Category: Sermon

In the Fullness of Time

On By J. Barrett LeeIn God Has A Dream, SermonLeave a comment

Excerpt from God Has A Dream:

There is a lovely phrase which St. Paul uses in his letter to the new Christian converts in Galatia.  And that phrase is “in the fullness of time.”  Paul speaks about how when Jesus was born it was at just the right time, all the pieces had fallen into place, the antecedents were just right, and it all happened at exactly the right moment.  A little earlier would have been too soon and a little later would have been too late.  When it happened it could not have been at any other moment.

Last year, many of us had a good laugh at the hype created by a fringe religious group who claimed to have exclusive knowledge that the end of the world was coming on May 21, 2011.  As you may (or may not) recall, the day itself came and went without event.  This was by no means the first time someone tried to cash in on apocalyptic hype.  At the turn of the Millennium, there was “much ado about nothing” regarding the Y2K computer bug.  In the 19th century, a man named William Miller made three unsuccessful attempts to predict the end of the world before his followers lost faith in him.  Even before that, at the turn of the previous millennium, Pope Sylvester II trembled in prayer in his church, convinced that the world would come to an end that very night.  Later this year, so we’re told, the Mayan calendar is supposed to run out, leading some people to speculate that this ancient civilization knew something we don’t about the apocalypse.

Predicting the what, where, and when of the end of the world has never failed to be a sensationalistic, money-making pastime for would-be prophets and their paranoid followers.  We Christians have proved to be especially vulnerable to these scam artists, mainly because of the presence of the book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament.  Many claim that this document, when read and interpreted properly, provides a detailed road map for the end of the world.  It’s bizarre and cryptic imagery are said to contain secret messages about the Apocalypse that are meant to be decoded by those with the proper biblical study tools.  The downside of this approach is that every single prediction supposedly “decoded” from the book of Revelation has turned out to be wrong.  God’s plan, it seems, is not so readily available for human review and approval, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying to figure it out anyway.

Many of us might find it easy to laugh at them for their misguided pursuit.  However, I’d like to take a moment to sympathize with them.  My theory is that folks who tend to obsess over this kind of thing are looking for something.  I think they’re looking for a sense of meaning and purpose in life.  They want to believe that God has a plan for the world and that we’re not all just wandering aimlessly through history.  I can relate to that.

The next step that most of these folks take is to apply this concept of God’s plan to their personal lives.  They might say, “Not only does the universe have a destiny, but so do I.  I’m an important part of God’s plan.  Therefore, my life has meaning.”  Like I said before, I can respect that need.  I feel it too.  I think we all do.  But we have to watch out and make sure that we don’t carry this idea too far.

Our ancestors in the Calvinist tradition were famous for believing that God predestines the fate of every single human being.  They believed that some people were destined for eternal bliss in heaven while others were doomed to endless suffering in hell.  What makes the difference, they said, is “unconditional election” by God.  God chose who would be “saved” or “damned” from the beginning of time, and there is nothing that anyone can do or say to change their fate.  What’s more is that there was no way to know with any absolute certainty about which category you were in.  This theological belief, called “double predestination”, caused people a lot of anxiety.

I’ve also seen people take the idea of God’s plan to unhealthy extremes in rather mundane matters.  When I was in high school, I worked in a bookstore that had a section where we sold religiously themed posters.  One day, I was walking through the stacks when I came across a woman who was kneeling on the floor, weeping.  She had two posters laid out on the floor in front of her.  The problem, it turned out, was that she couldn’t figure out which poster God wanted her to buy.  Just like those folks who are obsessed with predicting the end of the world and the early Calvinist belief in double predestination, this person in the bookstore had taken the idea of God’s plan too far.

When I think about the idea of a divine plan for my life or history, I try not to get too hung up on the details of what, when, and where certain things are supposed to happen.  If we occupy our time with those kinds of questions, I think we’re more likely to end up in an unhealthy state of mind.  Rather, when I think about God’s plan, I prefer to ask questions of who, how, and why.

God is far less interested in what you’re doing and more interested in who you’re becoming, how you’re living, and why you do what you do.  These are questions of the heart.  Answering these questions goes a long way in helping us forge a sense of meaning and significance in our lives.  For example, let’s take a young person in school who is trying to decide on a career path.  I don’t think God tends to care very much whether someone decides to become a lawyer, a doctor, or a minister.  Those are questions of what, where, and when.  Of greater concern to God is whether that person wants to become a lawyer in order to just make money or to serve the greater cause of justice.  In God’s eyes, a waitress in a diner with a heart for hospitality is more holy, more in step with God’s plan, than a minister who just likes to hear the sound of his own voice.  Who we are is much more important than what we do.

That’s why I tend to avoid the phrase “God’s plan” when it comes to the events of history.  I much prefer to think of “God’s vision” or “God’s dream” as Desmond Tutu calls it.  God’s dream is a dynamic thing.  It’s always changing and in motion.  God is the ultimate creator of this dream, but has invited each one of us to become co-creators with God and each other.  Archbishop Tutu says it like this:

It has often been said, “What we are is God’s gift to us.  What we become is our gift to God.”  What we become is not about status, it is about love.  Do we love like God, as God so deeply desires?  Do we become like God, as God so deeply desires us to be?

As for the substance of the plan itself, the shape it takes is up to us, and God works with and around what we bring to the table.  Again, in the words of Archbishop Tutu:

There is a wonderful Portuguese saying that God writes straight with crooked lines.  God works through history to realize God’s dream.  God makes a proposal to each of us and hopes our response will move His dream forward.  But if we don’t, God does not abandon the goal, He does not abandon the dream.  God adjusts God’s methods to accommodate the detour, but we are going to come back onto the main road and eventually arrive at the destination.

I love that phrase: “God writes straight with crooked lines.”  To me, it describes so well my experience of life in this world where things don’t always go according to plan.  Accidents happen.  Things don’t always go your way.  Life goes on.  It doesn’t mean that God isn’t present or working in this world and in our lives.  It means that, if we’re going to look for God, we have to look deeper than the level of surface appearances and random events.

When someone gets sick, or an accident happens, or a terrible tragedy overtakes us, people are prone to ask, “Why is God doing this?” or “Why did God allow this to happen?”  I have to be honest with you, I don’t think God had anything to do with it.  The God of love that I believe in is not in the business of causing cancer and car accidents.  I think these things just happen.  The God I believe in is the one who meets us in the middle of these disasters and leads us to respond in a certain way.

One of my favorite examples that I use to illustrate this point is the terrorist attacks of September 11.  Some people said that God allowed those airplanes to crash because God was judging the United States for one reason or another.  I don’t think that’s true.  I don’t see God in that at all.  I see God in those volunteers who climbed the smoldering piles of rubble with buckets in their hands to get the trapped survivors out.  I see God in the police and fire fighters who risked or gave their lives to save others.  That’s where God is.  That’s God’s plan, God’s dream, in action.

I don’t know if there will one day be an apocalyptic end to the world.  I don’t know if there will be a once & for all victory of goodness over evil “in the fullness of time”.  I don’t know if we, or our children, or our grandchildren will ever live in a perfect world.

I don’t know much, but this is what I believe:

When I look out at the stars in the heavens, I see a harmony that human selfishness cannot touch.  We might destroy ourselves and each other someday.  We might even take our whole planet into extinction with us.  But the beauty of nebulae, quasars, and galaxies will still be there.  The impulse toward order and equilibrium will never be gone from our universe.  That same impulse exists in each one of us.  We call it life, we call it justice, and we call it compassion.  I call it God.  As long as there is a universe to exist, God will never stop working within it to shape darkness, death, and chaos into light, life, and love.  As long as we are alive in this world, God will never stop inviting us to join God in this continuing mission.  I close this sermon and end this series by going back to the words of Desmond Tutu himself:

All over this magnificent world God calls us to extend His kingdom of shalom—peace and wholeness—of justice, of goodness, of compassion, of caring, of sharing, of laughter, of joy, and of reconciliation.  God is transfiguring the world right this very moment through us because God believes in us and because God loves us.  What can separate us from the love of God?  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  And as we share God’s love with our brothers and sisters, God’s other children, there is no tyrant who can resist us, no oppression that cannot be ended, no hunger that cannot be fed, no wound that cannot be healed, no hatred that cannot be turned to love, no dream that cannot be fulfilled.

Stillness: Hearing God’s Voice

On By J. Barrett LeeIn God Has A Dream, Sermon1 Comment

Psalm 131

Excerpt from God Has A Dream:

God is available to all of us.  God says, “Be still and know that I am God.”  Each one of us wants and needs to give ourselves space for quiet.  We can hear God’s voice most clearly when we are quiet, uncluttered, undistracted—when we are still.  Be still, be quiet, and then you begin to see with the eyes of the heart.

One image that I have of the spiritual life is of sitting in front of a fire on a cold day.  We don’t have to do anything.  We just have to sit in front of the fire and then gradually the qualities of the fire are transferred to us.  We begin to feel the warmth.  We become the attributes of the fire.  It’s like that with us and God.  As we take time to be still and to be in God’s presence, the qualities of God are transferred to us.

Far too frequently we see ourselves as doers.  As we’ve seen, we feel we must endlessly work and achieve.  We have not always learned just to be receptive, to be in the presence of God, quiet, available, and letting God be God, who wants us to be God.  We are shocked, actually, when we hear that what God wants is for us to be godlike, for us to become more and more like God.  Not by doing anything, but by letting God be God in and through us.

As many of you already know, we’ve been making our way through this summer with Desmond Tutu’s book, God Has A Dream.  Last week, we read the chapter entitled “Seeing With the Eyes of the Heart” and we talked about the way in which you and I are called to look past our present life-circumstances and deep into this present moment in which we find ourselves.  It is here, in the very essence of this moment, that we find the loving presence of God: creating and sustaining us moment-by-moment.  We took a look at the lives of those remarkable individuals who, through their own “seeing with the eyes of the heart”, were able to bear witness to God’s ongoing redemption of the world.  We talked about Joseph from the book of Genesis, who was sold into slavery by his brothers, falsely imprisoned for a crime that he did not commit, and eventually elevated to a high office in the land of Egypt.  He looked with the eyes of his heart and saw God at work in his life, drawing light out of darkness, order out of chaos, and life out of death.  When his brothers came back, groveling and begging, he seized the opportunity for reconciliation instead of revenge.  He said to them, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.”

We also talked about Nelson Mandela, who went to jail as an angry young man in the 1960s and emerged to become the first black president of South Africa and a moral leader of the free world.  Finally, we also talked about Jesus, who suffered an ignoble death by torture and execution as a failed nonviolent revolutionary under the thumb of corrupt political and religious leaders, but whose life continues to shine as a beacon of hope for over two billion Christians in the world today, two millennia after his birth.

This week, we’re going to talk about how it is that we too can learn to see “with the eyes of the heart” and become the kind of people who see past surface appearances and into the very essence of reality.  The key element in this process, according to Archbishop Tutu, is the practice of stillness.

We North Americans, on the whole, tend to be suspicious of stillness.  Personally, I have a three year old at home, so I usually equate the sound of silence with trouble.  There have been many times when I’ve emerged from an extended period of pleasant silence only to discover the bathroom sink decorated with lipstick or a dining room chair entirely slathered with diaper cream.  Silence is not golden.  Silence is suspicious.  Tell me, parents and grandparents, am I right?

But, even without the presence of our tiny little bundles of destruction, we North Americans still tend to be suspicious of stillness.  We prefer to keep the radio or TV going at all times in order to keep the stillness at bay because the bottom line is that, at heart, we’re afraid of stillness.

Why?  What is it about stillness that scares us so much?

