The Power of Love

On January 13, 2013January 13, 2013 By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be blessed and be a blessing!

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

Seeing With the Eyes of the Heart

On August 5, 2012August 5, 2012 By J. Barrett LeeIn God Has A Dream, SermonLeave a comment

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

Genesis 50:15-21

Click here to listen to this sermon at fpcboonville.org

Excerpt from God Has A Dream

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

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

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

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

Sounds pretty intense, doesn’t it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God Loves You As You Are

On July 16, 2012 By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon2 Comments

This week’s sermon from Boonville Presbyterian.

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

based on the book by Desmond Tutu

Click here to listen to this sermon at fpcboonville.org

I John 4:7-21

Excerpt from the book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…Personal responsibility is usually the driving force behind success.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be blessed and be a blessing!

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

On June 24, 2012 By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

This week’s sermon from Boonville Presbyterian Church.

Click here to listen at fpcboonville.org

Mark 4:35-41

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Have Called You Friends

On May 13, 2012May 13, 2012 By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

This week’s sermon from Boonville Presbyterian Church.

John 15:9-17

If you were to ask the average person on the street to define the term ‘God’ (as it is often used in most contemporary monotheistic religions), you would probably get an answer similar to what the late Anglican Bishop John A.T. Robinson used to call the God “up there.” In his more cheeky moments, Bishop Robinson also referred to the God “up there” as “the Old Man in the Sky.” This idea of God was taken quite literally by superstitious people during the Medieval Dark Ages.

Folks these days, while they might use language about God that describes “the Old Man in the Sky” as being “up there,” will most likely admit when pressed that God (if they believe there is a God) is neither biologically male, nor does “he” exist in a physical location that just so happens to be directly vertical in relation to the speaker’s current point of reference. Most folks who believe in a traditional monotheistic deity these days tend to think of the God “out there” (to use Robinson’s words again). In other words, they think of God as a singular, intangible, all-knowing, and all-powerful Supreme Being who exists independently of the created universe. Depending on their overall outlook on life and religion, they may or may not identify this Supreme Being as benevolent or compassionate.

The attribute of God that people tend to name more than any other is omnipotence, which means “all-powerful” or “almighty.” Have you ever paid attention to how often people begin their prayers with the words ‘Almighty God’? We kind of take it for granted that God is almighty. We figure that a Supreme Being can do anything that comes to mind. This is a tremendous source of strength and comfort for those who face difficult circumstances. It’s helpful to know that God is in control, can handle any crisis, and has a plan to work everything out for the better. The downside to this idea is that there seems to be so much meaningless suffering in the world. How could God possibly bring good out of it? Philosophers and theologians have been wrestling with that question for thousands of years. If they ever come up with a single, universally acceptable answer, I’ll be sure to let you know right away.

I find it interesting that omnipotence has taken such a central place in our ideas about God. When you think about modern society, it kind of makes sense. Modern people are obsessed with power. In the last five hundred years, we’ve used the power of science and technology to accomplish things that our ancestors never dreamed of. We’ve come to see ourselves as the masters of our own destiny. We worship what we value, so it would be fair to say that modern people worship power. When we try to conceive of a Supreme Being, the first thing we think of is someone who possesses unlimited power. Thus, to the modern mind, God must be omnipotent. It is as the philosopher Voltaire famously said: “If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.”

However, our faith in the power of power has been shaken as of late. The twentieth century, with its two world wars, the holocaust, and the threat of nuclear annihilation, gave us reason to doubt our ability to bring about utopia through science and technology. The current century, as young as it is, has already drawn our attention to the growing problems of global warming, international terrorism, and social stratification. The modern era’s faith in the power of power has left us feeling empty, helpless, and alone in a sea of political propaganda and consumer advertising.

The God of modern power-lust has also presented us with certain problems. I’ve already mentioned what philosophers call “the problem of evil.” How can an all-powerful deity allow such horrible things to happen in the world? Whole books have been written on that question, so I won’t get into it just now. The problem I want to focus on is a relational one. There is only one way to relate to a God who is primarily understood as all-powerful: servitude. Obedience is all that matters in a power-based relationship. This much is true, even when power is trustworthy and only exercised in the interest of our individual or common good.

