Category: Sermon

The Great Ends of the Church: Breaking the Silence

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon, Uncategorized1 Comment
450px-Censourship_quiet_silence_no_words Image by stibbons. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

Click here to listen to this sermon at fpcboonville.org

Is there anything more uncomfortable than an elephant in the room?

You know what I mean:

There’s something going on.  Everybody knows about it.  It’s on everyone’s mind.  Everyone knows that everyone else knows, but they STILL won’t talk about it.

Don’t you hate that?

How many family dinners have passed in awkward silence all because people can’t or won’t break the ice on an uncomfortable, but still important, subject?  Worse yet, how many families or friends have simply given up on each other after a while because of something that needed to be said, but no one would summon the courage to say it?

Most of the time, our socially conditioned interpersonal skills lead us in the direction of etiquette, maintaining the status quo, and not rocking the boat.

But there is a time and a place for polite restraint and there is a time and a place for taking a chance on each other.  In order for our deepest and closest relationships to survive, someone has to stand up and fight for the relationship, even if it means saying something uncomfortable.

Those moments are never fun, but they are necessary.  And when they’re over and done with, so long as everyone stays true to themselves and true to one other, most relationships are better off for having had the hard conversation.

In this morning’s gospel reading, we have a record of one such awkward conversation that needed to happen.  The conversation is between Jesus and Peter.  It takes place after Jesus’ resurrection.  Twice already, the risen Christ had appeared to the disciples and offered words of peace and reassurance.  Jesus had even breathed the Holy Spirit into them and commissioned them to go and preach the gospel.  However, all was still not well.

Peter, rather than taking up the apostle’s calling, had gone back to the life he knew before he followed Jesus: fishing.  Not a bad profession or pastime, but certainly less than the high calling that had been placed on Peter’s life.

Something was still missing.  Peter wasn’t ready.  He had some unfinished business with Jesus.  One might say that it was his “elephant in the room.”

If you think about it, you might even remember what it was.  A few days earlier, on the night of Jesus’ arrest, Peter had pledged his undying allegiance to Jesus.  Peter said that he would die for Jesus, even everyone else turned tail and ran.

But that didn’t happen.

When the moment of truth came, what did Peter do?  He denied that he even knew Jesus.  Not once, but three times in a night.  His spirit was willing, but the rest of him was weak. 

Jesus had even tried to warn Peter that this was coming.  Somehow, call it intuition or clairvoyance, Jesus knew that this would happen.  He tried to comfort Peter, saying that everything was going to be okay, in spite of Peter’s upcoming failure of nerve.

But when all was said and done, Peter’s spirit was broken by his denial.  Even after seeing Jesus rise from the dead, he couldn’t bring himself to take his old place at his rabbi’s side.  His betrayal was too deep and his crime to heinous to be forgiven.  Whatever words of comfort and commissioning Jesus might have for the others, Peter felt sure that those words were not meant for him.  No, he would go back to the only life he knew: fishing.

It seems that Jesus and the other apostles didn’t share this overly negative opinion of Peter and his qualifications for ministry.  They stood by him, even as he returned to life as a fisherman.  Jesus even arranged a kind of intervention on the beach after a long night on the job for Peter.

As they sat together, eating breakfast, Jesus turned to Peter and called him by his given name, “Simon son of John.”  Peter, Greek for “Rock,” was a nickname that Jesus have given him early on in their time together.  Jesus asked Simon Peter three times, “Do you love me?”  After each question, Peter replied, “Yes.”  And Jesus responded, “Feed my sheep.”

The fact that Jesus did this three times is important.  Can you guess why?  It’s because three was the number of times that Peter had previously denied that he knew Jesus.  That denial was the source of Peter’s paralyzing shame.  And that shame was keeping Peter from becoming the person he was meant to be.  It was his elephant in the room.

Something needed to be said, but what?  Who would break the silence of shame that was holding Peter back?  As you might expect, Jesus took the initiative, as if to say, “Don’t worry fellas, I got this.”

