want to begin today by acknowledging the fun I’ve had thinking about this morning.  Weeks ago, Nikki Blanks, our director of youth and children’s ministries, and I began planning this two-part series on the poetry of the Old Testament.  Nikki’s Master’s work is in Old Testament and she focused primarily on some poetic forms in Jeremiah, which translate nicely to the work we’re doing today.  I’ve so enjoyed having Nikki as a colleague and I’ve benefited from her knowledge and insight.  I hope you’ll join Nikki for the adult education class here in the sanctuary at 10:45.

 And then also, in planning for this service, there’s the fact that we have Mark Paffrath with us for these weeks while Jerry recovers from his hand surgery, and being able to connect with Mark and think through musical possibilities for our worship—what a thrill!  And to have Mark and Kathi leading us in the song, “To everything there is a season – turn, turn, turn” – so good to have our Scripture sung today.  Thank you!

 So we gather this morning in the midst of art and poetry, and intellect and good study.  We gather in the midst of it all to wonder again about God and about our lives, our direction—about how it all fits together.  Old Testament professor and prolific author Walter Bruggeman has written that “the church on Sunday morning, or whenever it engages in its odd speech, may be the last place left in our society for imaginative speech that permits people to enter into new worlds of faith and to participate in joyous, obedient life.”  (from Finally Comes the Poet)

 Odd speech.  What better way could there be to describe what we do here together?  Here in this family of faith, where we regularly try to name the unnamable, describe the indescribable, and generally give voice to that which is beyond the limits of human reason and intellect…  It’s one of the things we do best as a church, I think—this odd speech.  When you think about it, it’s really one of the things what Jesus did best too…

 The Kingdom of God is like yeast… 

It’s like a mustard seed… 

It’s like a treasure hidden in a field…

 The Kingdom is like a merchant in search of fine pearls.

And I am the bread of life.  

I am the good shepherd. 

And you are salt.

 And you are the light of the world.

 It’s all kind of odd speech.  But something happens when we use it.  Something faith-filled and wonderful happens when we allow ourselves to use and be captivated by these odd words of Scripture and faith…

 Emily Dickinson wrote this poem:

 A word is dead,

 When it is said,

 Some say.

 But I say

 It just begins to live

 That day.

 And that’s what happens.  We gather here as a church and at some point during the worship service—and we’re not always sure how this happens—a word or phrase lodges itself firmly in that notch between our thinking and believing, and that word—that piece of odd speech—begins to live that day!  I’ve been here long enough to hear some of you talk about something that was said here in worship that affected you and challenged you and ultimately caused you to make a move in your life or think differently about something.  It’s really amazing to think about what might happen when we let a word or two live within us!

 Another short poem from the poet Tukaram:

 A good poem is like finding a hole

 in the palace

 wall -

 never know what you

 might

 see.

 Now I know—some of you here love, love, love poetry.  You read it, you write it, and your thought life is wonderfully littered with couplets and stanzas…  But I also want to acknowledge that some of you might not connect so much with the language of poetry—that as soon as a poem begins, your eyes tend to glaze over and your mind wanders to another place.  This morning I’d like to challenge you with this idea that a good poem is like a key that allows you to open and experience something that you otherwise wouldn’t have experienced.  It’s like a hole in the palace wall, and if you can see through it—if you can see through the poem—you never know what you might see.

 With that in mind, let’s look through these words from Ecclesiastes.  “Vanity of vanities,” it begins.   “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.”  That word, “vanity” is essentially an English translation of a Hebraic metaphor meaning “breath” or “the wind chasing the wind.” Ecclesiastes begins with a description of it all as this “breath,” this vain “wind chasing wind.”

 At first glance, it may seem a pretty bleak picture.  “What do people gain from their toil?” the poet asks.  “Generations come and go, the sun rises and sets, the winds blow and blow only to replace themselves, the rivers flow into the sea, but it is never full.”  And then the crux of the issue:

 All things are wearisome;

 more than one can express;

the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

 or the ear filled with hearing.

What has been is what will be,

 and what has been done is what will be done;

 there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there a thing of which it is said,

 ‘See, this is new’?

 And so the Ecclesiastes poet seems to ask, “What’s this all for?”  Living, dying, suffering, healing, working, loving… With a poem he or she summons that question before us.

 Can I just take a moment to say how happy I am that a book like Ecclesiastes is even in the Bible?  It’s really a wondrous thing, when you think about it, that we have this book in our Scriptures.  It’s not a book of commandments—nothing here about what you shall or shall not do.  No doctrine, no demands…  When people argue with each other and try to use the Bible to back up their points, they never quote the book of Ecclesiastes.  (“Oh yeah?  Well “there’s a time to mourn, and a time to dance!”)

 Sometimes we as Christians have this strange habit of reading the Bible and constantly looking for the should in it—something we should think, something we should do, something we should believe, or something that should happen…  But there are no “shoulds” in Ecclesiastes.  Instead, the book is a poet’s observation about life—about the meaning of life, and about how that meaning can slip away sometimes.  And I’m happy that Ecclesiastes is in the Bible because there are simply times when everything that should be slips away and we are left to either acknowledge or deny what really IS. 

 Birth, and death.  Marriage and divorce. 

 Cancer, car accidents, success and failure.

Deep, wonderful happiness and deep, dark depression.

Life in all its thrills and spills, comings and goings,

Faith and doubt, hope and dismay…

Ecclesiastes is about real life—not the life of “shoulds,” but just real life—

Life in which there is…

² a time to be born, and a time to die;


a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; 


³ a time to kill, and a time to heal;


a time to break down, and a time to build up; 


⁴ a time to weep, and a time to laugh;


a time to mourn, and a time to dance…

 The phrase that has come into my mind for the book of Ecclesiastes is “the holy, unvarnished NOW.”  This is life that hasn’t been cleaned up for company.  Life cluttered with the good and the bad, joy and pain, excitement and regret

 Ecclesiastes is about real life—not the varnished life we sometimes fool ourselves into living,

            the life where there is…

            A time to weep, but only if no one’s watching,

            A time to mourn, but not too much time,

            A time to die, but never a time to talk about how we feel about dying.

Ecclesiastes is not about this varnished life.  Rather, in a very holy way, Ecclesiastes is so wonderfully unvarnished—it’s just life as we really experience it—raw and uncensored and holy in its honesty.

