Category: Sermon

Abundance

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon3 Comments
Dr. Loren Wilkinson at his farm on Galiano Island
Dr. Loren Wilkinson at his farm on Galiano Island

When I was in seminary at Regent College, there was a professor there named Loren Wilkinson.  Loren was famous for regularly inviting students to join him and his wife Mary Ruth at their farm on Galiano Island, just off the coast of British Columbia’s lower mainland.  This trip to the Wilkinson farm became one of the central hallmarks of the Regent College experience for many students, myself included.

Now, this trip was no mere vacation, mind you.  No, when you went to Galiano Island, you went there expecting to work.  Loren got you up early and gave you a task to complete somewhere on the farm.  There was always something to be done, and with groups of students visiting almost every weekend, there were usually enough hands to get it all done.  Many students, like me, came from urban or suburban backgrounds, so we had never experienced life on a working farm before.  Loren made sure that we got our hands dirty and broke a sweat during the day.

And then, at night, the real treat came: dinner.  After work, the other thing you were expected to do at Galiano Island was eat.  And, oh my goodness, did we eat!  Homemade delicacies of every imaginable variety were set out before us in abundance.  Nobody left that table hungry.  And it wasn’t just the quantity of food that was abundant, it was the quality as well.  Everything was organic, homemade, and delicious.

Loren and Mary Ruth lived very simple lives on the island, but the main thing we learned during our stay with them is that simple need not mean austere.  Visitors never got the sense that these people were sacrificing or going without the creature comforts of life.  They live in abundance.

I thought about my trip to Galiano Island and the abundance I discovered there when I read this week’s scripture passage from the book of Isaiah:

Ho, everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and you that have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price…

…Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.

Later on in the passage, the prophet compares the word of God to the life-giving qualities of rain:

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
and do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

Finally, at the end, the prophet leaves the people with a promise of even more abundance, which is yet to come:

For you shall go out in joy,
and be led back in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;
instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;
and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial,
for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.

The power of these images is undeniable.  The earth itself is veritably bursting at the seams with life and blessing.  More than just “the way it is”, to this Jewish prophet, the abundance of creation is a divine revelation: it tells us something about God: the Ground of all Being, the core nature of reality itself.  We humans live, move, and have our being in a vast ocean of abundant blessing and amazing grace.

Why then don’t we see it?  Why don’t we believe it?  Why don’t we live our lives as if this was the most central truth of our existence?

It can be hard to embrace the abundance of creation when we are surrounded by a cacophony of voices and circumstances testifying to the contrary.  Every time we change the channel, it seems like there’s one more voice reminding us how close we are to the brink of Armageddon.  Politicians and advertising executives make their livings off of our fear that there is not enough to go around.  Popular media would have us believe that poverty and starvation are problems too big to be solved.  We tell ourselves there’s simply nothing we can do.  However, according to the World Hunger Education Service, the earth produces enough food to provide every man, woman, and child with 2,720 kilocalories per day… that’s over 1,000 times the amount of calories needed for a healthy diet.  Regardless of this fact, people all over the world (mostly in Asia and Africa) are dying of starvation while Americans are dying of an obesity epidemic.

Is the problem really that there’s not enough to go around?  Or is it that too much has been hoarded into one place?  Could it be that powerful, fear-mongering politicians and executives are holding the rest of us hostage with delusions of scarcity?

What makes it worse is that the powerful people who propagate these lies have come to believe in them so strongly that they are making decisions for the rest of us.  They lob their ideological grenades at one another on TV, meanwhile the children of God line up outside soup kitchens and homeless shelters.  Senators and CEOs drive around in bullet-proof limousines while the people of this country stand in unemployment lines.  Friends, I daresay this is a sin against heaven itself.  Something is radically wrong with our collective worldview if we truly believe the lie that there is simply not enough to go around.

This morning’s scripture reading calls us to change this worldview.  First, the prophet gets our attention:

Incline your ear, and come to me;
listen, so that you may live.

And then warns us:

let the wicked forsake their way,
and the unrighteous their thoughts

The details of this passage are worth paying attention to: the problem, according to the prophet, is not the bounty of creation but the small-mindedness of its inhabitants.  Presumably, they want to live and live well.  What is needed then?  We must forsake our wicked ways and unrighteous thoughts.  The problem is not with the world itself, but with our way of thinking and living in it.  Average people are envious of those who have more than they need, so they run roughshod over the rights and needs of the poor in an attempt to emulate the powerful.

The prophet gives us the remedy:

Incline your ear, and come to me;
listen, so that you may live…

let the wicked forsake their way,
and the unrighteous their thoughts

In other words: it’s high time to change our stinkin’ thinkin’.

It’s time for us to stop shouting at the sky about how big our problems are and start shouting at our problems about how big the sky is.

Instead of looking out for number one in our small-minded, self-centered little worlds, we need to cultivate an attitude of gratitude and sharing.  The abundance of creation is a free gift to all.  We lose it when we try to keep it all for ourselves.  It’s time for us, as people of faith, “to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”  I borrowed that phrase from our neighbors in the Unitarian Universalist tradition.  In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.  Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

The simplest answer is that it’s time for us to learn how to share.  I’m not just talking about opening our wallets on occasion; I’m talking about opening our minds on all occasions.  We have to expand our definition of the word family.  We need to nurture global family values, but that’s a tall order, so why don’t we start with local family values?  When we hear about that sickness, that layoff, or that foreclosure for our neighbors, let’s not harden our hearts or turn our backs saying, “It’s not my problem.”  Because it is our problem.  When we live in community with one another, not just proximity to one another, options, possibilities, and resources begin to open up.  All of a sudden, we don’t feel so desperate or alone anymore.  Together we find hope, strength, and courage to overcome adversity and make it through the darkest night.  In short: we begin to manifest the freely given abundance of creation that is our collective birthright.  We start small and work our way up.  As they say, “Think globally, act locally.”

Coming up in a few weeks, on Easter Sunday, our congregation will be participating in a single, unified manifestation of abundance for people all over the world.  It’s called One Great Hour of Sharing.  This ecumenical effort was begun over sixty years ago to pool the efforts of multiple denominations in the fight against global poverty and hunger.  Our forebears realized they could do more together than any of them could do apart.  To date, we have raised as much as $20 million annually to assist with disaster relief and development projects around the world.

Throughout the season of Lent, you will notice inserts in your bulletins that outline a different project each week that is supported by One Great Hour of Sharing.  Take these inserts home with you, pray for the project highlighted that week, and please consider pooling your resources with ours on Easter Sunday so that we might collectively manifest the abundance of creation for the good of the whole.

These are our global family values.  This is our faith-based alternative to the politics of fear and the economy of scarcity.  It has nothing to do with the powers that be in Washington or on Wall Street.  The kingdom of heaven-on-earth doesn’t belong to the powerful; it belongs to the little ones of this world, it belongs to the local communities of average Janes and Joes who reach out to care for one another in the midst of good times and bad.

In a few minutes, we will gather as a church around the Communion Table to celebrate the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.  In this feast of the abundance of heaven and earth, all people are invited to come, eat, and drink without money and without price.

I pray that the message of this feast will not return empty, but will accomplish the purpose for which it was sent: bringing forth life and growth, manifesting the abundance of creation for the common good.  May the meaning of this mystery take root in the soil of your soul, and as you go out from this place today, fed and filled with Word and Sacrament, may you go out in joy and be led back in peace, may the mountains and hills burst into song before you and the trees of the field clap their hands.

May you know the abundance of creation as you share it with everyone you meet.  May you be blessed and be a blessing in the knowledge that I love you, God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4pb8Z9q3Ac%5D

The Evolution of Temptation

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon1 Comment

We’re going to talk about temptation today.

Whenever I say that word, a part of me wants to say it like an old-timey southern gospel preacher: Temp-TAY-shun!

I could tell you stories…

I’ve been to southern revivals, after all.

I could go on about the wrath of God and the fires of hell for those who give in to temptation.  But I’m going to that to you.  I sat through enough of those sermons as a teenager to know that they don’t really work.  Those hellfire-and-brimstone sermons didn’t really make me and my friends into better Christians or better human beings.

In fact, they didn’t even help us to resist temptation.  All they did was scare us into thinking that God was an angry judge up in the sky who wants to throw people into hell for eternity.

Scientists have done studies on the effectiveness of those kinds of scare tactics for changing patterns of human behavior.  What they found out is that, while fear and guilt do yield some short-term results, they lack the power to effect long-term change in the way people live.  In order to do that, people need positive, stable communities where they know they will be accepted and encouraged to pursue worthy goals and common values.  Furthermore, they need to have a sense of meaning and purpose in their connection to the larger community.  Give people this and they will be more likely to develop healthy patterns of behavior that enable them to resist temptation.