Three times, Jesus gets Peter to say that he loves him.  And three times, Jesus reminds Peter of the calling on his life.  In a sense, Jesus was healing the wounds of the past by giving Peter a “do-over.”  Rather than only healing sick, blind, and lame people, Jesus was healing his relationship with Peter.  He had the guts to stand up and fight for that relationship by talking about the elephant in the room.

In the end, it worked.  Peter walked away from that tough conversation a changed man and went on to take his place as a leader in the early church.  Dealing with the elephant in the room, even when it’s tough, has its benefits.

Today, we’re continuing with the second sermon in a six week series on the Great Ends of the Church.  It’s based on a document produced by Presbyterians about 100 years ago.  Behind each of these Great Ends is the question, “Why are we here?”  It’s all about what it means to be the Church.  On Easter Sunday, we talked about the first Great End of the Church, which is “The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind.”  This week, we’re talking about the second Great End of the Church, which is “The shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God.”

Now, of all the Great Ends of the Church, “The shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God” is the one that most Presbyterians think they have down pat.  Their first thought is, “Well, of course we do that.  We’re a friendly, welcoming church.  If only we could get more people through the front door, they would join our church and stay forever because we’re basically nice people.”

I don’t want to downplay the importance of being nice, but I think too many Christians in mainline denominations settle for being nice as their whole definition of shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship.  More than that, I’ve even noticed that a lot of them aren’t even really that nice.  What they really mean to say is that they’re polite.  They settle for a kind of “live and let live” libertarianism that tries not to get involved with the personal lives and problems of others.  Before long, their politeness gives rise to a culture of silence and people end up sitting next to each other in the pews for decades without ever really getting to know one another on a deep level.

Here in this fragmented and isolated society that we live in, polite standoffishness at church does nothing to break the ice of loneliness for hurting people.  If we really want to live up to our calling, which is the “shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God,” then we have to go deeper in our relationships with each other.  We have to break the silence, take a chance on our neighbor, and have those uncomfortable conversations.

Brennan Manning, one of my favorite spiritual authors (who passed away just two days ago), writes a story about two drunks sitting together in a bar in Poland.  The first one, Pietrov, says to the other, “Ivan, do you love me?”

“Yes,” Ivan responds.

Pietrov: “Then tell me what hurts me.”

Ivan: “How should I know what hurts you?”

Pietrov: “If you don’t know what hurts me, how can you say you love me?”

If we want to truly love each other as a faith community, we have to learn about our neighbor’s pain.  This is more than just offering sympathy in the form of a greeting card or a casserole during moments of crisis, we actually have to get our hands dirty and meet one another in the midst of our messiness.  We have to have those hard talks about things like addiction, mental illness, aging, and coming out of the closet as gay.  Most of us would rather not go there.  It feels too hard.  It’s awkward.  We’re afraid that we might say the wrong thing.

But you know what?  I’ve sat with many people in those hard moments… I’ve sat with many of you in those hard moments, and do you know what I’ve discovered?  Most people don’t remember a single word you say.  All they remember is that you were there… and it means the world to them.

Most people don’t want sage advice or theological answers that explain their questions away.  Most of them just want to know that they’re not alone in this world.  That’s why they come to church.

People just want to have a safe space where they can open their hearts and unburden themselves of their troubles.  They yearn to know that there’s someone somewhere who will love and accept them no matter what they may have said or done.

They want to be vulnerable, which is one of the most frightening yet necessary parts of the human experience.  Dr. Brene Brown is currently the world’s most well-known expert on the subject of vulnerability.  She has written a book called Daring Greatly that’s all about vulnerability in relationships.

Dr. Brown writes, “[Daring greatly] means the courage to be vulnerable.  It means to show up and be seen.  To ask for what you need.  To talk about how you’re feeling.  To have the hard conversations.”  Later on, she writes, “I define vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.  To be human is to be in vulnerability.

When we say that part of our job, as the Church, is to provide for “the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God”, it has to mean that we are more than just an organization of people who are polite and nice.  It has to mean that we are the kind of community that creates safe space in which other people, outsiders, can make themselves vulnerable.