 The poet writes, “Vanity of vanities!”  And, stuck in traffic between school and soccer practice, we’re apt to say the same thing.  But I would offer this for us to consider this morning:  that perhaps what we have here is not simply an indictment of the way things are, but rather an invitation to simply rest in the way things are.

 Seventeen summers ago, two years before my mom died, I found out that she had cancer.  I was backpacking with a friend in northern California.  I had known that she was having some tests done, so that morning I hiked out to a pay phone to call home.  The news was horrible.  When I got off the phone, I didn’t want to hike back to camp just yet, so I made my way down to the shore of the Pacific ocean—a remote, rocky place where I could think.  I stood there for a while, naturally overwhelmed with worry and fear, wondering what was next, staring out at the sea.

 A head popped out of the water, looking at me.  It was a sea lion.  Maybe twenty-five feet away, he floated there for a bit, checking me out, and then went back under.  Soon another popped up, a little closer, and then another.  I guess there were about seven or eight of them, and after a while, they became a little less wary of me, doing what sea lions do—playing in the surf, catching fish.  I stood there like a statue for maybe half and hour, forty-five minutes, watching them. 

 It was a meaningful moment for me.  On some level, certainly, those sea lions gave me comfort.  But beyond that, a truth began to dawn in me.  Watching them and the sea beyond them, I realized something. 

My mom will die

And so will I

 And so will all of these sea lions

 And others will come

 Other moms

 Other sons

 Other sea lions

 And had I been writing the book of Ecclesiastes at the time, I might have added,

 All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow.  We are like wind, chasing wind, chasing wind.

 And for a moment, standing there, weeks before the hospital visits and the chemotherapy, I had some sense of this sweeping arc of time and all of natures rhythms going along with it—life and death, change, decay, new life… joy, sorrow, hope, despair… And seldom have I felt more afraid, but seldom have I felt more connected. 

 The Ecclesiastes poet writes, "All things are wearisome; more than one can express."  But that word “wearisome” is an ambiguous one, sometimes translated as “constantly active, always in motion.”  Never-ending. 

 I want to suggest today that something happens to us when we reckon with the never-ending-ness of time—that something happens in us when we wake up, even briefly, to the notion that our lives and our life spans are like microscopic flecks of cosmic dust in an unfathomably large universe of space and time.

 Perhaps we stop trying to manage it all

   To control our time

   To control our relationships

   To manage our feelings

   To keep our emotions in check

   To accumulate the things and events that will comfort us

 Acknowledging the timelessness of millions of moments before and after us, perhaps we can recognize the timeliness of this moment and we can begin to live in the holy, unvarnished NOW.

   This tree

   This silence

   This person in need

   This conversation with a child

   This prayer

 A good, honest, holy, and unvarnished life becomes not the goal we strive for, but rather the byproduct of our perspective

   Our paying attention

   Listening

   Becoming more aware

   And alive

 May God with God’s own odd speech gift us in such a way.

God of all love and grace, help us stop and pay attention to life as it unfolds.  Give us holy honesty to celebrate joy and face fear, to revel in goodness and acknowledge grief.  Give us a raw, sacred perspective that the gift of this day, this hour, and even this moment will not be lost on us - that we might live in light and love and truth.  In Christ's name we pray, amen.

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Scripture:  Isaiah 40:21-31

I spent a summer in my twenties as a camp counselor at a Lutheran camp up near Kalispell, Montana.  The camp itself nested on a craggy slope on the western side of Flathead Lake—a heavenly place to spend a season in one’s life.  Glacier National Park to the North, Flathead National Forest and the Rocky Mountains to the West, and this enormous glacial lake to the East, with mountains on the other side that would light up at night with the setting sun. 

 I hold some fantastic memories of that summer:  Backpacking trips up to the Continental Divide, white water rafting trips down the North Fork of the Flathead River, nights sleeping out in the field looking up at more stars than I’d ever seen before…  Simply existing in a place like that makes life itself feel more alive and holy.  And so even simple moments and conversations from that summer stand out in my mind with great purpose. 

 One week that summer we had our youngest campers on site, and I was assigned to a cabin of six or seven nine-year-old boys.  It was such a silly week—full of games that I’d outgrown and then returned to for the sake of these kids.  Lots of hiking and turning over rocks and looking for crawling things.  If I had forgotten what it was like to be nine, these boys had pulled me back in time full force and I loved it.

 The first night that week, it became clear to me that each boy had brought a stash of candy from home.  This stuff was contraband at the camp, and was supposed to be confiscated, but I made a deal with them. If they didn’t eat it all at once, then each night after “lights out,” we’d sneak out of our cabin, climb the nearby rocks overlooking the lake, and each of us could have one piece of candy then.  They were thrilled with the idea, and so every night by the light of the moon we crept outside and up to our special spot, where we ate candy, laughed, and told stories. 

 Each night was a new conversation, and one night I asked them what they’d wish for if they had one wish.  The boys went around and wished for the things that nine-year- olds wish for.  As magical and sacred as so many things were to me that summer, I will not forget what one boy shared that night.  His name was PJ, and when it was his turn to share, there was a pause.

"PJ, what’s your wish?” I asked him.

 “I know,” he said.  “I’m just thinking how I want to say it.” 

 Silence for a bit.  The moon shown down on the handful of us perched on our rock, high above the lake. 

 Then PJ said, “I know exactly what I want to wish for.  My whole life, I’ve always known what it is.  And it’s that I wish I could fly.  Just like a bird, I wish I could fly.  And sometimes, you know, I’ll be thinking about my wish, and I’ll watch a bird flying so easily, and I’ll think more about my wish, and for a second it’s almost like I can really…”

 At this moment, PJ was leaning forward on his knees, and I was sort of off to the side and behind him a little, but ready to reach out and catch his ankles, should he try to take flight over Flathead Lake. 

 But I’ll tell you this.  Maybe it was the magic of summer camp, or the sugar rush at the end of an exhausting day, or that holy time and place where we had found ourselves, but his voice was so full of imagination and wonder, that for a brief second he and the other boys and even I got lost in the possibility of flight.

 The Irish have a way of referring to moments like that.  They call them “thin places”—places where the veil between this world and the next is so thin you can practically see through it—where the holy and the everyday mingle and become one and the world is alive with sacred imagination—where little boys can sneak out at night and eat candy under the stars and share stories and… maybe even fly.

 PJ’s old enough to have a kid of his own now.  I have no way of contacting him, but I thought about trying, just to tell him that I remember the story, and that he vividly came to mind this week when I thought about the prophet Isaiah.