So, you’re not going to get any fire and brimstone from me this morning.  That’s not what this church is about, anyway.  But we are going to talk about temptation.  We’re going to talk about it in a way that gets us away from the blame and shame game.

In order to do this, I’m going to use two, very common, almost stereotypical examples of the kinds of temptation that plague men and women in this society.

For men, the stereotypical temptation and potential source of shame has to do with sex.  The message we men receive is that we are animalistic Neanderthals who think of nothing but sex all day.  We hear messages like this: “You’re looking at that person?!  How could you?!  Don’t you love me?!  You men are all such filthy pigs!  You couldn’t keep your one-track minds out of the gutter if your lives depended on it!”  Sound familiar, guys?  Ladies, I want to let you in on a little secret this morning: you’re not the only ones saying these things to us.  We say it to ourselves.  We live in a society that trains us to be simultaneously obsessed with and ashamed of our sex drives.  With that kind of split thinking, even the best of us are bound to get confused on occasion.  What’s worse is that this same society has also trained us to think that real men don’t talk about their feelings (especially with each other), so we end up thinking that we have to bear the burden of this confusion alone, lest we admit it and look like wimps to our fellow men and perverts to the women in our lives (who have themselves been trained by society to believe that women aren’t supposed think about sex, which is also not true).  So, you can plainly see: there is a lot of shame and confusion going around about men and sex.

Now, let’s talk about women for a minute.  Think about this: you’re at Applebee’s and a commercial comes on with some bikini model selling Budweiser, and every heterosexual male head in the restaurant is turning toward the TV.  Now imagine this: the person sitting next to you at your table orders that double-sized piece of chocolate cake with the warm fudge topping flowing like lava down the slopes of a sweet, delicious volcano… am I provoking some kind of reaction with this mental image?  How about this one: you come home after a long, bad day at work.  Your significant other is away for the night, so you’re exhausted, on your own, and you happen to know that there is a mostly full container of rocky road ice cream in the freezer… do you see where I’m going with this?  Be honest: are you even going to bother getting a bowl or is that spoon going right into the carton?  I think you see my point: For women, the stereotypical temptation and source of shame has to do with food.

From an outsider’s perspective, this temptation might seem more benign or acceptable than sexual temptation.  After all, when was the last time you heard about a politician being impeached over a bucket of fried chicken?  But then there’s the pressure that society puts on women to conform to a particular body type.  Even if you have the most loving and supportive spouse or parents in the world, they cannot drown out the screaming chorus of voices shaming you because of the way you look.  And you’re told that it’s all because of your desire for food.  What most men don’t understand is that this critical voice, when it comes from inside your own head, gets you saying things to yourself like: “I’m disgusting!  What a pig!  I can’t believe I just ate that.  I’m going to look like beached whale!”  The men who love you would never let another person talk to you that way, but we don’t get that the voice of shame in your head talks to you that way on a daily basis.  And even though indulgence in food is more socially acceptable than indulgence in sex, the struggle between temptation and shame is just as real and just as damaging in its own way.

What I’d like to do today is explore some ways for dealing effectively with temptation that don’t involve launching people into these shame spirals that never lead anywhere positive.  And I’d like to do that by looking at Jesus’ struggle with temptation in Luke 4.

The story opens just after Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River.  During that ritual, Jesus has a vision of a dove landing on him and a voice from heaven telling him, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  The truth of who he is as the Son of God has just hit home with him.  He needs to process this new information, so he heads out, away from civilization, to fast and pray in the desert.

While he’s out there, he is tested by the devil, who tempts him to misuse the gift he’s been given.  The devil tempts Jesus to do three things: to turn stones in to bread, to bow down and worship him, and to throw himself from the top of the temple.

Some movies portray this scene in a very dramatic fashion.  The devil is portrayed as a talking snake or a man in a business suit with slicked back hair who wants to make a deal with Jesus.  Personally, I like to imagine Jesus hearing that voice as if it was coming from inside his own head.

It seems that Jesus was wrestling with his own sense of identity and purpose.  In light of what he had just seen and heard at his baptism, Jesus had to work out for himself what it all meant.  Should he use his status as God’s Son to offer quick fixes to the world’s problems, like ending global hunger?  Should he opt for the way of power over the way of suffering?  Should he make a spectacle of himself to gather followers and build a movement powerful enough to challenge the Roman Empire?  In the end, Jesus said no to all of the above.  Those ideas weren’t consistent with who he was and what he was meant to do in life.  He came back from his time in the wilderness with a much deeper level of self-understanding and self-acceptance.

I think this story has some important implications for us as well.  I think it gives us a paradigm for dealing with temptation in ways that don’t buy in to that old shame and blame game.  Like Jesus, we too are on a journey to understand ourselves as beloved children of God.  Those parts of ourselves that we wrestle with are divinely-given parts of who we are.  We don’t need to despise them as dirty in order to keep them from throwing our lives out of balance.

We can even look at those parts of our lives from a more scientifically informed perspective that, if properly understood, can help us understand and accept ourselves better.

Let’s look at the sex-drive again.  We already covered the confusion and shame that surrounds this subject for most men.  We think of ourselves as bad or dirty because we have these impulses we can’t shake.

But let’s think for a minute about the purposes those impulses served for our ancestors.  The first is obvious: making sure that our genes are passed on to future generations.  But that’s not all.  Sex is also a social bonding ritual.  We feel instinctively drawn toward one another in ways that go far beyond mere reproduction.  We form families to pool our skills and resources.  This capacity gave our ancestors the advantage they needed to survive in a world full of predators that were faster and stronger than them.  Without that basic attraction toward each other, our species never would have survived.  Sexual desire was the first impulse that made family and civilization possible.  It’s a good thing.  We need it.  Human society wouldn’t be here without it.  We should seek to understand and honor its presence within us before we pass judgment on it.

Let’s look at our impulse for food as well.

(By the way, I’m borrowing most of what I’m about to say from Michael Dowd’s book Thank God for Evolution, which our Monday night Vespers group is currently studying.)

The three so-called “bad” foods that we tend to crave most often are sugars, fats, and salts.  Whenever we get the urge to indulge our palette, it’s usually an urge for foods in one or more of the above categories.  Have you ever wondered why we so many cravings for those particular flavors?

Well, as it turns out, sugars, fats, and salts were pretty hard to come by in prehistoric times.  Our foraging ancestors had to eat all they could find in order to stay alive in the jungle.  Their craving for these foods gave them an evolutionary advantage over others.  The folks who ate more sugars, fats, and salts were more likely to stay alive and healthy for their next meal.  When we feel those cravings within us, we’re tapping into a part of our biology that has a noble and triumphant heritage.  Our very existence is proof that our ancestors did well in eating all the sugars, fats, and salts they could get their hands on.  We should be grateful for those cravings before we pass judgment on them.

So, those are the evolutionary explanations for our sex drive and food cravings.  They are a part of who we are as human beings.  We wouldn’t even be here without them.  We should honor their presence and function in our lives.  We should call them good because that’s exactly what they are.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s always a good thing to indulge such impulses.  Sugars, fats, and salts were rare for our ancestors in the jungle, but we’re surrounded by them in our current setting.  Likewise, acting on every sexual impulse is more likely to break up a family than build one.  We shouldn’t forget that nature gave us brains as well and expects us to use them for making good decisions.  Accepting yourself and understanding yourself do not necessarily mean indulging yourself.

What self-acceptance and self-understanding do mean is that we can finally give ourselves permission to call a time-out on the blame and shame game.  Just like Jesus did in the desert, you and I are coming to grips with who we really are.  Our desires are part of that.  Temptation is really just one of our natural survival instincts acting out of context and out of proportion.  That, hopefully, is where our higher-level brains can kick in and override the software that would otherwise lead us to unfavorable consequences.

There’s no need to be ashamed.  There’s no need to beat yourself up.  Simply say Thank You to your temptations and honor the place those impulses hold in our species’ evolutionary past.

“God don’t make no junk.”  That includes you and every natural thing about you.  It’s all good.  It’s all sacred.  It’s all blessed.  Remember that the next time you’re facing temptation, and maybe you too will hear that voice from heaven, saying to you, “You are my Son/Daughter, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

The Greatest of These is Love

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon5 Comments

I’d like to tell you a story I heard several years ago about a church in crisis.  They were a relatively small church in a large, cosmopolitan city.  They were a young church, having only been planted a few years before, but had been around long enough to enter their second generation of leadership as their founding pastor moved on to another call and was succeeded by a popular, charismatic preacher.  The members of this church came from all across the ethnic and socioeconomic spectrum.  From the perspective of church growth marketing analysts, this place was set to be a gold mine!  They had everything: a prime location in a major urban center, a diverse membership, and a popular, dynamic preacher.  What could go wrong?  Well, as it turns out, there was a lot that could go wrong… and it did.