And, in order to do that, we have to break the culture of silence and go deep with ourselves and each other.  We have to share our hurts and joys with one another.  We have to bring our questions and experiences into our conversations and relationships.  We have to get personal and carry one another’s burdens.

If we can do this, we will begin to embody the kind of healing presence that our hurting world so desperately needs.  We will find ourselves growing internally as a church, which is the key to growing numerically as a church.  We have to take a chance on each other, which is also to say that we have to prove ourselves trustworthy of such risk.  We have to hold our neighbors’ stories in confidence, treasuring them as the precious gifts that they are.

As we learn this art of vulnerability and sharing, I believe that the presence of the risen Christ will become more and more obvious in our church community.  I believe that people in the broader community will be attracted to the kind of church that provides for the “shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God.”

Will you take that chance with me?

One place where this kind of vulnerable sharing has been happening is at our Monday night Vespers service and book study.  We get together each week to sing, pray, and discuss whatever book we’re reading.  The round-table dialogue is where the real miracle happens.  In the end, it’s not so much about the material in the book as it’s about our lives.  Yes, we’ve all learned new things from the material, but none of that compares with how much we’ve learned from each other.  We’ve taken the risk to become vulnerable and made safe space for others to do the same.  Those relationships, more than anything else, have been the real fruit of this enterprise.  If you haven’t come to Vespers before, I’d like to extend the invitation again.  We meet on Monday evenings at 6pm.  If you can’t make it then, don’t worry.  Our church offers other opportunities for that kind of sharing and growth.  There’s the Tuesday morning Prayer Group or the monthly study with the In His Name Women’s Missionary Society.  All of these are groups where deep discussion happens on a regular basis.  You might also find it by singing with others in the choir or serving as a deacon or elder.  All of these moments are opportunities that God gives us for clearing the elephants out of the room, for breaking the silence of loneliness, and  for growing together as a church community that provides for “the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God.”

The Great Ends of the Church: Love Conquers All

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment
European Bee-eater (Merops apiaster): a distant relative of the legendary Phoenix? Image by Pierre Dalous. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons, European Bee-eater (Merops apiaster): a distant relative of the legendary Phoenix? Image by Pierre Dalous. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons,

Before I say anything else, I think it would be appropriate on this particular Easter morning to express thanks for the brave work of the men and women of the Boonville Volunteer Fire Department in their handling of the fire that destroyed part of downtown Main Street this week.

I don’t know if you heard, but there was a class of kindergarten students that was looking at a picture of a fire truck with its crew and trusty Dalmatian close at hand.  One student asked the teacher why fire trucks always traveled with Dalmatians.  The teacher didn’t know, so the kids began to speculate.  One said, “Maybe they help control the crowds.”  And another one said, “Maybe it’s just for good luck.”  But in the end they all agreed that the best answer came from the third kid who said, “They must use the dogs to find the fire hydrants.”

Like Dalmatians on fire trucks, there is so much in this world that we simply accept as present without asking why it’s there.  Take the church, for instance.  A lot of people go to church their whole lives without ever really asking why.  What is the purpose of the church?  Why is it here?  Is it just to keep the pipe organ and stained-glass window companies in business?  Is it just to give our pastor a place to bring all his corny jokes that no one else will laugh at?  Is it a civic organization where people can gather as a community to reflect on their beliefs and values?

According to our ancestors in the Presbyterian tradition, the church does have a particular purpose.  Actually, it’s a six-fold purpose.  It was most clearly delineated and written down a little over a hundred years ago by the United Presbyterian Church in North America, one of the predecessor denominations to our current national church: the Presbyterian Church (USA).  The statement written by our forebears is called The Great Ends of the Church and it reads as follows:

The great ends of the church are:

  • The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind
  • The shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God
  • The maintenance of divine worship
  • The preservation of the truth
  • The promotion of social righteousness
  • The exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world

Now, I don’t expect you to remember all of these points at once.  But starting today, we’re going to spend some time with the great ends of the church over the next several weeks (not including next week, when I’ll be away from the pulpit).  One by one, we’re going to look at these related ends and ask ourselves why we are here.  My ultimate hope is that our discussion of the great ends of the church might lead us to explore questions about what it is that God might be calling our particular congregation to be and do in this community and the world at large.