This idea of God is quite popular among religious believers today. God is an all-powerful lawgiver with a plan for the world that must be obeyed to letter, or else…

The spirituality shaped by such a theology is characterized by crime and punishment, as well as guilt and forgiveness. Average people, uncertain of what an all-powerful Supreme Being wants of them, tend to vest the authority for moral decision-making in some tangible and supposedly infallible source like a church, a Pope, or a Bible. This infallible source, so they say, represents the will of God to the people. In their minds, questioning the words of the Pope or the Bible is disobedience toward God. One must either obey or face the consequences of eternal damnation in the fiery abyss of hell. As you can see, this is how religious fanaticism and fundamentalism are born.

So, the question I want to ask today is this: is there a way to relate to God outside of the modern obsession with power? The answer, in my opinion, is yes.

I have already noted how the only way to relate to the omnipotent God of power is as an obedient servant. So, with that in mind, I love how Jesus says to his disciples in today’s gospel reading, “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends.”

Jesus was (in)famous in his day for challenging the authority of traditional orthodox religion in order to replace it with authentic and radical relationships. His own family called him insane, all the preachers said he was demon-possessed, and respectable folks called him a glutton, a drunkard, and “a friend of sinners.” Those who followed him were as diverse as they were dense. They were ancient versions of government workers with guerilla fighters, barstool brawlers with church choir soloists, adult film stars with senators’ wives. It was an offensive and unlikely collection of people that found friendship with this remarkable person and each other.

Jesus, in his teaching and his living, replaced the God of power with the God of love. He told his disciples, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.” He makes it clear to them that his friendship with them is not based on religious observance or moral performance. He says to them, “You did not choose me but I chose you.” His love for them is a free gift of grace.

Gone is the sophisticated legal system of the Torah with its 613 commandments. Gone too are the famous tablets of the Ten Commandments. In fact, the only commandment that Jesus leaves his disciples is the commandment of love. “This is my commandment,” he says, “that you love one another as I have loved you.” The only thing Jesus asks us to do with this free gift of love is pass it on. And the end result, he says, of this extravagant love-fest is a lasting fullness of joy for eternity.

What Jesus knew on an instinctual level, and his friends learned by following him, is that God is love. The experience of a lived compassion and affection is more than just a fleeting emotion. It is divine. Love, as Jesus lived and taught it, is an expression of that which is the “Ground of all Being” and the very heartbeat of reality. Live like this, he says, and you will touch the face of God. For Jesus, God is not some all-powerful Supreme Being who rules the universe from a golden throne behind a pearly gate on a white, puffy cloud. The throne of God, the place from which God reigns, is much nearer to us than that. The kingdom of heaven, according to Jesus, is within you and among us.

If you want to find God, don’t look up, look deep. Look into your own eyes and those of your neighbors. Honor the relationships in your life and you will automatically be following the will of God for you. As the Christian theologian, St. Augustine, once said, “Love and do what you want.”

This is a radically different view of God than the one we get from religious fanatics, fundamentalists, and other modern folks who are obsessed with power. According to Jesus’ experience, love (not power) is the primary attribute of God. Everything else we might say about God must be understood in light of this first principle. This kind of God, the one revealed in and through Jesus, is Emmanuel (i.e. “God with us”). The life of Jesus represents a fundamental shift in the way we think about God. Going back to serving the demanding God of power after this would be an act of sheer idolatry.

Jesus’ God of love offers us a healing balm for the wounds and ailments of power-driven modern society. In spite of our incredible technological capacity for communication and information exchange, folks of all ages today tend to feel more isolated and lonely than ever. We are besieged by an endless invasion of barbarians who tear us and each other apart in the effort to obtain our money and our votes. We are horrified to discover, as Charlton Heston did at the end of the movie Soylent Green, that we are all destined to become mere consumers and products for consumption. But Jesus shows us that there is another way. There is more.

Jesus turns us onto the God of love and the subversive power of committed relationships. When we, as a community, begin to learn and practice this art, we find ourselves living the life of heaven on earth: the fullness of joy forever more. We might not be luckier, happier, or more prosperous than before, but we will have discovered the secret to living well.