Now, my first thought would be: It must have been the pastor.  What did he do wrong?  He must have become embroiled in some kind of public scandal involving money or sex.  That’s all you really hear about from ministers in the media these days.  But no, it wasn’t the pastor.  In fact, their charismatic clergyman hardly shows up in this story at all.

In spite of everything they had going for them on paper, this church was struggling in reality.  In fact, things were going so badly, this church’s founding denomination was thinking about pulling the plug on the entire operation.

The reality was that this church was tearing itself apart from the inside out.  What started out as groups of like-minded friends had become rival factions in an all-out war for power and control of the church.  Their pious posturing was a thin veil over blatant hypocrisy.  This ongoing dispute between cliques became so all-consuming that the real problems facing the church couldn’t be addressed.

Newer members of the church were struggling with various spiritual and theological questions, but there was no one to help them search for answers.

Wealthy members of the congregation, primarily concerned with keeping up appearances, would intentionally schedule church suppers during times when they knew that the poorer congregants would still be at work.  By the time the latter group arrived at the suppers, there was often no food left for them.

At one point, it became publicly known that a prominent member of the church was tangled up in a scandalous affair (with his own stepmother, no less), but so much energy was being spent on dealing with the rival factions that the affair went unaddressed and this family was unable to receive the kind of attention and pastoral care they so desperately needed.

Outsiders and other church leaders were aghast when they heard about how bad things had become.  Some wondered whether this sorry mess of humanity could even be called a church anymore.  They were beginning to think that closing the church might even be the most compassionate option.

Instead of closing it down, the denomination decided to send in another pastor to help.  As it turned out the pastor they sent was the church’s founding pastor, who had left for another call some years before.  He had several insights to help them deal with their various crises, but the best thing he did for them was trace all their little problems back to a single big problem: Love, or the lack thereof.  The main problem was that these people just hated each other.

It was their mutual hatred for each other that consumed the members of this church from the inside out.  They couldn’t function as a church.  There was nothing anyone could do to fix that problem.  They had everything going for them: a great urban location, a dynamic super-pastor, and several wealthy financial supporters with deep pockets, but none of those things could make the church grow or stop it from dying if the members didn’t embody that single most important core value: Love.

None of it meant anything without Love.

Now, I want to pause for a moment and pull the curtain back on this church that I’ve been talking about.  I haven’t told you the church’s name or who the pastor was.  It’s not a church in our area or our denomination.  In fact, it’s not even a church that exists in our century.  The church I’ve been talking about is the first century Christian church in the Greek city of Corinth, founded by the apostle Paul himself.  He was that founding pastor who returned to help his former congregation in crisis.

The letter of advice he wrote to them is what we now call the book of 1 Corinthians in the New Testament of the Bible.  The most famous part of that letter is the section we read this morning: the Hymn to Love in 1 Corinthians 13.  This passage is most often read at weddings, where everyone looks great, music is playing, and love is in the air.  Most of us probably heard those words this morning and let them breeze right past us because they are so familiar and so associated with saccharine euphoria that we miss their real meaning completely.

These words, when lived in reality, are radical and revolutionary.  They have the power to transform the way we interact with one another and rescue the future for a community that most people have simply given up on.  This beautiful love poetry was not written for a wedding.  It doesn’t spring up from the same part of human experience that inspired Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.  There is nothing sweet or saccharine about these words at all.

These words about love arose out of conflict within a church that was bitterly divided against itself.  These words are Paul’s challenge to every rival clique’s claim to superiority over others.  Listen to his words again.  If you’ve heard them before, listen to their meaning for the first time:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Can you hear the urgency in Paul’s voice?  He’s telling the Corinthians to stop acting like children and grow up.  These little spats that their cliques are having over church power simply don’t matter.  At all.  All their theological knowledge, their faith, their pledge cards, and their volunteer service to the church are rendered meaningless if they don’t know how to love each other.

Love and love alone makes a church.  And this love isn’t just some warm fuzzy feeling they get when they sing Amazing Grace or Kum Ba Yah.  This isn’t some hippy flower fest; this is the church of Christ.  In here, love only counts as real when it takes on flesh and blood in the actions of those who claim to possess it.

Love is patient.  Are you patient?  Love is kind.  Are you kind?  Love is not irritable or resentful.  Are you?  Love is not envious, boastful, arrogant, or rude.  Are you any of those things?  Love does not insist on its own way.  How often do you insist on getting your own way in a church conflict?

Is this making you uncomfortable?  It should be.  What Paul is talking about here is nothing less than a complete reordering of our priorities.  He’s not just trying to change the way we live, he’s trying to change the way we fight.

The Corinthian Christians had a rather skewed perspective on the fight that was tearing them apart.  They all saw themselves as heroes defending a battleground (i.e. the church) from dangerous enemies (i.e. their rivals).  In reality, they were not the heroes: they were the battleground.  God was the hero defending them.  And their so-called rivals?  They were not the enemy.  They were actually God’s allies in the fight for each other’s souls.

In truth, the Love that Paul wrote about was already present in each one of their hearts.  They were members of the same body: the body of Christ.  What was good for one was good for all.  There was no point to the rivalry then, because they were trying to divide something that couldn’t be divided.  The sooner they realized this truth, the sooner they would get over their petty little squabbles and get back to really being what a church should be: a community of people so full of love that it just naturally spilled over and into the surrounding community.  That’s how you define a healthy, growing church.  The pastor, the size, the building, and the budget are all completely secondary concerns.  Our first job is always to embody the love of Christ within our own lives, amongst each other, and eventually flowing out into the larger community.  When the people in this lonely world see that, they will be naturally attracted to it and will come from all over to see what it is that we have here.

What might that transition from hate to love look like?

It’s hard to say. “Love,” as Han Suyin said, “is a many splendoured thing.”  Love looks different when it takes on flesh and blood in the lives of different people.  I can tell you the stories of a couple of times in my life when I had to make that transition from hate to love.

Hate is a strong word, and I don’t use it lightly.  But in these two cases, I can honestly say that I really, actually came to hate my enemy.  The first was one of my seminary professors.  The second was a co-worker at my first job after seminary.  In both cases, I was the one in the right.  My enemy had hurt and offended me with words and deeds that I found demeaning and humiliating.  Time after time, I tried to reach out in friendship, but was repaid with cold indifference.  Eventually, I stopped trying.  I left them to their miserable little worlds and went on with my life.

But they didn’t leave me.  Their hostile presence was still firmly lodged in my mind, even though we managed to avoid each other most of the time.  I learned what it felt like to grow hard and bitter inside toward another human being.  All of our public interactions were polite, but I seethed inwardly with a hot hatred I’d never felt before.  Mutual acquaintances quickly learned to never mention their names in my presence because of the sharp reaction it would provoke in me.  I had a problem: a problem with hatred.  Jesus said that to hate another person is to murder that person in your heart.  I get that now because I’ve felt it.

But the irony is that my enemies weren’t being hurt by my hatred, I was.  That fire inside was burning me alive without ever touching them.  My hate was keeping me from fully becoming the person I was meant to be.  Even though I knew I was in the right, that knowledge gave me no relief from the bitterness.  Something had to change.

I thought, at the time, that what I needed to do was forgive my enemies, just as Jesus had done to those who were crucifying him.  I tried and I tried hard, over and over, again and again.  I didn’t want to be a person who wallowed in hate.  I kept telling myself, “I need to forgive him… I need to forgive him…” but I just couldn’t.

And then, one night, it hit me.  I was standing on the balcony of my apartment in Vancouver, seething with more bitter thoughts about my enemy.  I said to myself again, “I need to forgive him.”  And then, it felt like I heard a voice whisper to me from the very back of my mind, “No you don’t.  You need to ask forgiveness for yourself.”  I believe now that what I heard was the voice of God, speaking wisdom to my heart.

The fact is that I was the one who had let my righteous indignation turn into bitterness, not my enemy who had hurt me.  I was the one who had allowed hatred to change me into the kind of person I didn’t want to be.  I had tarnished my enemy’s reputation with harsh words spoken behind the back.  I wanted the whole world to know what he had done to me.  I wanted him to pay.  But the irony is that I was the one who was paying the price and reaping none of the benefits of vengeance.  Beneath my anger, I was just as scared and hurt as ever.

After that initial insight on the balcony, I quickly realized what my next step needed to be: I had to face my enemy and ask him to forgive me.  I had to let go and throw myself upon the mercy of the person I hated.  It wasn’t fun, but it was the only remedy that could ease the searing pain in my heart.

When the deed was said and done, in both cases, relief came.  I never became close friends with either of the men I previously hated, but the war was over.  I found peace within myself.  More importantly, I discovered that an internal blockage had been removed from my heart and I was able to love much more fully than before.  I wasn’t just able to love my enemy more fully, I was able to love myself and world more fully as well.  Love was taking on flesh and blood in me, transforming me into Love’s hands and feet in the world.