Today, we’re going to look at the first great end of the church: The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind.

Now, that’s a mouthful of theologically loaded terms that don’t always conjure up the most positive mental images of the church.  When the average person hears church-folks talking about “proclaiming the gospel” and “salvation”, the first thing they tend to think of is proselytism (the active recruitment of converts to one’s religion).  In other words, they think of people going door to door with Bibles in hand, winning converts for Christ and saving souls for heaven.  At best, people see this kind of activity as misguided and self-seeking.  After all, aren’t these people just trying to grow the ranks of the church and fill the offering plate?  Most folks (understandably) would much rather be left alone from this kind of “gospel”.

So what else might we mean when we say that the first great end of the church is the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind?  Well, we’ll have to take a closer look at the words “gospel” and “salvation” in order to get a clearer picture about that.  The word “gospel” simply means “good news” and the word “salvation” comes from the Latin word “salve” which means “to heal or make well”.  So we’re really talking about some piece of good news that has the capacity to bring wellness to the entire earth community.  When I let that definition roll around in my head, I imagine a TV news bulletin interrupting regularly scheduled programming in order to inform the public about some momentous discovery, like a cure for cancer, for instance.

For Christians, we see the life of Jesus as representing just such an occasion of good news.  We see in him a way to heal the darkness, chaos, and brokenness of this world.  We hear it in his teachings.  We see it in his actions.  Most of all, we believe this good news to be embodied in the stories we tell about Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Whether or not we take these stories literally, we see them as expressions of truth: the truth that the pure Love living in Jesus could not be silenced or held back by the hateful, violent, and power-hungry forces of this world.  No, this Love that he revealed to us is more powerful than all the crosses, all the bombs, and all the schemes of all the nations of the world.  Death itself is not strong enough to keep this Love down.  This Love is so powerful that we would even call it divine.  We would go so far as to say that the Love revealed in Jesus pulses in the nucleus of every atom, in the core of every star, and in the heart of every person.  No matter what you try to say or do to it, the divine Love of Jesus lives.

In other words: God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

That’s it.  That’s the message of resurrection.  That’s the story of Easter.  That’s the gospel: the good news that brings wholeness and well-being to all.

The first great end of the church, the first reason why we exist at all, is to make this good news known to as many creatures as possible.  The Love we see in Jesus should be apparent in our words and deeds as well.  Our lives, as Christians, should make it easier for others to believe that Love does indeed conquer all (even death).  Every service, every prayer, every hymn, every sermon, every building, every service project, every committee meeting, every rummage sale, and every dollar raised or spent should be directed toward making this one truth more clear and visible to the world:

Love conquers all.

God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Can we say that our church currently embodies this truth in everything we do?  If not, how do you think we can do it better?  What concrete steps can we take toward that end?

How about your individual life?  Do people ever look at you and say, “Wow, that person’s life makes me want to believe that Love really does conquer all”?  If not, then what concrete steps can you take to make the reality of Love more apparent in your life?  Maybe it’s even something as simple as learning the name of your server in the diner where you eat lunch today?

There are bigger ways we can do this as well.  This Easter morning, our congregation is collecting the One Great Hour of Sharing offering, which will go to support national and international organizations that provide, disaster assistance, hunger relief, and self-development resources to people all over the world.  Grants funded by One Great Hour of Sharing go to support initiatives like the Water for Life project in the African country of Niger.  Since 2006, Water for Life has dug six large wells for drinking water, 85 small gardening wells, and ten water-retention pools.  “As a result,” according to the website of the Presbyterian Hunger Project, “19,892 people in 3,292 households, as well as 28,000 livestock animals, have benefited from improved access to potable water for drinking and food production.  Additionally, over 853 acres of land have been cultivated with food crops and over 4,942 acres have been reforested.”

This is Love in action, embodied at a distance for people we’ll never meet.

On a more local level, I’d like to draw your attention to the post-fire recovery effort currently underway at the Boonville United Methodist Church.  From the very beginning of this crisis, before the buildings had even stopped smoldering, the Methodist Church opened its doors as a command and resource center for victims.  Donations of food, clothing, and supplies have poured in from all over our community.