Based on what I’ve seen in myself and others, I think it’s two things.  First of all, we’re afraid that if we surrender to stillness and allow ourselves to just sit in silence for a while, we’ll be overwhelmed by that haunting sense of loneliness and isolation we carry inside us.  This is true for all of us, without exception.  Deep down, we are all afraid of being alone.  So we try to keep moving with the herd and keep up with the pack of our fellow homo sapiens.

The second thing that scares us about stillness is the way that our own thoughts tend to creep up on us when we’re not constantly overloading ourselves with information.  Specifically, I’m talking about that inner voice of criticism and self-hatred that follows us around.  You know the one I’m talking about: it’s the voice that says things like, “You’re not good enough.  You’re not smart enough.  You’re not pretty enough.  You’re not successful enough.  You don’t work hard enough.  You don’t make enough money.  Your house isn’t clean enough.  You don’t spend enough time with your family.  You don’t spend enough time at the office.  You don’t pray enough.  You don’t go to church enough.”  It could be any or all of those voices that you hear inside your head.  It could even be something else that pertains specifically to you, but you get what I’m saying.  We feel guilty because there’s always something more that we could or should be doing.  It’s really too much for any one human being to manage, so we just try to stave off the guilt by drowning out that inner voice with noise… any noise will do, so long as we don’t have to be left alone with our thoughts.

Aloneness and self-criticism, those are the two things that scare us most about stillness.  Together, they form the reason why we fill our lives with endless amounts of what Shakespeare called “sound and fury”.  Our fear keeps us running from our true selves and, ironically, the source of our power to overcome our fear, change our own lives, and maybe even the world around us.

Most of my heroes in this world points to their respective practices of prayer and/or meditation as their primary source of energy and inspiration for the extraordinary work they do.  I’m thinking of my usual list: people like the Dalai Lama, Dorothy Day, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, and yes, Desmond Tutu.

Archbishop Tutu says:

The Spirit of God sends us into the fray, as it sent Jesus, but we must observe the sequence in his life and we will see that disengagement, waiting on God, always precedes engagement.  He waited to be anointed with God’s Spirit, which made him preach the Good News to the poor and the setting free of captives.  He went into retreat in the wilderness.  He had experience of the transfiguration and then went into the valley of crass misunderstanding and insistent demand.  If it was so vital for the Son of God, it can’t be otherwise for us.  Our level of spiritual and moral growth is really all we can give the world.

So you see, not only is the practice of stillness essential for Desmond Tutu in his work, but it was even essential for Jesus himself.  There is something about the stillness itself that empowers us to overcome the fear that keeps us from stillness.

There are several scenes in the gospels where Jesus deliberately takes time away by himself or with only a few close friends to pray and commune with God.  I like to imagine that it was in these moments of quiet contemplation, as he observed the world around him with the eyes of his heart, that he received the inspiration for most of his parables and teaching.  Maybe there was a day when he was struggling with how to explain the Kingdom of God to his students.  Then, looking around on the lonely hill where he had gone to meditate, he spotted a mustard bush with a bird’s nest in it.  And that’s when it hit him: “Aha!” he says, “That’s it!  The Kingdom of God is like this mustard bush.  It starts as a tiny seed, but then grows into a great, big bush where birds can come and build their nests.”  Maybe the same kind of thing happened for those times when he compared the Kingdom of God to crops growing in a field, a woman kneading bread dough, or farm workers calling it a day.  I can easily imagine that it was through his practice of meditation that he came to realize the truth of God’s abundant providence as it was revealed in the natural world.  With the eyes of his heart opened through prayer and meditation, he was able to look around and see God’s love in the birds of the air and the flowers of the field.  Birds and flowers don’t drive themselves crazy running rat race or keeping up with the Joneses, yet God feeds and clothes them so well that we hold them up as our highest standard of beauty.  Think about it: what do people do at weddings and proms when we want to look our best?  We decorate our clothes, our dinner tables, and our churches with flowers.  It’s like all our finest fashion designers and interior decorators just give up because nothing they make can compete with the beauty of what God has already made.  Kind of ironic, isn’t it?

Jesus’ practice of prayer and meditation gave him the eyes to see that.  And I think the same can be true for us as well.

The great prophets, mystics, and sages of the world’s religions drew spiritual power from their cultivation of stillness in the practice of prayer and meditation.  Like each and every one of us, each and every one of them probably wrestled with the same fears and insecurities.  They too probably had times when they were afraid to be alone or were haunted by the inner voices of criticism and self-hatred, but they bravely faced the darkness, the silence, and the stillness rather than running away or trying to fill every moment with some kind of noise or activity.  And the amazing thing is this: they found what Jesus found in the stillness.  The eyes of their hearts were opened and they began to see another, deeper reality.  They began to hear another voice in the silence.

Instead of that haunting voice of criticism and condemnation, they began to hear the voice of love and acceptance.  You are loved.  You matter.  Paul Tillich, the great twentieth century theologian, described that voice like this:

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”

Likewise, instead of the loneliness of which we are so afraid, the great mystics, in their stillness, experience a deep sense of belonging and interdependence.  I am not alone.  My life is connected to and dependent on yours.  We belong to the trees, the animals, the earth, and they belong to us.  We share this one planet in common.  All life has its origin in the heart and mind of God.  Therefore, all life is significant, important, and worth preserving.  Everything and everyone belongs in this web of existence.  We can never truly say “I don’t need you” to anyone and no one can truly it to us.  We affect each other.  We are a part of each other.

My favorite illustration of this truth comes from science itself: Did you know that most of the atoms in your body could only have been formed during the superhot explosion of a supernova?  Do you know what that means?  It means that, at the most basic level, the very substance of our bodies is made of the remnants of old, exploded stars.  You and I are literally made of stardust.  Isn’t that amazing?  And, since matter cannot ultimately be destroyed, it makes me wonder what the atoms of my body will be part of in another four billion years.  Who knows?  Maybe these very oxygen atoms coming out of my lungs right now will one day be breathed in and out by another preacher in another kind of church on another world where she is telling her congregation about this same reality of interconnected existence.

I’m sorry if this is starting to sound a little too much like science fiction for you, but I get really excited about it because it’s just so amazing.  We are never alone.  We are all connected.  We are part of an interdependent web of existence.  Within and around us all is that great, eternal mystery that we Christians call God.

This mystery is the ultimate reality that the great spiritual geniuses of the world have discovered in their practice of stillness.  Instead of the voice of criticism, they discovered the voice of love.  Instead of being alone, they discovered that they belong to the great community of life.  That dual sense of acceptance and belonging is what gives them the power to stand up, speak out, and overcome all kinds of wrong and injustice in the world.  Archbishop Tutu, Dr. King, Mahatma Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama were all able to face the darkness because they knew from their practice of stillness that injustice was doomed to fail because it goes against the grain of nature.  Exclusion and inequality based on something as ridiculous as ethnicity or skin color is not only offensive, it is ridiculous.  There’s no way it can succeed because that’s just not how the universe was designed.  Martin Luther King, quoting the Unitarian minister named Theodore Parker, once said, “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

When we are troubled by the evil we see in this world, we can laugh in its face.  We can know that it’s ultimately doomed to fail and disintegrate.  Just as sure as the law of gravity, the wrong in this world will one day fall to the ground.  This promise woven into the very fabric of space and time.  When we cultivate the practice of stillness through our own exercises of prayer and meditation, we can learn to hear that voice and trust that promise as well.  We, like our prophetic heroes, can be empowered to become world-changers.

All that is required of us is nothing.  We must simply be.  As someone once told me, we have to remember that we are human beings and not human doings.

If you have never taken the time to cultivate a practice of stillness, I would like to encourage you to do so.  Take fifteen or twenty minutes out of your day and just sit in the quiet.  Just be.  Many of us have heard the urgent phrase, “Don’t just sit there, do something!”  Right now, I want to encourage you to do the opposite: “Don’t do something, just sit there!”

With your eyes closed and your back straight, focus your attention on rhythm of your breathing.  Whenever you notice your mind beginning to wander, just gently bring your attention back to the unconscious rhythm of your breath.  If your mind wanders a thousand times, just gently bring it back a thousand times.  It’s simple, but it’s not easy.  Try this for twenty minutes a day and see what a difference it makes in your life.  If you can’t find twenty minutes, then do it for fifteen, or ten, or five.  Any practice is better than no practice at all.  Believe me, I have two jobs and two kids, so I know how hard it can be to find twenty quiet minutes to yourself in a day.  But if I can do it, anyone can.

Stillness is frightening, but it is also your friend.  Within its bosom, we find the power of acceptance and belonging that can set us free from what we fear most.  In silence, we can hear the voice of God reminding us that we are loved and inspiring us to love the world as God does.

 

 

 

Seeing With the Eyes of the Heart

On By J. Barrett LeeIn God Has A Dream, SermonLeave a comment

Morpheus, a character from ‘The Matrix’ who introduces people to “the real world” by inviting them take a red pill. “If you take the red pill,” he says, “you stay in Wonderland and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

Genesis 50:15-21

Click here to listen to this sermon at fpcboonville.org

Excerpt from God Has A Dream

Dear Child of God, I am sorry to say that suffering is not optional.  It seems to be part and parcel of the human condition, but suffering can either embitter or ennoble.  Our suffering can become a spirituality of transformation when we understand that we have a role in God’s transfiguration of the world.  And if we are to be true partners with God, we must learn to see with the eyes of God—that is, to see with the eyes of the heart and not just the eyes of the head.  The eyes of the heart are not concerned with appearances but essences, as we cultivate these eyes we are able to learn from our suffering and to see the world with more loving, forgiving, humble, generous eyes.

I have to confess that I really get a kick out of those movies and TV shows whose plots are built around the premise that the everyday “normal” world we all inhabit is a hollow fantasy and the “real” world is way more intense and exciting than most people can imagine.  I went to college in the late 90s and the movie that most exemplifies this idea for people my age is The Matrix, starring Keanu Reeves.  In this movie, the “normal” world turns out to be a computer simulation used by evil robots who are trying to control the minds of the human race.  The main character, a regular guy with a boring job in the beginning, turns out to be a hero with super-powers who is destined to save humanity from the robots.

Another example is the TV show Weeds.  This show takes place in sunny, suburban California, where a soccer mom named Nancy is trying to make ends meet for herself and two kids.  But the deep, dark secret is that Nancy is actually selling marijuana.  The show follows Nancy as her life drifts farther and farther away from the world of PTA meetings and white picket fences and into the criminal underworld of gangsters and drug dealers.

What all of these movies and shows have in common is the idea that the “real” world is somehow darker and seedier than the “normal” world.  Wesley Snipe says it like this in the movie Blade: “You better wake up. The world you live in is just a sugar-coated topping! There is another world beneath it – the real world. And if you wanna survive it, you better learn to pull the trigger!”

Sounds pretty intense, doesn’t it?

I think these stories tend appeal to people because they reflect, in a metaphorical way, the experience of disillusionment that everyone goes through in the process of growing up.  When we were young, our parents tried to shelter us from the harsh realities of life.  We do the same for our kids and grandkids.  Are there any good parents who don’t worry about the amount of gratuitous sex and violence their kids see on TV?  I doubt it.  We instinctively want to protect our kids from being exposed to those realities too soon, even though we all know our kids will eventually see them anyway, in spite of our best efforts.

So, why do we try to shield them?  Why, instead, do we bring them to church and enroll them in Sunday school where they can learn the stories of the Bible and the basic beliefs and values of our faith?

There are many out there who argue that we are simply trying to delay the inevitable.  They would say that we are trying to keep our kids locked up in a fantasy world that’s “just a sugar-coated topping” in the words of Wesley Snipe.  They would say that we parents are pining for our lost innocence and therefore trying to prevent that loss from happening to our kids.  Afraid of reality, they say, we try to keep ourselves and our children imprisoned in a fantasy world where everything is fine and everyone is happy all the time.