 We can’t be sure, but in all likelihood, Isaiah wasn’t writing in an idyllic summer-camp setting.  He and many others from Israel were living in exile in Babylon.  So life was not good.  Life was hard.  The Babylonians had conquered their way south to Jerusalem, where they destroyed the city, destroyed the Temple, and took the people north to live and work in exile. 

 There wasn’t one Jewish person who thought at the time, “Oh, this could be great.  I’ve always wanted to see Babylon.”  There wasn’t a soul who even thought for a second, “Change is good—let’s embrace this new Babylonian culture!”  No, for they understood that God was present to them in Jerusalem, in the Temple, and not only was it all destroyed, but they were also forced to live far from home. 

 The 40^th chapter of Isaiah is the prophet’s word of comfort to a people feeling lost in exile—a people who not only feel far away from God, but who are also beginning to forget who they are and where they came from. And so Isaiah begins, “Have you not known?  Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning?” And then he reminds them of a God who is faithful and just—a God of power who created heaven and earth.  And at one point, we can almost envision Isaiah and a handful of others, themselves out under the night sky, for he points to the stars and says, “Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these? [God] who brings out their host and numbers them, calling them all by name…”

 “Have you not known?” he asks again, “Have you not heard?  The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.”  And for a moment, the hardship of exile and the distance from home melt away as Isaiah, the poet, the prophet, the wish-maker continues:  “Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

 How do you handle it all?  When life gets crazy, I mean. 

 When you feel like you can’t make it through another day? 

 When it feels like something’s got to give or something’s gonna break? 

When the broken relationship stays disastrously broken?

When the chemotherapy is taking its toll?

When the family divide deepens?

When grief is so overwhelming that you don’t want to leave the house, or even the bedroom?

How do you handle it when the biggest, most consuming word in your life is ‘BUSY’?

 How do you handle it all?  Maybe you’ve tried a stiff upper lip?  Keep your nose to the grindstone?  For heaven’s sake, don’t burden anyone else with your problems.  Make a list each day.  Do the best you can with what you have.  Be happy with what you’ve got.  Be glad it isn’t worse.  Have you tried those things?  Have you told yourself those things? 

 Have you ever tried flying?  Or have you ever tried to believe that flying is possible? 

 I saw a woman fly once.  She’d lost her husband just days earlier, and now the family was gathered at home.  Children and grandchildren all home for the memorial service and a couple days with Grandma. 

 They’d all been to the church, and they’d been to the cemetery, and they’d been through the photographs and the memories.  Now they were just in the backyard.  The kids had been cooped up all day wearing clip-on ties and dresses and fancy shoes.  Now they were in their play clothes, and in spite of all the sadness, they’d exploded happily out into the lawn to run and giggle together.  The adults came out too, and were lined up in lawn chairs in the shade. 

 Somebody found a plastic bat and a beach ball in the garage, so now the kids were playing some version of baseball.  First base was the maple tree, second base was the corner of the perennial garden, third base was the birdbath. 

 The score was something to something and it was the bottom of an unknown inning when Grandma stood up from her chair and came up to bat.  The outfield scooted in, but then Grandma made them think twice.  She took that bat and knocked the dirt off her pretend cleats, she spit in the batter’s box, and then pointed out over the neighbor’s fence. 

 “Back up!” yelled the catcher, and the kids did.  With a twinkle in her eye, she held the bat high over her shoulder and got ready to swing. 

 What happened next doesn’t really matter.  No line drive or home run could be as miraculous as the fact that Grandma was flying. 

 Lots of pictures were taken that afternoon; the other adults were so pleased to see her enjoying a moment with her grandchildren on an otherwise sad day.  But in the photos all you can see is Grandma trying to swing a bat and laughing at herself.  What you can’t see are the eagle’s wings sprouting from her shoulders taking her high above it all.

 Maybe you’ve seen someone fly before too.  Maybe you’ve flown, or maybe you could fly.  God’s promise in our lives isn’t that we’ll simply endure life to the bitter end.  Rather, “those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” 

 We close today with a song written in 1929.  Albert E. Brumley was a cotton picker at the time.  I don’t know if you’ve ever picked cotton before.  I haven’t, but I understand that it’s awfully hard work—that it’s the kind of work that’ll make you want to fly away.  Brumley was out there picking cotton in the hot sun when the song struck him—when his own Godly imagination got a hold of him and that cotton field became another thin place and the wings sprouted behind him. 

 Some glad morning when this life is o'er,

I'll fly away;

To a home on God's celestial shore,

I'll fly away (I'll fly away).

[Chorus]

I'll fly away, Oh Glory

I'll fly away; (in the morning)

When I die, Hallelujah, by and by,

I'll fly away (I'll fly away).

When the shadows of this life have gone,

I'll fly away;

Like a bird from prison bars has flown,

I'll fly away (I'll fly away)

Just a few more weary days and then,

I'll fly away;

To a land where joy shall never end,

I'll fly away (I'll fly away)

I'll fly away, Oh Glory

I'll fly away; (in the morning)

When I die, Hallelujah, by and by,

I'll fly away (I'll fly away).

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Scripture:  I Samuel 3:1-10

 One of my early vivid memories of church was sitting in worship one Sunday as a young child.  I was maybe six or seven years old, and on this particular morning a light bulb managed to wiggle itself loose from the ceiling of the sanctuary and come crashing to the floor right in the middle of worship.  The Presbyterian church where I grew up wasn’t the biggest or tallest in town, but that sanctuary ceiling was high enough to give a renegade bulb time to gather significant speed before hitting the floor.  There was a loud “POP!” when it did, which was followed by the tinkling of glass skidding every which way.  And then some commotion—shrieks of surprise, audible gasps, and more than a few who’d probably been nodding off a moment earlier standing up to defend themselves from further attack. 

 The minister, having been in the middle of a sermon, was quiet.  I know now that whatever he thought he was going to say that morning had been eclipsed entirely by a fluke incident, and there was no going back.  From that moment on, he could have unlocked the deepest mysteries of scripture only to find during the coffee hour that all anybody wanted to talk about was that falling light bulb.  Looking back, I imagine that people’s surprise gave him a few seconds to think after the bulb hit, and when the dust had settled and the congregation was looking forward again, he began a new sermon with these words:  “God said, ‘Wake up!’”

I guess sometimes that’s what it takes.  An arresting, startling moment—a sure sign that Somebody wants our attention.  Haven’t you ever caught yourself asking God for just such a thing?  “God, if you could just send a signal of some kind—to let me know you’re there, that you’re listening…?  A wink and a nod, maybe?” 