Rev. Rob Dean tells me the one thing they need most right now is people who can come down to help sort and distribute donations.  Starting Tuesday, I’ll be spending most of next week over there as well, lending a hand and assisting Rev. Dean with any pastoral care needs for the families.  You’re invited to come along as well.  We could really use the help.

I spent yesterday afternoon over there.  When we sat down to dinner last night, we had more food than we knew what to do with.  In that upper room together were displaced families, dedicated volunteers, exhausted firefighters, and two bewildered pastors who still had services to lead and sermons to write for Easter Sunday.  Looking around the room last night, I discovered this sermon.  I realized that I was witnessing resurrection in action, right before my eyes.  In the midst of these people: suffering, hugging, laughing, and eating together.  Within them and among them, new life was rising up from the ashes and taking flight like the Phoenix of Greek legend.

Friends, this is not just charity, nor is it simply a worthy cause.  This is the good news that brings wholeness and well-bring.  This is the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind.  This is the first great end of the church.  It is why we are here.

Our Guest Preacher is Oscar Romero

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon1 Comment
Icon by Fr. Robert Lentz
Icon by Fr. Robert Lentz

Today is Palm / Passion Sunday.  From the gospels, we heard about the final suffering and death of Jesus.  Today also happens to be the 33rd anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador.

I brought this icon to church and set it upright on the Communion Table as I preached.

Instead of my own sermon, I preached Archbishop Romero’s final homily: the one he was preaching when he was gunned down in a hospital chapel on March 24, 1980… one week to the day before I was born.

I have tears in my eyes to think that I was able to bring his words to life again this morning.  One of the little old ladies at my church commented on her way out that what he said is even more relevant today than when he first preached it.

It is as the good Archbishop himself said: “If they kill me, I shall rise again in the Salvadoran people.”  Not only Salvadoran…

By some amazing coincidence, the gospel text for Romero’s last homily was John 12:23-26:

Jesus replied, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.  Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be.

Click here to read the full text of Oscar Romero’s last homily (in English)

Why Be A Christian?

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon8 Comments
Maria, sister of Lazarus, meets Jesus who is going to their house (1864). By Nikolai Ge. Image Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
Maria, sister of Lazarus, meets Jesus who is going to their house (1864). By Nikolai Ge. Image Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

My favorite part of our church’s mission statement is the part at the end where we declare that we are “open to all and reaching out to the world in love.”  I like to remind you of those words at the beginning of worship every Sunday because they speak volumes about who we are and what we do in this community.  The world at large desperately needs to hear this message about a community that is truly “open to all”.  So many other groups and organizations, even churches, divide themselves from one another along ideological lines.  Here in this church, it is my privilege to be a pastor to so many people from so many different political and religious backgrounds.  I can testify from experience that the Spirit who binds us together is deeper and broader than any one set of ideas or opinions.  This is a church that has been built from the heart up, not from the mind down.

Almost everywhere else you can go in the world, the exact opposite is true.  Most people want to know if you agree with them before they enter into a relationship with you.  But we are different.  We’ll move over and make room for you in the pew no matter who you are, where you’ve been, or what you think.  We’ll just keep on telling you that we love you, God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it!

Yup, we’re “open to all and reaching out to the world in love”.  I want you to know this morning how rare and unique that is, especially for a church.  I personally believe that this part of our identity is the key to our future as a church.  This commitment to openness is what makes us different from so many other Christians, who make people pass some kind of dogma test before they’ll accept them.

Recently, I was engaged in an intense discussion with one of these “other Christians”.  This person said to me, “You think it’s okay, in God’s eyes, for people to practice other religions.  So then, why would anyone want to be Christian if it’s not the one and only true religion?”  I thought that was a great question.  Why would anyone choose to be Christian if they could also choose to be Buddhist, Jewish, or Muslim?