Religion, according to these folks, is the ultimate enforcer of the fantasy world.  Karl Marx, the philosopher who founded the idea of Communism, called religion “the opiate of the masses.”  Faith in God, he said, was part of the fantasy world.  The real world, according to Marx, was a struggle to the death between the haves and the have-nots.  Religion, he said, was one of the tools that the haves used to keep the have-nots in line.  Similarly, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously declared that “God is dead,” considered virtues like compassion and humility to be part of the morality of the weak.  According to Nietzsche’s thinking, might makes right.  The only real winner is the superman who rises above the masses and imposes his will upon his fellow human beings.  Power, according to Nietzsche, is the only real morality.  It should come as no surprise then, that Nietzsche’s number one fan in the twentieth century was a man named Adolf Hitler.  Nazism was basically just Nietzsche’s philosophy in practice.

Both Marx and Nietzsche (the founders of Communism and Nazism, respectively), as materialist philosophers with a cynical edge, believed they had found the real world beneath the surface of everyday “normal” reality.  Each one thought he possessed the secret knowledge that held the key to history.  And you know what?  They were right… to a point.

They were right in observing that the happy world of easy answers, black & white morality, and “happily ever after” fairy tale endings is ultimately a fantasy constructed by people who want to shield themselves and their kids from the harsh realities of real life.  They were right in observing that many people use religion as a means of enforcing belief in the fantasy, threatening hellfire and damnation to those who question or doubt the fantasy’s validity.  They were right in guessing that truly mature people are those who can face the darkness of reality and see this complicated world for what it really is.  They were right in those things.

But they were also wrong.  They were wrong insofar as they believed that they had fully sounded the depths of reality.  They were wrong insofar as they presumed that this new level of consciousness they had uncovered was the final one.  They were wrong, not because they went too far in their quest for the truth, but because they didn’t go far enough.

As a person of faith, I believe there is another level of reality, of which Marx and Nietzsche were apparently unaware.  The existence of this level of reality can be neither proved nor disproved by philosophy.  Reason can lead us only to the point of possibility, at which point each of us must then freely choose for ourselves what we will accept as the more probable truth.

The world I see beneath the so-called “real” world of harsh realities is characterized by the presence of justice and compassion.  Hindus call this reality “Brahman.”  The ancient Greeks called it “Logos.”  Jews, Christians, and Muslims throughout history have traditionally identified this reality as personal and called it “Adonai,” “Allah,” or “God.”

God, so we say, is the one “from whom, through whom, and to whom” all things come.  It is in God that “we live, move, and have our being.”  For us, God is the mysterious “all in all” at the heart of the universe.  And what is the character of this ultimate reality?  We say that it is love.  “God is love,” as it says in the Bible.  How do we know this to be true?  We don’t, in an absolute sense.  We trust it to be true, however, because of what we have experienced in and through the person Jesus of Nazareth.

Looking at the life of Jesus, we experience something that Christians for millennia have chosen to accept as a revelation of God, the ultimate nature of reality.  Because of Jesus, we choose to believe that God is love.  We see it in the way that he drew our attention to flowers, birds, sunshine, and rain as evidence of God’s providential care.  We hear it in the parables he told about the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.  We feel it in the way he touched the unclean lepers and welcomed outcast sinners to dine at his family table.  Above all, we encounter it in the way that he died: forgiving his enemies and entrusting his spirit to God’s care.  Because of this, we say, “This is love.  This is ultimate reality.  This is what God is like.”  Because of this, the cross of Christ has become the central symbol of our faith.  And, because of this, we refuse to believe that death can have the final word over such love, so we celebrate Easter, the central holiday of our faith.  We tell stories of how, after Jesus’ death, some women came to his grave to pay their respects.  Upon their arrival, they found the tomb empty and the stone rolled away.  Then an angel suddenly appeared and asked them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?  He is not here.  He is risen.”

Can we prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that these things actually happened?  No.  But we believe them to be true because the love we see in Jesus leads us to believe that “love is strong as death” and is the creative power that gave birth to the universe.  The belief that “God is love” is the ultimate truth that “was from the beginning, that we have heard, that we have seen with our eyes, that we have looked at and touched with our hands” in the person of Jesus.  We can’t prove any of this.  The truth of it can’t be forced on anyone.  It must be freely chosen.

We are free to choose whether we will confine Jesus and his message of love to the annals of history or see him as our living window into the ultimate nature of reality.  This is what Desmond Tutu means when he talks to us about “seeing with the eyes of the heart” in this week’s chapter of God Has a Dream.

This new way of seeing, Tutu says, changes things.  It changes the way we look at Jesus, the way we look at others, the way we look at ourselves, and the way we look at the world.  Archbishop Tutu says:

Many people ask me what I have learned from all of the experiences in my life, and I say unhesitatingly: People are wonderful.  It is true.  People really are wonderful.  This does not mean that people cannot be awful and do real evil.  They can.  Yet as you begin to see with the eyes of God, you start to realize that people’s anger and hatred and cruelty come from their own pain and suffering.  As we begin to see their words and behavior as simply the acting out of their suffering, we can have compassion for them.  We no longer feel attacked by them, and we can begin to see the light of God shining in them.  And when we begin to look for the light of God in people, an incredible thing happens.  We find it more and more in people—all people.

There is another story in the Bible of a person who was able to look past his own disillusionment and “see with the eyes of the heart.”  I’m talking about the story of Joseph, from the Old Testament book of Genesis.  Joseph, you may remember, was his father’s favorite son.  This fact made his brothers green with envy to the point where they faked his death and sold him into slavery.  Later on, Joseph was falsely accused of rape by his boss’ wife and ten thrown into prison to rot.  Much later, after a few providential run-ins with royal officials, Joseph was freed from prison and appointed to what we might call the Vice Presidency of Egypt.  It was at this point in the story, in the midst of a severe famine, that Joseph’s brothers show up again, this time groveling and begging for food, not realizing who they were talking to.  This would have been the perfect opportunity for revenge.  No one would have blamed him for holding a grudge, but that’s not what happened.  In this story, after telling his brothers who he was, Joseph wept with them and forgave them.  He said to them, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good”.

Joseph knew all about disillusionment.  His fairy tale dreams were shattered at an early age.  He was well aware that, beneath the world of his childhood dreams, reality was a lot more complicated.  However, unlike Marx, Nietzsche, and the producers of those movies I mentioned, Joseph never stopped searching for that presence of justice and compassion at the heart of the universe.  I think it’s pretty clear that he must have found, or at least glimpsed, what he was looking for.  Somehow, he was able to look past the darkness and into the light beyond.  This way of seeing with the eyes of the heart brought Joseph to the point where he was able to forgive those who had done such unforgivable things to him.  He was even able to see the hand of providence at work at work in his circumstances, saying, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.”

Desmond Tutu tells us the story of another modern-day Joseph who was able to overcome injustice and let it shape him for the better.  He writes:

Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison, eighteen of them on Robben Island breaking rocks into little rocks, a totally senseless task.  The unrelenting brightness of the light reflected off the white stone damaged his eyes so that now when you have your picture taken with him, you will be asked not to use a flash.  Many people say, “What a waste!  Wouldn’t it have been better if Nelson Mandela had come out earlier?  Look at all the things he would have accomplished.”

Those ghastly, suffering-filled twenty-seven years actually were not a waste.  It may seem so in a sense, but when Nelson Mandela went to jail he was angry.  He was a young man who was understandably very upset at the miscarriage of justice in South Africa.  He and his colleagues were being sentenced because they were standing up for what seemed so obvious.  They were demanding the rights that in other countries were claimed to be inalienable.  At the time, he was very forthright and belligerent, as he should have been, leading the armed wing of the African National Congress, but he mellowed in jail.  He began to discover depths of resilience and spiritual attributes that he would not have known he had.  And in particular I think he learned to appreciate the foibles and weaknesses of others and to be able to be gentle and compassionate toward others even in their awfulness.  So the suffering transformed him because he allowed it to ennoble him.  He could never have become the political and moral leader he became had it not been for the suffering he experienced on Robben Island.

All of us are bound to become disillusioned in the process of growing up.  That much is inevitable.  What is not inevitable is how we will respond to our disillusionment.  Will you halt your search for truth with those cynics who say “God is dead” and “might makes right”?  Or will you continue to follow the living Christ ever deeper into the heart of reality where you can experience firsthand the love of God giving birth to the universe?

My prayer is that we would all choose to see with the eyes of the heart, that we would all come to know this eternal love for ourselves, and that we would all be forever transformed by that experience.

 

 

 

God Only Has Us

On By J. Barrett LeeIn God Has A Dream, SermonLeave a comment

John 6:1-15

After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near.

When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming towards him, Jesus said to Philip, ‘Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?’ He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do.

Philip answered him, ‘Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.’

One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, ‘There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?’

Jesus said, ‘Make the people sit down.’ Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, ‘Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.’ So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets.

When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.’

 When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

Excerpt from God Has a Dream

Dear Child of God, do you realize that God needs you?  Do you realize that you are God’s partner?  When there is someone hungry, God wants to perform the miracle of feeding that person.  But it won’t any longer be through manna falling from heaven.  Normally, more usually, God can do nothing until we provide God with the means, the bread and the fish, to feed the hungry.  When a person is naked, God wants to perform the miracle of clothing that person, but it won’t be with a Carducci suit or Calvin Klein outfit falling from heaven.  No, it will be because you and I, all of us, have agreed to be God’s fellow workers, providing God with the raw material for performing miracles.

There is a church in Rome with a statue of Christ without arms.  When you ask why, you are told that it shows how God relies on us, His human partners, to do His work for Him.  Without us, God has no eyes; without us, God has no ears; without us, God has no arms.  God waits upon us, and relies on us.

A couple of weeks ago, I returned home one day to find my wife in tears, sitting on our living room sofa with our laptop open in front of her.  Looking up, she said, “You’ve got to see this!”  It was a YouTube video recorded in the Spanish city of Sabadell.  For the first time ever, I wish we had a video screen in this church so I could show it to you instead of describing it.  In this video, a man, dressed in a tuxedo and holding a large double bass, is standing out in the town plaza with an empty hat in front of him.  After a moment, a little girl, probably about five years old, walks up and drops a few coins into the hat.  The man with the bass immediately starts playing a tune.  After a moment, a woman walks up behind him with a cello, sits down in a chair, and starts to play along with him.  A moment later, a couple of violins and a bassoonist appear.  By now we’ve begun to recognize the tune as the choral finale from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, better known as The Ode to Joy.  One by one, every few seconds, another musician emerges from the crowd and joins the growing orchestra.  By the end, there is a full symphony with chorus in the plaza, belting out this most beautiful and memorable piece of music above the din of the crowds and traffic.  The people who have gathered to listen are either singing along, dancing, weeping, or just standing there with their mouths hanging open.

What I love most about this video is how it reminds me of the story we just read from John’s gospel, where Jesus feeds the crowd of five thousand people with only a few loaves and fish.  In that story, the loaves and fish came from a kid who had brought them along for his lunch.  Just like the little girl in the video, this boy’s small offering triggered a pre-arranged event that transformed an ordinary moment into a miracle.  All that was needed was one small gesture of generosity to set things in motion.

That is so like God.

People tend to have this idea about God as this all-powerful “sky wizard” who can do anything and everything.  God just sits on a cloud all day, controlling every little thing that happens.  For this kind of God, human free will is kind of an afterthought.  In fact, it doesn’t even really matter at all.  We’re all just pawns in a chess game to that kind of God.  But that’s not the God we read about in this week’s Bible reading and it’s not the God that Desmond Tutu tells us about in this week’s chapter of God Has A Dream.