Asking my enemy to forgive me, even though I knew I was in the right, is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but it was worth it.

I think that’s the truth that Paul was trying to get across to the Corinthian Christians, who were so divided and hateful toward their fellow church members.  Paul wanted them to know that love is worth it because love is what lies at the center of reality.  God is love.  Therefore, our efforts to love one another are what make God’s loving presence more palpable to the rest of the world.  That’s our mission, as Christians.  That’s our church’s reason for existing.  If we’re not doing that, then we’re not a church, no matter how nice our building, how big our budget, or how handsome our pastor is.  Those things don’t make us church.  Love makes us church.

That’s all I really want to tell you today: Love one another.

Because I love you, because God loves you, and because there’s nothing you can do about it.

The Power of Love

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment
Image is in the public domain. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
Image is in the public domain. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

How do you know when you’re on a bad first date?

  • When you’ve been waiting at the restaurant for half an hour and she still hasn’t shown up yet.
  • When she pulls out a newspaper and starts reading it.
  • When she pulls out a cell phone and says, “Let me call my husband…”

Each and every one of these things happened to me at one point or another when I was still single.  Looking back, they’re kind of funny, but they didn’t seem so at the time (especially the last one).

There is something especially deflating about a first date that does not go well.  It takes the wind out of your sails in a way that few things can.  You put on your best clothes and your best behavior in an attempt to ultimately convince another person that you are worth loving.  When it doesn’t work out like you had hoped, it’s hard not to take that personally.  Your self-esteem usually needs some time to recover.

This doesn’t just happen in the dating world either.  Job interviews can be just as brutal in their own way.  You’re putting yourself out there, your future is on the line, but nobody wants to take a chance on you.  That kind of rejection stings to the core and leaves a mark on the surface.

Rejection is probably the most disempowering and disheartening experience a human being can go through.  It hits us right where we live and makes us feel like we aren’t worth anything.  No matter how old we are or how successful we appear to be in life, each and every one of us carries inside of us the pain of past rejection and the fear of future rejection.

This is true of everyone: from the washed-up wino under a bridge to the pop-star princess on TV.  I remember learning this as a teenager when I overheard a conversation one day with a girl who I thought was the prettiest and most popular girl in school.  She was telling someone how she would sometimes just sit in front of her mirror at home and cry because she felt so ugly.  I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  I thought for sure that this girl, of all people, must know what it’s like to be beautiful and loved by everyone, but I was wrong.  The pain and fear of rejection is universal among humans.

Saddest of all are those who experienced rejection so many times that they start to really believe that they’re not worthy of love or happiness in life.  These folks have started to internalize that message of rejection.  They think that’s who they are.  They think that’s what they deserve.  They think they’re nothing and that their lives are worth nothing.  So they treat themselves and others accordingly.

Personally, I can’t help but wonder whether this kind of broken heart might lie behind some of the many incidents of mass murder and random violence that have become so epidemic in our society?  If so, then I would humbly suggest that an effort to include the outcasts and befriend the loners might be more effective in preventing violence than our repeated (and unsuccessful) efforts to “watch out for those maniacs” or “keep an eye on those weirdoes.”  Internalized rejection is disempowering and dehumanizing to people.  There eventually comes a tipping-point when a rejected person becomes the kind of monster that others have made them out to be.

Rejection is powerful, but then again so is love.  Knowing that even one person cares is sometimes enough to make all the difference in the world.  It can even save a life.

I’ve seen what love can do in my life.  Having already mentioned some of my bad experiences in dating, I’d like to share one good one.  This single, ongoing good experience has been enough in my life to outweigh all those other bad dating experiences put together.  I’ve been married to an amazing woman for eight years.  We have laughed together, cried together, encouraged each other, and challenged each other.  Loving her and being loved by her has changed the way I live in this world.  I carry myself differently, I see myself differently, and even though Sarah and I might set each other off sometimes, we usually manage to somehow bring out the best in each other.  That’s what love can do.  That’s the power of love.

Jesus understood that power.  He had experienced it directly, in an ultimate sense.  When he was about thirty years old, he got involved with a radical movement started by his cousin, John.  Cousin John, who we all now know as John the Baptist, was a kind of revival preacher who lived a simple life in the desert and made extensive use of a Jewish practice known as tevilah (ritual washing).  Tevilah was (and still is) used for all kinds of religious and sanitary reasons in traditional Judaism.  John used it as a ritual sign of for Jews who wanted to recommit their lives to following the Torah.  John intuited that big changes were on the way for his people and he wanted them to be spiritually ready.

Jesus himself appears to have been attracted to John’s renewal movement.  Like many of his peers, he participated in the tevilah ritual (which our Bibles have conveniently translated baptism, from the Greek word for “immersion”).  But then something happened to Jesus that didn’t seem to happen to the others.  Luke tells us,

“Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.””

This ritual washing seems to have been a significant spiritual experience for Jesus.  It was the catalyst that set the rest of his life in motion.  This is the point where Jesus’ work of healing and teaching really gets started.  In a sense, Jesus’ baptism was the moment when he was ordained and commissioned to his ministry.

The part of this story that really stands out to me is the voice from heaven.  This voice says, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  This message is addressed directly to Jesus himself.  The voice calls him “Beloved,” which I take to be significant.

I think about those times in my own life when I faced a scary challenge and my wife said to me, “I love you, sweetheart.  I have faith in you and, no matter what happens, I promise we’ll get through this together.”  I can tell you that, when I hear that from her, I find an inner strength I didn’t know I had.  Love is empowering, no matter where it comes from.  Spouses and partners can affect each other in that way.  We can do the same as friends, family, parents, teachers, and bosses.  We encourage each other.  Have you ever thought about that word?  Encourage.  It comes from the Latin en (into) and cor (heart).  We “put heart/strength into” one another.  When Jesus was baptized and heard that voice from the sky saying “You are my Son, the Beloved,” I believe he was being en-couraged: the very heart of who he was and what he would do was being put into him at that moment.  I believe it was then that Jesus discovered the depths of inner strength that would allow him to heal the sick, feed the hungry, and speak such bold words of truth to power.  Whatever else we might believe about him, we can say that Jesus was a person who felt himself to be empowered by the ultimate Love that springs up from the very heart of reality: the sacred energy that we Christians name God or Holy Spirit.

The same Spirit that empowered Jesus also lives in us.  The same energetic force that catalyzed the Big Bang also animates our brains and bodies.  The flame that burns in a hundred million stars is also shut up in our bones, sparking our creativity and setting our hearts on fire to imagine what might be possible.  After 13.75 billion years of preparation, fine tuning, and evolution, the universe has finally given birth to us: you and me.  We have been gifted with unprecedented knowledge, opportunity, resources, and power to shape the future of the world.  Life itself has placed these gifts into our hands as if to say, “You are my beloved sons and daughters.  I made you, I love you, and I believe in you.”  No less than Jesus, you and I are empowered people.

We call it a miracle when we read about Jesus feeding 5,000 people with loaves and fishes, but we have that power too.  According to the World Food Programme, one dollar will feed four children for a day in a developing country.  This means that we could feed 5,000 people for only $1,250.  Even our little country church could manage that much miracle.  On Christmas Eve 2011, our congregation answered a cry for help from Thea Bowman House, an affordable daycare center in Utica whose funding was being slashed by the county government.  Closure seemed imminent.  This would have forced dozens of parents to leave the workforce and go on welfare because they couldn’t afford full-time daycare without assistance.  People from our church raised $1,000 that Christmas Eve and sent it to that program.  I ran into their director several months later, who told me that, thanks in part to our contribution, they managed to weather the storm without closing their doors.  What’s even more amazing is that they did it without having to drop services to a single family.  I call that a miracle!

We call it a miracle when we read about Jesus healing the sick, but we have that power too.  Our congregation recently finished paying off a $4,500 pledge to Presbyterian Homes & Services in New Hartford to help build the new Parkinson’s Residence.  We’ve been told that this program is the first of its kind and will lead the nation in the fight against Parkinson’s disease with state-of-the-art technology.  Just a few weeks ago, at our most recent Christmas Eve service, our little congregation took up a special collection of $1,420 that was sent to Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) to help with the cleanup effort in New York and New Jersey after the devastation left by Hurricane Sandy.  Immediately after the storm, PDA set up emergency shelters and food distribution sites for the victims.  Since then, PDA has continued to work with churches and send down teams of volunteers to help with the long-term cleanup and recovery.  I call that a miracle too.

These are your miracles.  This is the power of what Love can do.  It causes us to think outside the box and reach deep down inside to find resources of strength and generosity we didn’t even know we had.  It’s true that the sharp sting of rejection and the dull ache of loneliness can be felt in all corners of this hurting world, but the caress of love can be felt as well.  The same Spirit that empowered Jesus’ ministry inspires ours as well.  The same voice from the heavens that spoke to Jesus still whispers in our hearts, calling us beloved children.  I pray that our lives will continue to echo the sound of that loving voice to this lonely world, saying to it: “I love you, God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Be blessed and be a blessing!

