Category: Sermon

Elements of Worship: Sacrament

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Elements of Worship, Sermon2 Comments

This week’s sermon from First Presbyterian, Boonville.

The text is I Corinthians 11:23-26.

Click here to listen to this sermon at fpcboonville.org

“ACHOO!”

“Bless you!”

Gyula Derkovits, 'The Last Supper'

Do you know why people say that when someone sneezes?  The practice goes back almost to the time of Christ, but nobody knows for sure how or why it got started.  There are a number of interesting theories out there.  Some think it started during an outbreak of the bubonic plague as a way of commending people to God’s care when nothing more could be done for them (i.e. “It’s been nice knowing you”).  Tibetan Buddhists believed that sneezing provides a moment of “clear consciousness” (like dying, falling asleep, or meditating) during which one might be able to achieve Enlightenment.  But my favorite explanation is this one: when you sneeze, your soul is temporarily dislodged from your body.  The blessing makes it go back in so that the devil won’t come and possess you.

That’s just one example of the kinds of crazy superstitions that we got rid of at the end of the middle ages in western society.  We might still say “bless you” when somebody sneezes, but I seriously doubt that anyone still believes that it’s your soul trying to leave your body.  We needed to get rid of that superstition (along with several others).  I, for one, am glad that our society no longer burns women at the stake because “they might be witches.”

The light of reason brought us out of those dark ages and into the modern era, where humanity has grown by leaps and bounds.  We’ve landed on the moon and created a global communication network so efficient that I could just flip out my phone and have a conversation with someone in India if I felt like it.  Letting go of these old superstitions has, on the whole, been a good thing.  But, like everything else in this world, our so-called Enlightenment has its dark side.  We now live in a world that is “disenchanted”.  We’ve lost that sense of meaning and connectedness with the world around us.  We no longer see spirits and fairies in the trees and rivers.  If we think of God at all, it is as some distant and abstract Creator who has little or nothing to do with the world as we know it.  Naïve superstition gives way to cynical materialism and we see ourselves as random collections of atoms that just conveniently happen to make consciousness possible.  The world around us becomes an empty shell of resources just waiting to be exploited for profit.  Human life becomes equally meaningless under this mindset.  What matters is gaining the upper hand in the ongoing battle for survival (which we all eventually lose).

In reaction to this sinister cynicism, some religious folks have chosen to side with the aforementioned distant Creator.  They gather round their campfires and sing, “This world is not my home, I’m just a-passin’ through” and “Some bright morning, when this life is over, I’ll fly away.”  These folks want to save their souls from this wicked world in order to enjoy the blessings of some far-off heaven for eternity.  This perspective may seem more like faithfulness at first, but it nevertheless leaves this world looking just as empty and meaningless as cynical materialism does.  It is the advocates of this kind of escapism who shout things like, “Drill, baby drill!” and figure, “This whole world is going to hell anyway, so why bother to take care of it?”

We needed to drop the ridiculous superstition of the middle ages, but I wonder if maybe we threw out the baby with the bathwater?  Secular and religious folks alike have lost all sense of connectedness to God, the earth, and each other.  Both sides are saying that this earth just doesn’t matter.

Is there some way to reconnect with that larger sense of meaning and mystery in the cosmos without going back to that ridiculous superstition?  I think so.

We’re currently in the middle of a five-week sermon series on the Elements of Worship.  We’ve already looked at the Word, prayer, and service as Elements of Worship.  Next week, we’ll be talking about relationship.  This week, we’re talking about sacrament.

The word sacrament comes from a Latin word that means mystery.  When Christians talk about sacraments, they’re typically referring to one of two church events: Baptism and the Eucharist (a.k.a. the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion).  A few weeks ago, we had a service where talked about the sacrament of Baptism at length in the sermon.  We even baptized three new people into our congregation.  So this week, I’m mainly going to focus on sacrament of the Eucharist (which we happen to be celebrating in our service later today).

In the sacrament (mystery) of the Eucharist, we celebrate three realities.  First, we remember Jesus: who he is and what he did.  Jesus revealed the heart of God to the world in a way that no one else ever has.  He “gave himself for us” in a life of service and love.  We participate in that act of self-giving when we remember him and receive his gift of himself, his body and blood, into our own bodies.

Second, we participate in a present reality.  Remember the old saying, “You are what you eat”?  Well, it’s true.  We are the body of Christ.  Through him, we are also part of each other: one loaf, one cup, one body, one family.  They also say that “blood is thicker than water”.  In this case, the blood of Christ is thicker than our own blood.  The blood of Christ flows in our veins.  Gone is any illusion of pedigree, race, nationality, status, or caste.  As Christians, this is where our loyalty lies.  This is where our true identity is to be found.  Blood is thicker than water and this blood is thickest of all.  When we target, discriminate against, or otherwise antagonize those who have been to the table of Christ with us, we are turning our backs on our own kin.  This is a truth worth remembering whenever we are next tempted to divide the world into “us” and “them”.

Finally, Christians at the Lord’s table anticipate the future with hope.  Christ told his disciples that he would drink wine with them next when the kingdom of God comes in its fullness.  The end of history is often described in the scriptures as a fully-catered wedding reception.  The bread and wine we now eat and drink around this table is a foretaste of that coming celebration when all things are made new, justice and equality are established on earth, and (as it says in Revelation) “God will wipe every tear from [our] eyes.  Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”  When the tides of despair threaten to overwhelm us, we have these edible tokens to hold onto.  They are the aperitifs of the heavenly banquet.

In the Eucharist, we are fed with spiritual food.  This sacrament, I think, holds the key to reconnecting us with our lost sense of wonder and mystery.  Without it, Christian faith too easily becomes just one more product for sale in the modern marketplace of ideas.  With it, we are able to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”  Through this sacrament, we touch the mystery of Love that springs from the very heart of the universe and reaches out to its edges.  Just as we say in the Great Thanksgiving, I invite you to “Lift up your hearts” to see that “heaven and earth are full of [God’s] glory”.

How do we do this?  How can we “lift up our hearts”?  Well, I think we can start by simply celebrating the sacrament as often as we can.  As recently as the 1970s, most Presbyterian congregations celebrated the Eucharist only four times a year.  Since then, the frequency has increased.  Most of our churches celebrate it monthly.  More and more, there are churches in our denomination that are beginning to celebrate the sacrament on a weekly basis.  In our church, that is a decision for the session of elders to make.  I would like to encourage those of you who are currently serving as elders to meditate on this and consider increasing the frequency with which we celebrate communion.  In our Book of Order it says that the Eucharist “shall be celebrated regularly and frequently enough so that it is clear to all that the Lord’s Supper is integral to worship, and not an addition to it.”

We Presbyterians are used to thinking of our Sunday worship as revolving around the central event of reading and preaching God’s Word.  This is true.  But it’s also true that we worship in a binary system.  Our liturgy revolves around the twin stars of Word and Sacrament.  They are meant to go together.  John Calvin, one of the founders of our tradition, urged his churches in Geneva to celebrate Communion weekly.  Calvin told them that, yes, the scriptures make up the foundation of the church, but the sacraments are its pillars.  The church won’t stand up without both to support it.  Let’s make sure that we are not starving ourselves of Christ’s spiritual food and drink.

The moment of real transformation comes when we begin to see the presence of Christ, not just in this bread and wine, but everywhere we look.  This is what it means to “lift up your hearts” and see that “heaven and earth are full of [God’s] glory,” as it says in the liturgy.  The more regularly we honor the presence of the sacred mystery in this bread, the more we will begin to see it in all bread.  And we will see that, like this consecrated bread, all bread is meant to be shared.  So let’s share our bread with those who are hungry.  And I’m not just talking about literal bread either: let’s share the bread of freedom and equality with all.  Let’s learn to share the bread of work, education, healthcare, and housing with those who are also our brothers and sisters.  They are God’s children and we are one family.  This sharing is a sacramental sharing.  It’s an integral part of what we do here on Sunday.

This whole universe is sacred.  It is infused with divine glory from stem to stern.  Our celebration of the sacraments helps us reconnect with that mystery.  Let’s make that connection as deeply and as often as possible, so that it might stay with us as we go out from this place to share our bread with the hungry and be the body of Christ in the world.

Lift up your hearts.  Heaven and earth are full of God’s glory.  Let us give thanks.

Elements of Worship: Service

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Elements of Worship, SermonLeave a comment

This week’s sermon from First Pres, Boonville.  Part 3 in a series of 5.

The text is Matthew 16:21-28.

Click here to listen to this sermon at fpcboonville.org.

Star Trek's George Takei (Mr. Sulu). Image by Gage Skidmore.

Did you know that there’s a civil war going on in our country right now?  I’m serious.  There is.  It’s been happening for over thirty years.  Unlike the last Civil War, this one isn’t between the North and South.  You might be thinking, “He means the war between the political Right and the political Left.”  Nope.  Black and White?  Nope.  Haves and Have-nots?  Not even close.  Right now, I’m talking about the bitter divide that exists between Star Trek fans and Star Wars fans.  The geeks and nerds community is a house divided against itself.  My fellow Americans, this cannot be!

I feel so torn in this conflict.  The fight between Star Trek and Star Wars runs right through the center of my own heart.  I dream of one day being beamed aboard the starship Enterprise so that I too can “boldly go where no one has gone before.”  At the same time, I also fantasize about trained as a Jedi by Obi Wan Kenobi.  How can they ask me to choose sides between these two epic artifacts of science fiction lore?

Fortunately, there is one person out there who has issued a call for “Star Peace” and it’s none other than George Takei, the original Mr. Sulu on Star Trek.  He’s calling for a “Star Alliance” of fans from Star Trek and Star Wars who are willing to put aside their differences and fight the real threat to good science fiction: Twilight.  You may have seen the Twilight books and films being advertised in recent years.  For those who haven’t experienced it, Twilight, in George Takei’s own words, is all about “Vampires who sparkle and mope and go to high school.”  In Twilight, according to Takei, there is no “sense of heroism, camaraderie, and epic battle… There are no great stories, characters, or profound life lessons to be had… In Twilight, the only message that rings through loud and clear is: ‘Does my boyfriend like me?’”

