Beyond Imagining

Sunday, August 24, 2008
Preacher: Pastor Gary Johnson

Readings:
Isaiah 51:1-6
Romans 12:1-8
Matthew 16:13-20

Audio sermon link: http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/422/1BBF417E-A28C-D7DE-9158-F454AA2C43F2.mp3

Pastor Johnson admitted finding this week’s texts terribly disconnected. Today’s Gospel lessons needs to be seen in the context of the events leading to it and those subsequent to it. That said, we are left with the two terribly important questions. Who do people say Jesus is and “who do you (presumably meaning the disciples) say that I am?”. One of the key insights Pastor Johnson offers us is that Jesus is, perhaps, not addressing the disciples (only). He is addressing all of us when he asks, “Who do you say that I am?”

And Peter gets the answer right! And then Jesus tells him to not tell anyone. Right! You get 100 on the test and you need to keep it to yourself?! Pastor Johnson shared with us what we know – that we humans all share a need to put God in a box that makes sense to us. We need to package God in a way to which we can relate.

But Jesus knows the truth – that no human can fathom the depth and meaning of what God truly is. Isaiah implores us to “look to the rock from which we are hewn, and to the quarry from which we were dug”.

Pastor Johnson just returned from vacationing in Canada where he stood on 15,000 year old granite boulders. Geologic babies – compared with the 1 million year old granite that dots the plane we call home. When you stand on those baby rocks, you are in awe of the vastness of God’s universe and creation. You are humbled.

Many treatises on science quote Sir Arthur Eddington who said of our cosmos:

“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine ..."

If we equate the cosmos with the God who created it and strangeness implies that we have difficulty imagining, we can apply these very words to today’s lesson. God is not only more than we do imagine, He is more than we are capable of imagining. We want God to look and act just like us so He can understand us and give us what we want when we need it, what we need when we want it. As much as we may want to, we cannot put Him in a box, or in our brains.

The Olympics were a reminder in our own living rooms that the world is much bigger than 53213, 53226, or 53XXX. The planet is much more diverse than we ever often stop to imagine. It is all shades of black, tan, yellow, red. It is more than Wauwatosa, more than the small world we allow ourselves to be limited to living in. God is more than a white guy from the Midwest, He is not Democrat or Republican. He defies categorization or characterization as we attempt these. The diversity of creation, the vastness of the cosmos remind us we have no right to be smug or self-righteous.

Paul gets it. He gets that God is more than the law. We need for God to be more than the law. We need grace and mercy – and this is why Jesus comes to offer us what we have not the muster to imagine. Paul struggles with this for 11 chapters and in chapter 12, he reasons that God’s mercy and grace are not something “we can get or understand”.

And for all the struggling, Paul comes up with this, a two-part suggestion:

Present your bodies, yourselves as a living sacrifice. Paul’s “a temple guy”, he gets sacrifice and what it entails. He suggests that “we kill ourselves” – that we empty ourselves, let go of our egos, our demands, our preconceptions; empty ourselves so that we can fill ourselves up with God. Paul was sent with the message that we “empty the well”.

We are, each of us individually, only a part of a greater whole. We are, each of us, only ever endowed with special, unique gifts not to be measured by their size, but by their necessity as part of a whole. We all bring 2 saltines to the mix and together God uses us all to feed the 5000. All of our gifts together are as awesome as the 15,000 year old baby rocks beneath our feet.

But this need to get over ourselves, and recognize our part in a greater whole are both lessons that the world will seldom teach us – in fact, it often espouses pretty much the opposite. You won’t learn much about Paul’s suggestions by watching a world that is not about emptying, bu about winning, about accumulating, about medal counts and gold trumps silver trumps bronze trumps a twelfth place personal best.

If you watch that world, you don’t have to look hard to see what Rabbi Harold Kushner saw – a billboard on the highway in Massachusetts before the 1996 Atlanta Olympics that read “You don’t win the silver – you lose the gold.” If you watch the world, you saw what I saw when the USA pole vaulting silver medalist in Beijing, Jennifer Stuczynski, a woman barely vaulting four years place second behind the reigning world champion from Russia. Upon "winning silver", she was crudely and callously chided by her coach on international television for taking “only the silver” … looking at her with disdain in her moment of personal triumph and best, offering only “What can you do? It’s a silver.”

Pastor Johnson was reminded of this by watching the coverage in Canada where stories of athletes performing their personal best were perhaps more compelling than the national coverage in America, stacked as it is around daily medal counts and its obsession with gold and supremacy and superlatives.

In the topsy-turvy world of Jesus, we are offered a different notion:

Be not conformed to this world, but instead be transformed.

There are not enough rules in the cosmos to help you.

Empty yourself … and then ask “God, is there anything I can do for you?”

For most of us (who are not Mother Theresa), this will be something ordinary, something simple – a small but not insignificant kindness, patience in the heat of happenings, forgiveness for a wrong done to you, a moment of not judging someone. It will be a kind word, a thought, a touch or a smile.