And I just couldn’t resist adding this video to the blog post:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkAVfsw5xSQ%5D

It’s a Small World After All…

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment
Image by Michael Derr. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
Image by Michael Derr. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

I had a funny thing happen to me the other day.  I read a Facebook status update by a friend of mine on a business trip to Delaware.  She said that her hotel was being renovated, so she had to switch rooms.  A little while later, I read another status update by one of our congregants at this church: Melissa Roy.  Melissa, who is also on a business trip to Delaware, likewise mentioned that her hotel was being renovated, so she had to switch rooms.  In a moment of déjà vu, I put two and two together and realized that Melissa and my friend Michelle must be part of the same trip.  I had no idea they worked together!  We all had a good laugh about it and then Melissa threatened to sing It’s a Small World, After All.  For the sake of all that is good and holy in this world, I begged her not to.

We’ve all had experiences like this: little moments when separate points in our lives meet together unexpectedly.  People tend to laugh or smile when this happens.  I think this is because something deep inside of us leaps for joy at the discovery that we are not alone in this universe.  We instinctively rejoice to learn that our lives are connected as parts of a great, unfathomable whole.

Connection is a pretty cool thing.  It happens every day at all levels of existence: in the way we do business, in biological ecosystems, and even in the laws of physics.  There’s a scientific phenomenon I first learned about a few years ago called quantum entanglement.  Quantum entanglement has to do with photons (tiny particles of light).  I’m not a physicist, so I’ll explain it in the words of Theodore Roszak, which I found in another book by Diarmuid O’Murchu called Quantum Theology (p.32):

Entanglement is a relationship that allows physicists to make twins of photons, and then link them in a sort of quantum web that permits instantaneous communication across light years of distance.  At least thus far, entanglement stands as a relational state so strange that it eludes any causal explanation.  The very antithesis of isolation and autonomy, it suggests that scientists who approach nature with a sensitivity for interaction, reciprocity, and rich interrelationship will find endless wonders.

Here again we see the miracle of connection taking place.  Connection is everywhere.  You’ve heard me say this before (and you’ll hear me say it again): the word religion comes from the Latin word for connection.  So, it’s no wonder that the very deepest parts of ourselves jump for joy whenever little momentary connections happen in our lives, like those times when we discover that two friends from different parts of our lives also know each other.  We say, “Hey!  Look at that!  We’re all connected!”  Moments like that are religious moments, on the most basic level.  For an instant, our spiritual eyes are open to the great mystery of the universe and we realize that we are not alone.

In this morning’s reading from the letter to the Ephesians, the author talks at length about this mystery of connectedness.  The author of this passage is writing in the name of the apostle Paul, although most biblical scholars agree that it probably wasn’t Paul himself who wrote this.  It was probably one of his students, writing in his name a generation or so after his death.  This wasn’t at all uncommon in the ancient world.  In that culture, it was considered a great honor for a student to write in the name of a beloved former teacher.  However, it poses a problem for us modern readers because we like to look for concrete facts that we can take at face-value.

This author, writing honorifically in Paul’s name, talks about a mystery that was revealed to Paul during his lifetime.  Most of us have probably heard the story before: Paul (then called Saul) was a devout and educated Jew who made a name for himself by hunting and imprisoning the followers of Jesus.  Then, one day, while Paul was on the road to the city of Damascus in modern-day Syria, he was struck by a blinding light and a voice from heaven that identified itself as Jesus.  From then on, Paul’s life was different.  He became a leader in the very movement he had previously sought to eradicate.  He still considered himself to be a faithful Jew, but his interpretation of Judaism was now being filtered through his newfound faith in Jesus as the Jewish Messiah.

This interpretive change had all sorts of consequences for Paul and his faith.  One of the most significant changes for Paul was that he now believed that Gentiles (non-Jewish people) could be included in the fellowship of the chosen people.  For Paul, it was a person’s faith, not his or her ethnicity or religious background, that qualified him or her for membership in the chosen people.  Paul himself wrote in his letter to the Galatians, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”  The author of Ephesians expresses a similar idea in today’s passage, saying, “the Gentiles (non-Jews) have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.”

This new idea did not go over very well with the religious leaders of Judaism in Paul’s day.  From their point of view, Paul and these so-called “Christians” were a bunch of liberal hippies, frolicking around and claiming that anybody who wanted to could be part of the chosen people.  These more traditional believers were scared that Paul and his Christian friends were undermining the very beliefs, morals, and values that their ancestors had fought and died for.  Blood had been shed to preserve Jewish tradition, Jewish culture, and Jewish religion, but now this Paul guy and his students were saying that it didn’t matter anymore.  This was a problem for them.  It was disrespectful.  It was offensive.  It put Paul and the Christians at odds with the Jewish community from then on.  Paul never stopped thinking of himself as a Jew, but the rest of the Jewish community saw him as a heretic and a traitor.  They did everything they could to ensure that he and his students were unwelcome in their synagogues.

But Paul and his Christian students never blinked.  They had discovered something so powerful in their lives that rejection from the powers-that-be didn’t even phase them.  Their faith was no private devotion that secured their individual souls for an afterlife in heaven.  Theirs was a faith of connectedness.  Just like my recent encounter with mutual acquaintances, they found that strangers could be family.  Just like entangled photons, they found that connectedness itself is woven into the very fabric of the universe.  Through their faith in Christ, the early Christians discovered that the umbrella of God’s grace is big enough to include all people, all beings.  The author of Ephesians talks about celebrating “the boundless riches of Christ” and “the wisdom of God in its rich variety.”  Within the mystery of grace, there is abundance without boundaries.

The joy they found in this ever-expanding family of faith trumped the persecution they faced from religious and political authorities on every side.  No less than their ancestors who had suffered and died to preserve the traditions of the Jewish people, these early Christians were just as willing to suffer and die for their faith in the God who’s “got the whole world in his hands.”  What they had discovered was news so good that it had to be shared, no matter what the consequences might be.

You and I, as Christians in the 21st century, are the heirs of this subversive legacy.  We live in a culture where people see themselves as isolated and divided.  They fight for the survival and superiority of their own little groups.  Consumerism tells them that “greed is good” and “selfishness is a virtue.”  Economic collapse, political corruption, and religious violence are simply the fruits that grow from the seeds of self-centered hearts, minds, and societies.

The gospel of grace stands in stark contrast to this selfishness.  In Christ, we learn that we are all connected.  As Paul himself wrote: “The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.”  This connection is no trivial thing, either.  It’s not some feel-good philosophy that warms our hearts once in a while.  No, we depend on each other.  We need each other.  Once again, I refer to Paul’s writing:

…just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ… The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’, nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’… If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

We are connected, interdependent, and members of the same body.  If we understood the truth of this, one would no more be able to demean, degrade, or dehumanize another person than to poke out one’s own eye or cut off a hand.  We need each other.  We belong to one another because we all belong to God.  That’s what it means to be connected and to live as connected beings.

That’s the message the people of this world need to hear.  They’re longing to belong so badly that they’ll jump on the band wagon of any agenda or ideology that comes their way, promising peace and prosperity.  What they don’t realize is that they already do belong.  There is a place for them in this house, this community, this church.  The whole world desperately needs to hear this good news, but they won’t hear it unless we tell them.

The church is meant to be a microcosm of that inter-connected community in the universe.  We are called to love and to care for each other as brothers and sisters of Christ.  We are also called to love and care for outsiders as if they were our own.  That’s how the world will come to see and know that they too are loved and connected to the universe in God.

This good news is no sales pitch for conversions, neither is it a “turn or burn” warning of hellfire and damnation.  It seems to me that we’ve done a good enough job of making hell on earth already.  No, the gospel we preach is food for hungry hearts and medicine for sick souls.  We preach it with our lives more than our words.  If we live lives of compassion and integrity, recognizing and honoring our own sacred connections to the universe, people will naturally be attracted to us, just like they were drawn to Jesus.

Like Jesus, each of us can become agents of healing and enlightenment for the world.  This is our destiny: to remind the world of its destiny and to take this message of faith, hope, and love to very ends of earth.

We are all messengers.  Whether we speak up in words or not, the world will receive some kind of message from our lives.

May the message that your life sends to the world be the same as my message to you at the end of each Sunday sermon:

“I love you.  God loves you.  And there is nothing you can do about it.”

Be blessed and be a blessing.

The Glory Around You

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment
Angels Appearing Before the Shepherds. By Henry Ossawa Tanner (1910)
Angels Appearing Before the Shepherds. By Henry Ossawa Tanner (1910)

There are two ways of not seeing something.  One way is for the object in question to be so far away that our eyes can’t distinguish it from the surrounding environment.  This is what happens when we try to look for distant stars and galaxies with the naked eye.  We can squint as hard as we like but, without the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, we still won’t be able to see the millions of galaxies that surround us in every direction.  They’re just too far away.