I want to invite you then, whoever and wherever you are, to begin to look deeper into the relationships in your life. Take a second (or third) look at your family, friends, and neighbors. Take an especially good look at those you might consider your enemies. Take a look at those strangers you pass by in public and at the store.

If you’re listening to this sermon online or on the radio, I would invite you to take a break our culture’s individualism and consumerism to come visit us on Sunday at 10:30 and start exploring these relationships with us at our church. We don’t do it perfectly all the time, but we give it our best try. Come and get involved. See what love looks like in our little community of unlikely friends and ragtag disciples. Get involved and help us look for God in these little things. Maybe you’ll find the God of love while you’re helping Wally move chairs after the rummage sale, helping Vivien make sandwiches, or helping Rod put up the Christmas tree. These are the places and times when heaven comes to earth and the Spirit of God takes on flesh and bone again.

These relationships are sacred. Try to treat each person as you would treat Christ himself. Maybe you could memorize what Jesus said in Matthew 25:40 and recite his words silently to yourself as you interact with people, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” This is the secret to living well. This is the fullness of joy. This is how the kingdom of heaven comes to earth. This is how we come to recognize the sacred face of Jesus’ God of love.

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15:12)

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God… for God is love.” (1 John 4:7-8)

Abiding in the Vine

On May 6, 2012May 6, 2012 By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

ubuntu — Symbolic enactment of Ubuntu by African school children. Photo taken at Nazareth House Apostolate in Sierra Leone

John 15:1-8; 1 John 4:7-21

This past week, I was glad to wrap up another semester in my teaching job at Utica College. I have to say that one of my favorite things about this academic year has been my daily walk from the parking lot to my office.

When I first arrive on campus in the morning, I like to sit in my car for a few minutes. With two young kids, it’s hard to find a quiet moment to myself at home. During these few minutes in my car, I like to close my eyes and pay attention to the natural rhythm of my breathing. This is an exercise that I learned from a doctor named Jon Kabat-Zinn. You would be amazed at the effect that it has on my day. I feel so much more relaxed, focused, and “tuned in” to the present moment.

When I get out of my car, I am so much more aware of my immediate surroundings. I feel the wind blowing my hair back as the soles of my feet hit the ground rolling and propel me forward, I smell the dirt emerging from beneath the snow, I hear the sound of birds chirping and cars going by, and I see blue sky meeting red brick and green grass that stretches as far back as the eye can see.

I’ve become particularly good friends with the two deciduous trees who flank the front entrance to White Hall, where my office is located. I don’t know my botany well enough to name their species, but I’ve enjoyed watching them change with the seasons. The brilliance of autumn gave way to the stark bareness of winter. The buds of spring have now given way to new green leaves that seemed to burst forth overnight. I suppose they have been right there for at least as long as I have been teaching at the college, but I never really noticed them before this year. I guess you could say that, because of this new meditation practice, I’m literally “coming to my senses” in ways that I hadn’t before now.

I’m tempted to label this effect as a “spiritual experience,” except that it lacks so many of the characteristics that are often associated with mysticism. There are no visions of angels or voices from heaven. There is no intuitive sense of a supernatural presence within or around me. I am simply aware of the present moment and caught up in what I like to call the “is-ness” of everything. If I am experiencing God at all through this meditation exercise, it is as the “Ground of all Being” and the great “I Am Who I Am” that Moses encountered in the burning bush at the beginning of the book of Exodus. If God is present at all, it is in the overall wholeness of “the big picture” and the natural lines of connection that weave us into “the interdependent web of existence.”

I said, “if God is present,” but of course I do believe that God is eternally present in all places and at all times, whether we perceive God’s presence or not. Our moment-to-moment existence, as creatures, is forever dependent upon that which is greater than us. For example, we do not “take birth,” our mothers give birth to us. To illustrate further: imagine the finely-tuned delicate balance of creation that allows for life to exist on this planet. If Earth were just a little bit closer to the sun, the oceans would boil and we would burn up. If she were just a little bit farther away, we would freeze. If Earth’s rotation on her axis were just a little more tilted, the seasonal conditions would be so extreme that the Arctic Circle would reach all the way to the tropics and vice-versa. If the moon floated only a few miles closer to the Earth tidal forces would decimate our coastlines. I could keep going, but I think you get the point. We do not create or sustain ourselves. Life cannot be taken for granted. Existence is a gift that is given freely to all.