Now, I don’t actually care if people like Twilight.  So why am I telling you this?  Why am I taking time out of my sermon to drag you down this wormhole into the darkest depths of the nerd kingdom?  Because I’m very intrigued by the way in which Mr. Takei has criticized Twilight.  Let me give it to you again in his words:

Gone is any sense of heroism, camaraderie, or epic battle.  In its place we have vampires that sparkle and mope and go to high school… there are no great stories, characters, or profound life lessons to be had in Twilight.  No.  In Twilight, the only message that rings through loud and clear is: ‘Does my boyfriend like me?’

What Mr. Takei is saying, in so many words, is that good stories are always bigger than the people in them.

As it is in science fiction, so it is in real life.  Imagine those who live entirely selfish lives with no connection to anyone or anything other than that which maximizes their own personal profit.  The thrill of financial stability lasts for a little while, but wears thin eventually.  Who can’t think of tabloid headlines depicting any number of celebrity scandals brought on by conspicuous consumption and wanton indulgence?  Despite its material benefits, I think most of us can agree that such a life does not sound ultimately appealing.  Something deep within us longs to be part of a bigger story than that of our own little lives.

We’ve been talking about the Elements of Worship these past few weeks at our church.  On the first week, we talked about the Word of God as an Element of Worship.  Last week we talked about Prayer.  If you missed either of those sermons, you can listen to them on our website at www.fpcboonville.org.  In coming weeks, we will discuss Sacrament and Relationship as Elements of Worship.  This week, we’re talking about Service as an Element of Worship.

“Service” is a word that we use a lot.  If you go out to a restaurant where the staff is friendly and the refills keep coming, you’re probably going to say, “Wow!  This place has really good service!”  And what will you do next?  You’ll probably leave a bigger tip.  Isn’t that interesting?  A waiter brings his whole self to work, welcomes customers with genuine personal warmth, and people just naturally respond with generosity.  Remember that point because it will become important later.  Here’s another example: When a person is a soldier or sailor in some branch of our country’s armed forces, we say that she is “in the service.”  In other words, she dedicates her whole self to the cause of national defense by risking her life in a combat zone.  We tend to respect that, don’t we?  A lot of people wear yellow ribbons that say, “Support the Troops.”

In the same way, when we talk about service as an Element of Worship, we’re talking about more than this one-hour-per-week ritual that we do on Sunday mornings in this building.  We’re talking about more than the cash we fork over in the collection plate.  We’re even talking about more than the time and energy that so many of you tirelessly volunteer for our various church projects during the year.  Just like that waiter or soldier, real service happens when you offer your whole self to something bigger than you.  Service, as an Element of Worship, is a self-offering.

As Christians, we see our self-offering as connected to and growing out of the self-offering of Jesus.  His life, death, and resurrection provide us with a lens through which we can come to understand what it means to give ourselves as an offering.

First, his life.  Jesus gave himself as an offering in two ways.  He offered himself to God and he offered himself to others.  These two ideas cannot be separated.  Jesus believed that God is Love, therefore you can’t love God with your whole heart, soul, mind, and strength without loving your neighbor as yourself.  If you try to do one without the other, you’re going to end up very confused about what love is.

Jesus’ commitment to love (in this dual sense) got him into trouble on more than one occasion.  He exposed the hypocrisy of the powers that be.  He threatened the security of religious and political authorities in ways that no terrorist ever could.  Leaders in the public and private sectors alike were so frightened by what Jesus stood for that they even temporarily put aside their mutual hatred for each other in a grand conspiracy to have him killed.

Under these circumstances, no one would have blamed Jesus for mounting a defensive strategy in order to ensure his own survival, but that’s not what he does.  It says in today’s reading from the gospel according to Matthew: “Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”  Jesus walks straight into the belly of the beast, knowing full-well what the beast is about to do to him.

Jesus was not so caught up in his own ego that he wasn’t willing to offer himself.  He knew that his personal story was part of the universe’s bigger story.  Sure, he could pick up a sword and fight for his own survival, but he knew that survival isn’t everything.  His fellow Jews were fighting for their survival every day and, ironically, it was killing them.  “Those who live by the sword die by the sword,” he said.

So, instead of the path of survival, Jesus opted for the path of self-offering.  He lived his life of love as an offering to God and others.  When that love brought him into conflict with powerful forces that wanted to kill him, he walked the way of the cross and let them do their worst.  But that’s not the end of the story.

What happens next is the best part.  We celebrate it every year at Easter time.  The offering turned into a miracle.  Early in the morning, on the first day of the week, three women found an empty tomb.  And an angel asked them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?  He is not here.  He is risen!”  This is where the big story really gets going.  Death itself starts to unravel like an ugly old sweater.  The powers that be were vanquished by the power of love.  Christians remember this event annually as our most sacred holiday.  We celebrate it weekly in order to remind ourselves of what we really believe in.  As Christians, we don’t believe in survival; we believe in resurrection.  That is the true meaning of service (self-offering) as an Element of Worship.  Jesus taught us that.

What does this look like for us?  That’s a great story about Jesus, but how can we live lives of self-offering and resurrection today?  Jesus said to his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”  The way of the cross is a path, not just for Jesus, but for all of us as well.  We who claim to follow him must decide whether we will choose survival (like the world) or resurrection (like Jesus).

When we choose to follow the way of the cross, we become part of a story that’s bigger than us.  We say that we are willing to jeopardize our survival for something more important.  It’s a dangerous move to make, but if we move in faith, we see miracles.  I once heard someone say that, until you find something worth dying for, you’re not really living.  Are we really living?  Are you?  What are you willing to die for?  What is this church willing to die for?  When we find an answer to that question, we’ll learn what resurrection is really all about.  Like George Takei was saying: there we will find heroism, camaraderie, and epic battles.  There there are great stories, characters, and profound life lessons to be had.

I heard a story this week from Rev. Marlin Lavanhar, the senior minister at All Souls’ Unitarian Church in Tulsa, OK.  He said their church made a rather controversial decision several years ago.  They decided to take all the money that came into the church through their collection plate (about $20,000 per year) and give it away.  People were scared because that’s a lot of money.  The church depended on that money for their operating costs.  But they decided it was the right thing to do, so they amended their budget and went for it.  In that first year, rather than the $20,000 that usually came in through the collection plate, they raised $150,000 and gave it all away.  Now, you might say, “That’s great, but it’s too bad that they couldn’t meet their budget.”  Actually, according to Marlin, they did meet their budget that year.  They even took in about 10% more than they needed.  “Generosity begets generosity,” Marlin said.  Remember what I said about the waiter?  When somebody serves from the heart and offers him/herself, aren’t you just naturally inclined to leave a bigger tip?  Generosity begets generosity.

Let’s find another example, maybe one that’s a little closer to home.  I’ve mentioned this already, but I can’t help bragging on you folks again.  You remember this past Christmas Eve, right?  We heard about a crisis in our community where the county government was cutting funding to daycare programs.  Hundreds of kids were being affected and some of the most reputable and affordable daycare agencies were in danger of closing.  And the elders of our church voted unanimously to take the collection from Christmas Eve, our single biggest worship service of the year, and send the whole thing to one of those struggling daycare agencies.  Did you know that, with what came in that night, our little country church was able to cut a check for $1,000 to Thea Bowman House?  We’ve never taken up a Christmas Eve collection that big!  Generosity begets generosity.  Did you know that there are people in the community who noticed what we did and decided to join our church because of it?  That’s resurrection in action.

One more story about you folks.  Last summer, controversy was in the air as New York state was making a decision about legalizing same-sex marriage.  I drove down to Albany that week and stood in the halls of the state capitol building.  I saw the crowds of people shouting and holding signs with Bible verses about hellfire and damnation.  During that time, our little church took a stand.  We stood up and said, “All God’s children are created equal: black or white, male or female, gay or straight.”  At a church supper only two weeks before that happened, one of our own long-time church members came out of the closet to us at a church supper.  He shared his story with us.  And I remember the first thing that anybody said, after a long silence, was, “Well, God don’t make no junk!”  Our church took a stand.  We made a statement that this is a welcoming church.  We told the world that this church is a place where the law of love trumps the letter of the law.

Sure, it was a controversial thing to do.  It still is.  Our survival instinct might tell us to keep quiet and not rock the boat, because we don’t want to lose church members to controversy.  But you all chose resurrection instead of survival.  Did you know that people in the community noticed what we did?  On the very next Sunday after the legislation passed in Albany, a news crew surprised us during our morning worship.  They had TV news cameras set up right here in the sanctuary.  People heard about our little country church and said, “What?  A church that accepts and welcomes gay and lesbian people?  A church that believes that God loves everybody?  We’ve got to check this out!”  In the past few months, families have driven in from as far away as Utica to visit our church.  We didn’t lose people by being controversial, we gained them!  That’s resurrection in action!

And let me tell you what: we’re going to keep doing it.  We’re going to open the doors of this church so wide that the whole world will know it’s welcome here.  There are a lot of churches in Boonville, but there’s not very many where people can go and know they’ll be loved and accepted no matter who they are.  But people know they’re welcome here.  This sermon is being played on the radio, so even more people will know after this week.  I know it’s controversial but I don’t care (and neither should you).  Just like Jesus, we are offering ourselves to God and our neighbors.  We are choosing resurrection over survival.

When we go downstairs after worship today, we’ll be hearing our annual reports from all our different church committees.  We’ll be voting on this year’s budget and deciding our thoughts together for 2012.  As you look at the paperwork and hear the reports, I want you to remember what service and self-offering are really all about.  I want to invite you to look past your ego-driven instinct for survival and look to your God-given faith in resurrection.  That, more than anything else, will make a difference for the future of our church.  Like George Takei was saying: here we will find heroism, camaraderie, and epic battles.  Here there are great stories, characters, and profound life lessons to be had.

Here is a video of George Takei’s call for Star Peace:

Elements of Worship: Prayer

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Elements of Worship, SermonLeave a comment

This week’s sermon from First Pres, Boonville.  2nd of 5 in a series on the Elements of Worship.

The text is Matthew 6:5-15.

Mahatma Gandhi, the great Indian social reformer, once said something quite profound when someone asked him what he thought of Christianity.  He said, “I like your Christ but I don’t like your Christians.  They are so unlike your Christ.”  In a similar vein, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said to a group of Christians (in his typically caustic fashion), “Yuck, you make me sick!  Because you redeemed don’t look like you’re redeemed!”