I was reminded of this conversation when I read this week’s gospel passage from the lectionary.  It’s the story of a woman named Mary of Bethany, who knelt at Jesus’ feet, anointing them with expensive perfume and wiping them with her hair.  This was an incredible act of affection and devotion toward Jesus.  Mary obviously loved and cared about him very much.

That got me thinking: if I was in Mary’s place, what is it about Jesus that would make me fall down on my knees in love and devotion?  What is it about Jesus that makes me want to commit my life to him?  Why am I a Christian?

I think this is a question that each and every one of us should ask.  Whether you’ve just started coming to church or you’ve been here your whole life, you’ve decided to be here for a reason.  We owe it to ourselves and the world to know what that reason is.  I can’t answer that question for you.  But what I can do is tell you why I’ve decided to be a Christian.  I hope that my answer to this question might help you answer it for yourself.

So here’s what Christian faith means to me.  This is what has driven me, like Mary of Bethany, to kneel down before the feet of Jesus and offer him all that I have and all that I am:

For me, being a Christian is all about love.  Love is what I have experienced in and through the person Jesus of Nazareth.  When religious scholars quizzed Jesus about the most important part of the Bible, he told them it all comes down to love: “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength” and “Love your neighbor as yourself”.

Jesus embodied love in the way he lived his life.  He broke bread with tax collectors, Jews who sold their own people out to the Romans in order to make a quick, dishonest buck.  He pardoned the sin of a woman caught in adultery when the rest of her village was ready to stone her to death.  He nurtured relationships with Samaritans, the ethnic and religious rivals of the Jews, and saw the best in them.  He praised the faith of a pagan Roman soldier.  He reached out and touched a leper, who had been shunned and exiled from society because of his disease.  Finally, he spoke words of forgiveness to his executioners as they waited for him to die.  This is love.

Love, he said, is the first duty of any religious person.

When he wasn’t around, Jesus called upon his followers to love each other in his place.  Any good deed rendered unto the most despised and forgotten members of society, Jesus said in Matthew 25, he would count as service rendered unto him.  “Truly I tell you,” he said, “just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family,you did it to me.”

The love that shone through Jesus came to have a profound impact on his followers.  The apostle Paul declared that, if it wasn’t for love, all his words, knowledge, and faith would be meaningless.  John the Beloved went so far as to let Jesus’ example of love redefine his idea of God: “God is love,” he said, “and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

What I learned through Jesus is that God is not some angry judge, sitting high up on a cloud, hurling down lightning bolts at people he doesn’t like.  No, God is that dynamic energy of love that flows out from within us.  God works through persuasion, not coercion.  This divine love takes on an infinite variety of forms, depending on the person and the situation.  As we open ourselves up to this love more and more, we are continually filled with God’s Spirit, and we begin to resemble Jesus.  Love, then, is the measure of our faith, not religious dogma.

Through Jesus, I learn how to love and I learn that I am loved.  Jesus didn’t just teach people about love, he didn’t just point to love.  No, Jesus embodied love in his very being and person.  Love shone through his every word and deed.  That’s what I mean when I praise Jesus as the Son of God and the Incarnation of God: Jesus is the embodiment of divine love who invites me to do and be the same, in whatever imperfect and limited way that I am able.

This is what takes my breath away when it comes to Jesus.  This is why I want to fall down at his feet and offer everything I have and all that I am, so that I might be part of that love too.  This is the kind of God that I can believe in.

For me it is no contradiction to believe that the dynamic God of love I discovered in Jesus can be active in the lives of people from every time, place, culture, and religion.  I hear the voice of this God whispering to me in the pages of the Bible and singing to me in the clouds at sunset.  Jesus has opened my eyes, ears, mind, and heart to experience the presence of God in all things.  For this, I am amazed and give thanks.  What else can I do but collapse to my knees before Jesus and worship?

That is why I am a Christian.  It has nothing to do with creeds, dogmas, or being the one and only true religion.  It has everything to do with love.  I hope and pray that the people around me will experience through me, in some degree, the love I have received through Jesus (whether they recognize it by that name or not).

How about you?  Why are you here in church today?  If you call yourself a Christian, why do you choose that label for yourself?  I want to encourage each and every one of you to answer that question for yourself today.  Something has brought you here.  You are not sitting in this church by accident.  It is therefore incumbent upon you to ask yourself: Why?

