The Voyage of Discovery

Readings:
Isaiah 2:1-5
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44

As we begin the Advent journey, Pastor Johnson breathed life into The Word and its message for us today – that we live our lives, day to day, hoping for something to change ourselves. The change that Advent calls for is to see the world with new eyes, through glasses that appreciate each day as a pure and total gift, a blessing from God.

The challenge: Tomorrow, at the start of our day, we should seek to ask ourselves this question:

“Is this the day I’m going to do something different? Is this the day I’m going to accept Jesus as my role model for being an agent of change? Is this the day I will have a bold enough vision, a big enough dream to be a person of the light in a world of chatter, busyness, distractions and noise? Can I find a kind way to rattle someone’s cage of complacency or entitlement … and say how wonderful life is?”

Or will I buy into the news media’s constant barrage of concentrating on the things that divide us all, on confrontation, turmoil, strife, war, and a culture that tends to view modern life through lenses of individual accomplishments, the zero-sum game, and the rat race that the world can become … if we CHOOSE to view it that way.

From a sermon of the same name, Barack Obama once heard preached, he recalls in his book, The Audacity of Hope:

“Our culture fixates on where our values clash. Spend time actually talking to (people) and you discover (we are more alike than different). We are at an empathy deficit. Empathy calls us to take task. No one is exempt from the call to find common ground. Talk is cheap. Empathy must be acted upon. If we aren’t willing to pay a price for our common values, if we aren’t willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we should (collectively) ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all. (Our values) demand deeds and not just words. (In so doing), we are all shaken out of our complacency. We are forced beyond our limited vision.”

I have a quote framed in my office that I find myself looking at more and more, the older I get, not so much because it’s becoming any more the truth, and only because I am only now becoming more aware of that truth:

”The voyage of discovery requires not seeking new landscapes, but rather having new eyes.”

Professor Keating, the unconventional and counter-cultural professor who introduces his poetry students to the defunct Dead Poets’ Society has them stand on his desk to ‘view the room’. In so doing, he reminds them:

“Just when you think you understand something, you must view it from a different perspective.”

In Washington, DC, the police gathered handguns confiscated in the nation’s homicide capital. The artist Esther Augsburger welded the handguns together to re-create the image of a large plow blade, reminiscent of the scriptural text from Isaiah:

“…and they shall beat their swords into plowshares”

That image also brought back to mind my days in graduate school when I asked why the rather long, and complex computer programs we were to learn and run were called, respectively, Hickory and Isaiah. The first, Hickory, was used to study the behavior of wood germane to the Colorado region where the code was written. The latter was named by a fellow student, Tim Dewhurst, who wrote the code that simulated metal forming processes. My friend is today a professor at Cedarville University where he spends equal time enriching Christian lives as performing 3-dimensional analyses of complex metal forming operations.

Rather than slabs of metals in a processing plant, Tim saw a language that helped put in some technical perspective how to alter the view of one form to another. Like Esther, he saw the world with ‘new eyes’. Esther did not see guns, but a welded monument of hope.

Do we wear those kinds of glasses? Do we have that kind of hope … that seeing things differently will allow us to, through God’s grace, change the way others view the world?

If we do, Jesus and Pastor Johnson reminded us, the world will likely, on more than an occasion, see us as fools. Pastor Johnson posed an Advent question for us to consider:

“Are we courageous enough to be called a fool for the cause?”

We are promised that, if we do, Jesus will walk that road with us every step of the way, but we are asked to start today! Today, we are tasked to offer a word of kindness, of peace, a word of hopefulness where one is usually not found.

We are to see beginnings where others see only ends. We have to discover the Word by wearing new glasses, by adopting new eyes. The landscape’s what it’s been. We are tasked to view it from a different perspective.

But, first, to do that will require that we see today as a gift and ask:

“With whom will I share that gift? To whom will I give that gift back?”

There’s an old adage that goes

“The love in your heart wasn’t put there to stay. Love isn’t love … ‘til you give it away.”

Our gift of today is very much the same.

In Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, Emily is allowed to return from the dead to experience, again, one day of her life. Mrs. Gibbs is somewhat insistent in declaring to Emily “Choose and unimportant day. Choose the least important day of your life. It will be important enough.”

Despite that advice, Emily returns on her 12th birthday to find her mother obsessing over seemingly insignificant details in the kitchen and her father otherwise overly preoccupied. She quickly realizes that humans are preoccupied with their petty occupations and small thoughts, and know little of true joy and happiness. Stimson reminds her afterward:

“Now you know what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion or another. Ignorance … and blindness!”

We don’t have time to even look at one another. We’re too busy getting from one place to the next to see what’s in between, to just enjoy or realize or BE in the moment. We’re too busy making Christmas plans to appreciate that there even IS a Christmas and come to peace with what a gift it really is.