The God that Jesus reveals to us in this passage from John’s gospel is the God who actively invites human participation in the ongoing process of creation and redemption.  This God makes a special point of going out of the way to include contributions from the members of society who matter the least (in the world’s eyes).  The author of John’s gospel goes out of the way to mention that the loaves and fish used by Jesus came from a boy’s lunch.  John’s gospel is the only one of the four that mentions this point.  It’s no small detail.

Children, in the ancient world, were not typically the objects of affection that they are today.  We tend to idealize childhood and give special attention to our kids, but in the ancient world, a child was just another mouth to feed until she or he was old enough to work.  In that world, many children died before the age of five, so most parents would hesitate to get too attached to a child who they weren’t sure would survive.  That’s why it’s such a big deal that Jesus was the kind of person who went out of his way to bless children and value their presence, like he did in today’s gospel reading.  Jesus was probably one of the only adults to do so in his society.  To everyone else, children were nothing but a nuisance, but Jesus saw them for the human beings that they are.  That’s why, on another occasion, he made a special point of welcoming children and blessing them when his disciples were trying to send them away.  It must have blown their minds the first time Jesus held up a child as the role model for pure faith!

The God who Jesus reveals is a God who works with us, in us, and through us.  And, by us, I mean all of us, from the greatest to the least.  This God is not some distant “sky wizard” who treats people like chess pieces.  This God sees human beings as partners.  This is what Desmond Tutu calls us in his book.  You and I are “God’s partners”.  He goes even further to call us “God carriers”.  He says: “In the Christian point of view, our God is one who took our human nature…  You don’t have to go around looking for God.  You don’t have to say, “Where is God?”  Everyone around you—that is God.”

Personally, I like that idea of us being “God carriers”.  It kind of makes God look like a virus that spreads from person to person until the whole world is infected.  That might not sound very pleasant at first, but imagine a kind of virus that, instead of making you sick, makes you healthier.  Imagine a virus that gives life instead of taking it.  A virus is the smallest kind of life form that transforms its host from the inside out.  It gets passed around through little moments of contact, like a touch or a kiss.  Pretty soon, it takes over the world.

Isn’t that what God is like?  That’s what Jesus was getting at when he said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”  A little later, Jesus made the same point again: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”  In both of these parables, something small and insignificant grows and grows until it transforms its environment from the inside out.  That’s how God works in the world.  God does not impose God’s will on the world by coercion from the outside.  No, God brings about God’s will in the world by persuasion from the inside.  Do you get the difference?  It’s subtle but important.  Coercion forces another person to do what you want.  Persuasion invites another person to join you.  Coercion takes away a person’s freedom.  Persuasion respects freedom.  Coercion changes only the outward circumstances.  Persuasion changes the heart.  Our God, the God of Jesus and Desmond Tutu, works from within.  God is transforming the world from the inside out and we, you and I, are all invited to be God’s partners in this project.

God is a virus.  And you and I?  We’re carriers.  Our job is to spread the God virus until the whole world is infected.  Every little moment of contact, every good deed, every gesture of compassion, every random act of kindness, and every senseless act of beauty, no matter how small or unnoticed: each of these contributes to God’s ongoing vision of changing the world from the inside out.  You are all “God carriers.”  You are all God’s partners.

I want to invite you to go out into the world this morning like the little boy from our gospel reading or the little girl from that YouTube video.  Go out with your little offering, your loaves and fish or your pocket change, and offer that up in the full and conscious faith that your little gift is really part of God’s big idea, God’s dream.  Know that you, in your small and intentional acts of kindness, are offering up to God the raw materials out of which miracles are made.  You might never know what kind of impact your life will have, but, like a small stone dropped into a large pond, the effects of your actions will become ripples that eventually reach to the farthest shore of eternity.  No life is insignificant and no person is without dignity for we are all God’s partners in the task of transforming the world from the inside out.

 

 

 

God Loves Your Enemies

On By J. Barrett LeeIn God Has A Dream, Sermon2 Comments

This week’s sermon from Boonville Presbyterian.
Excerpt from chapter 4 of the book:

Dear child of God, if we are truly to understand that God loves all of us, we must recognize that He loves our enemies, too.  God does not share our hatred, no matter what the offense we have endured.  We try to claim God for ourselves and for our cause, but God’s love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.  And our prejudices, regardless of whether they are based on religion, race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or anything else, are absolutely and utterly ridiculous in God’s eyes.

This past week was one of those weeks for me when current events caused me to rethink my entire Sunday sermon.  We’ve been making our way through this book, God Has A Dream by Desmond Tutu, and I was already planning to preach this week on chapter 4: “God Loves Your Enemies”.  I had planned on using historical figures and events in order to illustrate my points about justice and forgiveness, but then we all woke up yesterday morning to news reports about a brutal massacre at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.  With 71 people wounded or killed, some of them children as young as 6, this is now being called the worst shooting spree in U.S. history.

Integrity prevents me from ignoring this awful headline while I extol the virtue of forgiveness in your presence.  I’m a firm believer that anything we talk about, sing about, or pray about “in here” (i.e. in this sanctuary on a Sunday morning) has to matter “out there” (i.e. in places like Aurora, Colorado) or else it just doesn’t matter.

In moments like this, I think justice and forgiveness matter now more than ever.  However, unlike some other preachers you might hear, I won’t be offering you Bible verses or bumper-sticker slogans designed to help you get around or get over horrible tragedies like this.  Instead, just like we’ve been doing these past few weeks, we’ll be talking today about the kinds of spiritual values that can help us get through the horror.

The main value I want to talk about today is one that guided Archbishop Tutu and the Truth & Reconciliation Commission in their work of rebuilding South Africa after the fall of the racist Apartheid regime.  They knew that if they were going to create a new society where people of all races could live together in freedom and equality as “the rainbow nation”, then they would need a different model of justice than the one most commonly associated with western culture.

You see, the model of justice to which we westerners are most accustomed is technically referred to as retributive justice.  You might not have heard that term before, but you are almost certainly familiar with the concept.  Retributive justice is built on the principle of crime & punishment.  “You do the crime, you do the time” is one example of retributive justice.  “An eye for an eye” is another example of the same principle.  The idea behind retributive justice is that, if a perpetrator suffers to the same extent that he or she has caused others to suffer, then justice has been served.

On the whole, this isn’t a bad starting point for thinking about justice.  It’s based, first of all, on the principle of reciprocation.  “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” is a positive example of the principle of retributive justice in action.  Many of our professional and business relationships are solidly built upon this idea.  The promise of reciprocation provides people with an incentive for cooperation, since they can accomplish more together than they can alone.  Reciprocation works out pretty well for most people, most of the time.

When it comes to crime and punishment, this same principle seems to apply as a good foundation for fairness: “If you give me something, then I owe you something of equal value; If you take something from me, then you owe me something of equal value.”  All in all, it sounds pretty fair.

Over time, we’ve managed to build a complex criminal justice system around this basic idea of fairness.  The development of governments means that some offenses aren’t committed just against individual people, but against society as a whole.  We’ve come up with multiple ways for offenders to pay back the debt they owe to society: through paying fines, performing mandatory acts of community service, serving time in prison, or (in extreme cases) paying with their lives.  Some other cultures who operate with a retributive model of justice still make use of physical suffering as a means of restoring the balance of fairness.  In those societies, thieves have their hands cut off and delinquents are publicly whipped, although most people in our country find the ideas of maiming and torture distasteful, to say the least.

So, while the basic principle of retributive justice tends to work pretty well for most people, most of the time, it does have its limits.  There comes a point when we need to go beyond it in order to serve the causes of real peace and justice.

For example: what do you do when a perpetrator commits a crime so heinous that no amount of retribution can restore the balance of fairness?  I think we’re all finding ourselves in just such a situation this weekend as headlines pour in about the massacre in Colorado.  12 people are dead and dozens more wounded.  Even if James Holmes (the shooter in Colorado) was to receive the death penalty, there’s no way for him to be killed 12 times.  It’s just not possible for the balance of fairness to ever be restored through retribution in a case like this one.

Here is another example: what do you do when retribution brings no peace?  Larry Whicher, whose brother Alan was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, was present for the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the man responsible for that attack.  After it was over and McVeigh was dead, Larry said, ”I expected more of a sense of closure and relief than I had. It was weird.”  “An eye for an eye” was not enough to serve justice and bring peace to Larry Whicher.

Jesus seemed to have an inner sense that retribution was not enough to right all the wrongs of this world.  In defiance of his own culture and religious tradition, he called upon his followers to move beyond the “eye for an eye” principle of justice.  He seemed to indicate that something more is needed if people truly want to find peace in the wake of injustice.  What could that “something more” be?

Desmond Tutu ventures a guess, drawing on his own cultural traditions.  He says:

We have a had a jurisprudence, a penology in Africa that was not retributive but restorative.  In the traditional setting, when people quarreled the main intention was not to punish the miscreant but to restore good relations.  For Africa is concerned, or has traditionally been concerned, about the wholeness of relationship.  That is something we need in our world, a world that is polarized, a world that is fragmented, a world that destroys people.  It is also something we need in our families and friendships, for restoration heals and makes whole while retribution only wounds and divides us from one another.

The end-result, the goal, of the justice process, according to Desmond Tutu, is not punishment but forgiveness.  Justice is served and peace is found when genuine friendship between victim and offender is able to emerge.

This is difficult.  Forgiveness is far more difficult than mere punishment.  Some might even call it impossible.  But if we are going to call ourselves Christians and followers of Jesus, then we have to at least allow for the possibility that he was onto something when he said what he said about moving beyond “an eye for an eye.”  The call to Christian peacemaking is a call to trust that forgiveness is much more foundational to the fabric of the universe than retribution.  We might even say that forgiveness lies at the very heart of God.  Therefore, when we mere mortals choose to walk the hard road of forgiveness, we aren’t just laying the foundation for greater peace in our hearts and justice in the world, we are drawing near to God.  In fact, I would venture to say that we are never closer to God than when we find it in our hearts to forgive those who have sinned against us.  Forgiveness is the single hardest, yet most worthwhile, calling of the spiritual life.

While I was preparing for this sermon, I came across the story of Rais Bhuiyan, a gas station attendant from Bangladesh, living in Texas in 2002.  One day, he was working behind the counter when a man came in and pointed a shotgun at his face.

The man with the gun asked him, “Where are you from?”  Before Rais could answer, the man shot him in the face at point blank range.  Miraculously, he survived, although he was horribly scarred and lost his right eye.  The man with the gun, Mark Stroman, had already killed two other men in the same way.  Mark called himself “the Arab Slayer” and claimed to be carrying out these killings as vengeance for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

While he was recovering in the hospital, Rais Bhuiyan promised Allah that he would make a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca if he was allowed to live.  As it turned out, Rais lived and made good on his promise to Allah.  During his pilgrimage, Rais came to the conclusion that God was calling him to forgive the man who shot him.  From then on, Rais formed a relationship with Mark Stroman and tried to stop his execution.

“This campaign is all about passion, forgiveness, tolerance and healing. We should not stay in the past, we must move forward,” Rais said, “If I can forgive my offender who tried to take my life, we can all work together to forgive each other and move forward and take a new narrative on the 10th anniversary of 11 September.”

In response to this, Mark Stroman had this to say, “”I tried to kill this man, and this man is now trying to save my life. This man is inspiring to me.  Here it is, the attacker and the attackee, you know, pulling together. The hate has to stop – one second of hate will cause a lifetime of misery. I’ve done that – it’s wrong, and if me and Rais can reach one person, mission accomplished.”

Ultimately, Rais Bhuiyan’s attempts to stop Mark Stroman’s execution failed and Mark was put to death by lethal injection.  The article I read was published on the day he died and I was shocked when I looked up at the date it was published: July 20, 2011.  Exactly one year to the day before James Holmes opened fire on a movie theater full of people in Aurora, Colorado.