There’ve been times in our lives when our prayers have been more earnest, when we’ve been most fearful and most in need of God that we would have welcomed something—anything—crashing to the floor, something we could point to and say beyond all shadows of doubt, “God is here, calling me to attention.”  But bulbs crashing to the floor are rare these days, and when they do come, they’re unexpected, which means that we often devote our energy to the clean-up.  

I’m a sucker for the YouTube video montages of church bloopers, where everything that can go wrong does go wrong during a worship service.  The baby kicks over the baptismal font, a cat walks down the aisle during worship, the groom faints, the bride faints, the minister faints, candelabras crash to the floor…  Of course, what the videos don’t show you is what happens next—how the minister recovers, for example (assuming he or she isn’t the one passed out on the floor), and tries to bring some semblance of order back to the service.  My guess is more often than not, the question at hand is, “Now where were we?” and some attempt is made at business as usual.  The wonderful and sometimes frightening thing about worship, however, is that there should be no such thing as business as usual.  Interruptions can arrive as gifts to those of us who’ve become entrenched in our routines and rituals. 

All of this is to begin today by saying that we seldom come to church to be interrupted.  I doubt that’s why you’re here this morning—to be interrupted—to be jolted awake in a way you weren’t expecting.  I imagine that if you were to invite a friend to worship next Sunday, you’d say something like, “Oh, I think you’ll enjoy First Presbyterian.  We like it a lot.” You wouldn’t say, “Come worship with me.  It will interrupt life as you know it and disrupt your thinking and believing!”  We tend to not come to worship for the unexpected.  Rather we arrive to rest and sink into comfortable routines that meet our comfortable expectations.

We read in the Hebrew Scriptures, in I Samuel, that “the word of the LORD was rare in those days,” that “visions were not widespread.”  And so maybe we can well imagine the people of God settled into comfortable routines of worship and life, cajoling themselves into thinking that all was right with the world.  After all, if God is not speaking, it must mean that everything’s ok…  If God’s not delivering messages through prophets or dropping light bulbs on your head, you must be doing something right.  Maybe another way of beginning this passage in I Samuel would be to say, “The word of the LORD was rare and visions were not widespread in those days, and so the people of God became confident that their status quo was acceptable to themselves and to God.” 

It’s actually kind of nice when the word of the LORD is rare, and it’s really quite convenient when visions aren’t widespread.  When God isn’t talking or showing up, it means that we can sit back and enjoy ourselves, confident that if God’ll do something if we get too far off track. I wonder if that’s how folks felt back in Samuel’s day—that all was well with the world, since God wasn’t doing much to fix it. 

But then God came and spoke to Samuel, a boy in the temple.  We don’t know how old Samuel was at the time, but we can guess he was eleven or twelve.  It was night, and all were asleep when the voice came.  “Samuel.  Samuel.”  Then Samuel did what all three of my daughters do when they wake up in the middle of the night.  They go wake somebody else up because it’s fun to be awake at two in the morning, and who would want to keep that experience all to themselves? Samuel goes to wake up the priest, Eli. 

Now by all rights, Eli should have been the one receiving messages from God. He’d been a priest all his life and was dedicated to his ministry.  But Eli’s sons had run amok, abusing the priesthood and taking advantage of people with their power.  As much as he cared for his work, Eli had failed to reign in his sons, and about this God was not happy.  And so the word of the LORD came to Samuel.

It’s sort of funny to think that Samuel was raised in the Temple but wasn’t taught to expect God to say much.  He runs to Eli thinking that Eli must have called him, and Eli says “No.  Go back to sleep.”  Again it happens, and again Eli sends him back to bed.  Then again, and by now both Eli and Samuel have lost all hope of a good night’s rest, but still neither is catching on.  The last time Samuel comes to Eli’s side and says, “Here I am—you called,” Eli realizes what’s going on and instructs Samuel, “Go lie down, and if you hear the voice again, say, ‘Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.’”

The image that has stuck with me from this story is of two people, Samuel and Eli, lying awake, restless.  Samuel is lying in his bed, awake, tossing and turning, and he’s wondering, “Whose voice is that?”  Eli is lying awake in his bed, tossing and turning, and he’s wondering, “Why isn’t God talking to me?”

Haven’t you been restless, and haven’t you wondered both?  Restless at night, tossing and turning, wondering, “I hear something—a voice, but whose voice is it?”  Or restless at night, tossing and turning, crying out, “God, where are you, and why won’t you say something?”

In Samuel’s story, the voice comes to a child, which during an age when visions were rare, was unexpected.  But this is in keeping with other stories in Scripture—where the least likely people are the ones hearing God’s voice and bearing the good news.  Just a few weeks ago we told the story of the shepherds, who were some of the first to know of Jesus’ birth.  Remote, homeless shepherds, out in the field, treated to an angel chorus and the announcement of good news. 

There’s another gospel story that occurs to me as I think about Samuel.  Remember when Jesus was out in the wilderness with the crowds?  There were thousands of them, and at one point, everyone was hungry, but there was no food.  The disciples came to Jesus and said, “People are hungry, Jesus.  Where are we going to buy enough bread?”  But then one of the disciples found an unlikely provider—a boy who had five loaves of bread and two fish.  Jesus told the disciples to have the people sit down, and then he took the loaves and fish, blessed them, and fed everyone, until all were satisfied. 

Here’s what I’m wondering this morning.  What if, on the way to see Jesus, that boy had turned to his parents and said, “Mom, Dad, I’ve been thinking about it, and you know, there’s going to be a lot of people coming to see Jesus today, and I bet they’re going to get really hungry.  So I think I’d like to use my five loaves of bread and two fish at some point this afternoon to feed everybody.”

Can you imagine what his parents would have said?  “Oh, honey, that’s a nice thought.  We’re proud of you that you would think so generously, but that is impossible.”  Or, “Isn’t that sweet, dear.  Our little boy thinks he can feed the world with five loaves of bread.”  Or even, “Son, put that bread away.  If others find out how much food we’re traveling with, we might have to share it.”