All of this has been in the back of my mind this week as I’ve been thinking about Jesus’ words from John’s gospel: “I am the vine, you are the branches.” He goes on to talk about “abiding” in the vine and “bearing fruit.” This is a powerful image. It speaks beautifully of the grace of being, which connects us to each other and to the greater whole. Christians from the first century to the 21^st century have come to believe that the great Source of Life and the Ground of all Being was revealed to the world through Jesus, not just in his words and accomplishments, but in his very person. Other religions have noble sages and prophets who delivered the will of God or the meaning of life to people, but it was always the message and not the messenger that was most important. Christianity is unique in our belief that the messenger is the message. Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches.”

Each of us is begotten and sustained by our connection to this vine, the Source of Life. This truth is so easily forgotten by people who live in the modern age. We are trained to be rugged individualists. In spite of our rational disdain for all things superstitious, we retain our belief in the ridiculous myth of the “self-made man (or woman).” I think you can ask anyone in a hospital maternity ward and they’ll tell you that there’s no such thing. We are all branches off the same vine. Our lives intertwine and intersect with one another. Our separate identity as branches presents us with the illusion of independence, but we can only keep that idea up so long as we persist in living what the Greek philosopher Socrates called “the unexamined life.” The minute we start asking questions about who and what we are, it becomes self-evident that we are all connected to and dependent on each other and the whole. Scientists have identified this inherent connection in their study of ecosystems. Individual species are mutually supportive of each other in symbiotic networks that form the engine, if you will, of evolution. Plants feed animals, who feed other animals, who die and return to the earth, where their bodies become fertilizer for plants. The food chain, it seems, is not so much a line as a circle. One of my favorite illustrations of this point comes from the process of breathing itself. We animals inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide as waste. Plants, as many of you already know, inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. What a wonderful coincidence! What beautiful symmetry! We are sustaining one another through the very air that we breathe.

As Christians, we have come to understand and interpret our connection to the whole through the person of Jesus. To us, he is far more than our favorite philosopher and an ancient wise man. What we celebrate during this Easter season is our experience of Jesus as an eternally living reality. Christ is alive in our hearts and the world around us. He may not be visibly present, but he lives nonetheless. We’ll say more about that when we celebrate Ascension Sunday in a few weeks. Christ is alive. He is the vine of which we are all branches. This is the Christian’s fundamental understanding of the universe. You might even call it our most basic principle.

In response to this truth that we believe, Jesus instructs his followers in John’s gospel to “abide in” him so that they might “bear fruit.” What is that all about? If we’re all branches on the same vine, wouldn’t we just naturally “abide in” (i.e. “stay connected to”) the vine? On one level: yes. We can’t cut ourselves off from the source of existence any more than one of us could willingly disconnect ourselves from an arm or leg. But the vine analogy breaks down when we consider that human beings have a quality that plants do not have, to wit, consciousness. We are able to think and make decisions in ways that other life forms cannot. Through the choices we make and the lives we live, we are able to either honor our connection to the whole or not. We can nurture the common life that is in us all or not. We can water the seeds of faith, hope, and love in our souls or not. That much is up to us. To the extent that we choose well, our lives will tend to flourish. To the extent that we choose poorly, we will wither and die. Jesus’ words in today’s gospel reading make it clear that we are meant to flourish.

How can we do this? How do we, as branches, abide in the life of the vine? I think there are many ways that this is possible. Personally, I have found my aforementioned meditation practice to be most helpful in this regard. It reminds me of the significance and sacredness of the moment in which I find myself. There is no day but today. There is no place other than here. Here and now is where I live. Simply recognizing and respecting this reality goes a long way in nurturing my connection to the vine.