This is what restorative justice looks like.  This is what we get when we move beyond “an eye for an eye”.

I’m not saying that it comes easily or quickly.  The road to forgiveness is a long one.  It’s full of twists and turns and pot-holes along the way.  Sometimes, it feels like you’ve been traveling it forever with no end in sight.

When I think about the struggle to forgive, I think about the closing scene from the movie Dead Man Walking, starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn.  The scene takes place at the funeral of Matthew Poncelet, a young man who has just been put to death for murder.  Sister Helen, the main character of the film, looks up to see Mr. Delacroix, the father of the murder victim, standing on the outskirts of the cemetery during the service.  After it’s over, she walks up and talks to him.

He says to her, “I don’t know why I’m here.  I got a lot of hate.  I don’t have your faith.”

Sister Helen responds, “It’s not faith.  I wish it were that easy.  It’s work.  Maybe we could help each other find a way out of the hate.”

“I don’t know,” he says, “I don’t think so.”  And then he walks away.

But then, in the very last shot of the movie, we see Sister Helen walking into a church.  The camera peers through one of the windows from the outside.  Inside the church, we see Sister Helen and Mr. Delacroix kneeling together in prayer.  I love this final image.  Here we have a man who is not there yet, when it comes to forgiveness, but is walking the path and working through the problems.  I love this image because I think it’s a perfect analogy for where we are today: you and I, together in this church.

Only two short days since a brutal massacre, you and I are not there yet when it comes to forgiveness.  Yet, we have come together this morning because we choose to have faith in “that which is within each of us and yet greater than all of us.”  We have come here today because we suspect that there is more to this universe than senseless violence, that life itself has meaning, and that the powers of death and hatred will not have the final word.  We have come here today following a “holy hunch” that there is more at work within us and around us than the blind forces of reciprocation and retribution.  When it comes to forgiveness, we may not be there yet, but we are walking the path, participating in the process, and working through the problems.

We are here today, we are together, and we are not alone.  That fact, by itself, gives me hope and strength enough to keep going on the journey toward forgiveness.

I love you.

God loves you, God loves each and every person who was in that movie theater on Friday, God even loves James Holmes, and there is nothing we can do about it.

Be blessed and be a blessing.

God Loves You As You Are

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon2 Comments

This week’s sermon from Boonville Presbyterian.

We’re in week 3 of our summer series: God Has A Dream

based on the book by Desmond Tutu

Click here to listen to this sermon at fpcboonville.org

I John 4:7-21

Excerpt from the book:

Dear Child of God, in our world it is often hard to remember that God loves you just as you are.  God loves you not because you are good.  No, God loves you, period.  God loves us not because we are lovable.  No, we are lovable precisely because God loves us.  It is marvelous when you come to understand that you are accepted for who you are, apart from any achievement.  It is so liberating.

We too often feel that God’s love for us is conditional like our love is for others.  We have made God in our image rather than seeing ourselves in God’s image.  We have belittled God’s love and turned our lives into an endless attempt to prove our worth.  Ours is a culture of achievement, and we carry over these attitudes to our relationship with God.  We work ourselves to a frazzle trying to impress everyone including God.  We try to earn God’s approval and acceptance.  We cannot believe that our relationship with God, our standing before God, has got nothing to do with our performance, our works.

Someone has said: “There is nothing you can do to make God love you more, for God already loves you perfectly and totally.”  But more wonderfully, there is nothing you can do to make God love you less—absolutely nothing, for God already loves you and will love you forever.

I’ve been told more than once that, practically speaking, every preacher really only has one sermon inside of him/herself that gets preached over and over again from ordination until retirement.  I don’t know if that’s actually true, but if it is, and if I get to pick what that sermon is, then I think would pick something like this: “God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it.”

Those of you who worship with us regularly are probably chuckling to yourself right now, because that’s how we end our sermons here every week.  I don’t mind admitting that it’s almost like a kind of slogan.  Hey, if you’re gonna have a slogan, it might as well be something like that, right?

But sometimes, I get a little scared that we use it so much that it loses its meaning for us.  God’s love is probably the single most overlooked of all the divine attributes.  It’s usually the first thing that kids learn in Sunday School: “Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so.”  We hear it so often at church that we take it for granted as a basic part of our theology.  We never let the truth God’s love seep into us and soak us to our very bones.

Can you imagine what it would be like if we took showers in the same way that we reflect on the love of God?  We’d step behind the curtain and turn the water on for all of five seconds and then get out to dry.  If a person just did that every day, could he or she honestly say that he or she had “bathed” and was “clean”?  No, we wouldn’t say that.  Would you want to sit beside that person at church?  No, I wouldn’t either.  But, if that’s the case, why then would we expect people to want to come and sit beside us in our churches when we Christians, who claim to believe that “God is love”, don’t ever give that love more than five seconds of tacit consideration in our weekly liturgy?  Can we really say that we’ve “soaked” our souls in God’s unconditional love?

This morning, I want to invite you to go deeper with me into this mystery.  I want us to spend some time kicking back together in the Jacuzzi of divine grace.  We’ll know that we’ve been in there long enough when it starts to change us.  In the same way that soaking in water wrinkles our skin and makes us smell like soap or chlorine, soaking in God’s love changes the way we “smell” to the world.

As Archbishop Tutu points out in the book, we live in a society that thinks of itself as a “meritocracy”.  The American Dream says that anyone who works hard and does what is right can reach the top of the ladder of success.  To be fair, there is something very liberating in this ideal.  In ages past, you had to born into an aristocratic family in order to have access to resources and opportunities.  There are some who would argue that we still live in such a society.  But, in a conscious philosophical sense, America refers to itself as “the land of opportunity”, where anyone can potentially become the President or an astronaut, if they want it and work hard for it.  This is a good ideal to have.  It speaks volumes about the American commitment to liberty and equality.  As my dentist once observed, “The United States is the first country in history to be founded on a philosophy rather than an ethnicity.”

However, even when this philosophical system is functioning properly (which isn’t all the time), it can still leave us with a conscious or subconscious disdain for the “losers” and “failures” of the world.  Even though we know better, we often assume that those who are poor must somehow deserve their suffering.  We don’t like handing out our spare change to homeless people because we think “they’ll just spend it all on booze or drugs.”  We don’t like hearing about people on welfare because we think they might be somehow “cheating the system” while the rest of us subsidize their laziness.  Well, I’ve spent lots of time with people who are homeless or on welfare.  Yes, some of them do abuse drugs and others do stay at home when they are physically capable of working, but not all of them do so.  Many really need the extra help that they receive.  In fact, most of them actually need a whole lot more help than they’re currently getting.  I’ve also discovered that even those who are “abusing the system” in one way or another are doing so for reasons that are more complicated than mere laziness.  Having listened to their stories on more than one occasion, I cannot say with any degree of certainty that I would not being doing the exact same thing that they are doing, given the right circumstances.

Our American meritocracy inclines us to look down on those who fail in life.  “They made their own bed,” we say, “so let them lie in it.”  But I don’t think we often stop to think and realize that, for many of them, that bed is a deathbed.  Many of them are so caught up in cycles of poverty or addiction that they can no longer “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.”  When we dismiss them as worthless, we are functionally taking away their basic human dignity and saying to them, “You don’t deserve to live.”  These children of God, our brothers and sisters, are being given the death penalty for their mistakes.  Those who snort, “Just get a job, you lazy bum” as they pass by are casting themselves in the role of executioner.

I recently heard a rant by a popular figure whose name I will not mention.  This person says:

“There comes a time when compassion can cause disaster. If you open your home to scores of homeless folks, you will not have a home for long…

…Personal responsibility is usually the driving force behind success.

But there are millions of Americans who are not responsible, and the cold truth is that the rest of us cannot afford to support them.

Every fair-minded person should support government safety nets for people who need assistance through no fault of their own. But [some people] don’t make distinctions like that. For them, the baby Jesus wants us to provide no matter what the circumstance. Being a Christian, I know that while Jesus promoted charity at the highest level, he was not self-destructive.

The Lord helps those who help themselves. Does he not?”

“The Lord helps those who help themselves” could be the unofficial motto of our American meritocracy.  Many people think this proverb comes from the Bible.  Let me assure you that it does not.  Believe me, I’ve looked.

These words from this contemporary public figure strike me as eerily similar to the words of another passage that I came across while I was studying for my ordination exams in the Presbyterian Church:

“We know something of Christian duty and love toward the helpless, but we demand the protection of the nation from the incapable and inferior… We want [a] Church which roots in the national character, and we repudiate the spirit of a Christian cosmopolitanism.”

This passage comes to us from the so-called “German Christians” who ardently supported Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and subsequent dominance over Germany during the Nazi era.

In this week’s chapter of Desmond Tutu’s book, our friend the Archbishop shares with us a passage from Harald Ofstad’s book, Our Contempt for Weakness:

If we examine ourselves in the mirror of Nazism we see our own traits—enlarged but so revealing for that very reason.  Anti-Semitism is not the essence Nazism.  Its essence is the doctrine that the ‘strong’ shall rule over the ‘weak,’ and that the ‘weak’ are contemptible because they are ‘weak.’  Nazism did not originate in the Germany of the 1930s and did not disappear in 1945.  It expresses deeply rooted tendencies, which are constantly alive in and around us.  We admire those who fight their way to the top, and are contemptuous of the loser.  We consider ourselves rid of Nazism because we abhor the gas chambers.  We forget that they were the ultimate product of a philosophy which despised the ‘weak’ and admired the ‘strong.’

The brutality of Nazism was not just the product of certain historical conditions in Germany.  It was also the consequence of a certain philosophy of life, a given set of norms, values and perceptions of reality.  We are not living in their situation but we practice many of the same norms and evaluations.

This passage literally scares the hell out of me.  I’m not just swearing here.  When I look at my own culturally shaped ideals and realize that they might lead me to one day condone in my country what happened in Germany during the Third Reich, I want to tear them out.  I wish I could go through some kind of exorcism that would protect me from that demonic and infernal part of myself.  I feel motivated to look deeper into myself and hold tighter to what I believe is the heartbeat of the universe: the biblical truth that “God is love.”

Friends, the Lord does not help those who help themselves.  The Lord helps the helpless.  The Lord helps those who have made such a mess of their lives through their own fault that they cannot put themselves back together again and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.  The Lord helps the undeserving, the losers, the failures, and the washouts.  The Lord helps the cowards, the deserters, the deniers, the betrayers, and the sinners.  The Lord helps the lost, the lonely, the losers, the left-out, the lazy, the let-down, the lustful, the lascivious, the lecherous, the lushes, the loveless, the lackluster, the lame-brained, the listless, and the low-down.  In short, brothers and sisters, the Lord helps us.

As Archbishop Tutu tells us, “None of us meet the norms or standards for success in all ways… we all feel inadequate in some way.”  He says elsewhere that we are all subsidized by God’s free grace.  He continues:

At the risk of getting myself into trouble, I will say that in a sense it actually doesn’t matter what we do.  For nothing we can do, no matter how bad, will change God’s love for us…

Just like a mother loves her child no matter what, so god loves you even if you don’t succeed, even if you don’t win.  Our capitalist society despises weakness, vulnerability, and failure, but God knows that failure is an inevitable part of life and that weakness and vulnerability are a part of creaturehood.  They are part of what makes us human.  It is through this weakness and vulnerability that most of us learn empathy and compassion and discover our soul…

When we begin to realize that God loves us with our weakness, with our vulnerability, with our failures, we can begin to accept them as an inevitable part of our human life.  We can love others—with their failures—when we stop despising ourselves—because of our failures.  We can begin to have compassion for ourselves and see that even our sinfulness is our acting out of our own suffering.  Then we can see that others’ sinfulness is their own acting out of their suffering.