The other way of not seeing something is for the object in question to be so close up that there’s no way for us to see all of it at once.  Such is the case with our own galaxy.  We are part of it.  It’s all around us.  If someone were to ask you where our galaxy is, you wouldn’t be wrong at all to say, “it’s right here” without pointing to anything in particular.

When it comes to thinking about invisible things like the reality of God, most modern philosophers have argued for the first option: God, if there is a God, is simply too distant from our everyday reality to be seen or experienced directly.  From one point of view, this was a most useful idea.  It helped modern thinkers to move beyond the old mythical and superstitious ideas about God as “the old man in the sky” inherited from their ancient and medieval ancestors.  This was a good thing.  It needed to happen, especially once science began to debunk so many of the old superstitions.  In place of “the old man in the sky,” modern people began to think of God as a kind of cosmic clockmaker: a rational mind which was responsible for the machine-like order we observe in creation.  The Creator, according to this way of thinking, designed the laws of nature, built the universe, set it in motion, and then sat back to run under its own steam.  Compared to ancient mythologies, this idea of God seems very plausible, rational, and consistent with the discoveries of science.

On the other hand, this way of thinking has also made God seem more remote and distant from the concerns of everyday life.  God, according to the modern mind, doesn’t exist in this universe.  Some would say that God doesn’t even care about us or creation.  “The clockmaker may have got everything started,” so they say, “but hasn’t been seen or heard from since.”  The clockmaker idea of God might be more rational and less superstitious than “the old man in the sky,” but it doesn’t inspire our hearts toward worship and devotion.  The clockmaker God is little more than a mental concept that can be either accepted or rejected without consequence.  It didn’t take long for modern philosophers to dismiss the clockmaker concept itself as irrelevant and unnecessary.  Like the distant galaxies, such a God was simply too far away to be seen or experienced by human beings.

In recent years, those of us who still feel drawn toward worship have come to realize that both the “old man in the sky” and the “clockmaker” ideas of God are wholly inadequate.  Neither one captures the essence of what we mean when we use the word “God.”  In contrast to the modern thinkers who say that God is too far away to be seen, we say that God is close: so close, in fact, as to be all around us… too close and too big to be fully seen and understood by any one person.  The Bible tells us that we “live, and move, and have our being” in God.  God is like our own Milky Way galaxy: if someone were to ask, “Where is God?” it makes perfect sense to say, “Right here!  All around us!  We exist in God!”

For me, this idea of God being all around us, too close to be fully seen, is expressed most beautifully in the story of Christmas.  That story begins in a fairly mundane way: with regular, working class people being pushed around by the powers that be.  This has been the story of humankind in every age of history.  In this case, the Roman emperor wanted an accurate count of the population in occupied territories for tax purposes, so people Mary and Joseph were shuffled around like cattle and treated like animals to the extent that they even ended up sleeping and giving birth in a stable like animals.  Likewise, we see shepherds working the night shift.  Two thousand years of nostalgia and Christmas pageants have romanticized the shepherding profession, but it was a despised and disgusting job in the first century.  No one liked shepherds, no one trusted them, and everyone saw them as little better than the animals they tended.  Yet, it was to this band of ragamuffins that the angels came.  No outsider or passer-by could have known that the pathetic, mundane scene playing itself out before them was one of the most significant and miraculous moments in all of human history.  Even the key players themselves were shocked and amazed as “the glory of the Lord shone around them” and the heavens themselves seemed to break out in song.

The God that Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds encountered that night was neither “the old man in the sky” nor “the clockmaker.”  Theirs was an incarnate deity who “took on flesh and dwelt among” them.  They experienced this God in “the glory” that “shone around them.”  Contrary to the conclusions of modern philosophers, their God was too close to be seen, not too far away.

God is here.  God is all around us.  I can’t point to one place, or time, or thing and say “this and this alone is God” because the God I believe in can’t be so easily contained or limited.  We “live, and move, and have our being” in God, whose glory can be seen, shining all around us, if only we have the eyes to see it.  Like so many mystics and sages before us, we can see the glory of God shining in the wonders of creation, in the discoveries of scientists, in the guidance of teachers, in the healing of medical professionals, in the courage of those who risk their lives for others, and in the compassion of those who help the suffering.

The glory of the Lord is shining around us tonight, no less than it did for those shepherds on the first Christmas Eve, if only we have eyes to see it.  The poet Girard Manley Hopkins wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” and St. Augustine of Hippo reminded us that “God is closer to us than our own hearts.”

The task of the believer in all this is to take these momentary flashes of glory and learn to see them, not as random, isolated events, but as parts of a whole, individual threads in a great tapestry, woven through the ages.  That’s what Mary, the mother of Jesus, was doing that night when it says in the text that she “treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.”  She didn’t let her moment of glory just pass her by, she grabbed hold of it and kept it with her.

In the same way, if we want to become the kind of people who can see the glory of God shining around us, then we need to start paying attention.  We need to find those little moments of joy, wonder, peace, and compassion in a day and remember them.  Maybe for you it’s the silvery beauty of snow on tree branches or the golden light of an Adirondack sunset.  Maybe it’s as insignificant as someone generously giving you the right of way instead of cutting you off in traffic.  Wherever you see these little moments of glory, don’t let them escape before you give thanks for them.  If you find it helpful for you, try keeping a daily journal of thanksgiving where you keep a record of these little happenings.  Develop this into a habit and I think you might be surprised at how easy it eventually becomes for you to call these moments to mind.  If that journal idea isn’t exactly your style, don’t worry about it.  Find whatever works for you, but find something.  Don’t let this life pass you by without seeing the glory around you.  Like Mary did: treasure these things and ponder them in your heart.  As you do this, may the glory of the incarnate mystery of God in whom we “live, and move, and have our being,” shine around you and become ever more real to you.

Of Messes and Miracles

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment
De Visitatie by Frans Francken (1618)
De Visitatie by Frans Francken (1618)

Have you ever felt the pressure to be perfect (or the pressure to appear to be perfect, even if you are not)?  This pressure comes down on us in many different forms.  For some, it might be related to performance at work or at school.  For others, it might be the pressure to have a perfect body.  It might also be the pressure to live up to a strict moral code or to be the perfect churchgoer.

For some strange reason, I think many of us have this vaguely-defined idea in our heads about what it means to “have it all” or “have it all together.”  We tend to think that if we want to be accepted, then we have to be acceptable according to some outside standard of beauty or performance.

I’d like to test this theory this morning as we examine the lives of two people whose lives were far from perfect.  The first is Elizabeth, the wife of Zechariah the priest, and the other is Mary, who we all know as the mother of Jesus.

Elizabeth, we know, was a good-hearted person, but she had a problem: she was getting on in years and she couldn’t have children.  While this can be devastating for families in any place and time, it was doubly-painful for women in first century Judea.  The most pressing concern for people in that society was the welfare of their nation as a whole.  They thought of themselves as the chosen people.  The most important thing, then, was to keep the chosen people going.  Anything that interfered with that process was most troubling.  So, if a woman was unable to bear children, people would see it as a sign that God had rejected her as a mother of the Jewish nation.  It wouldn’t have mattered that Elizabeth and her husband were honest people with good reputations, most people would assume that they had committed some kind of unspeakable act that brought this dreadful curse upon their family.  The village rumor-mill would have concocted all kinds of tantalizing tales of speculation over what that act might have been.  According to Jewish law at that time, Elizabeth’s husband, Zechariah, would have been well within his rights to divorce her because of this.  Elizabeth, because of her inability to have children, was certainly an object of shame and ridicule in the time and place where she lived.

Elizabeth’s life and family were about as far as one could be from perfect in first century Judea.  Yet, even in her old age, after all hope had been lost, the angel Gabriel appeared to Zechariah, Elizabeth’s husband, and informed him that they could soon expect the arrival of a son, who would be named John.  What’s more is that this was not to be any ordinary baby, but a prophet who would prepare the people of Israel for massive change.

As painful as the stigma of childlessness must have been for Elizabeth, it put her in the perfect position to help her cousin Mary, whose period of shame was just beginning.

As her story opens, Mary seems like she has it all together.  Biblical scholars estimate that Mary was probably about 13 or 14 years old at the time.  This was the typical age for young girls to get engaged in that society.  They believed that women should start having children as soon as they were biologically able.  We read elsewhere in the New Testament that her fiancé, Joseph, was a kind and just working man who loved her very much.  Mary’s entire life was in front of her and things were looking pretty good.