In your imagination, put yourself in Mary of Bethany’s place: kneeling at the feet of Jesus, offering the very best of what you have and who you are.  What has brought you here?  Even as you acknowledge and respect the faith of others who are different, something about this faith and this person, Jesus, has captured your attention.  What is it?

Answer that question for yourself and don’t be afraid or ashamed to share your answer with the world.  There are people out there who need to hear what you have to say.  Go out there today and tell them.

“Preach the gospel always… use words when necessary.”

May your words and your deeds say to the people of this world: “I love you, God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Prodigal Grace

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon, Uncategorized1 Comment
Rembrandt, The Return of the Prodigal Son (c.1663-1665). Image retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
Rembrandt, The Return of the Prodigal Son (c.1663-1665). Image retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

The last one hundred and fifty years or so have borne witness to more technological and scientific advances than any other equivalent period of time in human history.  From industry to the internet, from the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk to the first moon landing at Tranquility Base, from outer space to cyberspace, we have traveled farther, communicated faster, and dug deeper into the mysteries of the universe than previous generations could have dreamed possible.

In all this time, perhaps the greatest mystery we have encountered is the mystery of each other.  Without a second thought, I can pull a hand-held device out of my pocket and initiate an instantaneous conversation with someone on the opposite side of the planet.  Compare this ability to explorers like Magellan, whose trip around the globe cost him his life, four out of five ships, and all but 18 of his 270 crew members.  Compare it to the life of the average peasant in medieval Europe, who would likely never travel more than 5 miles away from the spot where he was born.  Our experience of the world in the early 21st century is so much more connected and cosmopolitan than our ancestors thought possible.

But it hasn’t been an entirely utopian experience, of course.  This heightened interconnectivity has brought us into contact with people very different from ourselves.  These people talk, dress, think, and worship very differently than we do.  Our knowledge of the world has given rise to more questions.  The most vexing of these questions have to do with religion.  Once the average person became aware of so many different religions on this planet, and especially once they began living next door to people who practice these religions, how are we supposed to make sense of such diversity?  With so many varieties of belief and so many opinions about the ultimate nature of reality, surely someone has to be right while everyone else is wrong, right?

These questions have sparked an ongoing debate about who God is and what God wants that has lasted to this day.  It seems like there’s always some nut-case out there who is more than willing to stand up on national television and claim with unwavering certainty to have the one and only right answer about what God’s will is.  Too many people, longing for something to hold onto in these confusing times, are only too willing to buy into such easy answers.  As we have seen, time and again, these peddlers of snake-oil and easy answers can make their followers say and do the unthinkable.  In exchange for absolute certainty about the will of God, people are willing to hand over the money in their bank accounts, cut off relations to friends and family, and even fly airplanes into buildings.  The philosopher Voltaire said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”  I like to pray a prayer I once saw on a bumper-sticker: “Lord, protect me from your followers!”

In these times of complication and confusion, the promise of absolute certainty feels like a virtue but turns out to be a vice.  As it turns out, the way we hold our questions with our values is far more important than the answers we come up with.

In Jesus’ time, there was a group of people who claimed to have all the answers.  They were the Pharisees.  Erudite scholars of the Torah, these well-respected citizens seemed to possess a monopoly on the truth market.  Their rabbis fielded questions of theology and ethics so well that they established themselves as defenders of the faith and guardians of family values.  Theirs was a world of black and white easy answers.  Faith and certainty went hand in hand with no room for mystery, doubt, or mercy.

You can imagine then that when Jesus came along, he really messed with their worldview.  We read in the opening verses of this morning’s gospel passage that Jesus was eating with tax collectors and sinners.  The Pharisees were quite offended by this gesture, since eating with someone in that time and culture implied that you accepted that person just as he or she was.  From their point of view, Jesus was sending the wrong kind of message for an upstanding citizen and an acclaimed rabbi.  In response to their offended sensibilities, Jesus told them a story.  It’s the famous story we now know as the parable of the prodigal son.