In this story, Jesus performs the miracle but a child is the source of the abundance.  As one theologian points out, “Children make very good Christian disciples because they readily believe in the foolishness of God.  They have ample room in their minds to hold miracles, visions, and dreams.  A childlike imagination believes there is a trap door behind the wardrobe and that the line is thin between the possible and impossible.” [1] 

We might say that children are the ones who are often restless enough to stay awake for whatever it is God might say or do.  Could it be that there were adults in the crowd that day keeping their fish to themselves?  We’ll never know.  What we do know is that a child was present with an imagination that was restless enough to believe that he could make a difference with what little he had.

Some questions to consider.  Are we restless enough to receive a word or two from God?  Or do we tend to want to just go back to sleep?  Are we faithful enough to listen to those to whom God is speaking? 

I wonder to whom God is speaking these days.  I wonder what messages of challenge and change are falling on the ears of our own young people, and I wonder if we, like Eli, can be perceptive enough to listen to and encourage those voices among us.  Samuel’s message to Eli was a difficult one for him to hear, but in his faithfulness to Samuel, Eli was in turn faithful to God.  Might we follow suit?  Trusting God enough that we even trust one another to bear God’s living word…  God give us strength, insight, and courage.  Amen.

1.  Enuma Okoro in “Grappling with a Theology of Play,” which appeared in Communitas, an Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary publication for the College of Pastoral Leaders, vol. 8 2011.

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Scripture:  Matthew 2:1-12

By now I would suppose that for most of you, it’s sinking in that the Christmas holidays are done.  It’s 2012.  The stockings and ornaments are in hibernation once again.  For some of you, the thought of twelve whole days of Christmas seems a little far-fetched to begin with.  You were ready to take the tree down before the New Year.  And so it’s good for you to reach a point at which Christmas is definitively over. 

 But I know that some of you are still hanging in there with Christmas.  And it’s not just that the decorations still haven’t come down.  You’ve still got the Christmas music play-list queued up on your iPod, and you’re still convincing yourself that you’re going to get a Christmas letter out to your friends this year. 

 My family falls into this second camp.  We had a lot of family in town through the holy days, and there never seemed to be a good time to put all the Christmas stuff away.  We were actually leaning towards taking ornaments off the tree Thursday or Friday, but then we realized that Christmas in Ethiopia was being celebrated on January 7^th, and that was all we needed to hear.  The tree is still standing, dry as a bone, needles cascading to the floor.  Today may be the day. 

 For those of you who, for one reason or another, are still clinging to Christmas, you’re in luck this morning, because today we’re zooming in for one more close-up of the manger scene.  Today is Epiphany Sunday.  The word “epiphany,” of course, means “a sudden moment of intuitive understanding,” or “a moment when something is revealed.”  For us as Christians, Epiphany celebrates the day that Jesus was revealed to the world as God’s son, and our Epiphany scripture comes from Matthew’s gospel.  It’s the story of the wise men who brought gifts to the baby Jesus.

 A couple things you may not have known about the wise men. First, there probably weren’t three of them.  Granted, three is a good number for crèches and Christmas pageants, but the Bible never actually says that there were three wise men.  There were three gifts—gold, frankincense, and myrrh. When you think about it, it’s sort of funny to imagine three men with camels traveling across the countryside all by themselves with that much treasure on them.  Might as well have hung a sign on one of the camels that said, “Hi, we’re rich!  Please rob us!”  No, if the wise men were really wise, they would have traveled in greater numbers than just three.  In all likelihood, they’d have had some muscle with them—some strong men to go with the wise men.

 In our staff meeting this past week, Nikki pointed out something that I had never thought of before.  She asked, “Why didn’t anyone in Jerusalem go with the wise men to Bethlehem?”  Have you ever thought about that?  Matthew tells us that the wise men came into Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising,^* and have come to pay him homage.” 

Ordinarily you’d think that this would be front page news.  And Bethlehem is only, what, six miles from Jerusalem?  Matthew 2:11 says that “on entering the house, [the wise men] saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage.”  You know, the next verse ought to be, “and then the thousands of people who came with them from Jerusalem lined up outside the door and started pouring in—person after person, family after family—all eager to see their newborn king.” 

But no one came.  The wise men showed up in Jerusalem, stuck out like a sore thumb, and told everyone why they were there and what they were looking for.  It’s like the whole city of Jerusalem said, “What’s that?  The Messiah’s been born and he’s close by?  Yeah, I’m kinda busy today.  Maybe some other time…”

Of course, there is one person in Jerusalem who took particular interest.  King Herod secretly called for the wise men^*, pumped them for information, and sent them out to find Jesus so that he might also “go and pay him homage.” 

So were the wise men wise?  Yes, maybe, but that doesn’t mean that they were persuasive with the people of Jerusalem or smart when it came to local politics.  They may have been wise, but that doesn’t mean they could smell a rat when they appeared before Herod. 

Had it not been for a vivid dream, the wise men’s next stop after the manger was Herod’s palace, where they were going to helpfully share Mapquest directions with the man who would have Jesus murdered. 

Wise or maybe not-so-wise, these foreigners in Matthew’s gospel reveal something about Christ’s presence in the world.  Their story is one of kingdoms clashing.  One kingdom is Christ’s kingdom.  In this kingdom, the king is a helpless infant child born to a poor peasant couple far from home.  The other kingdom is an earthly empire whose local king is so hell-bent on maintaining control that he justifies his tactics of fear, intimidation, and murder.  In Christ’s kingdom, the king is a servant who will grow up to love his enemies and pray for those who persecute him.  In Herod’s kingdom, the king fights to stay on top and his motto is “strike first and strike hard.” 

When Jesus was born, Rome was rapidly growing its power in the world.  The Roman Empire hadn’t yet stretched around the entire Mediterranean Sea, but it was close.  Cities like Jerusalem were some of the latest to be overtaken and occupied.  We might forget this when we read the gospels sometimes—that life was falling apart for the Jewish people, that Rome’s presence in Judea was brutal and devastating.  And from the word “go,” the gospel is a story about kingdoms clashing. 

Herod strikes first and then just keeps on striking, again and again.  From Christmas to Easter—from the manger to the cross—the kingdom of Herod is the kingdom of “might makes right.”  It’s the kingdom of swords and clubs, whippings and crucifixions.  It’s the kingdom of tanks and AK-47’s, persecution and institutionalized torture.

Still, in the midst of it all, the gospel of a new kingdom was lived and proclaimed.  Jesus was born into a culture of violence and oppression, and his kingdom grew around his good news that the kings of this world will not have the final say.  This is part of what we celebrate in Christ’s birth, and it’s what we commit ourselves to when we hear again these stories of Christmas and Epiphany—we commit ourselves as citizens of Christ’s kingdom, aware, perhaps, that the kingdom of Herod is still alive and well.