While these comments are more than a little bit harsh, I think we Christians have to admit they are also more than a little bit true.  For a long time, Christians have held onto a crazy idea that we are the guardians of infallible doctrine and impeccable morals.  The end result of this idea is that the rest of the world has come to see Christians, not as messengers of good news and amazing grace, but as “sour-faced saints” with their halos screwed on just a little too tight.  Under these circumstances, church becomes little more than a “holy club” for people with an answer for every question and a solution to every problem.

Is this who we’re meant to be?  I think not.  Consider Nietzsche and Gandhi’s words in reverse: how would you describe someone who “looks like” he or she is “redeemed”?  Can you imagine what it would be like to live in moment-to-moment awareness of the truth that within, behind, and beyond the apparently random facts of life there is, at the very heart of the universe, a “Love that will not let me go”?

Christians (in their better moments) believe there has been at least one such life in the course of human history.  By this, I am referring of course to the life of Jesus.  Folks come out in droves to celebrate with us at Christmas and Easter the beginning and the end of Jesus’ thirty-something years on Earth (and we’re delighted to welcome them on those days).  But there are, of course, fifty other Sundays of the year when we celebrate everything that happened in the middle!  Jesus’ amazing life is something worth remembering, celebrating, and imitating all year long.  There is something so wonderful about the life of Jesus that even Gandhi, a devout Hindu, sat up and took notice.

“I like your Christ, but I don’t like your Christians.  They are so unlike your Christ.”

What was it about the life of Jesus that caught Gandhi’s attention?  What kind of moment-to-moment awareness of Love’s presence did Jesus live with?  One phrase that he liked to use more than any other was “the kingdom of heaven.”  For him, this wasn’t some far away realm where angels played harps on clouds, but a very present reality.  For Jesus, the kingdom of heaven was very near, “at hand,” closer to every atom than its own nucleus, closer to every person than her own soul.  If you asked him to describe it, he would start telling stories about the things he saw around him.  Jesus saw heaven everywhere: a farmer sowing seed, a woman baking bread, a merchant buying pearls, a shepherd tending sheep, a woman sweeping her house out, birds that nest, seeds that grow, and flowers that bloom.  For Jesus, the question isn’t “where is heaven?”  For Jesus, the question is “where isn’t heaven?”  This is the kind of life that Jesus lived: a moment-to-moment awareness of the truth that within, behind, and beyond the apparently random facts of life there is, at the very heart of the universe, a “Love that will not let me go.”

“Believe the good news,” he said, “the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

This week is the second in a five week series of sermons on the elements of worship.  We’re looking at who, what, when, and where but also (most importantly) why we do what we do each week in church.  Last week, we talked about the Word of God, found in (but not mistaken for) the words of the scriptures, which forms a kind of central fulcrum around which the rest of our liturgy revolves.  This week, we’re talking about prayer.  In the coming weeks, we’ll cover service, sacrament, and relationship.

I began this week’s discussion on prayer by describing the kind of life that Jesus lived: a life of moment-to-moment spiritual awareness.  In doing this, I kind of started at the end.  This is the point to which we will return.  This moment-to-moment spiritual awareness, demonstrated and embodied in the life of Jesus, is the purpose of all prayer and the final destination of every praying person.

But before we get back to that central point: a few words about what prayer is not.  First, prayer is not magic.  There are many churches and organizations out there who teach that if you pray for something long enough, hard enough, or in a particular way, you will (or should) always get what you want.  Many prominent televangelists and proponents of the so-called “Prosperity Gospel” have made use of this idea as a fund-raising strategy.  The most corrupt among them have willingly and knowingly manipulated people into giving up their money as a “seed of faith” in exchange for some sort of miracle.  A private investigation of one such organization during the 1990s found that the donations were being sent to a bank where the checks were deposited and prayer requests were simply thrown into the trash.

A further problem with the “prayer is magic” approach is how it deals with the inevitable question: “What happens when we don’t get what we pray for?”  This is not so big a deal when we’re talking about some trivial thing that the heart desires, but it becomes a big deal when we’re praying about things that really do matter: What happens when the cancer doesn’t go into remission?  What happens when the child isn’t found alive?  These are big questions that make a big problem for those who subscribe to the idea that prayer is magic.  Sadly, there are those in this group who answer this question by blaming the victim.  “Oh well,” they say, “I guess you just didn’t have enough faith.”  If you’ve ever had someone say that to you, let me be blunt and tell you that it’s nothing but a load of baloney.  It’s a lie from the pit of hell.  Don’t believe it.  There are many stories in the gospels of Jesus working miracles for people, but never once does he look an individual person in the eye and say, “Go away.  You don’t have enough faith.”  Don’t take my word for it, go and look it up for yourself.

In response to this obviously destructive idea that prayer is magic, many other folks have adopted the very modern notion that prayer isn’t actually anything at all.  They would say that prayer is a placebo.  For those who might not be familiar with that term, the Placebo Effect is an event that doctors have noticed during clinical trials of experimental medications.  When they’re testing a new drug, they run a test where half of the people are given the real medicine and the other half are given a sugar pill (i.e. placebo) that looks like the real thing but doesn’t actually do anything to your body.  Nobody knows which pill they’re getting.  What the doctors found is that the patients who received the placebo nevertheless showed signs of improvement.  The mind was tricked into believing that it was receiving a new medical treatment that would make the body feel better.  So strong was this mental expectation that the body responded by feeling better, even when there was no actual medicine involved.  This is known as the Placebo Effect.

Those who view prayer as a placebo see it in the same way.  They think that prayer is just a mental exercise that people undertake in order to make themselves feel better.  It would be foolish, they say, to think that God would intervene to make a difference in human circumstances.  Honestly, the idea that prayer is a placebo makes me just as uncomfortable as the idea that prayer is magic.  I have a hard time believing that this universe is a closed and mechanical system with nothing beyond itself.  I think that God is real, that God does care about our pain, and that God does make a difference in this world.  I feel stuck between unfounded idealism on the one hand and hard-nosed cynicism on the other.  I can’t claim to have the final answer to this conundrum, but I have a hunch that the reality of prayer is actually a mystery that somehow encompasses and yet transcends both of ends of the ideological spectrum.

The Presbyterian Book of Order defines prayer as “a conscious opening of the self to God.”  I really like that.  It reminds me of the first verse from our beloved hymn: “Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee, God of glory, Lord of love; Hearts unfold like flowers before Thee, Opening to the sun above.”  While I do believe that prayer can and does make a tangible difference in this life and this world, I don’t see that as the reason why we pray.

Even though it’s become kind of a dirty word (even in church), I have to admit that I like the term religion.  It comes from a Latin word that means “to reconnect”.  Thanks to online tools like Facebook, people all over the world today are enjoying that feeling of reconnecting with old friends from days gone by.  It’s the same way with religious practices.  Through them, we find ways to reconnect with God, ourselves, our neighbors, and the universe as a whole.

Now, I should qualify that statement by saying that I don’t believe we are ever completely disconnected from God in an absolute sense.  The scriptures tell us that it is in God that we “live, move, and have our being,” that God is “above all, through all, and in all,” and that “from God, through God, and to God are all things.”  When we reconnect with God, we are reconnecting with that which is already nearer to every atom than its own nucleus and closer to every person than her own soul.  It would be more proper to say that through prayer and other religious practices, we are nurturing our conscious connection with God.  Prayer brings us to an awareness of the Reality in which we already live, move, and have our being.

There are many ways that we seek to nurture this conscious reconnection in our public worship.  First of all, there are those parts of our service that are explicitly referred to as prayer.  In our Call to Worship, we acknowledge God’s presence and invite God to work in us whatever needs to happen in order for us to become the kind of loving and compassionate people that God wants us to be.  In our prayer of Confession, we acknowledge our shortcomings and celebrate God’s undying and redeeming love.  Confession is not about guilt and fear.  Confession is about honesty and trust that God never gives ever up on us.  In the prayer for Illumination, as we talked about last week, we ask the Spirit of God to enlighten our hearts and minds so that we can hear, believe, and follow God’s Word.  In the prayers of the People, we lift up to God our specific needs and concerns, trusting that God is working in us and in the world to bring peace and wholeness to all.  In the prayer of Thanksgiving, we raise a voice of gratitude for all the goodness we see in the world around us and we dedicate our lives to cooperating with God’s work in the world.  Finally, we gather all our various prayers into one great prayer that Jesus taught his disciples: the Lord’s Prayer.  There is so much to be said here, but time grows short and the hour grows late.  I will leave most of that for another sermon on another day.  For now, I’ll simply say that this one prayer encompasses all the other forms of prayer that I have already mentioned.  We say it by rote week after week, but I encourage you, as an extended meditation exercise, to stop sometime and really think about what you are saying: “Our Father, who art in heaven: hallowed be thy name…”

Not all prayer involves words or speech.  Music itself is a form of prayer, even when it is purely instrumental.  The preludes, hymns, anthems, offertories, and postludes of our worship service are not provided for your entertainment.  They are prayers in themselves.  The beautiful arrangement of sound into organized tones called music is meant to guide you and me into and through the present moment to the eternal mystery in which it rests.  Can you resonate with the music of the spheres?  Can you imagine, during an organ solo, the life-giving harmonies of our delicately balanced solar system?  Music, as a form of prayer, leads us beyond ourselves to participate in a larger reality.  A theologian once said, “The one who sings prays twice.”

Prayer can also be undertaken in total silence.  No words are necessary.  Sitting quietly for an extended period of time and focusing on the unconscious rhythm of each God-given breath is a form of prayer.  This kind of prayer, called contemplative prayer, lets go of all doing in favor of just being with God in the present moment.

“Prayer is a conscious opening of the self to God.”  In its various forms, we reconnect with that which is deepest in us and the universe.  We move beyond just “knowing about God” through dogma and theology.  We come to “know God” in a direct and mystical sense.  Through the regular practice of prayer, our lives begin to look more like Jesus’ life: living in that moment-to-moment spiritual awareness of the Love in which we live, move, and have our being.

Elements of Worship: The Word

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Elements of Worship, Sermon1 Comment

Starting a new sermon series at First Pres, Boonville.  This is part 1 of 5.