Our gifts are not spectacular, they’re not gold medals. God asks of us our 2nd place, our 5th place, our 89th place finish. Why? Because we can.

And He will use your thread as just one among many in the greatest of tapestries, one we may often be too close to see as it is seen from afar, one beyond our imagining, or our ability to imagine, but not beyond God’s making.

Where Are You From?

Sunday, August 17, 2008
Preacher: Pastor Kendra Mohn

Readings:
Isaiah 56:1,6-8
Romans 11:1-2a,29-32
Matthew 15:[10-20] 21-28

Audio sermon link: http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/422/CB7FEE81-12A7-B502-E8E4-DD5F0B0A8CBA.mp3

Pastor Mohn greeted us today with a confession that she’s on Round 2 of preaching the scriptures and she’s felt, at times, as if she’s out of stories, even ones about her family. So thank God for the Olympics. The theme resonating through this week’s texts is nationality, wha tit means to be foreign, to be from “away”.

The question “Where are you from?” permeates all the readings today.
Watching the Olympic opening ceremonies, we were regaled with images of the host country, its culture, the depth and richness of its country and people. Nation after nation marched into the Bird’s Nest in its own unique attire, with its own unique behavior and mannerisms. What a diverse world we live in and what a cool thing that is to see and realize. It is also a reminder that not every basketball player is American!

One thing that stuck out to Pastor Mohn was how many athletes were not competing for their home country of origin. One story was telling, a woman gymnast whose son was suffering from leukemia, but could not get medical help in her own country. So she moved to Germany, and became a gymnast while her son received the medical attention he required. And they would not play the German national anthem for her until she officially became a citizen. When she had, they claimed her for their own. She belonged to them.

And, yet, she remains from her home of origin as well.

The Olympics showcases this interesting and telling dichotomy. Our national identity says something about “where we’re from”, but it begs an accompanying question …

Is your place of origin as important as we’re you’re from “right now”?

Speaking as a self-professed nomad, Pastor Mohn laughingly recounted how when she and Erik are asked “Where are you from?”, they look at eachother and smile. As a relative nomad, myself, I often share a similar smile with Laurna when we’re asked that same question.

We think “Do you mean the last 3 years? …the four before that. Where I was born? Where my family comes from? I guess I’m from Wisconsin." I know Laurna and I only just this past year can say that we’ve lived in Wisconsin longer than we’ve lived anywhere our entire adult lives since moving out of our parents’ homes.

In Isaiah, the Israelites are not from where they’re from! They are in exile. They’re from Jerusalem, but they live in Babylon. If you ask them, they will tell you they “belong to God”.

“And foreigners who join themselves to the Lord … these I will bring to my holy mountain.”

God has made the net bigger!

Pastor Mohn offers a thought-provoking nuance. Often the question “Where are you from?” begs an underlying question “To whom do you belong? Who claims you as their own?”. This will tell us something about ‘who you are’.

Rcently David Brooks wrote his Op-Ed column in the NY Times pondering why Barack Obama in not leading by a landslide in the national presidential polls. His theory is that:

“ … Obama is a sojourner. He was in law school, but not of it … he was in the legislature, but not of it … he partook in Trinity United Church of Christ, but was not of it … He is in the US Senate, but not of it. He absorbed things from those diverse places, but was not fully of them. This has been a consistent pattern throughout his odyssey … and it does make him ‘hard to place’. We don’t just judge the individuals but the places that produced them. We judge them by the connections that exist beyond choice and the ground where they will go home to be laid to rest … If you grew up in the 1950s, you were inclined to regard your identity as something you were born with. If you grew up in the 1970s, you were more likely to regard your identity as something you created.”

Very telling, indeed, this “where’re you from” conundrum.

In Romans, Paul tells us that God is claiming a wider collection than was previously imagined (by us). Our imagining is faulty in this regard. The message in Romans is also that when Jesus comes and “does this new thing”, he is making the net wider, to be more inclusive.

And then, on the heels of this dramatic message, he calls a woman a dog, he ignores her in a dramatically rude fashion. Pastor Mohn shares that there are many interpretations of why Jesus might have done this. Perhaps he was being ironic to teach the disciples a lesson by proxy, maybe preaching “A”, then doing just the opposite to make a point. Pastor Mohn offers an alternative & truly human interpretation … maybe Jesus was just tired, at the end of a very long day with no gas left in his tank.

Haven’t we all been there? Working away finally at something we need done when the phone rings and we say “Do I have the time for them?” There’s often not enough of us, seemingly, to ‘go around’. Maybe Jesus was saying “Do I have anything left for one more person?” There’s not enough of me to go around.

But the woman answers him directly and forthrightly. She counters

“What if it’s even bigger than we thought? What if the net is, indeed, wider? What if God’s intention is beyond anything we’ve yet imagined? What if our imagination has been faulty ( to this point)?”

What if?