Than an angel named Gabriel showed up and informed Mary that she was about to have a baby, just like her cousin Elizabeth.  It’s ironic that the very news that took away the disgrace of Elizabeth would heap disgrace upon Mary.  While Mary herself knew that she had committed no indiscretion, she had a hard time convincing others of that fact.  Even Joseph didn’t believe her at first!  Not only could Joseph call off their wedding, but he could have her legally put to death as an adulteress for fooling around with another man.  As the weight of this news settled upon Mary’s shoulders, she packed up and made a hundred mile journey on foot as a lone, unwed, pregnant teenager to the only other person she knew would understand: Elizabeth.

Elizabeth knew what it was like to bear the disgrace of the community for no good reason.  Furthermore, Elizabeth also knew what it was like to be pregnant for the first time under unusual circumstances.  And so, sure enough, it was Elizabeth who was the first to greet Mary by speaking a blessing over her pregnancy.  Elizabeth was the first to realize that Mary’s baby was a miracle, not a mistake.  She said, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”  In Mary’s darkest hour, when the rest of the world was ready to reject and stone her, Elizabeth called her “blessed.”  This blessing must have had a profound effect on Mary.  In the text, she immediately breaks out into a song of praise, just as if this was some kind of Broadway musical.  In the song she sings, Mary says, “Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed”.  The support and acceptance she received from one person was enough to transform her entire experience of pregnancy into one of blessing.

During the next three months that Mary stayed with Elizabeth, the two women became a support network for each other.  Each of them was God’s gift to the other in the midst of messiness and chaos.

We can see the miracle of Christmas working itself out in their lives, but it looks nothing like we would expect in polite society.  We learn from Elizabeth that miracles don’t just come to those whose lives are seemingly perfect or put together.  We learn from Mary that miracles don’t necessarily turn our lives into inspirational success stories.  The message here is that ordinary miracles happen in the midst of ordinary life, however painful, broken, imperfect, or messed up it may be.

Here in the nostalgia of the secular holiday season, it can be easy for us to get caught up in illusions of having the perfect family, the perfect gift, the perfect Christmas dinner, etc.  Too often, the Christmas story itself gets presented with all of the messy parts carefully removed.  For example, you walk by a beautifully crafted crèche sitting on a church lawn and see the newborn Christ lying in a manger, but do you ever think about what stables really smell like?  Not very good.  In fact, they stink just about as much as our own messy lives sometimes stink.

The world into which Christ was born was this world, the same one we live in now, only two thousand years ago.  As Eugene Peterson writes, God “took on flesh and moved into the neighborhood”.  Your neighborhood, just as it is.  As we draw to the close of this Advent season, we are not just preparing to celebrate an event that took place “once upon a time”; we are preparing to celebrate the good news that Christ meets us right here in the midst of our messy and imperfect lives.  And what’s more is that our messiness does not prevent something good, beautiful, and miraculous from being born in us and through us.

Mary and Elizabeth knew that.  They accepted it.  What’s more is that they accepted each other in the midst of their mutual messiness.  That, more than anything else, is what put them in the perfect position to witness the miracle of the first Christmas.  They were a safe place for each other, a community of acceptance.

When I dream about what it is that our church is meant to be and do in this community, I think about Mary and Elizabeth.  I dream about a safe place, a community of acceptance that is truly open to all and reaches out to the world in love.  I dream about a church of people who are so accepting of themselves and their own mess that they can’t help but be gracious toward the messiness of those others who come looking for a place to belong.

There is so little of that in the world today.  Every authority figure, from teachers to bosses to the police car in the rearview mirror, seems to be looking over our shoulders, just waiting for us to mess up at something.  So, we mind our P’s and Q’s, dot the T’s and cross the I’s, and make sure to keep an eye on the speedometer.  On a less official level, we also feel like we’re constantly being evaluated by our peers for what we wear, what we drive, how we look, and who we know.  That pressure is enough to drive us crazy.

Sadly, our churches are not immune to this judgmental tendency.  In fact, we’ve developed something of a reputation for it over the years.  Too many churches have turned the gospel of Christ into just another system for judging people based on dogma and morality.  Too many churches have become houses of exclusion rather than communities of acceptance.

But our Presbyterian heritage teaches us that we are saved by grace: the unconditional love and unmerited favor of God.  There is nothing we can do to earn our salvation or get ourselves on God’s good side.  Not a single one of us has any grounds for looking down on or passing judgment over anyone else, even if we disagree with their opinions or disapprove of their behavior.  We are all sinners, saved by grace, loved by God, and welcome in this church.

This faith in grace as unconditional and unmerited acceptance is the biggest gift I believe our church has to offer our local community.  Ours is a church of grace, a community of acceptance: “open to all and reaching out to the world in love,” as it says in our church mission statement.  We have many neighbors in this town who need to hear this good news.  Their hearts are yearning for a place to belong, a place where none are judged and all are welcome.  We can be that place.

What we need to do in order to help that dream come true are three things:

  1.  Accept ourselves as we are.  We are not perfect.  We never will be.  We are full of faults and fears.  We don’t always live up to the values we espouse.  We need to recognize and accept this messiness in our own lives.  We need to get comfortable in our own scarred and wrinkled skin, knowing that we are loved in spite of our many messes.
  2. Extend that grace to others.  When you are able to accept yourself as you are, it’s only natural that you gradually start to become more tolerant and accepting of other people.  Their successes no longer threaten you.  Their failures give you no pleasure.  Their opinions were once the yardstick by which you measured yourself, but once you’ve stopped measuring yourself, you don’t need the yardstick anymore.  You are free to see and accept them as they are, faults and fears included.
  3. Spread the good news.  Let folks know about us.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people from places all over this country say to me that they’re looking for a church like ours.  I refuse to believe that none of these people live in Boonville.  Souls here are hungry for acceptance and a gospel that really is “good news.”  Our job is to share that good news with them in word and deed.  Just as you’ve often heard me say before: “Preach the gospel always, use words when necessary.”

This Christmas, don’t worry about finding the perfect tree, the perfect gift, or the perfect ham.  Instead, focus on cultivating this kind of self-acceptance based on your faith in the immeasurable, unconditional love that holds us from birth to death and beyond.  This acceptance of self and others is ultimately what makes for a happy home, a growing church, and a merry Christmas.

Raise Your Head

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

There is no sermon text, since I preached from an outline this week.

Click here to listen to a recording of the sermon at fpcboonville.org

Here is the scripture text:

Luke 21:25-36

[Jesus said,] “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

Then he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”

A New Way of Being: Redefining Power

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment
Ecce Homo, Antonio Ciseri (1871).

There are lots of ways to feel or be powerless:

You can be trapped in the McDonald’s drive thru at rush hour, with a long line of cars in front of and behind you, and then realize after you order that you left your wallet at home.   You can start telling an off-color joke to a friend or sibling, only to have your boss or your mom enter the conversation and ask you to continue with what you were just saying.  You can propose to your significant other on the jumbo-tron at an NBA game, only to have that person say “no” in front of 10,000 people.

On a more serious note (not that rejected marriage proposals aren’t serious):

You can walk the hallways of your school in fear, watching your back for that bully who somehow always manages to find you anyway.  You can cut every luxury and non-essential expense from your budget, only to realize that you still have to choose between paying rent and buying groceries for a week, because you’re hourly-wage job won’t allow you to do both.  You can struggle for years to break a bad habit or overcome an addiction without much success.

There are lots of ways to feel or be powerless.

There is no such thing as absolute power.  Every single person on this planet, up to and including the president of the United States, experiences powerlessness in some way or another.  Officially or unofficially, everyone answers to someone.

In spite of this fact, or perhaps because of it, people everywhere are constantly trying to step over one another in an attempt to be top dog of whatever hill they happen to be climbing at the moment.  In a social system where power comes in limited quantities, people try to take whatever they can for themselves, believing (rightly or wrongly) that with power comes security.  So they grab whatever power they can get and use it to their own advantage.  Powerful people fight one another for more power.  People with this mentality tend to use phrases like, “It’s a dog eat dog world out there.  It’s survival of the fittest.  Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.  No one is looking out for you.  You’re on your own.”

Compassionate and kind-hearted folks tend to wince at this kind of cynical talk.  We don’t want to believe the world really works that way, but when we look at the facts, we have to admit that the world often does seem to work that way.  What makes cynicism so enticing as a philosophy of life is its apparent realism in the face of difficult circumstances.  Is this who we really are?  Is this all we are?  Or is there another way of being, of being of being alive, and of being human?

This morning’s gospel reading sets us down right into the middle of a particularly intense competition for power in the ancient Middle East.  The religious authorities of Judea were engaged in an ongoing cold war with the occupying Roman government.  Each side, through their official representatives, vied for the loyalty and obedience of the people.  On the particular day in question, their conflict revolved around a common nuisance: Jesus of Nazareth, the latest in a series of so-called Messiahs who promised peace, liberation, and yes: power to the people of Judea.  Each one would rise up, gather an army of zealous insurgents, try to overthrow the Roman occupation by terrorist campaign, and eventually fail.  The religious authorities, on the other hand, had learned different ways of dealing with the occupation.  Some, like the Pharisees, sought to empower Judean society by a return to traditional morals and values.  In time, so they thought, God would intervene on their behalf to free them from foreign rule.  Other groups, like the Sadducees, learned how to manipulate the strings of the political system from the inside.