If you want to try it sometime, I recommend that you set aside a quiet place and time (I find that early in the morning, after my first cup of tea, works best, so that I don’t fall asleep). Sit upright in a comfortable position with your back straight and your feet flat on the floor. Close your eyes and try to become conscious of the fact that you are breathing. Don’t try to breathe more deeply or slowly than usual, just notice this unconscious act that is happening in us all the time, whether we realize it or not. Stay in this place for a while. As thoughts pop into your head (and they will), don’t fight them or get angry at them, just simply acknowledge them and then gently direct your attention back to your breathing. Do this as often as you need to. It doesn’t matter if thoughts pop up one time or a hundred times. Simply recognize the thought and redirect your attention. You’re not trying to accomplish anything in the moment. There are no “altered states of consciousness” that you are trying to reach. You’re just trying to be fully aware of the present moment. If you want to, try this exercise for five minutes a day. When you feel ready, try increasing it by another five minutes at a time. Some people stay at five minutes, some go for fifteen or twenty, and some sit like this for as long as an hour at a stretch. It’s your practice. Do what works best for you.

Another way that we can “abide in the vine” is through the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist (a.k.a. Communion). Just as we’re about to do in a few minutes, we gather as a community around one table, breaking bread and drinking wine. This ritual reminds us that we are part of one another through Christ. We are what we eat: the body of Christ. The wine reminds us that the blood of Christ flows in our veins. They say that “blood is thicker than water.” This blood is thickest of all. As we eat and drink in this sacramental ritual, the branches abide in the vine.

Finally, and most importantly, the best way to “abide in the vine” is to nurture our relationships with each other. This is the true mark of our religion and the true measure of our spiritual health. Jesus continually told his followers that the “fruit” of this vine is love. The community that first published John’s gospel also published his epistles, which we also heard from this morning. They offered additional advice to flesh out what Jesus meant by “abiding in the vine.”

They remind us that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” If you want to know how spiritual a person is, don’t look at his/her church attendance or theological beliefs. Look at the way s/he treats other people. I once heard someone say, “A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter is not a nice person.” The size of your waiter’s tip says more about the quality of your Christian faith than the Bible you leave on the table. In fact, your life might be the only Bible that another person ever reads. What does that Bible say about what you believe?

I was talking to someone just yesterday about politics. I know that’s a dangerous topic for preachers to broach in church (especially in an election year), so I’ll choose my words carefully. I’m not going to tell you how you should vote. Frankly, I don’t care what your ideological stripes are: conservative/liberal, Democrat/Republican, whatever. That doesn’t matter nearly so much as the way we treat each other. I care very much about that. We live in a time of intense polarization in this society where those labels (conservative/liberal) are thrown around and used as insults. We slander each other with names like “fascist” and “socialist.” We categorize and demonize those who think differently from us. We paint them as stupid or evil. This, rather than the particular views we fear, represents the real threat to our democracy. We’re so busy attacking each other that we’re unable to make any real difference in advancing the common good. It’s high time that we learn to “abide in the vine” and nurture the life of the whole plant, so that we might bear the fruits of peace and justice.

There is an African word, Ubuntu, that refers to a particular character quality. A person who has Ubuntu is conscious of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all people and all life. We might say that a person with Ubuntu really knows how to “abide in the vine.” We need more Ubuntu in our common life today.

Sola Gratia

On April 29, 2012 By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon4 Comments

This week’s sermon from Boonville Presbyterian

Click here to listen to this sermon

1 John 3:16-24

Back when was in college, I lived in a little town in western North Carolina called Boone. It’s nestled way back in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which form part of the ancient and gentle Appalachians. Once you get up into the High Country of Christmas tree and tobacco farms in the hills around Boone, let me tell you: you will meet some “interesting” people. We had one guy named Joshua who lived in a tent in the woods and sold poetry on the street corner. We had Satanists, Neo-nazis, drug dealers, apocalyptic conspiracy theorists, and fire-breathing preachers galore. Don’t forget: this is the same region of the country that produced snake-handling churches. I think there are even a few folks left in that region who (still) might not have read the memo saying that the Civil War is over.