She is wise enough to remind Jesus that every loaf of bread sheds its crumbs that nobody wants. Even if she can’t sit at the table where Jesus is because of where she’s from, she wants those crumbs. She’ll take the scraps. She’s not proud. She knows she doesn’t deserve it, but she’ll take what she can get.

When the body of Jesus is broken, grace and mercy spill out all over the place. We know we don’t deserve it, but we each secretly hope there might be a crumb or two left over that nobody wants, that we can find later when there’s no one to tell us we can’t have it.

When the body of Jesus is broken, there’s plenty to go around. There’s nobody checking ID’s, saying “Where are you from? To whom do you belong?”.

They simply give and we receive … the scraps – that promise peace beyond our faulty imagining, hope beyond all that tomorrow will bring unbeknownst to us, love that is beyond that of a parent for their child.

So .. the answer to “Where are you from? To whom do we belong?” is we belong to God. It’s a miracle that the scraps left over are enough for all – even you!

No More Rules

Sunday, May 11, 2008
Preacher: Pastor Gary Johnson

Readings:
Acts 2:1-21
1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
John 20:19-23

Audio sermon link: http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/422/7219B46F-94B2-F409-F5F4-C9D82E328734.mp3

“All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses. For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.”

I am going to leave you now, but I will be leaving you the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Comforter. Why? Well, maybe because He’s like the teaching assistant. The lecture’s over, but the learning is still to take place. And we’re all going to need the help.

Have all of us not done something we wished we hadn’t done, said something we wished we hadn’t said, were in a situation we wished were weren’t in? For all of our sinfulness and rottenness and shortcoming, how does Jesus welcome us? With messages of how far short we’ve fallen? No … but rather with “Peace Be With You”.

The kids, aka the apostles, thought school was out, finals were over. But we’re not being graded (yet) – we’re just beginning. And it’s not just a beginning, it’s a Grand Opening. Pastor Johnson illustrated the moment with images of driving through the streets of Detroit late at night following the search lights arcing through the night sky, driving around trying to locate them. Today, we’ve found the place that’s open! Our hearts and minds can be opened by the power of the Holy Spirit.

If you’ve ever spoken words you know you didn’t speak, spoke up for someone who couldn’t speak up for themselves, were visited at 2 a.m. in your kitchen by someone who came to comfort you, you have been visited by the Advocate. Who doesn’t want to spread that Word??

Today, all divisions – race, gender, age, ethnicity, denomination, religion, country – all divisions are antithetical. There are no more divisions, only community.

To God, there are no foreign languages. The Word of God is not spoken in English. The Living Word must be spoken in all languages. It is not one that reminds us of who’s out and who’s in, who’s down and who’s up, who’s bad and who’s good. There is, today, no longer East or West, slave or free, man or woman. There is no one part of the body to be judged any less worthy than another. Leave the judgment to God. Judgment will block the entry of the Holy Spirit. Each instrument was created to produce a unique sound, its individual contribution to the orchestra, each as pleasing to God as the other.

We hear today “Are these not Galilleans?” The Galilleans were known for not being smart enough to be erudite in many languages. There was prejudice against them and their accents. And these are the very ones God chooses to spread His Word.

Pastor Johnson pointed out that in their home, everyone contributes uniquely in accordance with their gifts: Hannah bakes, Caleb’s the techno-geek, Professor Scott Page of the University of Michigan recently published his research on the power of diversity in human working groups. His research has shown that a group comprised of a diverse set of people and talents statistically solve problems faster and better than a comparable size group of “the smartest people”. This, he surmises, is because diverse groups bring more and different ways of seeing a problem to the table. Professor Page states:

“Any one of us can get stuck. If we’re in groups where everyone thinks the same way, everyone will get stuck in the same place.”

Garrison Keillor has said it similarly when he said,

“Four wheel drive only allows you to get stuck in more remote places.”

The empirical data shows that more diverse cities are more productive, more diverse boards of directors make better decisions, and the most innovative companies are the most diverse in makeup. Even social science mathematical models developed by economists at the Loyola University in Chicago show that diversity trumps ability, that diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups comprised of individuals deemed the best problem solvers.

We all have different gifts and we’re should be spending our time wisely to use them rather than judging which of ours is most beneficial overall. We are often too quick to tout strength as an asset. Yet the propeller on a boat is spared costly and irreparable damage when a shear pin fails. When the pin fails, the design and the overall mission succeeds! The shear pin’s the Galillean in the design and God sees their value in the grand scheme.

It’s the Grand Opening and the Holy Spirit announces:

There are No More Rules!

You thought it was for one people – but it’s or all peoples.
You thought there was but one language, but there are all languages.
You thought it was just America, but it’s for all countries.

We have work to do, but it’s fun work – to find our common ground. Pastor Johnson shared a warm story about Caleb’s summer job cutting grass at a country club, working with nearly all older Mexican workers. They weren’t the same age or marital status, they spoke different languages, ate different food, had very different names. But they once saw Caleb forget his lunch, and they reached in their lunch pails and shared theirs. For days afterward, when they rose at 3 a.m., they made sure they packed an extra bit for the kid who might, again, forget his lunch – the kid 'whose name we can’t pronounce'. They always made sure there was something extra for Caleb. The one thing they did have in common was knowing what it was like to be a young boy who’s hungry.