The text is II Timothy 3:10-17.

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

Does anybody here remember the Periodic Table?  I’m taking you back to 6th grade science class on this one.  It’s an oddly shaped chart of letters and numbers that’s somehow supposed to explain everything that exists.  Personally, I always thought it looked like somebody started writing the alphabet and then got really confused.  I’m told that students used to have to memorize the whole thing, but they did away with that by the time I got to Middle School (mostly because scientists were coming up with all kinds of new additions like Einsteinium and Nobelium, so the Table was getting bigger every year).  These days, I think we’re up 118 entries.  The Periodic Table is divided into metals on the left and non-metals on the right.  At the far right, there are the Noble Gases like Helium and Radon.  On the far left are the Alkaline metals like Lithium.  Each individual unit on the Periodic Table is called an element.  Elements are the basic units of chemistry.  An element represents the most basic level to which a compound or molecule can be broken down using chemical processes.  To go any father (i.e. protons, neutrons, and electrons), you’ve got to use nuclear means.  So, they are called elements because they are the basic components of the science of chemistry.  In the olden days, that same term was applied to the basic forces of nature: earth, air, water, and fire.  These were called the four elements.  These days, when kids get old enough to go to school, they begin at a basic and introductory level in an elementary school.  An element is a basic component of some larger system or process.

Starting today and continuing for the next four Sundays, we’re going to be talking about elements in church.  Now, we won’t be talking about chemical elements on the Periodic Table.  No, for these five Sundays, we’ll be talking about the Elements of Worship.  We’ll be looking at a kind of Periodic Table for the Church, if you will.  Each week, we’re going to look at a different element and see how each element fits into the big picture of what we do each week in church.  There are five Elements of Worship that we’ll be looking at.  The five elements are as follows: Word, Prayer, Service, Sacrament, and Relationship.  Everything we do in church, from the Announcements to the Benediction, is made up of these five elements in some combination and configuration: Word, Prayer, Service, Sacrament, and Relationship.  Even though we’re only focusing on one element per week, it will quickly become clear that none of these exists in isolation from the others.  They are all connected and intertwined with each other like a great big spider web.  We can’t really think about one without touching on the others.  Nevertheless, you’ve got to start somewhere.  So let’s get going…

This week, we’re focusing on the element of the Word.  By that, we specifically mean the Word of God.  Now, I know what you’re all thinking right now: “I know what that is.  He means the Bible.  The Word of God is the Bible.”  My answer to that is: “Well, yes and no.”  You see, the Bible never actually refers to itself as “the Word of God”.  In the Hebrew Scriptures (what we call the Old Testament), “the Word of God” typically refers to a particular message that came to particular prophet at a particular place and time.  Thus, it says in Genesis 15, “The word of the Lord came to Abram”.  Later on, in the New Testament, “the Word” mostly refers to Christ himself.  Jesus Christ is the living Word of God.  Thus, the Word of God is a person, not a book.

What then can we say about the Bible?  First of all, the Bible is more of a library than a book.  It is a massive collection of stories, poems, and letters composed and compiled over a period of many centuries.  Thus, I like to refer to them as “the scriptures” (plural) rather than “the Bible” (singular).  These writings chronicle the ongoing relationship between God and God’s people.  Opening the scriptures is kind of like finding your grandparents’ old love letters in a trunk in the attic.  When you read them, you get these insightful little snapshots into a romance that has spanned the ages.  We treasure these fragments but we would never mistake them for the relationship itself.  That is something that can only be experienced firsthand.  Thus, the scriptures point beyond themselves to the deeper reality of a relationship into which you and I are invited.  Marcus Borg calls the scriptures “a finger pointing to the moon.”  If you’re looking at the finger, you’re looking at the wrong thing.  Look instead to where the finger is pointing.  Then and only then will you “get the point”.  Jesus himself said as much in John 5 as he was debating with the Pharisees, a group of religious people who had worked very hard to preserve the scriptures in their own tradition.  Jesus said to the Pharisees, “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf.”  The scriptures point beyond themselves.  They are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

In this day and age when the culture prizes knowledge that can be objectively verified and scientifically proved, people of faith often experience the temptation to find absolute certainty on historic and scientific facts documented in the scriptures.  They believe that the authors of the scriptures were inspired by God in the same way that a secretary takes down a dictation.  For them, the Bible (singular) is literally “the Word of God”.  They see the Bible as a single book with a single author who can never be wrong.

Reading the scriptures in this way can provide a comforting level of certainty in these uncertain times, but it can also cause all sorts of problems.  First of all, the words of the scriptures can be and have been used to justify all manner of brutality and injustice.  Advocates for slavery, exploitation, genocide, racism, sexism, and homophobia have all used the texts of the scriptures to support their causes.  A further (and bigger) problem that arises when we read the Bible as the literal Word of God is that our confidence in the book actually undermines our faith in God.  We mistake that box of Grandma and Grandpa’s love letters for the relationship itself.  We worship the Bible instead of God.  It seems to me that the second of the Ten Commandments has something to say about that: “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”  The way I like to read that sentence is: “You can’t put God in a box.”  I think the same holds true whether that box is a statue, a building, or a book.  Make no mistake: worshiping the Bible in God’s place is idolatry.

Presbyterians, on the whole, do not tend to view the scriptures as a single, inerrant document.  We see them collectively as the “unique and authoritative witness” to Jesus Christ as the living Word of God.  For us, the scriptures are that “finger pointing to the moon” and we want to look (and go to) where that finger is pointing us.  We want to get closer to Jesus.  We want to grow in our relationship with God.  For us, the stories, poems, and letters contained in the scriptures are a record of our ancestors’ relationship with God, centering around this amazing person named Jesus.  They remembered, reflected on, and wrestled with everything his life meant to them.  Finally, they wrote it all down in the best way they knew how, using the words and ideas they had available to them at that time.

And so we listen: we listen to these words of our fellow human beings with the ears on our heads, but we also listen for the Word of God with the ears of our hearts.  We believe the Word of God still speaks to us through these human words, limited and imperfect though they may be.  To do this, we need help.  In order to take us from these human words to God’s Word, we need something Presbyterians call “the inward illumination of the Holy Spirit”.  That’s why we stop to say a short prayer right before we read from the scriptures each week during worship.  Go ahead and check it out in your bulletin.  Right before the scripture reading, there is something called the Prayer for Illumination.  We’re asking God to turn the lights on inside of us so that we can see things more clearly.  We’re asking the Holy Spirit to help us find God’s Word in these human words.  This event is central to our worship as Christians.  When we come together, we prepare ourselves to receive God’s Word by gathering together, praising God, confessing our shortcomings, and making peace with our neighbors.  We listen for God’s Word in the reading of the scriptures and reflection on the sermon.  We respond to God’s Word by affirming our faith, praying for our needs, giving thanks for God’s blessings, and offering our whole lives to God’s service in the world.  Finally, we follow God’s Word back out into the world, trusting that the One who meets us in this place will continue to guide us out there during the other six days of the week.  It’s all about God’s Word, not a book but a person, Jesus Christ: God’s living Word.  As the lights come on inside of us and we begin to hear God’s Word through the human words of the scriptures, our lives will begin to look more like Jesus’ life: the life of a radical healer, teacher, revolutionary, and friend.

I can’t help but mention the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, whose 83rd birthday just so happens to be today.  Dr. King knew what we’re talking about today.  During his lifetime, people from all over the United States, even pastors, used the words of our scriptures to put him down and keep African American people under the thumb of segregation.  But Dr. King didn’t listen to those words.  He opened the scriptures and heard the Word of God saying to him (in the words of the prophet Amos), “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”  The Word of God showed Dr. King how to dream that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  In spite of being ridiculed, beaten and arrested, Dr. King heard God’s Word in the book of Isaiah, dreaming of that day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”  On that day, he said, all God’s children: black and white, Jew and Gentile, Protestant and Catholic, will join hands and sing together, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”  Through the inward illumination of the Holy Spirit, these ancient scriptures became for Dr. King vessels for the Word of God.  That same Spirit lives in you, illumines you.  May the Word of God be a lamp unto your feet and a light unto your path.  May you be able to say, along with Martin Luther King:

I’ve heard the lightning flashing, and heard the thunder roll.
I’ve felt sin’s breakers dashing, try’n to conquer my soul.
But I’ve heard the voice of Jesus telling me still to fight on.

He promised never to leave me, no, never alone.

Say Yes to Love

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon3 Comments

This week’s sermon from First Pres, Boonville.

The text is Mark 1:4-11.

Back when I was a kid, we used to have a snarky way of telling people we didn’t want them to be part of a conversation.  We’d say, “This is an A-B conversation, so C your way out of it!”  In that same vein, we also used credit card names, saying, “This is a Visa-Mastercard conversation, so Discover your way out of it!”  Neither of those is very nice.  And today, I want to invite you to do the opposite.  I would like for you to C your way into this particular A-B conversation.  Even better, I would love for you to Discover yourself in this conversation.

We’re talking about baptism today.  First of all, we’re remembering Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan River.  Second, we’re welcoming a new family into our church, three of whom will be joining by baptism.  Even though we’re talking about these two specific events, one that occurred two thousand years ago and another that will occur in a few minutes, I would like for all of us to see through them to the one great universal event that encompasses all of us in its grand embrace.

Let’s look first at Jesus’ baptism.  We read that story this morning from the first chapter of Mark’s gospel, the second book in the New Testament canon.  What’s interesting is that this is where Mark chooses to begin his retelling of the Jesus story.  There is no Christmas story in Mark’s gospel: no angels, shepherds, magi, manger, or virgin birth.  For whatever reason, Jesus felt compelled to join with John, the passionate preacher and activist, in his grassroots movement for spiritual revival and social change.  Everyday people were inspired by and responding to John’s call to renewal but the religious and political authorities were suspicious.

John made use of an ancient Jewish ritual bath, called tevilah, as a sign of personal commitment to this movement.  Tevilah washing was common for ancient Jews.  Women did it monthly for sanitary reasons, all Jews did it at least once a year before Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), and Gentiles did it when they converted to Judaism.  Moreover, there were several smaller washings that took place daily for both sanitary and religious reasons.