As you can see, friends, our soaking in God’s love changes the way that we look at the world.  We are tempted to breeze past these simple words like, “God is love”, and take them for granted because they strike us as so irrelevant to what we think of as “the real world”.  We think of compassion as weak and useless.  Our culture teaches separate our lives into these semi-schizophrenic categories of the public and private spheres.  In the private sphere, we’re supposed to tell our kids that compassion is important and that they are loved unconditionally.  In the public sphere, we’re supposed to live by the principles of “winner take all” and “survival of the fittest”.  And because our culture measures “success” (and, by extension, the total value of our lives) by what we achieve in the public sphere, we tend to think of those cut-throat values as the way we should live in “the real world”.  So you see, our tendency to dismiss and ignore God’s unconditional love for us is not simply a slip of the memory.  I would go so far as to say that it is the result of a spiritual conspiracy that is currently choking the life out of our civilization.

If we are to live the kind of “abundant life” that Christ tells we are meant for, the main thing we need to do is turn our attention, in an intentional and extended sense, toward the truth that God loves each one of us unconditionally and without proviso or qualification.  That, my friends, is the truth that can set our hearts on fire and change this world forever.

God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it.

May this truth never become so routine that it loses its meaning for you.  May it soak you to the bone, cleanse your soul, and change your world from the inside out.

Be blessed and be a blessing!

God’s Dream

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon2 Comments
This is how the principle of ubuntu is taught to kids in Africa

This week’s sermon from Boonville Presbyterian.

Click here to listen at fpcboonville.org

I Corinthians 12:12-26

An excerpt from God Has A Dream by Desmond Tutu:

“I have a dream,” God says, “Please help Me to realize it.  It is a dream of a world whose ugliness and squalor and poverty, its war and hostility, its greed and harsh competitiveness, its alienation and disharmony are changed into their glorious counterparts, when there will be more laughter, joy, and peace, where there will be justice and goodness and compassion and love and caring and sharing.  I have a dream that swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, that My children will know that they are members of one family, the human family, God’s family, My family.”

In God’s family, there are no outsiders.  All are insiders.  Black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight, Jew and Arab, Palestinian and Israeli, Roman Catholic and Protestant, Serb and Albanian, Hutu and Tutsi, Muslim and Christian, Buddhist and Hindu, Pakistani and Indian—all belong.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received came from a college professor of mine named Bob White.  He told me that, during my time in college, I should have some kind of “international experience”.  In a world as technologically interconnected as ours is, it’s more important now than ever before that students stretch themselves outside of their geographic comfort zone in order to see the world from a different cultural perspective.  I took Bob’s advice and, during my senior year, I went on a church-sponsored mission trip to the Eastern European country of Romania.

The experience changed my life forever, but not in the way that I thought it would.  At the time, I thought I was “bringing the light of Christ to the ends of the Earth”, but it turns out that I was the one who needed to be enlightened.  Working mostly in mental hospitals and orphanages, I experienced both tragedy and amazement on a level that I never thought possible.

For several decades, Romania suffered under the thumb of a particularly nasty Communist dictator named Nicolae Ceaucescu.  He would send his soldiers into the countryside to get women pregnant so that the children could be raised in state-sponsored orphanages as perfect Communist drones.  As a result, Romania is a country with an inordinately huge population of orphans.  Even after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989, this so-called “free” country has continued to be plagued with corruption and mass poverty.  The new government had no idea how to deal with so many orphans, so they would transfer them around from facility to facility until their paperwork got lost.

What happened next was truly awful.  Children started disappearing from the orphanages.  Without the appropriate paperwork, no one knew where they were, how to identify them, or where to find them.  Then, two weeks before my team arrived in the country, police uncovered a black market organ trade going on in Italy, with an apparently unlimited supply of fresh organs coming out of Romania.  It didn’t take much for us to put two and two together.

We visited one of the mental hospitals from which children were disappearing.  They wouldn’t let us in, in spite of our scheduled appointment.  So we parked our bus outside the front gate and waited for over an hour.  Eventually, the staff relented and let us in, but only to a certain room in the facility, and we were forbidden from taking photos or videos (a rule we disobeyed).  The scene inside reminded me of pictures I’d seen of Nazi concentration camps in World War II.  The smell alone was almost unbearable.

We sat and sang and played with the “patients” (“inmates” would be a more accurate term) for as long as the administration would allow us.  At no time did I see any doctors, nurses, or other attendants in this so-called “hospital”.  I left that place feeling more helpless than ever before.  There was no humanity in that place, no life, only existence (and even that was marginal and temporary, at best).

On the other hand, I also visited a Baptist church in a town called Galati.  We were there to distribute gifts and supplies to kids.  It was a chaotic scene at the end of a long day.  We were running out of supplies and this little church, probably no bigger than ours, was packed with over a thousand kids.  In the middle of all the chaos, a man grabbed me by the arm and said, “You will come to my house for tea!”  I didn’t know what to say, so I just told him to talk with my team leader about it.

After all the noise died down, we piled back onto our bus and collapsed.  We’d had no rest and nothing to eat all day.  My team leader stood up and thanked us for all our hard work and said there was just one more thing we had to do.

“I know you’re all exhausted,” he said, “but there’s this guy who wants us to come to his house.  I promise it won’t take long, but let’s just be polite and humor him before we go.”

We all grudgingly said okay and went to his house.  What we saw when we got there just blew us away.  This man and his family were especially concerned about all those orphans in the government systems.  Even those who weren’t being killed for their organs were just dumped out onto the street on their 18th birthday.  What this family did is take those freshly ejected orphans and bring them into their own home.  They gave these kids a safe and stable place to live while they learned viable job skills.  They even brought these kids to church and taught them about Jesus and the Bible.

As if that weren’t enough, they had prepared a welcome for us that we never could have expected.  We walked into a room with a table set with a feast of hors devours.  To a team of college students who hadn’t had anything to eat all day, it looked like heaven on earth!

What was even more like heaven on earth was what happened next.  This family and their adopted orphans talked and sang with us around the table.  In spite of the language barrier, we were all enjoying ourselves immensely.  We passed  a guitar back and forth, singing one song in English, and then one in Romanian.  Finally, when it was our turn again, I had an idea:

I said, “Here’s an oldie but a goodie,” and started playing Amazing Grace.  The Romanians in the room got extremely excited and shouted, “We know this song!”  And then, over this feast of hor devours, this foretaste of heaven, a group of Americans and Romanians, middle-class college students and previously homeless orphans, sang together this most well-known hymn, each in their own language.  I think that moment is about as close to heaven as I will ever get in this lifetime.

How amazing!  This week, as we read about God’s dream in Desmond Tutu’s book, I remember that incredible night in Galati, Romania.  In that moment, I was being fed and nourished, not just by strangers with rye bread and deviled eggs, but by that great and mysterious “interdependent web of existence”, of which I am a part.  I felt the Spirit of God in the room that night, knitting us foreigners together and filling the cups of our souls to overflowing.

What I witnessed in this family and their adopted orphans is what Archbishop Tutu calls ubuntu.  Ubuntu is a hard word to translate into English.  Much like the Greek word agape and the Hebrew word shalom, there is no single English word that adequately captures the reality to which the African word ubuntu is referring.  Ubuntu is a particular character quality, much like courage and kindness are character qualities, but ubuntu is, in Archbishop Tutu’s words, “the essence of being human.”  Saying that someone has the quality of ubuntu is a very great compliment.  A person who possesses ubuntu recognizes that “a person is a person through other persons”.  In other words, ubuntu is all about recognizing the fact that we are interdependent beings.  To pull a phrase from the Disney movie The Lion King, we are all part of “the circle of life”.  None of us exists alone.  Archbishop Tutu says, “The self-made man or woman is really an impossibility” and “The solitary man or woman is really a contradiction in terms”.

More than just an African cultural concept, Archbishop Tutu tells us that ubuntu is “God’s dream” for us.  What God wants more than anything in the world is for us to be people who have ubuntu.  You can hear echoes of this idea when you hear Jesus say, “In all things, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  And again when Jesus is asked about the most important commandment in the Bible and he says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength… [and] you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

I can also hear ubuntu in the selection we read this morning from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.  He compares the community of a church to a human body.  What makes us beautiful is our diversity.  All the different parts work together to form a whole.  This is more than just motivational team-building; it’s the expression of a spiritual truth.  We are part of each other.  We are one family, even one person, in God’s eyes.  Christ is more than just a person we remember on Sundays; Christ is the body of which we are a part.  We are the body of Christ on earth.  The blood of Christ flows in our veins.  We reveal this mystical reality of Christ to the world, not just by ourselves, but together as a group.  This means that if I want to be a Christian, then I need you.

We humans seem to have an uncanny ability to divide and demean ourselves.  It’s almost as if the truth of ubuntu and our common identity in Christ is so powerful, so radical, and so threatening to the status quo that we’ll come up with just about anything as an excuse to invalidate it.  We’ll build walls between each other over skin color, gender, sexual orientation, politics, religion, sports teams, musical tastes.  At what point do we wake up and realize how ridiculous it all is?  And the most hilarious part is that none of it means a thing, since we can’t ever change the fact that we all come from one source and are headed toward one destiny.  The battle lines we draw are little more than squiggles on a piece of paper to God.

God is much less concerned about who is different and much more concerned about how we treat those who are different from us.  Can we, through the lens of our particular faith, recognize and celebrate “the interdependent web of existence, of which we are a part”?  To see each other in this way is to see the image of God.  To love each other in this way is to serve Christ.  This is ubuntu.  This is our destiny.  This is God’s will, God’s vision, God’s dream for us.  The question that each of us has to answer this week (and every week) is this: how are you going to wake up and make God’s dream come true?

Sometimes, God Calms the Storm; Sometimes, God Calms You

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

This week’s sermon from Boonville Presbyterian Church.

Click here to listen at fpcboonville.org

Mark 4:35-41

I’m normally suspicious anytime someone tells me that there are “just two kinds of” anything in this world.  I find that reality rarely lends itself to such neat and tidy categories.  At no time is this suspicion more likely to be true than when we are talking about relationships.  There are all kinds of relationships in this world.  Probably about as many different kinds as there are people who have them.

Now, having said that, I’m going to break my own rule.  I’m going to look at two different kinds of relationships that people can have with one another: conditional and unconditional.

Conditional relationships are based on something outside the people involved.  Something is usually expected of each person involved in the relationship.  For example, if you were a boss with an employee who didn’t do the job right and repeatedly showed up to work late with a consistently bad attitude, you probably wouldn’t be inclined to say, “Golly, I bet you’re a nice person with a good heart.  This relationship means so much to me, I just can’t fire you!”  Would you do that?  Of course not.  That would be ridiculous.  In employer-employee relationships, there are certain expectations that have to be met in order for the relationship to continue.  It’s conditional.

But, on the other hand, imagine that your teenage son or daughter comes to you after a bad breakup.  “Mom & Dad, so-and-so dumped me and I’m really down about it.  Is there something wrong with me?  Could anyone ever love me for who I am?”  In that moment, no parent in his/her right mind would say, “Golly, I’d really love to be here for you right now, but I am just not impressed with your report card from last semester.  Why don’t you bring that C in Chemistry up to a B?  Then we’ll talk about who can love you.”  Would you do that to your child?  No, that would be equally ridiculous (not to mention heartless).  Your love for your child is unconditional.  There is nothing that child did to earn your love and there is nothing that child can do to lose your love.  It’s not based on anything.

We need both kinds of relationships in this world.  They’re both good.  But it’s really important that we not confuse these two kinds of relationships with one another.  A friendly boss is still your boss at the end of the day.  That’s just how life works.  Likewise, you parents have to help your kids grow up to be healthy and successful people, but that’s still your child at the end of the day (and no bad grade will ever change that fact).  We can’t treat our conditional relationships like unconditional relationships.  We can’t treat our unconditional relationships like conditional relationships.