We have a lot in common: work, school, suffering, hunger, our aches, our pains, and our dreams. Let’s not exploit our differences or judge each other for them. Let’s instead, exploit our differences for the greater good of all.

We have to work so we can reach out to one another, in each others’ languages and say to one another … “Peace Be With You”.

I May Not Know Much

Sunday, August 10, 2008
Lay Preacher: Sarah Naumann

Readings:
1 Kings 19:9-18
Romans 10:5-15
Matthew 14:22-33



Audio sermon link: http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/422/F4888F2A-C7F6-63C9-729B-0473C1ED74B1.mp3

Sarah Naumann was our lay preacher today and what a lucky bunch we were. Her interpretation and take on the Gospel message today was poignant, touching, and powerful.

Sarah’s dad, Mike Naumann, shared a story with her daughter about a co-worker, Pat, whose mother is suffering from dementia and who, herself, was recently diagnosed with a rare form of colon cancer. She asked Sarah’s dad ‘why this happens … why God allows this to happen’. Mike confessed to Sarah that he had no answer for her, that he didn’t know what to say to her.

And then the wisdom in the father shone through. He told Sarah, “Maybe you don’t have to have an answer. Maybe there is no answer.” There was (and is) a storm on Pat’s life like the storm on Galilee. We collectively have experienced the human condition: illness, crises, wars, school shootings, poverty, death … there are a bevy of emotional storms, earthquakes, tornadoes in our lives. And we often, while weathering these storms, feel, at times, as if we are fighting them alone. Like Elijah, we might be calling out “I alone am left”.

In the commencement advisement entitled Sunscreen, the graduates are admonished that if life is a race, “that race is long and, in the end, it’s only ever with yourself”. In our most difficult moments, we may well feel entirely alone or abandoned. We are told today, at those times, to keep sight of Jesus, to keep focused on Him. Yet, even though Peter has faith enough to try, the storm blows and he loses his focus. Within the storm, we are likely to lose sight of our focus and falter and doubt.

There is a great quote attributed to Henry Ford that “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.” When Luke first meets master Yoda in his Jedi tutelage, he fails to raise the star cruiser spaceship. He says “I can’t” to which Yoda replies, “THAT is why you fail.”

Jesus, like Yoda, asks us to keep our focus on Him, on The Force. Being human, our faith will waver when we face tough situations if we focus on our circumstances. At such moments, we will sink in the waters. Even when we try to focus on Jesus, we often falter. It’s the human condition.

Sarah offered a brightly hopeful conjecture on why Jesus was able to supercede his human condition with a calling to his divinity.

Before he walked on the waters of Galilee, he made the waters; before he was crucified on Calvary, he made the tree they hung him on. When we have Jesus in our boat, we lay claim to that creation. And we don’t have to reach all the way as Jesus is there reaching out for us.

Tony Snow, former White House Press Secretary, penned a wise piece entitled Cancer’s Unexpected Blessings which Sarah offered as a telling testimony to today’s scriptural lesson:

“ … we shouldn't spend too much time trying to answer the why questions: Why me? Why must people suffer? Why can't someone else get sick? We can't answer such things.

Through such trials, God bids us to choose: Do we believe, or do we not? Will we be bold enough to love, daring enough to serve, humble enough to submit, and strong enough to acknowledge our limitations? Can we surrender our concern in things that don't matter so that we might devote our remaining days to things that do?

God relishes surprise. We want lives of simple, predictable ease—smooth, even trails as far as the eye can see—but God likes to go off-road. He provokes us with twists and turns. He places us in predicaments that seem to defy our endurance and comprehension—and yet don't. By his love and grace, we persevere.

We don't know much, but we know this: No matter where we are, no matter what we do, no matter how bleak or frightening our prospects, each and every one of us, each and every day, lies in the same safe and impregnable place—in the hollow of God's hand.”

Just as last week, we meet up with the saying “We may not know much, but we know this.” Sarah said we know Jesus implored us “Be not afraid.” Scripture, she tells us, evokes this statement 366 times, one for every day of the year. And we all probably need, at least once a day, to here Jesus say to us, again, “Don’t worry. Trust me. I’m here.”

William Barkley, Sarah tells us, called us all the hands and feet of Jesus. So being without answers to the questions we can’t answer is maybe all too human. Sarah and Tony Snow wisely remind us that maybe we won’t recognize Jesus until we’re in the heart of the storm ourselves.

Two Saltines Worth

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Readings:
Isaiah 55:1-5
Romans 9:1-5
Matthew 14:13-21

Audio sermon link: http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/292/246E9ACE-1450-C481-040A-72AB69F2450E.mp3

Pastor Mohn describes for us, in her inimitable sense of humor, how familiar and rote the liturgy of Church could be to a pre-teenager PK growing up in Iowa. She self-professed keeping a checklist of the weekly goings on and that she’d check each off as it occurred … just precisely as it had occurred the week before.