Members of these last two groups saw Jesus as “just another self-appointed Messiah with his army of zealots.”  As such, he was just another temporary nuisance and a threat to their power that had to be dealt with.  So they brought him to Pontius Pilate, Rome’s appointed governor over the perpetually unstable and troublesome province of Judea.

Pilate, for his part, didn’t care about who Jesus was or the content of his message, nor did he care about the Pharisees and Sadducees with their incessant squabbling and competing strategies for survival.  The only thing Pontius Pilate cared about was maintaining order and loyalty to the Empire.  If this Jesus really was claiming to be the anointed one who would liberate the Judean people from Roman rule by military force, then Pilate would have to deal with him swiftly, in the name of maintaining civil order.

Jesus, for his part, was powerless: caught between multiple groups who were competing for power on a national stage.  To the outside observer, he appeared to be a failed revolutionary: his closest followers had denied, betrayed, and abandoned him at the moment of truth.  His own people had arrested him and handed him over for crucifixion, a punishment reserved for terrorists.  Pilate’s job, in this situation, was to figure out whether Jesus really was a terrorist or not.

This morning’s gospel reading opens as Pilate begins his examination of Jesus.  By all accounts, Jesus is helpless, powerless.  He has been reduced to the status of a pawn in chess game between multiple powerful parties.  The scene plays out as one would expect: Jesus is examined, cross-examined, tossed back and forth, and eventually executed, not because he was found guilty, but because Pilate could find no other way to regain control of a volatile situation.

But, when we look at the conversation between Jesus and Pilate in detail, a different picture emerges.  The author of John’s gospel tells this story through the eyes of a Christian, writing decades after the events of Jesus’ crucifixion took place.  As John tells this story, the positions of power are actually reversed.  It is not Pilate who is interrogating Jesus, but Jesus who is questioning Pilate.  Jesus makes no apology, confesses no crime, and concedes no ground.  Reading this story is actually confusing to the modern reader because it seems like Jesus and Pilate are talking about two different things.  In fact, they are.  They’re not so much talking to each other as much as talking past each other.  Pontius Pilate obviously doesn’t understand what this Jesus guy is all about and Jesus obviously doesn’t care about Pilate’s need to maintain order.  Their conversation goes around and around but never really gets anywhere.

At one point Jesus says to Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world.”  Pilate, thinking he’s finally found his opportunity, pounces and says, “So you are a king?”  But Jesus wriggles away from his trap and returns the proverbial tennis ball back into Pilate’s court.  “You say that I am a king.”  Jesus says, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”  Their bizarre dialogue ends with an unanswered question in Pilate’s witty retort, “What is truth?”

Pilate never gets an answer to his question, presumably because he would never be able to understand any answer that Jesus gave him.  In the language of John’s gospel, Pilate exists in “darkness”, quite apart from the “light” that Jesus offers.  Pilate is an “unenlightened” being.  The 21st century spiritual teacher and Catholic priest Richard Rohr would say that Pilate was “operating at earlier stage of consciousness” than Jesus was.  Pilate was operating out of what Rohr would call a “tribal consciousness” wherein an individual is preoccupied by identifying with a particular group in conflict with all other groups.  Competition and power are primary concerns for those who see the world through an “us vs. them” ideology like Pilate had.  Jesus on the other hand, according to Richard Rohr, was operating out of a much higher, non-dualistic consciousness.  He was not caught up in the petty us/them struggles of the world as Pilate knew it.  In the eyes of Jesus, all people and all things are one in God.  This is why Jesus was able to say to Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world.”  I don’t think Jesus ever meant for us to think that he came from some far-off, magical kingdom in the sky where everyone is happy and sits around on clouds, playing harps all day.  That is the stuff of fairy tales and story books.  Nevertheless, Jesus’ kingdom is a reality and it truly is “not from this world” in the sense that it includes all people, all creation, and all other kingdoms in its wide, wide embrace.

As a king, the “king of kings” in fact, Jesus redefines power.  In place of domination, Jesus holds up service as the ideal.  He said to his disciples, “You know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as this human being came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”  At the Last Supper, we see Jesus leading by example in this regard as the Servant King.  He gets up from the table, wraps a towel around his waist, and proceeds to wash his disciples’ feet.  This was a task typically assigned to the lowest, most despicable slave.  No one in his or her right mind would volunteer for this job, but Jesus told his disciples that this is what being a king, a leader was all about.  Humble service, for Jesus, is one of the marks of true power.

In a similar vein, Jesus’ kingdom is “not of this world” because he rules by compassion and mercy rather than by violence and judgment.  Forgiveness, according to Jesus, is the most powerful act any person can ever commit, whether king or peasant.  Victory is not achieved when your enemy is defeated.  Victory is won, according to Jesus, when your enemy becomes your friend.

Obviously, Jesus’ ideas seem “out of this world”.  They were incomprehensible to Pontius Pilate.  They were foreign to the Judean religious authorities.  They still sound bizarre to our ears in the 21st century.  We’re still operating out of a lower level of consciousness where our competitive, tribal concerns keep us from seeing the big picture, the whole of reality in which we live, move, and have our being.

When it comes to Jesus’ kingdom, we’re simply not there yet.  We might not ever get there in this lifetime.  But we, as those who claim to be Christians, who claim to follow Jesus, have an obligation and a responsibility to take Jesus’ words and Jesus’ life seriously.  What Jesus is offering Pilate (and us, by extension) in today’s gospel reading is a new of being, of being alive, and of being human in this world.

Something inside each of us cries out for this.  Even though we tend to give in to the temptation toward cynicism, even though we tend to trust in the power of warfare, weapons, and bombs to make a better world, even though we tend to seek power rather than service, there is nevertheless a deep longing within our souls for a world and a life where we will not have to live in fear and mistrust.  Something inside each of us knows that this is not how the world was meant to be.

Something about Jesus awoke this longing within people.  In some way that we still don’t fully understand, he embodied, even incarnated this alternative way of being in the world.  In Jesus, the longing took on flesh and showed us what it could do if it was given the chance to run free over the face of the earth.

I have seen moments and known people in whom the Spirit of Christ does run free and raises them up above that immature, ego-centric tribal consciousness.  I remember one such person who made an impact on my life when I was in high school.  His name is Phil.  He was a grad student and one of the leaders of a youth group I attended.  Through him, I discovered another way of being, of being alive, and of being human in the world.

Phil was the first person I ever knew outside of my family who made me feel accepted for who I am.  He spent time with me, mostly just goofing off and hanging around.  He didn’t care that I wasn’t popular or influential in school.  He didn’t preach to me.  He didn’t have any kind of religious sales pitch for getting me to sign on the dotted line as a Christian.  He just seemed to care.  During my freshman year, when I was going through a hard time and even contemplating suicide, Phil was the one I trusted enough to open up to.  He wasn’t a pastor or a therapist, but he knew how to love people like Jesus did and that’s what made the biggest impact on me.

Over time, I gradually came to see something in Phil.  Looking back, I think I would call it the Spirit of Christ.  And that, more than any sermon I’ve ever heard in my life, is what made me want to live as a Christian.  I had been going to church ever since I was a baby, but I never had any desire to make that spiritual path my own.  After my experience of seeing Christ in Phil, I wanted to follow Jesus too.  Since that time, almost seventeen ago, I’ve been through several crises of faith and endured many seasons of doubt, but I keep on going back to the Christ I saw in Phil: Jesus who is the friend of the friendless, the one who welcomes the outcasts, the one who “eats with tax collectors and sinners”, the one who lives above and beyond this world’s sick systems driven by competition and lust for power, the one who offers me an alternative way of being, of being alive, and of being human in the world.

Each and every one of us is called to be a ‘Phil’ to someone, somewhere, at sometime.  None of us is perfect, so we’ll each do it in our own small, temporary, imperfect, and partial way.  But when the moment comes and the Spirit moves us, will we have the faith to set aside our twisted hunger for power and competition?  Will we take up the mantle of compassion, humility, mercy, and service when it is needed?  Will we allow Christ live again in us, so that someone else might hear and respond to the call of that same Spirit in his or her own way?  If that hunger in our hearts for a different world, a better world, is true and not just an illusion, if this world’s sick system of power-hungry competition is not finally an expression of all that we truly are, if there is another way of being, of being alive, and of being human in the world, then it is absolutely imperative that we open our hearts and minds to this Jesus, so that Christ can live again in us, continuing in our community today the same ministry he started in Palestine two thousand years ago.  May it be so, even here, even now.