One such “interesting” person that I had the singular privilege of knowing was a guy named Mike. Mike was a reformed drug user who lived in a trailer way back up in the woods. He attended a particular church that holds the unique belief that theirs is the one and only true church left on planet Earth. All others have either forgotten or corrupted the true gospel of Christ. They believe that strict adherence to the dogmas and morals that constitute the membership requirements for their one, true church is what could secure one’s status as “saved” in the eyes of God.

Mike himself was an intense and energetic loner who felt drawn to their form of religious belief and practice. Their robust conviction and die-hard certainty was attractive to him. However, Mike was a person who struggled in many ways. He wrestled with substance abuse and mental illness. His church, unwilling to bend their strict rules in the name of pastoral sensitivity, was constantly excommunicating him and then readmitting him to membership. Whenever I would bump into him in public, Mike’s customary greeting was, “I got saved again!” Mike believed that his status before God was constantly in a state of flux because of his inability to adhere to his church’s code of faith and conduct. That inflexible code, I think, only served to increase Mike’s anxiety and make him feel alienated from the Source of life and love that could truly help him on his quest to become a better person and a more faithful Christian.

Now, I don’t think many of us are likely to find ourselves in Mike’s position. While we too might very well wrestle with problems like addiction and mental illness, this church does not exclude or condemn people for being human. However, we do live in a time when it is quite likely that you will encounter someone (in person, online, or on TV) who will try to send you the message that you’re not “saved” or “born again,” which is to say that you don’t count as a “real” Christian or a child of God. Let me tell you right now that I think that’s a bunch of baloney.

In the interest of full-disclosure, I should probably take this opportunity to also tell you flat-out that I am a universalist. What that means in theological terms is that I believe in the doctrine of universal salvation. What it means in plain English is that I don’t believe in hell. I find the idea of eternal punishment after death to be completely incompatible with the nature and purposes of the God of Love who is revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. This means that I believe everyone, everywhere, regardless of their religion or their behavior, is “saved.” I’m going to come back to this point later, but I think it’s important that I lay it out now, just so you all know where I’m coming from and where I’m going with this.

Those who try to draw lines in the sand between us and them (i.e. the saved and the damned, the religious insiders and the secular outsiders), typically do so using one or both of the following criteria: belief and behavior. They might say that there are certain ideas you need to accept before you’ll count as a “real” Christian in God’s eyes. They might also say that there are certain things that you need to do if you want to be “saved.”

Folks like this have been around for a long time. In fact, I think it’s probably fair to say they’ve been around for as long as organized religion has been part of human society. We can definitely see their tendencies emerging within the pages of the Bible itself.

In the earliest decades of Christianity, there were two influential groups that developed within the church, each with its own ideas and ideologies. The first group is now known as the Judaizers. These were folks who had a very high degree of respect for Christianity’s roots in Jewish religion and culture. So great was their love for this heritage that many of them began to insist that every new Christian should become Jewish first. They thought this would limit the amount of cultural perversion and assimilation that might happen among Christians. The Judaizers insisted that Christian believers of all ethnicities should make certain that they follow all 613 of God’s commandments in the Jewish Torah. The leaders of the early church, however, decided together that the doors of the church should be flung as wide open as possible in order to welcome people from every tribe, language, people, and nation into the community of Christ. Christianity’s honored roots may have been Jewish, they said, but its future would be international and multicultural. You can read about the details of this conversation in chapter 15 of the book of Acts in the New Testament. The apostle Paul confronted this controversy head-on in his Epistle to the Galatians (also in the New Testament). He had a lot of passionate things to say about it (he was against the Judaizers). Even though the issue seems to have died down in the later part of the first century, we can still hear echoes of that conflict in today’s reading from John’s First Epistle. John’s words about “obey[ing] the commandments” may well have been a reference back to the controversy with the Judaizers. With their strict emphasis on following the commandments, one can easily see how the Judaizers were the ones who said that there are certain things that people need to do in order to count as “saved” in God’s eyes. We could say that they believed in self-salvation through behavior.