One of the trademarks of ‘the familiar’ is it’s obvious when deviation from it occurs. Ask a child who sings a song by rote memorization and they can (and will!) spot the very first deviation from its meter or lyrics. And apparently so it was one Sunday when Pastor Mohn’s father noticed one Communion deacon shy in the count and no one ‘on the bench’. He arose to fill the void. This was not on ‘the checklist’. Pastor Mohn recalls thinking “How did he know it was supposed to be him?” (to take on the role of Communion deacon in absentia). Well, her father responded, ‘somebody had to do it’. Pastor Mohn remembers this being a transitional moment, one in which her thinking about the liturgical procession of the service moved from one of passive observer to possibly one of active participant. And this led, ultimately, to a path to the seminary (Thank you, Lord!). Pastor Mohn then shared that she’s pretty sure that’s happened, at one point or another, to most fo us. Why? Maybe … because it’s supposed to.

Today the disciples are called … by Jesus. When told by the disciples that the crowd is hungry. Jesus responds, “You feed them”. Of course, we know their response is one of “We have only five loaves and two fish”. Translation: we haven’t enough to remedy this situation at hand. We don’t have what it takes. This problem is bigger than any solution we can offer. Sound familiar?

Jesus’ call today is this:

“I called you. So bring what you have.”

So what’s the protocol? Well something interesting happens when we’re brought face-to-face with our meagerness, with the little that we do have. Two things rear their heads:

We’re made more aware that we really don’t have much … and

We’re often reticent to show how little we really have.

All too often, when asked to feed the crowds, we will have to own up to only having a measly two saltines.

We might think “My little 2 saltines can’t make a dent.”

“Just because I don’t know what to do, there’s nothing can be done (by me anyway).”

Well, there’s thousands of reasons and rationalizations to stay seated. There’s only one reason to ‘get up’ …

Get up and feed the crowd … either at ‘the shore’ or at the Communion rail.

… and you ‘get up’ by trusting the one who called you, who sent you.

Remember the God and Spirit modeled Jedi master Yoda who chides Luke Skywalker “Judge me by my size, do you?” The scriptures are lined with references cautioning us against making such judgement(s).

God will work with whatever little you can bring. God will make it enough. Instead of nay-saying, perhaps we might learn from the disciples who said “If He says so, let’s give it a shot!” When Luther spoke and wrote on ‘good works’, he said what God wants is your two saltines worth. When you look at your familiar checklist, keep your eyes open. There may be something unfamiliar lurking around the next corner. You never know when the world might look different. Being aware for that moment is a blessing.

In the great movie Good Will Hunting, Ben Affleck portrays one of Will Hunting’s playful Southy sidekicks in Boston. He is no mathematical genius and is in every way ordinary. He is portrayed very adeptly in stark contrast to the boy prodigy. When Will is struggling coming to terms with his great intellectual gift, Affleck challenges him by saying “You’re sitting on a winning lottery ticket and you’re too scared to cash it in. If you’re still hanging around here in 20 years, with all due respect, I’ll kick your hide.” Will says “You don’t know that” … to which Ben replies:

"Let me tell you what I do know. Every day I come by to pick you up, the same way every day and we go out … and we have a few laughs. But you know what the best part of my day is? For ten seconds before I knock on the door …'cause I let myself think I might get there, and you'd be gone. I'd knock on the door and you wouldn't be there. No ‘Ga Bye’. No ‘See ya’. Nothin’. You just left. Now, I don't know much. But I know that."

Translation: Keep a cautious eye open. You never know when the familiar may give way to the day there’s no answer to the knock on the door. And that may be your call to rise and feed the crowd … with your two saltines worth.

Blog, Blog, Blog Revisited

OK, so it's not going to happen. Catching up, that is. So we're back to weekly blogging of the sermon-of-the-week. There were some great sermons this past spring and early summer that I just never got to. The blogs on these may no longer be timely, but the messages are still great. So I hope to post these as "golden not-so-oldies" (appropriately labeled) ususally mid-weekly. In the meantime, I hope anbody reading (or until so recently having read) the weekly blogs can return with their coffee and donuts for Monday Morning Quarterbacking ... This QB (while admittedly not Hall of Fame caliber) did not, despite reports to the contrary, announce his retirement from blogging and then blog from churches in Minnesota, NY and Tampa Bay ... oooops, sorry.

Reach Out & Touch Someone

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Readings:
1 Kings 3:5-12
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Audio sermon link: http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/422/E930C8EF-0605-3680-B58B-CFB6C2E76CC4.mp3


All three readings today relay two crucial things: that God is active in the world and in our lives. Also that that world can (and is often) a dark place in which it is hard to see God at work. In Romans today, Paul is intimately aware of the power of the Dark Side.