This, by the way, is why many Jews were spared from the horrors of the Bubonic Plague in medieval Europe.  Christians falsely accused them of causing the plague by poisoning the wells.  The reality is that the Bubonic Plague was caused by fleas that arrived in Europe on the backs of shipboard rats.  Jewish religion required regular bathing while Christian religion did not.  Jewish people got sick less frequently simply because they were much cleaner than their Christian neighbors.  Alas, this did not stop our forebears from concocting all sorts of slanderous conspiracy theories.  But I digress.

John made use of this very familiar Jewish ritual as a symbol of hope and dedication.  John had a hunch that he was getting people ready for something big that was about to happen, although he might not have been totally sure about exactly what that was.  And then, here comes Jesus.

At first glance, there didn’t seem to be anything particularly unusual about Jesus.  According to Mark’s gospel, there’s not even any indication that Jesus himself knew what was about to happen.  He was just another person who felt drawn to this radical and passionate preacher.  He decides that this is the place for him, his spiritual home, so he undergoes John’s symbolic cleansing ritual.

And then something happened that wasn’t part of the ritual.  Jesus had a spiritual awakening.  Compare it to Moses beholding the glory of God on top of the mountain or the Buddha attaining Enlightenment while meditating under a tree.  The text of Mark’s gospel tells us, “just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.”

Earlier this week, I was listening to a biblical scholar named Marcus Borg talk about a similar series of experiences that once happened to him.  He describes these mystical experiences in language that will sound less poetic and more familiar to our modern ears:

[These mystical experiences] began to occur in my early thirties. They changed my understanding of the meaning of the word “God”-of what that word points to-and gave me an unshakable conviction that God (or “the sacred”) is real and can be experienced…

I saw the same visual “landscape” – a forest, a room, the inside of an airliner – that I normally see…

For a minute or two (and once for the better part of an hour), what I was seeing looked very different. Light became different – as if there were a radiance shining through everything. The biblical phrase for this is “the glory of God” – as the book of Isaiah puts it, “the earth is filled with the glory – the radiance – of God. The world was transfigured, even as it remained “the same.” And I experienced a falling away of the subject-object distinction that marks our ordinary everyday experience – that sense of being a separate self, “in here,” while the world is “out there.”

They were… experiences in which I felt that I was seeing more clearly than I ever had before – that what I was experiencing was “the way things are.” And they were also experiences of complete peacefulness, marked by a sense that I would love to stay in this mental state forever. Anxiety and distraction utterly disappeared. Everything looked beautiful.

I imagine that when Mark’s gospel tells us that Jesus “saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove” it is describing the kind of experience that Marcus Borg was speaking about.

Next, Jesus hears a voice speaking to him.  We aren’t exactly told whose voice is speaking, but it makes sense to infer that it must be the voice of God.  The voice says to Jesus, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  Let’s narrow it down: “Love.”  The voice from heaven is the voice of Love.

Jesus listened to this voice and it changed his life.  That was the point in the story where Jesus’ ministry began.  The Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus and the voice of Love empowered him to go out into the world and heal the sick, feed the hungry, welcome the outcast, and enlighten lost souls.  His great miraculous mission started right here, in a cold and muddy river, where a voice from heaven called him “Beloved”.  He spent the rest of his life trusting in that Love and sharing it with other people.

The word baptism comes from a Greek word that means “to soak or immerse.”  On one level, it obviously refers to the way that a person is literally and physically soaked in water during the ritual.  On a deeper level, we are all surrounded by and soaked in the infinite Love of God throughout our whole lives and beyond.  It is part of the air we breathe.  We need it more than oxygen.  Baptism is a ritual, we call it a “sacrament” (Latin for “mystery”), that makes this Love real to us.  God’s Love washes over us like a refreshing bath.  Day in and day out, we are floating on an ocean of Love.

The response of faith has ironically little to do with our religion.  Real faith means saying “Yes” to Love.  When you say that Yes, Love empowers you to live the kind of life that Jesus lived: healing the sick, feeding the hungry, welcoming the outcast, and enlightening the lost.

This is exactly what our church tries to do in its various denominational and grassroots organizations that work together for peacemaking, disaster assistance, hunger relief, health education, environmental preservation, social justice, and human equality.  This is the Presbyterian Church at its best.  And we’re not the only ones doing it.  Other churches, faith communities, and non-profit groups are working for these same goals.  Each one is saying Yes to Love in its own way.  That’s what real faith is.

Each of us is called to say Yes to Love in our personal lives as well.  This is harder than it looks.  We have to contend with the powers-that-be in this world that would try to choke the life of the Spirit and the voice of Love out of us forever.  We have to actively resist the pull toward cynicism.  We have to live like nonviolent radicals and revolutionaries, practicing random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.  Saying Yes to Love is a lifelong task that involves every part of life: church, work, school, and home.  All life is ministry and baptism is your ordination.  Say Yes to Love.

I pray that, as we think about and celebrate the sacrament of baptism this morning, it would be more than just a religious ritual to you.  I pray that it will be to you a sacred mystery.  I pray that the eyes of your heart will be opened so that the infinite ocean of Love in which we are all soaked might be made more real to you.  I pray that you will say Yes to this Love and go out from this place today to live the kind of life that Jesus lived: a life of Faith, a life of Hope, and a life of Love.

Why Be Normal?

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

This week’s sermon from Boonville Presbyterian.

The text is Matthew 2:1-12.

Click here to listen to this sermon at fpcboonville.org

What is ‘Normal’?

People use this word all the time, as if they knew exactly what it meant.  Picky eaters at the dinner table whine, “Mom, why can’t we have normal food for dinner?”  Angst-ridden teenagers roll their eyes and moan, “Why can’t I have normal parents?”  Meanwhile, their parents are pulling their hair out and screaming, “Why can’t I just have normal children?”

For me, this question of ‘normalcy’ is a vocational one.  After college, many of my peers spent their twenties getting established in their respective careers.  They worked as real-estate agents, pastors, teachers, reporters, etc.  Meanwhile, I went to graduate school for 3 years and then got a job doing laundry for homeless and drug addicted people.  Since then, I’ve been a stay-at-home Dad, a philosophy professor, a chaplain in the inner-city, and the pastor of a country church.  Through it all, I often ask myself, “Why can’t I be happy in a normal job?”

So I ask again: what is ‘normal’?

Honestly, I’m beginning to think there’s no such thing as ‘normal’.    It’s an illusion people create, based on what they think other people’s lives are like.  But the truth is that most of your neighbors probably feel just as ‘abnormal’ as you do.

There are lots of ways in which a person can be made to feel abnormal.  I already mentioned family and work as two big ones.  We might feel abnormal because of our mannerisms or our relationships.

We might also be made to feel abnormal because of our spirituality.  I find this one especially interesting.  I think there are many people who have a very deep and abiding spirituality, but don’t feel comfortable in church.  Their relationship with God finds its expression in their enjoyment of the natural world, their study of the sciences, their pursuit of social justice, or their artistic endeavors.  I think the sad fact is that too many of these people don’t recognize their own activities as genuine expressions of faith.

For these people, and for anyone else who feels ‘not normal’ in any way, I have good news this morning: you are one of the Magi.

The Magi were an interesting group of people.  Church tradition has attached all sorts of ideas to them that aren’t necessarily true.  “We Three Kings of Orient Are” is an especially misleading hymn.  First, there weren’t necessarily three of them.  Next, they weren’t kings.  Finally, they weren’t from the so-called “Orient”.

In reality, the Magi were astrologers (like the ones you see on TV) who probably came from somewhere in the vicinity of present-day Iraq.  Their job was to study the movement of the stars and make predictions for the future based on the stars’ movement.  These Magi weren’t Jewish, so they wouldn’t have known about the Torah or the Hebrew prophets, and they certainly weren’t waiting for a Jewish Messiah to come and deliver them.  Nevertheless, God spoke to the Magi in the language they were most likely to understand: astrology. God didn’t send a rabbi along to teach them the Bible or take them to a synagogue.  Instead, God was willing to connect with these Magi through pagan rituals of divination!  Talk about ‘not normal’!

Let’s see what happens next:

The Magi head to Jerusalem and meet with the established religious and political authorities in order to find this newborn “King of the Jews”.  So the royal officials and scholars get together, have a Bible study, and figure out that the Messiah is supposed to be born in Bethlehem.  So the Magi set out again, but once they’re on the road, do they follow the instructions laid out by the religious scholars?  No!  Matthew’s gospel explicitly tells us that they follow the star again.

Think about how mind-boggling this is!  Even after going to Jerusalem and learning the Bible from the best scholars of the day, these Magi go right back to relying on their pagan practices; and instead of astrology leading the Magi astray, it brings them to the exact place where they were supposed to be: in the presence of Jesus.  From beginning to end, there is nothing ‘normal’ about this story!

This is good news for all of us who feel ‘not normal’ in some way (especially those of us who feel out-of-place in church).  This is good news because it means that the God we encounter in the person of Jesus Christ is a creative and inclusive deity.  It means that this God reaches out to all people in whatever way they are most likely to hear.  One of my roommates in seminary liked to say, “God will broadcast on any antenna you put up.”  The question of whether someone’s spiritual journey is ‘normal’ or ‘not normal’ by our standards is irrelevant in the eyes of God.

I am slowly coming to have an appreciation for the ‘not normal’ ways that God is at work in my life.  I told you before about the wandering path that my career has taken during these past few years.  I can see now that my dead-end job doing laundry with a Master’s degree was really a two-year extension of seminary.  I learned to apply the theological and pastoral skills I had learned in the classroom to real-life situations.  Likewise, I formed personal relationships with homeless and drug-addicted people that helped me in my future ministry.

In 2009, I started offering spiritual care to people in the inner-city through St. James Mission, an ecumenical outreach ministry in Utica.  We call it our Community Chaplaincy program.  While many people refer to me as a street preacher, the truth is that I don’t do much preaching at all.  I’m more of a street listener.  The job of a Community Chaplain is to help people listen for the ways in which God is already present and active in their lives.