Some of you, I’m sure, are familiar with the book, Children’s Letters to God.  It came out quite a few years back.  In it, the author has compiled children’s questions, comments, requests, prayers—all addressed to God. 

“Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.”  - Joyce

“Dear God, Maybe Cain and Able would not kill each other so much if they each had their own room.  That works with me and my brother.”  - Larry

“Dear God, instead of letting people die and having to make new ones, why don’t you just keep the ones you got now?”  - Jane

But there’s one that caught my attention and made me think of this clash of kingdoms I’ve been talking about today.  Harriet, a 5-year-old, writes: “Dear God, are you real?  Some people don’t believe it.  If you are, you’d better do something quick.”  [1]

Sometimes even our children see it—the clash of kingdoms.  The kingdoms of this world—kingdoms of greed and hatred, kingdoms of “me first” and “every man for himself”—these are the kingdoms that thrive so easily in this world.  But sometimes, it’s in the midst of these kingdoms that the kingdom of God emerges.

Some of the most beautiful music ever composed was played on a cold January night in 1941in an unheated barracks at Stalag 8, a German death camp.  It was composed by a prisoner at the camp.  His name was Olivier Messien.  He was a devout Christian, and he wanted to compose some music that would say, even in the death camp, that the forces of oppression and evil cannot squelch the kingdom of Christ.

There in the camp, he was tired of the constant hup-two-three-four, the one-two-three-four beat of the jack boot.  And so he composed a “Quartet for the End of Time,” a quartet of kingdoms clashing in which all fragmented and broken and hopeless time has been gathered into the time of God.  How do you compose music like that?  The meters, rhythms are irregular.  The musicians cannot play in splendid isolation, simply keeping orderly time.  They have to attend to each other.  They have to play as an ensemble.  In fact, right on the score where most composers would have written, “Play slowly, play rapidly,” Messien wrote, “Play tenderly, play with ecstasy, play with love.”  A “Quartet for the End of Time” was composed and played in the middle of a death camp, and so this kingdom of life and hope clashed with the kingdom of death.  We live in a world where kingdoms clash. [2]

Where the story about a Savior’s birth gets lost in flyers announcing 60% off a Bed, Bath, and Beyond.  Where we worship the Prince of Peace, but violence rages on unquestioned and sanctioned or even ignored.  When we celebrate Christmas and now Epiphany, we commit ourselves and our citizenship to the kingdom of Jesus Christ. 

Pastor and writer Quinn Caldwell recently shared a reflection and a creed with the wider Church, and this morning I invite you to join voices together in that creed.  Caldwell reminds us that the word "creed" comes from the Latin “credo,” which means “I believe.”  It's a statement of faith, an attempt to capture in words the essence of the content of the faith.  [3]

Caldwell observes that “Herod’s creed might have gone something like, ‘I believe in the divine right of kings.  I believe in intimidation, fear, and murder.  I believe that infants and peasants do not matter.  I believe in the sword.  I believe in me.’  That is not a Christian creed.”

Friends, in defiance of all who place their faith in themselves or their swords, in rulers or in fear, I invite you now to rise with me and join me in saying a Christmas Creed.  Will you do that with me now?  Do not be quiet, do not be timid; God knows Herod’s not.

A CHRISTMAS CREED

I believe in Jesus Christ and in the power of the Gospel which began in Bethlehem.

I believe in the One whose spirit glorified a small village, of whose coming the shepherds saw the sign, and for whom there was no room in the inn.

I believe in the One whose life changed the course of history, for whom the kings of the earth had no power, and who was not understood by the proud.

I believe in the One to whom the poor, the oppressed, the discouraged, the afflicted, the sick, the blind and the leprous gave welcome and accepted as Savior.

I believe in the One who, with love, changed the hearts of the proud, and with his life, showed that it is more important to serve than to be served, and that the greatest joy is in giving your life for others. 

I believe that Christmas is strength and power, and that this world can change if, with humility and faith, we kneel before the manger.  Amen.

1.  I have Children’s Letters to God somewhere on my shelf, but a member of First Presbyterian recently brought it to my attention again and, coincidentally, I saw these letters used effectively in Mark Ramsey’s December 4^th sermon “Unbent,” preached at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church in Asheville, NC.

2.  I also received this story from a wonderful Mark Ramsey sermon.

3.  Quinn Caldwell’s reflection and this creed appeared in the January 2, 2012 Stillspeaking Daily Devotional of the United Church of Christ. 

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Scripture:  Luke 2:22-40

Merry Christmas once again.  Today is the eighth of our twelve days of Christmas—the day for “eight maids a-milking” if you’re somehow still looking for gift suggestions.  Christmas was a week ago, but the Christmastide carries us on into the new year, and so for a few more days, we can legitimately say, “Merry Christmas,” though the trees are coming down and the decorations boxed up for next year.

 I’d like to begin today with a YouTube recommendation for you.  Over the past couple of weeks, the events of 2011 have been highlighted in the media, reflecting with some perspective the year behind us.  Google has gotten in on the act with an interesting way to capture a calendar year—to see what the world was searching for most on Google.  Here it is...

Looking back, it’s amazing to think that all of that and more happened in just one year.  But it did, and it’s gotten me wondering about what’s in store for 2012.  Of course, we know some of what the year will hold.  Elections, summer Olympics, according to some the end of the world, and just maybe some snow, but there is much we cannot predict or plan for. 

Hopefully 2012 has come into your life with promise and a good sense of possibility, but perhaps it’s arrived with some uneasiness about the months ahead. Looking around in this family of faith, we can be sure that we’ll all blink and before we know it, our kids will be up here putting on another Christmas pageant.  What we don’t know is how our battles with cancer, heart disease, and depression will play out. 

This year we don’t know how we’ll be stretched emotionally and spiritually.  We don’t know how we’ll handle all the bumps and potholes on the road ahead.  Of course, we do know a few things:  there will be birth and there will be death.  There will be hardship and there will be joy.  Pain and recovery, grief and laughter, consolation and celebration—we will likely have it all in the year ahead, and most of it will not come as we could ever have imagined it coming.  Rather, 2012 will unravel as life often does—with certain mystery and unplanned meaning.

So, a question for us to consider as we pass “Go” and embark on another trip around the sun.  What gives you promise for the coming year?  What gives you promise? 