He is aware of what characterizes its power over the human soul. Its element of the unknown and fear, its ability to (without enormous efforts) bring about chaos and create conditions that have us feeling as if we are without options. Heath Ledger in Batman: Dark Knight engenders these devil-like qualities in his portrayal of The Joker. In a much older movie, The Chase, there is a devil-like figure of nearly equal (if less eerie) hands-offish-ness. Both characters remind us of the power of the devil to create such chaos and breeding ground for evil “without much effort”, as if to say “it didn’t take much”. Like a match before a pool of gasoline, it doesn’t take much. That gasoline is emblematic of our sinfulness. We’re wired for sin, for failure in the face of dwindling choices, for succumbing to fear and death; we wired to do wrong to one another. In The Chase, the devil-like character prods humans in a moment of vulnerability to turn on one another by their own choosing. It’s critical to notice the devil never lifts a hand against anyone – he simply gets us to “do it to one another”.

The character Kaiser Soze in The Usual Suspects has a memorable line when he says, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”. In Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, the devil is pictured as a cloaked androgynous figure who walks stealthily just beyond the crowd on the walk to Calvary. The devil preys on our feelings of there being no way out, no hope.

Pastor Mohn shared with us some of the writing of John Polkinghorne, physicist and theologian, who points out that when a child cries out in the middle of the night, a mother’s instinct is to reach out and tell the child “It’ll be fine. Everything’s OK”. Pastor Mohn paints the face of a bemused child that stares back, as if to say “Well, it’s not … can you see I’m crying?”

Translation: The world is not ‘an OK place’.

As much or as often as God reaches out to all of us to remind us that He loves us and He’s here. God is telling us today that He is the haven from the storm. Nothing can take that away: (not) death, nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nore height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God …’

And Pastor Mohn pointed out an important dichotomy. You can say ‘It’s OK’ all you want, but sometimes it’s just not enough. The baby needs for the mother to reach out and touch them, to touch the fear and the anxiety and quell it with a hug, with real, palpable contact. Analogously, God has reached out to us repeatedly through the disciples, the prophets and one another. But, at some point, He deemed it necessary to be among us, palpably, to allow us to see Him as one of us, reaching out to touch us and say ‘It’ll be OK’. The Word become flesh to quiet the crying infant in the night who is afraid and ‘not OK’.

Research indicates that touch is a critical feeling for a newborn infant. Babies that are not touched grow up with different pre-dispositions to feelings of hope calm, reassurance. I’ve written more than once (too often) in this blog that the Rabbi Harold Kushner has hypothesized that the Hebrew word for (Adam’s) ‘rib’ is ‘side’ indicating that when God created woman, He was creating another ‘side’ of God, presumably the ‘Mother’ side, the side that reassures us that all will ‘be OK’.

Pastor Mohn leaves us with this question: ‘How is the rest of the world to know this reassuring God today?’

The answer: ‘He sent you. He sent us.’

Reach out and touch someone …

The Ascension Train

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Readings:
Acts 1:6-14
1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11
John 17:1-11

Just before the reading of the Gospel, we sang an African Alleluia. It was moving, prompting many feet to go a tapping in pews.

From this dark spot on the Earth a great light.

Luke, in Acts, has his quill scorching the parchment to tell us without a doubt that Jesus is The Messiah, that Jesus IS alive. What is occurring is not random. It is fitting like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. But it is important to remember that how that puzzle falls into place is not for us to know.

Don’t get stuck, then. Just because things do not work out just the way we thought they would doesn’t mean The Plan is not playing out as it should. He will bring it about through the power of the Holy Spirit. In Samaria, Jesus broke all the rules, talking with women in the light of day. It is here, at the well, to a woman, that He reveals He is The Messiah.

So we say, “Yeah, but ….”

To which Jesus replies, “When the time comes, none of this is going to matter.

Luke’s message is “This si the Messiah for all the people.” And first the people use their ears, then their eyes. They watched, then they gazed, peering, seeing a cloud, This cloud they SAW with their own eyes. This was no random act, but a vision with a strong Biblical connection. A cloud is a holy sign signifying God’s presence. Clouds, by day, pillars of fire by night. It is noted that two saw this cloud, reminiscent of the Talmudic indication that it took two witnesses to affirm that something has truly taken place. A note that twp witnesses were present assures us that Jesus IS alive. By prefacing this story with the fact that these witnesses were a Sabbath’s day’s journey away assures us also that the witnesses were reverant men following the law, unlikely to lie about what they saw.

If you don’t believe these guys, you haven’t got a lot going for you!
Luke knows that when hard times come, when we’re on the last lonely journey to recovery or salvation, we’d better have something going for us.

Like the apostles, we’re all wanting for something to happen. We find ourselves saying, “Lord, when are you going to take this off my shoulders? … Lord, is it today you will fix my marriage or my relationship with my kids?” And Jesus answer, Luke assures us, is Yes! If Christ is alive within us, our brokenness will be healed, our sins forgiven. This is why Luke works so hard to get us on the Ascension Train. This train is bound for The Promised Land. The cost of a ticket: to humble ourselves. Cast all your baggage aboard. No charge for a second or a third or fourth bag. He’s here to carry your burden. There’s no weight limit here. This IS your Father’s train!!