I am constantly being taken by surprise in the course of this ministry.  The people I work with, who exist in the very margins of our society, live lives that can in no way be understood as ‘normal’.  I know one gentleman who is constantly struggling with addiction and mental illness.  He has been on and off the streets several times in the past few years.  The central point in his spiritual life is the image of planting seeds, which Jesus makes use of in several of his parables.  Planting seeds, for this man, meant doing small deeds of kindness for others.  So, in spite of his own struggles, he volunteered in several local organizations.  For a long time, he was an active participant in our Bible studies on Thursday nights.  He had dream of one day providing forums, called Feedback Seminars, where clients of social service agencies can offer insight and advice to service providers for making their organizations more effective.  “Just like a doctor puts on a white coat to go help people,” he said, “Jesus puts us on and uses us to heal others.”

This man’s faith looks very different from what we would call ‘normal’ Christianity, but it is nonetheless genuine.  He is one of the Magi, following the star God has set before him.  Likewise, without my ‘not normal’ experiences of feeling lost in my career, these pieces would never have come together to form the ministry that God has called me to be a part of on the streets of Utica, in college classrooms, and here in Boonville.  Even though my call to ministry looks very different from most other pastors, I believe this is the star that God has called me to follow right now.

I would like to invite you to examine those ‘not normal’ parts of your life, whatever they may be.  Are they just odd quirks in your circumstance or personality?  Are you just a misfit or a freak who doesn’t belong?  Or is God calling you to follow a star?  Could it be that God is calling you to embark on a wild and wonderful journey of faith and discovery?  I want to encourage you to follow that star and see where it leads you!

For those who may not feel this sense of ‘not normality’ that I’ve been talking about today, I want to encourage you to pay special attention to those unusual people in your family, your neighborhood, or your church.  Those people are Magi who have been specially chosen by God to teach us about the inclusive creativity of God and God’s work in the world.  Don’t write them off as freaks and misfits, but trust that God is leading them along a special path to the same place where God is leading you: to worship Christ, the newborn king who was born in a stable, the most ‘not normal’ king of who ever lived.

Have Yourself A Messy Little Christmas

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon2 Comments

A little late.

This was the sermon from the fourth week of Advent at First Pres, Boonville.

The text is Luke 1:26-38.

Click here to listen to this sermon at fpcboonville.org

Did you ever notice that every time you’re going through some major transition in life, especially if you’re getting married, suddenly everyone you meet somehow magically turns into an expert on the subject?  Suddenly, everyone has that one piece of wisdom that’s going to make the whole situation clear.  Suddenly, everyone’s got a PhD in wedding planning, right?  They think they’re so wise and insightful but they almost always end up being obvious and inane: “Make sure the flowers don’t clash with the bridesmaid’s dresses!”  And they all start the same: “One word of advice…”

“One word of advice: don’t pick a DJ who will play ‘Bootylicious’ while your Grandma is still in the room.”

“One word of advice: Kanye West’s ‘Gold Digger’ is not an appropriate song for your first dance.”

Really?  Thank you.  I don’t know what I’d do without you.

Nobody likes it when people do that, yet everybody still does it.  I’m no exception.  I get to work with a lot of couples as they plan their big wedding day.  And, like everyone else, I’ve got my “one word of advice” for every couple that comes through my office.  I like to think it’s brilliant, but maybe it’s just as annoying as everyone else’s.  It goes like this: “The key to the perfect wedding day is imperfection.”

When I see these shows like ‘Bridezillas’ and ‘Say Yes to the Dress’, it strikes me that a lot of people out there are obsessed with having “the perfect wedding day”.  But here’s the thing: it doesn’t exist.  Something will go wrong.  Count on it.

On the day that Sarah and I got married, we used recorded music and thought we had it timed and coordinated perfectly.  Unfortunately, there was a miscalculation and the music stopped while Sarah was still halfway down the aisle.  What do you do then?  Start over?  “OK everybody, take two!  Back to the beginning.  We didn’t get it right.  Cue bridesmaids!”  No, not really.  You just roll with it.  As long as everybody gets there in one piece and says, “I do,” it counts as a successful wedding.  Everything else is just icing on the cake (no pun intended).

You’ll have to excuse me.  I’ve got weddings on the brain today because today is my anniversary.  Sarah and I got married seven years ago today.  But this idea of imperfection being the key to perfection doesn’t just apply to weddings.  As it turns out, there’s also no such thing as the perfect car, house, job, family, or holiday (especially Christmas).

People tend to get especially funny about this idea of ‘perfection’ around the holidays.  As a society, we’re so doped up on nostalgia during the holidays that we can’t see the forest for the (Christmas) trees.  We sing silent night by candlelight around the sweet little Nativity Scene at church.  Perfect, right?  Actually, no.

Wondrous?  Yes.  Beautiful?  Absolutely.  But not perfect.  This is an important fact to remember whenever we get down on ourselves because our Christmas, our families, or our lives don’t look like what we see in that warm, candlelit manger.  Here’s the thing: those people around the manger didn’t have the perfect Christmas either.  In fact, a close evaluation of the Christmas story itself will show us just how ‘imperfect’ this whole experience really was.

At Christmas, we celebrate the mystery of the Incarnation, where God comes to meet us in the middle of the blood, sweat, and tears of our messy and imperfect lives.  When we come to the point of being open to the presence of that mystery in our mess, then we can say that we’ve truly understood the meaning of Christmas.

Let’s look at the biblical text.  Today’s reading from the gospel according to Luke is usually referred to as ‘The Annunciation’ because this is where the angel Gabriel makes an ‘announcement’ to the Virgin Mary that she is pregnant and will soon have a baby.  Mary is from Nazareth, a little hick town way out in the middle of nowhere that was probably less than half the size of Boonville.  As we’ve mentioned before, the country she lived in was at that time occupied by the Roman Empire.

Living in a society that was hardly ‘empowering’ to women, Mary’s only hope for a secure future lay in finding a good husband and having lots and lots of male children to care for her when she got old.  The price she had to pay in exchange for this security was her body.  She was considered to be the property of her husband.  Her value as a human being was defined by her virginity.  If any man was to make a lifetime investment in her, he would want assurances that he would have exclusive access to her.  Any evidence to the contrary (i.e. getting pregnant before the wedding by someone other than her fiancé) would be grounds for calling off the whole thing.  The next step would probably be a public execution.  Some might even view that as merciful, because it would save her family from shame and spare her from a life on the streets as a beggar or prostitute.

By the way, I should mention that Mary was probably somewhere around 13 or 14 years old while all of this was happening.  I’ll let that sink in for those of you who have ever had young teenagers.  Mary was an unwed teenage mother with no conceivable future from a backward hick town in an occupied country.  Does this still sound like the perfect Christmas to you?

Nevertheless, the angel Gabriel begins their conversation by saying, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.”  What kind of opening line is that?  In the midst of all this mess, knowing the scandal she was about to face, how could this angel have the audacity to call her “favored” and say, “The Lord is with you?”  It doesn’t make sense.

We’re not the only ones to notice the absurdity of the situation either.  The text tells us that Mary herself was “perplexed” and asking questions like, “How can this be?”  Her faith was not blind and unquestioning.  She didn’t walk around like some mystical saint with a halo over her head.  Mary was a realist.  She was just as confused as you or I would be in her shoes.

Nothing about her situation made any sense.  The angel’s message went against everything she believed in, morally and theologically.  The angel was asking the impossible.  Yet, as a voice told Mary in verse 37, “nothing will be impossible with God.”  Through the presence of that great divine mystery (which we call “God”) in the messiness her life, Mary encountered infinite possibility and creativity.  “Nothing is impossible.”

Her risky response, “Let it be,” opened her up to actualizing this potential in her own life.  This openness, more than religious dogma or morality, is what real faith is all about.  Are you open to the divine mystery being present in the messiness of your life?  To take the risk of disaster and damnation is to make a leap of faith.  “Let it be” is a statement so bold and so brave that the Beatles even wrote a song about it: “When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, ‘Let it be.’”  “Let it be” was her response to the angel’s invitation.  I think John Lennon perhaps understood something of the power in those words.

After Mary had spoken these words, everything was the same yet everything was different.  New life had begun to grow inside of her.  When the time was right, this new life was born into the world: Jesus (Yeshua, salvation, deliverance, liberation).

Celebrating Christmas is about looking for the mystery in the mess.  It’s not about perfection in holiday nostalgia, moral uprightness, or religious dogma.  It’s about saying “Yes” and “Let it be” to the limitless possibilities in front of you.  It’s about staying open to the new life that is waiting to be born in you.

Be open to the angel’s invitation when it comes to you in your messy life.  It might not look like a winged messenger from heaven, but it might show itself in a sudden opportunity to help someone, welcome someone, trust someone, forgive someone, or love someone.  When it happens, you’ll know.  In that moment, say in your heart, “Let it be” and watch new life grow in and be born through you.

Be open to the mystery in the mess.  Embrace the divine possibility in the earthly imperfection and take that leap of faith, saying, “Let it be.”

And have yourself a messy little Christmas.

Christmas and Reincarnation

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Christmas Eve sermon from First Pres, Boonville.

Have you ever met a word nerd?  You know who I’m talking about.  I’m talking about those annoying people who almost always manage to find the most complicated way of saying the simplest thing.  They would rather say, “I would like to annunciate my most sincere benevolent aspirations for your fecundity and longevity in this season of the remembrance of the birth of Christ” when a simple “Merry Christmas” would do just fine.

What do you call that? “Syllable envy?”  If one is good, then six is better.

I readily confess that I am one of those people.  My name is Barrett, and I am a word nerd.  I use this on my students at Utica College all the time.  I get a kick out of talking about “inductive teleological arguments for classical theism” and “epistemic circularity in the evaluation of sense perception.”  Yes, I am a word nerd.  But, as bad as I am, I don’t hold a candle to my wife, who was an English major in college.  Whenever we play games like Boggle or Scrabble as a family, Sarah and I have a house rule that I win whenever I manage to get half her score.

It’s no coincidence that word nerds like Sarah and me also happen to be ministers.  There’s something about this job that attracts word nerds.  Going almost all the way back to the very beginning of Christianity, we ministers have had a knack for taking something very simple and attaching some kind of multi-syllabic monstrosity to it.  Being a word nerd is lots of fun and it makes us sound smart, but it can also cause problems.  We’ve started arguments, split churches, and even fought wars over words.