The second influential group in the early Christian church was actually a collection or series of different groups that had common characteristics. Collectively, they are now known as the Gnostics. These were folks who came into their Christian faith from the Greco-Roman side of the equation. They brought with them a love of philosophy and wisdom as part of their cultural heritage. As they began to explore their newfound Christian faith, they tried their best to understand Christianity through the lens of philosophy. Popular philosophical thought at the time saw the physical world as completely evil and the spiritual world as completely good. The Gnostics saw Jesus as a kind of divine messenger who floated down to earth and appeared to take on human form in order to teach humanity the secret knowledge that would allow them to transcend above the realm of the physical and enter the spiritual realm, where God lives. The early church leaders, especially the author of John’s First Epistle, were extremely uncomfortable with the idea that this world is totally evil and Jesus wasn’t a real flesh and blood human like you or me. With their emphasis on “secret knowledge” as the source for salvation, the Gnostics were like those who insist that a person has to accept certain ideas or interpretations of scripture in order to count as a “real” Christian. We could say that they believed in self-salvation through belief.

Now John, writing as a pastor to his congregation in his First Epistle, challenges both of these false assumptions, but he spends a lot more time being concerned about the Gnostics (probably because that was the bigger issue with this congregation).

John counters these ideas with one, huge, over-arching principle that trumps both belief and behavior: Love.

John is the writer who famously wrote, “God is love.” God’s love, given freely and unconditionally to those who neither deserve nor earn it, is the basis of all authentic Christian faith and action. Another word for this kind of unconditional love is “grace.” That’s what we mean when we sing, “Amazing grace! How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me!” The Protestant Reformers, our forbears in this church, were following in John’s footsteps when they leaned heavily on the principle of sola gratia or “grace alone” as one of the central foundations of their faith. In theological terms, grace is the “unmerited favor” of God. In plain English, it means “God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

For John, the Protestant Reformers, and all of us in this church, the primary revelation of God’s love is in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus embodied love. He lived and died for others. He set for us an example of what love looks like and what the power of love can do in this world.

According to John, the only way to respond to this free gift of unconditional love is to give love freely and unconditionally. When we love like Jesus, we remind ourselves and others that love is the Ground of our Being. Love is the heartbeat at the center of the universe. When we love like Jesus, our hearts beat in time with the cosmos.

Love is so much simpler, yet so much more difficult, than following a list of prescribed beliefs and behaviors. We would much rather have an itemized creed to which we demanded adherence from everyone. That’s way easier than loving. We would much rather have a code of conduct that spelled out every possible contingency and application for each regulation. That’s way easier than loving.

Love is a fluid and unpredictable thing. Love keeps us creative and flexible. Love is difficult, but it’s also so sorely needed.

You and I live in a society where dogmatism and litigiousness run rampant, but real love and community are on the decline. Just as the Beatles found out that “money can’t buy me love,” we’re finding out that we can’t legislate it either. It would be so much easier to simply draw our lines in the sand over belief and behavior, keeping us in and them out.

The one thing that’s lacking in this land is a sense of love and community. People are longing to belong.

In spite of our exponentially accelerated rate of communication and information exchange in our culture, folks are feeling more isolated than ever. This is a time when the recovery of love as our central principle for faith and action is needed more than ever.

Because of this great need in the world and the great love that is in us as the people of God, I am ordaining and commissioning you all this morning as evangelists and missionaries of love to Central New York and the North Country. I’m not asking you to go proselytize your neighbors or try to win converts at the grocery store. There are enough folks out there doing that already.

At best, those “missionaries” and “evangelists” are only trying to get people to “believe that” certain ideas about Jesus are true (i.e. that he is the Son of God who was born of a virgin, died on the cross, and rose from the grave). Those pamphlets of religious literature can never really get people to “believe in” Jesus in a real way.

I can say “I believe that” about any number of facts. I believe that I am standing in a pulpit right now. I believe that there is a stack of paper in front of me. I believe that I can see our organist from here. All of those are simple statements of fact.

But to say “I believe in” takes a much more personal commitment. I believe in this church. I believe in you. It’s a statement of personal trust and relationship. It goes way farther than simply giving intellectual assent to a list of statements on a piece of paper.