You know the feeling once your bags have been stowed overhead or beneath and you can relax in your seat? Then, climb aboard the Ascension Train. But, Luke tells us, there’s a catch: we have to be ready. We can’t let the Sabbath go, we can’t not pray, we can’t forget our devotions, we can’t not sing at the beginning of the day, we can’t not plead for forgiveness, we can’t not gather together. We can’t not humble ourselves before the Lord.

And … we can’t pray enough.

When we’re dropping the kids off, in the grocery store, in the car, on the playground.

I know this, Luke says, because there WERE witnesses. They were good men and women. This, then is The Good News. On the Ascension Train, we have everything we need riht here, right now …

Meet Them Where They Live

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Readings:
Acts 17:22-31
1 Peter 3:13-22
John 14:15-21

Pastor Johnson pointed us to Paul’s encounter with the Athenians. He illustrated some of the history of the times. This was a Post-resurrection Greece with no real Church yet; so far, just a cult religion, not born of the urban center, but rather by a carpenter from the countryside. Remember how they claimed ‘Nothing good can come from Nazareth’?

Paul ginds himself in the center of all things intellectual, the center of mathematics and Euclidian geometry, architecture, the burgeoning libraries. Greece of these times was a great center of learning respected for that. Paul then proceeds to engage the people in intellectual discussions, on their own turf. So let’s see, he wants to engage the Athenians in an argument on behalf of Christianity. How does he go about this. How do you engage an intellectual people in a discussion of theology? With ‘shoulda’s’? … ‘you betta’s’? … by wagging your finger? Well, this never works, and Paul knows it. Paul addresses them:

“Athenians … I see how extremely religious you are.”

He engages them on their real estate, in an area in which they are already passionate. In Paul’s time a hallmark of the intellectuals was how pious they were. He succeeds in telling them that God is a God who takes care of us. He sees to it that the lion and lamb lie down together, that brings Greeks and Romans … and Jews to sit down together, forgiven of their sins.

If want to tell the story of this God, Paul knows you don’t hit them over the head with it; you engage them by joining them in their life. Pastor Johnson shared with us the story of how his pastor and mentors of 81 years gave him a Confirmation Bible with the verse from 1st Peter written inside. Underlined was the reference to respect for their ethnicity, their religion, their habitat, their ‘stories’.

If you want to deliver the message, start by asking:

“Tell me about yourself”.

Everyone has some heart, some wonderment within them.
You will most likely not tap into that with ‘shoulda’s’, ‘coulda’s’, fire and brimstone, and preaching fear. Pastors who are out of touch with gays, with single Mom’s working for minimum wage, with mmebrs fo their congregation with their own stories risk missing a chance to deliver God’s message. Paul knew the Athenians were apt to listen when they first heard they were a religious people. Jesus knew the woman at the well had her own life in which she was entrenched when he said, ‘I know you’re having a tough day. Can I have a drink of water?’. In the tree top, Zacchaeus answered the call of first ‘Hey, come on down. I’m having dinner with you.’. At the washing machine, in the doctor’s office where a diagnosis is handed over, people need to know God knows what they are feeling. We need dreams, hope, and affirmation.

So ask about their stories – what brought you here? What are your doubts, your fears, your apprehensions? After we trade our stories, there is time and space enough for the Story that can not be contained. In that Story there is a voice that says, “I know a God who can help allay your fears”. This …THIS IS the Good News.

We Need Every Bruce We Can Find

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Readings:
Acts 7:55-60
1 Peter 2:2-10
John 14:1-14

Pastor Johnson offered up the notion that as a pastor, one does a lot of funerals. And that they have less to do with death than they often do about affirming a life; they are less about passing to what’s next than about having lived a life in Christ.

Jesus is not (and never was) about the GOP or the Democrats, about consumerism or the economy. If we follow a life in Christ, we admit, we don’t need it all, we don’t even want it all. We’re much more about sharing, and not leftovers, but our first fruits. We’re about losing life to save it, about visiting the prisoner and giving up the ‘holier than thou’. Real Christians don’t sleep ewasy when kids go hungry, when homeless are sleeping in cardboard boxes. Unless we are sacrificing parts of out comfortable lives for such, we are not living ‘The Way, The Truth, and The Life’. It’s not about ‘those Muslims’, ‘those atheists’, ‘those Catholics’.

It’s more about what Bruce saw and what Bruce did.

Bruce was a non-practicing Jew who did not believe in God. On his 6 weeks of vacation, he provided free medical care at his own cost to the underprivileged in India. Bruce knows The Way, The Truth, and The Life. Bruce is a lover, a healer, a crusader, a respector, a carer. He wwas not a Catholic, a Methodist, a Lutheran.