If you look at tonight’s sermon title, you’ll notice one of those big nerdy words: Christmas and Reincarnation.  “Now, wait a minute,” you might say, “’Reincarnation’?  Isn’t that something that Buddhists and Hindus believe in?  So, why would we be talking about that in church at Christmas?”  Well, you would be right.  Reincarnation, as it’s typically understood, is not a Christian idea.  It typically refers to the belief (often held by most Buddhists and Hindus) that human beings are born over and over again in different bodies throughout human history.  It’s part of their beliefs about the afterlife.  It’s not a belief that has typically been part of the Jewish and Christian religions.  In case you’re still confused, let me put your mind at ease: I’m not using the word “reincarnation” in the Buddhist or Hindu sense of the term.  I’m not talking about the afterlife; I’m talking about this life.

Let me unpack this word in order to explain what I mean:

We start with the prefix Re-.  We all know what this means.  When you “redo” something, you do it again.  TV networks show “reruns” when there are no new episodes to broadcast.  You “repeat” yourself whenever you have to say something for the second time (or third, fourth, or fifth time… for those of us with toddlers or teenagers).  Re- means “again”.

Next, we come to the really meaty part: Incarnation.  Now this is a very Christian term.  It’s one of those nerdy words that ministers came up with in the early days of the Christian church.  The prefix In- is just like our English word “in”.  It means “into” or “inside”.  The next part, Carne, literally means “flesh” or “meat”.  Have you ever had chili con carne for dinner?  It’s chili with meat, right?  So, Incarnation literally means “in the flesh” or “in meat”.

Tonight, as we gather to celebrate Christmas, we are celebrating the Mystery of the Incarnation.  Incarnation is the nerdy word that Christians use to describe how special we think Jesus is.  When we look at him, we something special.  To us, he’s more than just a philosopher or a hero.  He’s not just another person.  He’s not even our favorite person.  Christians believe that, somehow, in a way that we will never understand, the great divine and eternal mystery that we call “God” was present in this flesh and blood person, Jesus of Nazareth.  That’s what we mean when we talk about the Incarnation: God “in the flesh”.  Christians have this two thousand year old hunch that something about the mystery and meaning of life itself was making itself known through this Jesus guy.  We can’t quite put our finger on it, but we can sense it in the things he said and did.  For us, he’s like that missing puzzle piece that makes all the other pieces of life’s puzzle fit together.  When we look at and listen to Jesus, we feel like we can finally see things clearly and make sense of the universe.  That’s why we like to call him “The Light of the World”.

Light is an amazing thing.  Without it, life would be impossible.  The light of the sun warms our planet to the point where organic life can exist.  Plants feed on sunlight through the process of photosynthesis.  Animals eat those plants.  Further up the food chain, humans are nourished by both animals and plants.  So, in an indirect way, we eat light.  Obviously, light also helps us to see clearly and make sense of our surroundings.  We are dependent on light as a basic natural resource.  From Christians, Jesus makes life possible, he nourishes our life, and he helps us to make sense of life and see things more clearly.

There’s a lot of talk about light in the passages from the Bible that we read tonight.  In the beginning, God is present in the darkness and says, “Let there be light.”  In the second reading, Jesus was described as “The true light, which enlightens everyone” that “shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”  In the third reading, we see Jesus in action as “the light of the world.”  What is he doing?  He’s healing somebody!  That should give us a big clue about what it means to be “the light of the world.”

Finally, in the last reading from Matthew’s gospel, Jesus gets really interesting.  He takes this idea of the eternal mystery and the light of the world and turns it back on us.  He says, “You are the light of the world.”  And then he tells people, “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

The really neat thing about the Incarnation is that it’s not just something that happened with one guy two thousand years ago.  It happens again and again and again.  God didn’t just happen to pop on down for a visit during Jesus’ lifetime.  God is still here with us.  The light of the world continues to shine.  In the midst of the brutality, chaos, and darkness of this world, the words of John’s gospel still ring true: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

There is still darkness in this world, yet the light of the world continues to shine.  Where?  We don’t see Jesus physically hanging around anymore.  Where is the light of the world?  It’s you.  The light of the world shines in you.  That’s what Jesus said.  “You are the light of the world… [so] let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

When we live as people of love, committing “random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty”, the light of the world “takes on flesh again” in us.  Did you hear that?  “Takes on flesh again”: Re-in-carnate.

I’m not talking about reincarnation because I believe that people come back to earth again and again after death.  It’s not about life after death; it’s about life before death.  And you don’t get reincarnated at all.  It’s Christ who gets reincarnated in you whenever you love.  Jesus is the light of the world.  You are the light of the world.  That’s what reincarnation has to do with Christmas.

Here’s a cheesy song, but what the hey: It’s Christmas.

It’s Time for Love to Get Loud

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

This week’s sermon from First Pres, Boonville.  Blog fans will notice some similarity with my previous post, Get Loud.

There is considerable congregational participation toward the end, so it would be better to listen at fpcboonville.org

The text is Mark 1:1-8.

First impressions are funny things.  They have a way of setting the tone for what comes next.

This is true for stories:

Who doesn’t remember the opening scene of Star Wars, when Princess Leia’s starship races across the screen, relentlessly pursued by Darth Vader’s menacing Star Destroyer?  George Lucas had audience members on the edge of their seats from the beginning to the end of that film.  How about the first line of the novel, A Tale of Two Cities?  “It was the best of times.  It was the worst of times.”  I particularly like the opening line of my favorite novel: Neuromancer by William Gibson.  “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

It’s also true in relationships:

My over-eager self-introduction to a professor on my first day of seminary effectively ended my career in academic theology before it started.  On a more positive note, my propensity for sharing too much information made an impact on my friend Matt, who works at a bagel shop in Utica.  At first, he was taken aback by my apparent lack of tact and subtlety, but those same qualities came to shape our future friendship as one characterized by intense honesty and trust.  He is one of my closest companions today.

This morning, we’re taking a look at the opening scene of Mark’s gospel.  Right off the bat, Mark sets the tone for what comes next in the story.  This gospel has a powerful opening line that often gets overlooked: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

That sounds pretty straightforward and innocuous, right?  Wrong.  There are three terms I need to unpack before we can come to a full understanding of what this verse is saying.  Those three terms are good news, Christ, and Son of God.

Good news.  The Greek word we’re looking at here is euangelion.  It’s a term that comes from the world of imperial politics.  An euangelion was a joyful announcement sent out by royal courier to the farthest reaches of the empire.  It usually announced big news, like the birth of a new heir to the throne or the victory of the emperor over his enemies.  Anyone else who proclaimed an euangelion that didn’t have to do with Caesar could be found guilty of treason.  Mark’s use of euangelion in the very first sentence of his gospel is an extremely radical and subversive move.  It’s the kind of thing that could get someone arrested by the Department of Homeland Security.  It says something important about the way Mark looks at the world and, more importantly, the way he looks at Jesus.

Christ.  Most people these days are used to thinking of this word as Jesus’ last name.  Well, it’s not.  Christ is a title.  It’s a Greek translation of the Hebrew word Messiah, which means “Anointed”.  When first century Jews talked about the Anointed, they imagined this Che Guevara kind of person who would rise up and liberate the Jewish people from Roman tyranny.  In short, the Anointed/Messiah/Christ was supposed to be a terrorist.

Son of God.  This is another title that was reserved for the emperor.  Caesar was worshiped as a god in ancient Rome.  People were required to make regular sacrifices to his statue as a sign of loyalty.  It was kind of like pledging allegiance to the flag, only more so.  When Mark proclaims Jesus as divine, he is implying that Caesar is not.  This is a bold statement to make in an occupied country.

With a fuller understanding of what these words mean, let’s hear them again: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”  In American terms, we might say, “The inauguration of President Jesus, our real commander-in-chief.”  Anyone who walked around this country seriously talking like that would probably earn a one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay.

Mark goes on from that opening sentence to paint a picture of the person who first ran through the countryside, shouting this euangelion at the top of his lungs.  His name was John.  He, like the message he preached, was a radical.  Later in the story, John is arrested and eventually executed for exposing the hypocrisy of Herod, the puppet king set up by the Roman government to maintain order.  Like the opening sentence of Mark’s gospel, John is subversive of the established status quo.  He looks instead to the way things ought to be, the way they will be, in God.  John is not satisfied with mere Roman order; he longs for the divine harmony that God intends for all creation.

John is not alone in his task.  He stands in the shadow of another outspoken reformer.  When John first shows up in Mark’s gospel, he is “clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist” and eating “locusts and wild honey”.  That might not mean much to us, but it would mean a lot to first century Jews.  Dressed in those clothes, they would immediately recognize him as the prophet Elijah, as surely as we would recognize a fat man in a red suit coming down the chimney on Christmas Eve as Santa Claus.

Elijah was another subversive radical from Israel’s history.  Like John, he exposed and confronted the powers that be.  He was constantly challenging the corrupt government of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel in his day.

Mark seems to be going out of his way to drive the opening point home: the gospel of Christ is a subversive message preached by radicals.  Those who want safe, predictable religion should stay away from Jesus at all costs.

What made John live his life as a “prisoner of hope” who never stopped questioning the way things are?  What is this radical message that turns the whole world upside down?  Mark spends the rest of the book answering that question.  It’s the story of Christ, a never-ending story that includes John, you, and me in its eternal plot.  There’s no way to fully capture its message in a single sermon, book, or library.  That being said, I’ll try to sum up one small part of it like this: God is with us, God is Love, Love wins.

This, in part, is the message of Christmas: God is with us, God is Love, Love wins.    Therefore, all that is not Love is destined to fade away like dust in the wind or a bad dream after you wake up.  There is hope in this.  And that hope gives us the strength to stand up and speak out loud and clear against all that would stand in Love’s way.

John believed in this Love (i.e. God’s Love, the God of Love, the God who is Love).  That’s why it bothered him to see so much un-Love in the world around him.  I call John a realist because he confronted the reality of the world as it is.  However, I also believe he trusted in a deeper reality that is more real than what he saw with his eyes.  I think John’s faith in that deeper reality is what gave him the strength to stand up and get loud.  His is not a voice of rage or hate.  There is no call to arms or partisan propaganda.  When John gets loud, it’s the voice of Love getting loud.

Here in this room today, we believe that God is with us, God is Love, and Love wins.  But, like John and Elijah, we live a world that is deaf to Love’s call because Love has been drowned out by the white noise of apathy and injustice.  What does that mean for us?  It means it’s time for Love to get loud.