The story begins with a fictional man with two sons.  One day, the younger of the two decides that he doesn’t want to sit around and wait for his father to die before collecting on his inheritance.  He asks for it ahead of schedule.  Basically, this move was his way of saying to his dad, “You’re dead to me.”  And his father, in spite of what must have been immense heartbreak over this rejection, acquiesces to his younger son’s demand.

The next thing we learn is that this son takes his share of the estate and burns out on the party scene of some far-away city.  But when the good times stop rolling, the son is hard-up for cash.  He ends up taking the most disgusting job possible for a young Jewish person: feeding pigs.  He was do hungry that even the hog-slop was starting to look and smell pretty good to him.

Finally, in a moment of desperation and clarity, the son selfishly cooks up a half-decent apology in order to get himself back into more stable living conditions.  And then he makes his way back home with his tail between his legs.  He wasn’t really sorry, mind you, he was just miserable enough that he would do anything, put up with any amount of humiliation, if it meant a warm bed and three square meals a day.

This is where the story gets really interesting.  Jesus says, “…while [the son] was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.”  Taken aback by this enthusiastic greeting, the son nevertheless begins his feigned apology speech, but his father never lets him finish.  He cuts him off by calling for his servants to bring a robe, a ring, and sandals.  He kills the fattened calf and prepares a celebration feast.  In this moment, we get a clear picture of this father’s true nature as a man overflowing with love and generosity for his children.

Most tellings of the story end here, with the prodigal son’s redemption via forgiveness.  But that’s not where Jesus ends the story.  He keeps going.

Enter the older brother, the father’s firstborn son.  He has been the dutiful heir to the estate.  He has his stuff together, so to speak.  He has always done everything right.  But he’s not the hero of this story, not by a long shot.

It turns out that this older brother, in his quest to be the perfect son, has severely misjudged the kind of person his father is.  When he sees the welcome that his younger brother receives, the older brother gets angry and shouts at his father, “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends.”  He thinks his father is a cranky old miser who demands absolute obedience without question.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Jesus’ cautionary tale about the older brother is a biting indictment of the leaders of the religious establishment in his day.  Like the older brother in the story, their devotion to certainty and obedience has led them to believe that their God is just as judgmental and small-minded as they are.

On the other hand, it is the tax collectors and sinners around Jesus, no strangers to imperfection and doubt, who have the keenest insight on the nature of reality.  Through Jesus’ acceptance of them as they are, warts and all, they are coming to have faith in the power of grace.

What is grace?  Well, a theological dictionary would define grace as “unmerited favor” but here’s my favorite definition of grace: God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Sound familiar?  It should.  It’s how we end our sermons here every week.

But more than that, grace is one of the central religious values of our Presbyterian heritage.  In the 16th century, when established religious authorities once used guilt and fear to manipulate and control the people, the Reformers countered that there is nothing a person can do to garner favor with God.  Grace is a given.  It is God’s basic orientation toward human beings.  All we have to do is decide how we’re going to respond to it.

Will we, like the older brother and the Pharisees, storm off in a huff over the scandalous nature of grace?  Or will we, like the younger brother and the sinners, open our hearts to this undeserved love?  Will we allow it to transform us from the inside out, until we start to look like Jesus?

When I look around our world in the 21st century, I see a planet in desperate need of grace.  We’ve had more than enough of pompous, self-righteous fanatics who claim to hold all the right answers to life, the universe, and everything.  What we need now is a deep, abiding faith in the mystery of grace.

We need imperfect people, full of doubts and faults, whose lives have nevertheless been touched by the knowledge that they are loved, no matter what.  Such people know how to love in return.  Theirs is the only message that can successfully defend against the attacks of judgmentalism, fundamentalism, and terrorism.

Their scandalous message of grace, never popular or pragmatic, applies equally to liberals as well as conservatives, Muslims as well as Christians, North Koreans as well as North Americans.  Grace is the great equalizer.  Grace is the central value by which we know that we can never out-stay our welcome in the kingdom of God, and it is the enlivening force that empowers us to go out from this church this morning, saying to one another (and to the whole world):

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

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