Organized religion has its strengths, but it also gives power to the voice that continues to say ‘women shouldn’t be pastors, gays should not be pastors or even Church members’. Can women or gays be disciples? Maybe we’d best leave that to God to sort out on judgement day. In the meantime, we need every Bruce that we can find. Every Bruce that knows we don’t any of us win until we all win, that we are our brother’s keeper. Remember Pastor Johnson’s ‘fort friends’? Ricky, Christine and Mike? We’re all running from something. Once, we had a fort where we’d take stock … with Tommy Tucker who smelled, but he was funny; Frankie Schnobel who was a garbage picker, but he always had band-aids when we needed ‘em; Louie Shemansky whose bossy sister none of us could stand, but his Mom was the BEST cook. Yeah, that fort where we all had something we were running from, but to which we all somehow brought something. For we all bring something to the soup and, for all our eventual faults, we all have our saving graces.


Let’s let it to Jesus to say ‘who’s IN the fort’. He’s the real Truth, the Way, and the Light.

The Fort

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Readings:
Acts 2:42-47
1 Peter 2:19-25
John 10:1-10

“Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand …”

The analogies of The Teacher do often confound, at least in the near term. But as one wise teacher confronting his own mortality once said, “It is really important to master ‘the head fake’ … that move that teaches people things they don’t realize they’re learning until well into the process.

"Head-fake learning’ is absolutely vital.”

So if the disciples were struggling with this analogy, let’s grab another. Einstein claimed ALL learning was by analogy. Another great teacher postulated that the brain was wired to hang analogies on analogies, and, they were wired in triplets. So if one failed, but you had managed to ‘hook or anchor an understanding on another’, you could connect them ‘upstairs’ and continue the climb to enlightenment.

So Pastor Johnson today provided one such hook: the sheepfold as safe haven, a fort against adversity.

A sheepfold is constructed by the shepherd out of flat stone (and lots of it!). The shepherd builds walls to shoulder height. It’s a one-man job. Atop the walls, a shepherd places thorned bushes and shards of cut glass to disway predators. The sheepfold is a SAFE place. There is traditionally one, single opening, one-way-in, by the gate. The gate is as wide as a single sheep. It is where the shepherd sleeps astride the gate. The warning is voiced: all who would harm these sheep must first pass The Shepherd. The shepherd will lay down his life for his sheep. The sheep know the sounds and rhythm of the shepherd’s voice.

Sheep, in general, are nearly blind. They will not wander from the sun into the shadows, but if the shepherd’s voice calls from the shadow, they will come, knowing they have “no evil to fear”. When we are baptized, we are called into the sheepfold, within the walls of that safe haven.

Pastor Johnson painted a picture of the four walls that separate the sheep from the world of predators without. The first wall is the wall of teaching: the sermon and teaching of The Word. Within this one encounters the wall of fellowship where ALL are welcome and the message is one of inclusiveness. We pass the peace and acknowledge that entry is not about income, race, party, status, cars or bank accounts. We shed the world’s labels. Further within is the wall of the breaking of the bread wherein we admit we come to this place WITH NOTHING. Having shed our labels and our possessions, we are, here within, ALL EQUAL. Herein, we experience Christ’s call to a joint priesthood. Our strength comes from our brokenness. A Catholic priest who was a mentor to one of my most favorite priests in our parish growing up once told him “If I were to make you a priest, I would break your heart.” Finally, the fourth wall is the wall of prayer, the wall you ‘take with you’ when you exit the gate.

Within these walls, you can be mad, sad, honest, tell secrets and they will stay in these four walls. In these walls, we are healed, we are forgiven. Jesus, Himself, promises us that He has prepared a reserved place in there for each of us. Jesus says, “I, myself, will turn down your sheets.” That voice of the shepherd within the walls says “We have it all”. This is counter to the voices in the outside world that say “We want it all.”

Pastor Johnson recalled a band of friends he had as a kid: Ricky, Michael, Christine and himself. They had a ritual after school had let out. They would build a frt, a paradise in a field. A fort .. within which they were invincible! They made it out of tree branches, cardboard, plywood, complete with secret door. Inside – they were safe. “No one could see us, reach us, hurt us, “ he said. In this fort, we were ALL THE SAME. It was the great equalizer. We shared all the food … Ricky brought the PBJ’s, Gary the candy bars …Christine was welcome even with her contribution of warm Kool-Aid with no sugar. What they did not share was that they were, much like a congregation or a sheepfold, all there for different reasons (at home). Here, no one could touch us, not even our homes.

Pastor Johnson has called us, called our Church, to be that fort, that sheepfold … where ti matters that you’re here and it doesn’t feel the same when you’re not. Where you don’t only come in to hide and escape and get away, but you come to be fortified against whatever the outer world is hurling at you. Where you are called to be strengthened and strengthen your neighbor to allow you to take the fort with you into that world outside.

Pastor Johnson’s voice became calm and soft as he opened the gate with words spoken in a fortifying and resolute voice:

“Whatever the world throws at you, I won’t say it won’t hurt you, but it won’t ‘get you’ … because you belong to the Good Shepherd.”