Our consumer-oriented culture only knows how to deal with one kind of relationship: the conditional one.  Everything comes down to some kind of quid pro quo contract.  Most of us believe that unconditional relationships exist, but we don’t have any way understanding or categorizing them in our heads.  Our society’s economic style of thinking doesn’t give us the kind of conceptual tools we need to form a mental picture of what unconditional love looks like.  The results of this kind of relational confusion are obviously disastrous when we start “keeping score” with our partners or our kids.  It starts a never-ending competition where no one wins and everyone loses.  The very essence of the relationship gets lost because we’re not thinking of it as the right kind of relationship.

The same thing can happen with our spirituality.  A lot of folks in our society tend to look at their personal relationship with God as a kind of quid pro quo contract (i.e. a conditional relationship).  They think they can offer God moral obedience, dogmatic belief, or church attendance in exchange for the benefit of answered prayers or an afterlife in heaven.  Almost everyone has prayed a prayer like this at some point: “Dear God, help me pass my math test and I’ll promise to stop swearing for a month.”  On the one hand, these prayers are great because people are reaching out to connect with God in moments of stress and crisis, which is exactly what we should be doing.  On the other hand, they turn our relationship with God into something it’s not: a conditional contract.

We end up with a God who looks more like Santa Claus than Jesus: “he’s making a list, checking it twice, he’s gonna find out who’s naughty or nice.”  This kind of God brings us toys in exchange for good behavior.  That’s not a very healthy idea of God for us to believe in.  We’ll end up fearful of God, nervously glancing over our shoulder, wondering if we measure up to the standard or if we’ll be sent to hell with coal in our stocking.

Another problem with this way of thinking is that it makes the success of our spiritual lives dependent on the success of our material lives.  What happens when we pray for a miracle and don’t get the one we wanted?  I’ve known many sincere believers who have prayed fervently for the recovery of a loved one from a serious illness, only to watch that person die.  “Dear God, heal my wife of cancer and I promise to quit smoking and go to church more often.”  What happens to that person’s faith if his/her wife dies anyway?  It’s sad to think about, but it happens in the real world.  I’ve seen it.  Our faith is what we depend on to carry us through these horrible tragedies, so we had better make sure it won’t collapse under the weight of unanswered prayers.

There is a story of a time when Jesus’ disciples missed an opportunity to learn what real faith is all about.  This is comforting to me, by the way: knowing that Jesus’ disciples missed the point more often than they got it.  It gives me hope for myself.  In fact, that’s why I like to read the Bible: it’s the only book I can read and find people more messed up than I am.  If God never gives up on them, then I can trust that God will never give up on me.

Anyway, this particular story takes place as Jesus and his disciples were crossing a lake in a boat one day.  A bad storm snuck up on them and things were looking pretty grim.  They were sure that this was it.  All their hard work and sacrifice as disciples was about to go to waste: sucked beneath the mighty waves of the Sea of Galilee.  And just where is Jesus while of this is going on, where is the one in whom they had put so much faith?  He was taking a nap!

Have you ever felt like that in a moment of crisis?  “God, where were you when I got that diagnosis?  God, where were you when my loved one died?  God, where were you when I got laid off from my job?”  I can relate to those disciples in the boat because, sometimes (in my life, anyway), it really feels like God is asleep on the job.  I have sometimes asked the very same question that the disciples asked Jesus, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”  Do you not care?  That’s the question that bothers us so much in times like that.  Does God not care about me?  Do I not matter in the grand scheme of things?  Does God not exist?  Am I all alone in a meaningless world?  These are hard questions.  In fact, these are the hardest questions a person can ever ask.  They are the ultimate questions that give voice to the deepest fears in our hearts.

In this story, the disciples do finally get the miraculous solution they were looking for.  Jesus wakes up and calms the storm with his divine power.  The hero saves the day.  But, after all is said and done, Jesus asks the disciples, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”

Have you still no faith?  Obviously, the disciples had some kind of faith because they knew exactly who to call when the situation got really hairy.  They prayed for a miracle and they got it, but they still missed the point.  The point is not the miraculous rescue from the storm.  That was simply a convenient arrangement of circumstances based on a conditional relationship with God.  The point of this story is that God is with us.  Jesus, asleep in the stern, is the main image we readers supposed to take away from this story.

God’s presence with you in the storms of life is unconditional.  There is no circumstance that God can’t handle.  There is no minimum faith requirement for getting “Jesus” into your “boat”.  Before, during, and after the storms of life, God is there, holding us all together in the arms of unconditional love.  There’s nothing you can do to make God love you any more; there’s nothing you can do to make God love you any less.  God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it.

Sometimes, when you face the storms of life, you get the outcome you’re looking for.  Sometimes, God calms the storm.  But then there are other times, when things don’t work out like we planned, prayed, or hoped.  In those moments, God calms you.  Whatever the outcome of your circumstances, the important thing to remember is that you are not alone, you matter, God is real, and God does care about you.

Faith, in these circumstances, means trusting in that love and embodying it in the way that we live our lives, so that we, through our love, can become living reminders of God’s love to each other.  Where is God when someone you love is going through life’s storms?  God is in you.  That inner impulse you feel to pay your respects, send a card, bring a casserole, or lend a hand?  That’s God.  On a larger scale, that still, small voice in your heart that makes you want to speak out against injustice whenever you see God’s children, your brothers and sisters, being treated unfairly?  That’s God too.

Whenever you listen to that inner voice and act on it, you are living a faith-filled life.  I would even say that you are living a godly life, a spirit-filled life.  And, best of all, when you live like that: you are making it easier for someone out there to trust that we are not alone in the storms of life, that we matter, that God is real, and that God cares about us.  And that’s what faith is all about.

Longing For Meaning

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon1 Comment
Helen Keller

Last week, I was invited to speak to the Durham Lions Club.  This is what I had to say:

On the first day, God created the dog and said: “Sit all day by the door of your house and bark at anyone who comes in or walks past. For this, I will give you a life span of 20 years.”

The dog said: “That’s a long time to be barking. How about only 10 years and I’ll give you back the other 10?’

So God agreed.

On the second day, God created the monkey and said: “Entertain people, do tricks, and make them laugh. For this, I’ll give you a 20-year life span.”

The monkey said: “Monkey tricks for 20 years? That’s a pretty long time to perform. How about I give you back 10 like the Dog did?”

And God agreed.

On the third day, God created the cow and said: “You must go into the field with the farmer all day long and suffer under the sun, have calves and give milk to support the farmer’s family. For this, I will give you a life span of 60 years.”

The cow said: “That’s kind of a tough life you want me to live for 60 years. How about 20 and I’ll give back the other 40?”

And God agreed again.

On the fourth day, God created man and said: “Eat, sleep, play, marry and enjoy your life. For this, I’ll give you 20 years.”

But man said: “Only 20 years? Could you possibly give me my 20, the 40 the cow gave back, the 10 the monkey gave back, and the 10 the dog gave back — that makes 80, OK?”

“OK,” God said. “As long as you’re sure.”

So that is why for our first 20 years we eat, sleep, play and enjoy ourselves. For the next 40 years we slave in the sun to support our family. For the next 10 years we do monkey tricks to entertain the grandchildren. And for the last 10 years we sit on the front porch and bark at everyone.

And that, my friends, is the meaning of life. Now you know.

This, so we’re told, is the meaning of life.  But philosophers, thinkers, and wise people from every time, place, and culture have long suspected that’s not true.  Something inside of us resists what Shakespeare’s tragic hero, Macbeth, said about the nature and meaning of life:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Most of us refuse to believe that life “signifies nothing”.  Something within each of us searches for significance.  We need to know that our lives have meaning.

I suspect that such a longing for meaning was active in the mind of Melvin Jones, the insurance agent from Chicago who had an epiphany during a lunch group with business colleauges in 1917.

Jones wondered out loud, “What if these men, who are successful because of their drive, intelligence, and ambition, were to put their talents to work improving their communities?”

It wasn’t long before he discovered other like-minded professionals who were asking themselves the same questions.  They organized a group that became the first Lions Club.  Within three years, they had grown into an international organization.

Then, in June of 1925, Melvin Jones’ vision of community service began to take on flesh as the members of Lions Club International listened to an impassioned plea from that famous icon of American history, Helen Keller.  As you all know, Ms. Keller called upon those Lions to become “Knights of the Blind”.  Few have ever heard her brief appeal in its entirety, so I would like to share it with you now:

Dear Lions and Ladies:

I suppose you have heard the legend that represents opportunity as a capricious lady, who knocks at every door but once, and if the door isn’t opened quickly, she passes on, never to return. And that is as it should be. Lovely, desirable ladies won’t wait. You have to go out and grab ’em.

I am your opportunity. I am knocking at your door. I want to be adopted. The legend doesn’t say what you are to do when several beautiful opportunities present themselves at the same door. I guess you have to choose the one you love best. I hope you will adopt me. I am the youngest here, and what I offer you is full of splendid opportunities for service.

The American Foundation for the Blind is only four years old. It grew out of the imperative needs of the blind, and was called into existence by the sightless themselves. It is national and international in scope and in importance. It represents the best and most enlightened thought on our subject that has been reached so far. Its object is to make the lives of the blind more worthwhile everywhere by increasing their economic value and giving them the joy of normal activity.

Try to imagine how you would feel if you were suddenly stricken blind today. Picture yourself stumbling and groping at noonday as in the night; your work, your independence, gone. In that dark world wouldn’t you be glad if a friend took you by the hand and said, “Come with me and I will teach you how to do some of the things you used to do when you could see?” That is just the kind of friend the American Foundation is going to be to all the blind in this country if seeing people will give it the support it must have.

You have heard how through a little word dropped from the fingers of another, a ray of light from another soul touched the darkness of my mind and I found myself, found the world, found God. It is because my teacher learned about me and broke through the dark, silent imprisonment which held me that I am able to work for myself and for others. It is the caring we want more than money. The gift without the sympathy and interest of the giver is empty. If you care, if we can make the people of this great country care, the blind will indeed triumph over blindness.

The opportunity I bring to you, Lions, is this: To foster and sponsor the work of the American Foundation for the Blind. Will you not help me hasten the day when there shall be no preventable blindness; no little deaf, blind child untaught; no blind man or woman unaided? I appeal to you Lions, you who have your sight, your hearing, you who are strong and brave and kind. Will you not constitute yourselves Knights of the Blind in this crusade against darkness?

I thank you.

While I was doing my research for this talk today, I was particularly struck by these words from Ms. Keller’s speach: “a ray of light from another soul touched the darkness of my mind and I found myself, found the world, found God.”

She was referring to Annie Sullivan, the teacher who worked indefatigably to help the young Helen Keller live well with her disability.  Ms. Sullivan forged a deep connection with Ms. Keller, who would later describe the event mythically as “a ray of light from another soul touch[ing] the darkness of my mind”.  And what was the final result?  In Ms. Keller’s words: “I found myself, found the world, found God.”

Now, since Lions Club is not a religious organization, you might find it helpful to replace her word, “God”, in your own mind with “that which gives my life ultimate meaning.”

Through the tireless compassion of Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller experienced a deep and profound sense of connection to herself, the world, and ultimate meaning.

It was this deep and profound sense of connection that resonated so powerfully with Melvin Jones and those early Lions.  They felt a longing for meaning that they sought to fulfill by serving their communities.

They wanted to be that ray of light from another soul that touched the darkness of someone’s mind so that, together, we all might find a deeper connection with ourselves, the world, and that which gives life meaning.

As we all know, the Lions accepted Helen Keller’s challenge to become “Knights of the Blind”.  Generations of Lions Clubs have dedicated their time, talent, and treasure to the treatment and prevention of blindness.