What does that mean for us?

It’s time for Love to get loud.

God is with us, God is Love, and Love wins.  But somewhere this week a boy got his face slammed into a locker at school just because he likes other boys.  What does that mean for us?  It’s time for Love to get loud.

God is with us, God is Love, and Love wins.  But somewhere this morning a girl looks into a mirror and cries because what she sees there doesn’t look like what she sees on the cover of a magazine.  What does that mean for us?  It’s time for Love to get loud.

God is with us, God is Love, and Love wins.  But somewhere there’s a local shopkeeper who is fretting about how to keep the family business open for another generation.  What does that mean for us?  It’s time for Love to get loud.

God is with us, God is Love, and Love wins.  But somewhere today someone is mourning the death of a beloved parent, spouse, or sibling.  What does that mean for us?  It’s time for Love to get loud.

God is with us, God is Love, and Love wins.  But in 2011, there are still churches in this country where the Bible is used as a weapon and people can be denied membership just because of the color of their skin.  What does that mean for us?  It’s time for Love to get loud.

God is with us, God is Love, and Love wins.  But Oneida County is still eliminating daycare funding for children already living below the poverty line.  What does that mean for us?  It’s time for Love to get loud.

It is indeed time for Love to get loud.  How will Love get loud in you?

It’s time to raise your voice, like John the Baptist, in the name of Love.  It’s time to lift every voice and sing!

“Stay Thirsty, My Friends”

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon1 Comment
The Most Interesting Man in the World

This week’s sermon from First Pres, Boonville.

The text is Mark 13:24-37 with reference to Daniel 7:9-14.

Click here to listen to this sermon at fpcboonville.org

It’s almost always a dangerous thing to mention presidential politics from the pulpit.  At no time in recent history has this been truer than it is right now, when sanity and civility are so conspicuously absent from all ends of the political spectrum in our country.  I sometimes fear that our centuries-old commitment to a democratic government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is quickly degenerating into a spectator sport where each side cheers for their favorite team and boos at the other side whenever they score a goal.  Accordingly, I will choose my words carefully.  I begin with a disclaimer: this is not a sermon about presidential politics, nor is it a political speech that should be misconstrued as an endorsement or denouncement of any particular party or candidate.  I’ll be using some of the buzzwords that factored highly in the last presidential election, but I do so in order to draw attention to the words themselves, not to the people with whom those words were associated.

Now, with that awkward business aside, the buzzwords to which I want to draw your attention are hope and change.  We heard a lot about hope and change in 2008.  Some people got really excited about those words.  They liked the idea that things could somehow be different (i.e. better) than they already were in this country.  In the years since then, some of the people who were initially excited have begun to feel frustrated because things still seem to be pretty much the same as they were before.  We’re still living in the same country with the same old problems.  This frustration has led other public figures to ask (cynically), “Hey America, how’s all that hopey-changey stuff working out for you?”  The hard lesson that people are (re)learning is this: without real change there is no real hope.  And the change necessary to inspire hope is beyond that which any political candidate, party, or ideology can offer.

In the absence of real hope, there are basically two responses that people can make.  First, they can jump on board the bandwagon with whatever big idea comes along next with flashy presentation and inspirational rhetoric.  Like bumblebees, they float from flower to flower, collecting whatever small grains of hope they can find to sustain their meager faith in the system.  Second, people can give up hope entirely.  They can sit back and cynically fold their arms saying, “Nothing ever changes.  Just give me what is rightfully mine and then leave me alone.”  I would argue that neither of these responses is wholly adequate to ease the pain we feel when our hopes are frustrated (in life as well as politics).  There has to be another way to preserve hope, even when our favorite human institutions have failed us.

The earliest Christians, just as much as (if not more so than) us, lived in a time of extreme political tension and unfulfilled hopes.  The land of Judea was occupied by the Roman Empire.  The people longed for some sign of hope that things might someday be different, but they were divided amongst themselves over what that hope should look like.  Some Jews, like the Zealots, picked up swords and sought to take back their homeland with divinely inspired military might.  Other Jews, like the Sadducees, worked with the Roman government to maintain order and preserve whatever religious and cultural freedoms they could.

Eventually, these tensions came to a head in the year 66 when war broke out between the Jewish people and the Roman Empire.  The government dedicated itself to crushing this rebellion and eventually did so with its might as a military superpower.  The ultimate symbol of Jewish defeat came in the year 70 when the Roman forces invaded Jerusalem and their sacred temple, the ultimate symbol of their national and religious life, was burned to the ground.

It was around this same time that Mark’s gospel was first written.  The Christian Church was just emerging as an independent movement within Judaism.  Christians wondered among themselves, “What should we do?  Should we fight the Romans or try to work with them?  Should we put our hope in each new self-proclaimed revolutionary leader that comes along or throw our hands up and admit that nothing (not even God) can defeat military juggernaut of the Roman Empire?”

The author of Mark’s gospel saw both of these options as deficient.  Neither the false hope of revolution nor the cynicism of collaboration embodied a faithful response to the very real hope that was made manifest by God in Christ.  So the author of Mark’s gospel made sure to include in chapter 13 of this book a particular story about Jesus that might provide some helpful guidance for the Christian Church in that day.

It begins as Jesus and his disciples were walking out of the great Jewish temple one day.  One of the disciples stopped to admire the architecture of the building.  Jesus responded in words that would ring eerily true to the Christians in Mark’s day, who would see this very thing happen in their own lifetime: “Do you see these great buildings?”  Jesus said, “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

He was speaking of the temple of course, the cultural icon and center of religious devotion.  Jesus’ own ancestors had fought and died to preserve everything for which it stood.  How could he, a Jew, speak so glibly about its destruction?  He didn’t stop there either.  He went on to speak so insightfully about the coming crisis that some later regarded his words as a prophetic prediction.  Instead of glorious victory and freedom, he spoke of war, earthquake, famine, and persecution.  What’s even worse is that Jesus then told his followers to do the exact opposite thing that their brave and faithful ancestors had done when Israel was threatened.  “[W]hen you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be,” he said, “then those in Judea must flee to the mountains.”  In other words, Jesus ordered them to run and hide rather than stand and fight to protect that which their nation held most dear.

How could Jesus be so offensive toward his patriotic Jewish audience?  The answer lies in verse 26 of the passage we read this morning.  He makes reference to “’the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory.”  This would have been a familiar image to his educated Jewish audience.  This phrase is taken from the book of the prophet Daniel.  In 7:13, Daniel describes “one like a human being (i.e. ‘son of man’) coming with the clouds of heaven.”  According to the vision, God would one day take the corrupt and destructive empires of this world and place them under the authority of this human being (son of man).  The powers that be would be divinely transformed and made to serve real human interests rather than their own animal-like greed.  Real change was bound to happen in this world, not because of violent revolution or political cunning, but because God wills it.  God will establish true “liberty and justice for all” regardless of what goes on in the halls of power.  The temple could be destroyed and the battle lost and God would still see this vision through to its fulfillment.  This is the source of Jesus’ hope.  It is a prophetic vision embedded deep within his Jewish heritage.  It transcends ideology, victory, even history itself.  Prophets and visionaries in every age have held onto this inexorable and eternal vision.  Many have laid down their very lives because of its promise.  Dr. Martin Luther King reiterated its core principle when he said, “The arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.”  Archbishop Oscar Romero proclaimed, “If they kill me I shall rise again in the Salvadoran people.”  Jesus himself willing went to his cross while trusting in the final victory of God’s vision over the powers that be.

Change is coming, therefore there is hope.  Real change, lasting change, God’s change.  It won’t come through any particular candidate, party, or ideology.  It won’t come through military might or violent revolution.  It won’t come about through our diligent plans or valiant efforts.  God’s kingdom will come and God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  We pray for this and proclaim our faith in this vision every Sunday.  Jesus had faith in this vision.  He was willing to stake his life on it.  That’s why the thought of Jewish defeat or the temple’s destruction didn’t bother him that much.

The author of Mark’s gospel was impressed with Jesus’ faith in God’s ultimate vision.  The early Christians needed that faith as well.  The Church needed an anchor that would hold them steady while the storms of war and persecution blew over the deck of their boat.  If they cut the line, they would drift and drown with their neighbors.  So it was that the early Christians took these words to heart and refused to fight in defense of Jerusalem or the temple.  They ran for the hills when the invasion came.  This was an unforgivable sin to their Jewish neighbors.  Christians were branded as cowards and traitors within the Jewish community.  Relations had been strained up to that point, but from then on, Christianity was cut off from the rest of Judaism.

As we meditate on these events this morning, we find ourselves at the first Sunday of Advent.  Thanksgiving and Black Friday have passed and so we now begin our preparations for Christmas.  For most people, this takes on a decidedly nostalgic tone as Bing Crosby dominates the radio waves.  There is a lot of talk about “peace on earth”, “the light of the world”, and “hope”.  But we start this season on an intentionally apocalyptic note.  We know that hope cannot exist without change, yet we know that change is coming, therefore we have hope.  None of the powers that be in Washington or on Wall Street can claim to be the fulfillment of God’s vision, yet neither can they stop God’s vision from being fulfilled.

In the absence of real hope, people tend to embrace false hopes or else bitter cynicism.  I believe that Jesus offers us a third way.  We can hold onto hope that transcends the fleeting promises of ideology and history.  We can live as prophets of hope in a hopeless world.  Like Jesus, we can look deep into the heritage of our faith and cling to God’s vision of a world that can be changed… that will be changed.

There is currently a beer commercial on TV that features “the most interesting man in the world”.  At the end of the advert he looks into the camera and says, “Stay thirsty, my friends.”  As he said to them, so I say to you: Stay thirsty, my friends.  I can think of no better way to sum up the call to action that arises from Jesus’ vision of hope and change.  While other people are dying of their thirst for hope and cursing the sky in cynicism, I say to you, “Stay thirsty, my friends.”  While others around you are desperately trying to slake their thirst for hope with things that will only lead to more despair, I say to you, “Stay thirsty, my friends.”  Stay thirsty for hope.  Stay thirsty for change.  It’s coming.  God will not let us down.  “Stay thirsty, my friends.”