Into this isolated and isolating world that knows so little of real love, I want to send you all as evangelists and missionaries of unconditional love in word and action. Show your faith in love through loving deeds, not creeds. Help people to believe in that love which we hold most sacred.

I commission you in the words of another, more famous, American Universalist named John Murray, who preached during the 1700s:

Go out into the highways and by-ways. Give the people something of your new vision. You may possess only a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. Give them not Hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.

The Erotic Spirit

On March 23, 2012March 23, 2012 By J. Barrett LeeIn Common Sense Liberalism1 Comment

The first week of spring has felt more like the first week of summer in New York. We’ve had temperatures in the 80s most days. This is unheard of in a land where I’ve preached Easter sermons under a blanket of snow.

I’ve come to love spring over the last ten years or so. It started when I was living in Vancouver, where spring’s arrival is loudly announced by the explosion of cherry blossoms and the rhododendrons just outside my apartment window. The combined effect is like floral fireworks.

Flowers aren’t the only things popping out either. I’ve noticed that, as human beings emerge from hibernation, they have some kind of instinctual urge to get out of their clothes in public. They do it while jogging, sunning, or going to class.

I like to say, “It’s mating season for the earthbound human!” I stole and adapted that phrase from a movie in the 90s. While sometimes annoying, this tendency never fails to be entertaining.

Earlier this week, the weather being what it is, I decided to take my work out of the office to the lake. Grading papers, prepping for next week’s lectures, and quietly meditating. Not normally sexually charged activities. I was rather surprised to find, on a weekday afternoon, our wannabe naturists already out in force with all the coy subtlety of Britney Spears’ famous claims to virginity.

In years past, I probably would have stormed off in a self-righteous huff, annoyed at the distractions while I was trying to get work done or “be spiritual” (whatever the hell that means). It reminds me of something Rich Mullins said (I think he stole it from Tony Campolo). I paraphrase:

“If you’re a [straight] guy on a beach and a young woman walks by in a bikini and that doesn’t do something for you, that doesn’t mean you’re spiritual. It means you’re dead.”

So, in the interest of (a.) reminding myself that I’m not dead and (b.) liberating myself from old habits of belief and behavior, I decided to stay where I was and see if it was possible to be spiritual and sexual at the same time. To many out there, this will probably come across as rather basic, but it’s still a new concept for me, thanks to my previously disembodied (my seminary prof, Loren Wilkinson, would call it gnostic) orientation toward all things theological.

What I discovered in that moment was happily surprising. I began to recall particular prayers of thanksgiving from the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship. In one prayer, we express gratitude for “All beauty that delights us…” and in another, “The treasure stored in every human life…”

I began thinking about the Greek word Eros. It’s one of several words that sometimes gets translated as Love. It’s where we get the English word Erotic. Eros is romantic love, desire, and attraction. Matthew Fox and Diarmuid O’Murchu, who have written on this subject far more than me, like to emphasize Eros as creative love. It simultaneously includes and transcends animal lust. I’m currently coming to believe that lust is neither foreign nor antithetical to love unless the two are deliberately divorced in the name of either licentious selfishness or “purity” (which can become a form of religiously legitimated selfishness).

I found myself saying prayers of gratitude for that indefinable magnetism that draws human beings together. It drives us to know one another fully. No other single psychic factor is so motivating. We yearn for intimacy, not only in our minds and spirits, but in our bodies as well.

The coming together of human beings (in the lab, studio, classroom, boardroom, or bedroom) is inherently life-giving and creative. It’s also complex, tricky, messy, and requires lots of skill and commitment in order to be fulfilling in the long-term. I pray that we would learn how to honor the meaning of our connections with each other so that we might sustain the beauty we have created. In this sense, all of life is as erotic as it is spiritual.

As my time of meditation at the lake came to a close, I surveyed the trees, the water, and the hills of the earth around me. I thought about the Jewish creation myth depicted in the first chapter of Genesis. Delirious in the pulsating and passionate throes of creation’s rhythm, God cries out repeatedly in climactic pleasure, “It’s good! It’s good! It’s SO good!”