I brought a visual aid with me today.  As visual aids go, it’s horrible, really, because it’s small and you can’t really see it from where you’re sitting.  It’s a C-clamp.  An old, worn C-clamp. Everybody’s got 2 or 3 of these in the basement shop or out in the garage.  It’s what you use to hold together something you just glued or to pin down something you’re trying to cut or file or sand.  I’m actually a big fan of C-clamps.  They become your third, fourth, fifth, and sixth hands when you’re working on a project.  But this C-clamp is my favorite.  It belonged to my grandfather, who died a few years back. 

On the weekend of his funeral, a handful of us gathered in the basement shop of his home.  I had been there many times before with Grandpa, watching and helping him fix things and make things.  Grandpa was a machinist.  He’d never earned a university degree.  His “college” was a plant in Ohio where he crafted parts for the war effort.  And he was an artisan with his tools.  There weren’t many things he couldn’t repair or just make from scratch.

Now I don’t know if you can see this, but this C-clamp has been welded together.  Somewhere, somehow, it became useless, having broken right here along the longest stretch of metal.  These days, C-clamps are cheap.  You can get one this size for just a few dollars at the hardware store.    But my grandpa wasn’t the kind of guy who threw things out just because they were broken.  (I’m sure a few of you can relate.)  Instead, he looked at this broken piece of metal and said, “Well, now that’s a perfectly good C-clamp,” and proceeded to weld it back together.  Probably saved him twenty cents at the time. 

He was part of a generation that could look at something and see the promise in it.  I thought of him this past week when I reread our story from Luke’s gospel about Simeon and Anna.  Luke doesn’t tell us how old Simeon is, but he says that Anna is eighty-four—“of a great age,” he writes, which is a wonderful way to think about your eighties.  Certainly they are both old enough and wise enough to see the promise in things.  Mary and Joseph arrive at the temple in Jerusalem, where Simeon and Anna each get a chance to see the promise in the infant Christ.

The family was there out of obligation to Jewish law, which required the couple to present their newborn child in the Temple.  This was both an act of dedication for the baby and of purification for the mother.  What they didn’t expect was Simeon, who scooped Jesus up in his arms and said, essentially, “Now I’ve seen it all.  Now I can leave this world, knowing that I have seen the face of God.” 

Luke says, then, that the prophet Anna arrived, and that upon seeing Jesus, she praised God and spoke about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.  We might say that Anna was like a new grandmother who’s just spent a weekend with her first grandson.  She’s got pictures in her purse and on her phone and she simply cannot contain her joy or stop talking about him!

Simeon and Anna saw the promise in things.  They looked at the baby Jesus and saw promise, possibility, and hope, which is pretty amazing because at that stage in the game, Jesus wasn’t doing very much.  He wasn’t eloquent, compassionate, or powerful.  He was just a baby.  One day he’d preach in Galilee, but then he was just babbling and gurgling and crying.  Still, they saw the promise in him, and they were overjoyed with wonder and hope.

What gives you promise for the coming year?  What gives you promise?  Or maybe, put another way, what is the symbol of your hope for the months ahead?  Is it the Dow Jones climbing?  Or the unemployment rate falling?  To what do you look for hope in 2012? 

Simeon and Anna saw hope in a helpless infant.  Somehow they saw healing and compassion, and they saw a man standing up to Rome as no one else had.  They saw justice and peace.  They could see the promise in things.

Back to my grandfather’s shop.  I kept a number of tools from his collection, and I’m always thrilled when I find occasion to use them.  But there’s something that I kept that I have never used.  It’s a steel bar—just a big, unwieldy piece of steel.  After all the tools were taken, that steel bar was still sitting there under his tool bench.  And on my way out, I grabbed it. At first I think I took it because I wondered why my grandpa kept it.  But now I know.  He could see the promise in things.

I read not too long ago that bar of iron is worth about $5.  If you take that bar of iron, though, and make it into horseshoes, they’re worth about $12.  If you make the iron into sewing needles, they’re worth about $3,500.  And if you make it into balance springs for pocket watches, it’s worth $300,000. 

Who knows what my grandpa was saving that metal for.  Horseshoes and balance springs?  Not likely, but he saw promise in it, and so now I do too.

Simeon and Anna saw promise in an infant child, and that promise changed their lives.  Their story stands today as a reminder to us, to establish promise in the little things and to believe in God’s transformative power to grow promises in us, though us, and around us.  May it be so this year.  Amen. 

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Scripture:  Luke 2:1-20

I want to begin by sharing with you what I imagine a lot of people are wondering about you this morning.  What on earth are you doing here?  It’s Christmas Day!  For heaven sakes, you could be home in your pajamas, your bathrobe and slippers… You could be opening presents under the tree, trying on that new sweater, or playing with those new toys… And you could be home where it’s (hopefully!) toasty warm.  But instead you braved the winter morning, got the car started, and made you way to church.  Why are you at church on Christmas Day?  [1]

 I even know of a few churches that aren’t holding services today on account of the fact that it’s Christmas and folks should be spending it at home with their families.  This, of course, is an interesting allowance given some folks’ preoccupation with the supposed “War on Christmas.” 

But we’re here, and we are with family.  Today is the last Sunday of 2011, and so we gather once more to sing, to worship, and today—to tell the story of our Savior’s birth—to revisit the manger, the angels, the shepherds out in the fields.

Did you know that of the four gospels, only Matthew and Luke tell the story of Jesus’ birth?  Just those two, and actually they tell the story quite differently.  Sure, we like to smush them together every Christmas—make it so the wise men arrive just five or ten minutes after the shepherds.  Matthew’s gospel gives us the wise men:  rich foreign kings who come from a far-off land to worship the Christ child and present him with gifts.  But Luke doesn’t seem interested in wise men.  Instead he gives us shepherds. 

In Luke we read that “there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night.”  Why is that, do you think?  In so many ways Luke and Matthew are parallel gospels, but not here.  Why would Luke leave out the wise men and opt for shepherds instead?

Could it be that the life of a shepherd was romanticized?  That everyone wanted to be a shepherd in those days?  That shepherds were the obvious choice to be the first to hear news of the Savior’s birth?  Not likely.  Shepherds were rough, dirty, and poor and they lived in the wilderness with their flocks. 

Here’s something to consider.  Mary and Joseph were in Bethlehem because Emperor Augustus commanded “all the world” to be registered for the census.  What about the shepherds?  Why were they still out in the field?  Why weren’t they in Bethlehem or in some other town getting registered? 