You and I live in a society that desperately needs the light you Lions carry into the darkness.  Our culture of consumerism has blinded us to the needs of others.  Our ears are deaf to the call of service.  We are falsely informed that ultimate meaning can be found in the pursuit of power, profit, and possessions.  It’s obvious to anyone who watches TV that we have forgotten the epic words of John F.  Kennedy: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

This world needs Melvin Jones and his Lions now more than ever.  We need to be reminded that the meaning of life can only be measured in what we give, not what we get.  So, I encourage you today to continue your work inside Lions Club and out.  Helen Keller is still knocking at your door!  Will you answer it?

Answer it with your time, talent, and treasure.  More than that, answer it with your whole self.  Remember what Ms. Keller said: “It is the caring we want more than money. The gift without the sympathy and interest of the giver is empty.”

Through your caring, you are making a better world, not just for blind people, but for yourselves and all of us who long for meaning.

I conclude with the benediction that I give to my church each Sunday:

Go out into the world in peace.  Hold on to what is good.  Return no one evil for evil.  Strengthen the faint-hearted.  Support the weak.  Help the suffering.  Honor all beings.  Love and serve, rejoicing in the power of the spirit.

And may the peace that passes understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of that which gives life meaning.  Be blessed and be a blessing.

The Question is the Answer

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon1 Comment

Krishna revealing his universal form to Prince Arjuna.
Image found at bhagwangiriji.com

Isaiah’s vision of God’s glory.
Image found at artloversonline.imagekind.com

Listen to this sermon at fpcboonville.org

Isaiah 6:1-8, John 3:1-17

Today, the first Sunday after Pentecost, is Trinity Sunday: the holiday in our church calendar when we’re supposed to talk about the Trinity.  Trinity is our name for the traditional Christian idea that we worship one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  God is three.  God is one.  That’s the textbook Sunday school answer.  Are you confused yet?  Is your head hurting?  Good.

I had lunch this week with my friend, Mother Linda Logan, the priest at Trinity Episcopal Church, and she joked that Trinity Sunday is typically the Sunday when most clergy try to schedule their vacations.  Who can blame them?  The idea of the Trinity is so bizarre and abstract, it’s hard to preach about in a way that feels relevant to everyday life.  Alas, I seem to have miscalculated this year because my vacation doesn’t start until next week.  Don’t worry though, I’ve given it some serious thought this week and I think I’ve found a way to spice it up.

You see, people didn’t always think of the Trinity as an academic theological concept.  There was a time when people would literally start riots in the streets about it.  They said that, during the early 4th century, you couldn’t even ask a baker about the price of bread without getting into an argument about theology.

The debate got so heated that the Roman emperor, Constantine (himself only a recent convert to Christianity), convened a conference of bishops at his lake house in a town called Nicaea.  They argued back and forth ad nauseum until the emperor decided that enough was enough and promptly put his foot down in favor of the position that we now refer to as the Trinity.  Shortly thereafter, the Nicene Creed was adopted as a trophy for those who had won the debate.  Needless to say, it’s not a very noble beginning for this idea that most orthodox theologians now regard as central to the Christian religion.

Obviously, you won’t find the Trinity mentioned anywhere in our scripture readings for today (because it hadn’t been invented yet).  The idea of the Trinity, as such, does not appear anywhere in the Bible.  Nevertheless, most Christians for the last 1,700 years have kept the Trinity as their main idea about who God is and how God works.  Something about the mystery in this incomprehensible puzzle has compelled Christians to hold onto the Trinity for almost two millennia.

Mystery is a troubling word for folks in the modern era.  We’re not so good at mystery.  Modern people much prefer concrete facts and figures.  We like being able to find the answers and solve the problems.  To the modern mind, then, the Trinity is infuriating.  By its very definition, it can’t be figured out.

Ever since the Enlightenment in the 18th century, our species has learned how look farther and deeper into the nature of the universe than our ancestors ever dreamed of.  We have accomplished feats of strength and intelligence that boggle the imagination.  Looking through his telescope at the moons of Jupiter, could Galileo ever have imagined that we would one day send spacecraft to see them up close?  Yet, in spite of all our achievements, human beings have also managed to discover new ways to systematically inflict death and destruction on each other with ruthless efficiency.  Hitler’s holocaust, two world wars, and the nuclear arms race have opened our eyes to that reality. Reason has not purged the animal from our collective being as we had hoped.  Indeed, if it weren’t for the baffling presence of mystery, our species would have given up hope long ago.

Thankfully, there remains something within our subconscious minds that spurs us on toward an encounter with that which is unknown and unknowable.  We get the sense that, in the darkness of ignorance and uncertainty, we are not alone.  Our scripture readings from this morning, while they mention nothing of the Trinity, have quite a bit to tell us about mystery.  In each passage, someone comes face-to-face with the infinite mystery of the divine and is permanently transformed by it.

In the first reading, the Jewish prophet Isaiah has an ecstatic vision of God’s glory.  The prophet tells his readers how his senses were overwhelmed,

I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke.

I love the dramatic imagery in this story.  It reminds me of a similar passage in a classic Indian poem called the Bhagavad Gita or “Song of the Lord”.  In this poem, a prince named Arjuna is having a philosophical chat with his chariot driver named Krishna.  Slowly, it dawns on the prince that there is more to this chariot driver than meets the eye.  Krishna, it turns out, is actually a divine messenger who was sent to teach the prince eternal wisdom.  At one point in the story, Krishna allows Prince Arjuna to see his true form:

with many mouths and eyes, and many visions of marvel, with numerous divine ornaments, and holding divine weapons.  Wearing divine garlands and apparel, anointed with celestial perfumes and ointments, full of all wonders, the limitless God with faces on all sides.  If the splendor of thousands of suns were to blaze forth all at once in the sky, even that would not resemble the splendor of that exalted being.  Arjuna saw the entire universe, divided in many ways, but standing as One in the body of Krishna, the God of gods.  Then Arjuna, filled with wonder and his hairs standing on end, bowed his head to the Lord and prayed with folded hands.  (Bhagavad Gita 11.10-14)

I love how similar these visionary experiences are, even though they come from very different cultures and religions.  In both stories, human beings are left standing in awe before the eternal mystery.  In Isaiah’s story, the one that Christians are more familiar with, even the angels cover their eyes and sing, “Holy, holy, holy”.  That word, holy, is one that we use in church a lot.  People use it outside of church too, sometimes combined with an expletive, in order to express amazement.  No one is more famous for doing this than Burt Ward, who played Batman’s sidekick Robin in the 1960s TV series.  Robin had all kinds of unique exclamations: “Holy Hallelujah, Batman!  Holy Fruit Salad, Batman!  Holy Uncanny Photographic Mental Processes!”  Holy was Robin’s catchphrase.  Given the startling nature of what Isaiah and Arjuna were experiencing in their respective visions, I can just imagine Robin standing beside them, shouting, “Holy, holy, holy, Batman!”  But, in Isaiah’s case, it was the angels who were saying it.

The word holy, as we tend to use it, typically means sacred or blessed.  However, on a more general level, it literally means special or different.  Something is holy when it is other than what one would expect.  Therefore, it is entirely appropriate for Robin to use it as an exclamation when he is caught off guard (which seems to happen a lot).  In the Isaiah passage, it seems that even the angels are amazed at the appearance of God’s glory in the temple.  They repeat “holy” three times as a way of communicating ultimate emphasis: it’s not just holy, it’s not just holy holy, it’s holy holy holy!  Special, special, special!  Different, different, different!  Amazing, amazing, amazing!  If we’re not caught off-guard by God’s presence like Isaiah, if we aren’t filled with wonder with our hairs standing on end like Arjuna’s, then we’re not really paying attention.

In our New Testament reading this morning, Jesus intentionally confuses a religious scholar named Nicodemus.  The latter comes to Jesus in private with an honest question: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”  And what does Jesus do?  Does he take this opportunity to clarify himself and maybe even start a theology class?  No, he alienates Nicodemus and leaves him with even more questions than he started with.  Beginning with a cryptic statement, “You must be born from above” (or “born again” as some translations say), Jesus finishes with an outright insult: “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?”  The philosopher in me feels indignant on Nicodemus’ behalf!  Can’t Jesus see that this is an honest and intelligent person who is simply trying to make sense of things in his own mind?  But rational understanding is not what Jesus is after in his conversation with Nicodemus.

Instead, Jesus seems to be giving Nicodemus a koan.  For those who are unfamiliar with that term, a koan is a Zen Buddhist riddle that cannot be solved by rational thinking.  Zen masters will often give their students a koan to fuel the students’ meditation and spur them toward enlightenment.  The most famous Zen koan is one we’ve probably all heard before: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”  If you immediately started thinking about your hand just now, then you don’t get it.  When it comes to the koan, if you can answer the question, then you haven’t answered the question.  Why?  Because the question is the answer.  The question itself is the point of the exercise.  Let it take you beyond the realm of what you think of as normal reason.  Sit with it a while.  Let it free your mind and expand your consciousness.  Only then will you be able to appreciate the mystery.

Neither Isaiah nor Nicodemus knew anything of the Trinity.  That wasn’t yet part of their culture or religion.  The Trinity is a human idea that tries to express the mystery of God as we have experienced it.  Like a Zen koan, the Trinity is a riddle that cannot be solved by rational thinking.  But if we sit with it and meditate on the mystery, we might just find ourselves in the state of holy confusion that some might call enlightened.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says to Arjuna, “You are not able to see Me with your physical eye; therefore, I give you the divine eye to see My majestic power and glory.”  With that “divine eye”, it says that the prince “saw the entire universe, divided in many ways, but standing as One in the body of Krishna, the God of gods.”  This is not all that far off from Isaiah’s vision, wherein the prophet realized that “the whole earth is full of [God’s] glory.”

If you’re confused about the Trinity, that’s a good thing.  It means that you’re paying attention.  Confusion is the first step on the path toward a free and enlightened mind.

I see confusion as a virtue at this point in the modern age where absolute certainty has become an idol.  We find ourselves these days surrounded by the cacophonous voices of politicians and advertisers, all of whom claim to possess the secret that will bring peace, security, and a successful end to our “pursuit of happiness”.  Vote for this candidate!  Buy that product!  That’s the key to lasting joy!

In this environment, even religion and spirituality themselves become products for consumption.  Fundamentalist preachers and cult leaders assure us that, if you simply sign on their dotted line and accept their dogmas without question, you too can secure your place in heaven for eternity.  In spite of their claims to possess “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” as revealed in ancient times, the fundamentalist commitments to absolute certainty and biblical literalism are very recent and modern ideas.  They only came about during the last one hundred years or so as a reaction to developments in science and philosophy that led some to question and/or reinterpret parts of their faith.  Their fear is understandable, but we don’t have to look hard to find the dark side of that kind of religion.  The September 11th attacks and the Jonestown massacre, where almost a thousand people died after willingly drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid at their pastor’s insistence, demonstrate what can happen when religious fanaticism goes unquestioned.

Under circumstances such as these, confusion is a virtue that provides us with humility and reverence for the mystery of it all.  The spiritually enlightened mind is one that can comfortably say, “I don’t know!”  Zen masters call this “beginner’s mind”.  Taoist sages call it “the uncarved block”.  Jesus called it “faith like a child”.

When it comes to the koan of the Trinity, there is no answer because the question is the answer.  The question leads us to confusion, confusion leads us to humility, humility leads us to reverence, and reverence leads us into a deeper experience of that great eternal mystery wherein we begin to see “the entire universe, divided in many ways, but standing as One” and “the whole earth… full of [God’s] glory.”  Only then can we truly join with prophets, angels, and saints from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation under heaven who forever sing: Holy, holy, holy!  Amazing, amazing, amazing!