Well, more than likely they were still out in the fields because they didn’t count.  Shepherds were always on the move, driving their sheep from one pasture to the next.  They didn’t really have a place they could call home.  Plus they probably smelled more like sheep than anything else.  Who would want them to come into town?  No one!  This is why, on the night when “all the world” had to come home and be counted, the shepherds had to stay out in the field.  They had no home and they didn’t count.

But in Luke’s gospel, the shepherds come to town.  And not only that, in Luke’s gospel, the shepherds get a whole angel chorus out there in the field.  Looking through the entire Bible, I would challenge you to find a bigger assembly of angels.  It doesn’t exist!  Sure, here and there someone bumps into an angel or two.  But the angels fill the skies and deliver a private concert only for the shepherds—the dirty, smelly, homeless shepherds who don’t count.  Except now they do count.  And while everyone else is travelling to their hometowns to fill out paperwork, the shepherds sprint into the city of David to worship the Messiah.

The shepherds, of all people, are the ones who worship Jesus first.  They deliver the news of what they saw, and Mary, who’s just delivered her first child, somehow has the wherewithal to receive their presence as a gift and to treasure their words in her heart. 

This, friends, is the gospel—where a young teenage girls bears the Christ and where smelly homeless men bear the good news.

The more we read the gospels, the more we know that we should expect nothing less.  And so we begin our Christmas Day with the reminder that God loves and sings to shepherds—that God loves and sings to even that shepherd part of you—that part of you that feels faraway, lost, rejected, and not worthy of good company.  God loves and sings to even that part of you and calls you home to worship and adore the Christ child.  Friends, welcome home and Merry Christmas.

1.  My friend and colleague San Williams preached a sermon on Christmas Day in 2005, at University Presbyterian Church in Austin Texas, and he began in similar fashion.

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Scripture:  Luke 2:1-20

Tonight is just my fourth Christmas here with you, but already this night feels like a coming home for me, and I’ve found myself over the past week or so thinking about this moment—the sights and sounds, the warm, familiar faces gathered here.  I’ve always felt that Christmas Eve has a feel of homecoming to it.  Hearing the story again about Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus has a way of bringing us home—to a place where we find ourselves connected to other Christmases in other times and places—so that as shepherds and angels come into focus, we find ourselves revisiting the past, celebrating memories, flipping through childhood and younger images in our lives.  I’m experiencing that with you this year, and it’s a true pleasure.  So friends, welcome to this Christmas moment of homecoming.  It’s good to be here with you again—good to tell the old story again and good to wonder with you a little more about what it all means—what it could mean for us in the coming year.

 I’d like to begin tonight with a Christmas tale that comes from Spain.  It’s Christmas Eve, and a pastor is sitting in his study, putting the finishing touches on his sermon for Christmas morning, working hard to come up with something fresh and meaningful to say about Christmas.  As he struggles over his desk, there is a knock at the door.  He goes to the door and opens it to discover a woman sobbing at his doorstep.   Her son has been arrested, and she asks if the priest will come with her to the police station.  He agrees.

They walk through the snowy town to the station, and spend time there in conversation with the police, but in the end there’s nothing they can do.  The son will have to spend Christmas in jail.   Sad and discouraged, they leave the station.  It’s late now and the air is cold and damp, and as they are making their way through the snow back to the church, they see a small figure walking just ahead of them.  Coming closer, they realize that it’s a child, huddled over, with a blanket around her shoulders, clutching something heavy.  Soon the pastor realizes that it’s the baby Jesus from his church’s nativity scene.  And the figure is a young girl, not older than eight.  She’s trudging through the snow with the baby Jesus in her arms. 

The pastor, full of compassion and patience after his trip to the police, says to her, “Are you okay sweetie?”  She looks up, with tears running down her face, and says, “I got lost, and Mama says that I’ve gotta walk with Jesus, so I went to the church and found Jesus.”  The pastor puts his coat over the young girl’s shoulders and says, “It’s all right.  Let’s walk with Jesus together.”  The pastor, the mother, and the young girl walk arm in arm with Jesus through the streets of Barcelona on Christmas Eve.  [1]

What an image of Christmas.  A complicated moment of peace and compassion against a backdrop of discouragement and loss.  Three wayward souls bearing the infant Christ through the quiet, lonely streets of a city, not knowing what’s next, not certain of what tomorrow will hold—just certain that for now, at least, they should walk with Jesus together.  Isn’t that the biblical story?  Jesus born into a messy time and place.

At our first story tonight, our children helped us tell the story of Jesus’ birth.  Upon entering the church, each child received a character figure of the Christmas story, and as the Scripture was read, they came forward and put them together in the manger.  Of course, we had 30-some-odd children here, so you can bet we used every manger piece we’ve got.  You can see what they put together as you exit the church through these doors.  It’s messy.  It doesn’t match.  A 3-inch figure of Mary is dwarfed next to a wise man three time her size.  But there they all are together, gathered around three or four baby Jesus’.  I like that image of Jesus’ birth… unkempt, miss-matched, unpredictable… 

That’s what it was, friends.  Jesus was born into a messy time and place—into a culture ruled by powers beyond its control?  It’s worth remembering that the census that brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem was Rome’s requirement, not Jerusalem’s.  The Emperor was counting each and every head in anticipation of the tax revenue.  Jesus’ parents were coping with that reality as best they could.  It didn’t matter that Mary was very pregnant and Rome didn’t care that travel for them was difficult.  That’s the Christmas story:Jesus the Christ, God-With-Us, born into the messy complexities of life.

In a few moments, we’ll light candles together and sing, “Silent night, holy night.  All is calm; all is bright.”  We’ll hold the Christ light in our hands and for a moment illuminate the darkness around us.  I recognize that sharing the light on Christmas Eve is a moment of wonderful Christmas tradition.   But remember that it is also an act of faithful defiance in a world where all is not holy or calm or bright—where conflict and chaos, war and mistrust will not blink even at the sight of angels singing over fields.

Tonight I invite each of you to hold the Christ light and simply walk with Jesus. Through the cold dark streets of life, through moments of separation and loneliness, through the turbulence of hardship and fear.  Hold the light and walk with Jesus, and remember that God is in the business of being born into the broken places of our world and of our lives. 

Friends, let us celebrate this as we remember Christ’s birth and as we move through these Christmas days.  Merry Christmas.  Amen. 

1.  This story’s been out there for a while, but I received it in a December 12^th sermon by Ian Lawton.   

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