But … WHEN we do it, when we slow down enough to get a glimpse of it – BOY, is life ever good.

Pastor Johnson and Barack Obama are reminding us and tasking us, as Jesus did, to take action today. For we do not know the day or the hour. And that day will most assuredly come, perhaps when we least expect it.

In the meantime, there are blessings to have, people to love, empathy to be acted upon, moments to be grateful for and appreciative of. We’re not talking about Christmas gifts or business meetings, or those things that seemingly can’t be placed in perspective enough for us to enjoy our daughter Emily’s 12th birthday.

We’re talking about our very souls.

So Pastor Johnson asks us to consider Jesus’ call:

“Is this the day I’m going to do something different? Is this the day I am going to have a vision, a dream big enough? Is this the day I will be a person of the light, forced beyond my limited vision?”

As Barack Obama ends his discourse on taking action:

“To do otherwise would be to relinquish our best selves.”

The Counter Cultural King

Readings:

Jeremiah 23:1-6
Colossians 1:11-20
Luke 23:33-43

Lay Preacher: Jan Veseth-Rogers


Jan began her sermon with notions of astronomy and America’s space program, of the necessarily tedious attention to detail that studying and exploring the cosmos require, the tough challenges that must be met and overcome. Of memories of Peggy Whitson, the first female in charge of the International Space Station.

Surmounting these challenges and reckoning with the cosmos often conjures images of Leonardo DiCaprio on the bow of the Titanic shouting, “I’m King o’ the world!!!”

Or Peggy Whitson exclaiming, “I’m queen o’ the world!”

Today, Jan reminds us, is the last day of the liturgical year, but it is eerily empty of any jubilation. Christ is soon to come, but as King cut of a different cloth. This King, Jan reminds us, is given vinegar to drink; he is taunted, scoffed, mocked and ridiculed. This is the one who will be crucified with a sign above his head proclaiming “This is the King of he Jews”.

But Jan is right to remind us also that Jesus never calls himself a King. When asked if he is King of the Jews, his response is “It is you who say that I am”.

This is not the kind of King people understand. He responds in ways they do nt expect. He surprises them with his words and deed ….

The Son of Man came to seek out the lost. He is here not for the well, but to aid the sick. He came to turn the world upside down. He came with an abundance of love and compassion for the sinful, the broken, the lost.

He came for us.

His was to be a counter cultural King who turned the rule book on its head.

In the topsy-turvy world that Jesus would come to show us, He used His power to stay on the cross rather than to save himself.

In so doing, Jan tells us we are tasked to

Follow the King who follows his call

Today we celebrate the topsy-turvy, the ‘it ain’t what it appears to be’.

In the final chapter of the Indiana Jones trilogy, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana must pass through a labrynth by correctly choosing, at one point, the Holy Grail from among a collection of some 100 chalices and goblets. Many are encrusted in rare jewels, others ornately constructed from rare and valuable gold and silver. Indiana reaches beyond these, way to the back and, after hesitating with his fingers circling it, chooses a small and simple goblet, handcrafted from common and ordinary wood. As he tightly wraps his fingers around its stem, he says, “This … this is the cup of a carpenter.” The gatekeeper looks at Indiana, with a wisp of a smile, and tells him “You have chosen wisely.”

Let’s do the same. Let’s look with new eyes at the world this Advent, and see, among all the ornate and glittery showiness of this world, the simple cup of a carpenter; the quiet and ordinary way that God chose to have his Son enter the world. Let’s celebrate the counter cultural King.

Thanksgiving

Today may easily be the most awe inspiring day I have ever spent in Mt. Zion Lutheran Church since arriving here 7 years ago this November. The music, the liturgy, the testimonials and the sharing all spoke a similar message to me. That message is one of comfort from business as usual, a challenge and encouragement to think outside the box, an acceptance of things easily rejected elsewhere. We reveled in each other and our common home where we celebrate more how alike we are to one another than different from one another; where we breathe our individual gifts into ‘the mix’ and collectively harvest the rewards for God’s will to be done. We spoke honestly and courageously to eachother and told one another what we meant to one another and committed ourselves to continue being a living presence for one another. We guaranteed each other we would never be alone in a lonely world; we offered our continued collaboration with each other in a competitive world. We reaffirmed our vows to one another to continue to ‘contribute to the cost of the ride’ within our home and continue to serve beyond its walls in our community. We smiled, we hugged and we felt the overriding presence of a God who created us so individually unique and yet to coexist in peaceful harmony in community. We celebrated that community in a way I’ve never experienced before. I can say no more …. Except that there may be a website listing of the words chosen by us to describe all that we mean to one another. When that compilation is ready, you will find the link to those heartfelt feelings right here. I would encourage you to read them again and know that the very people who sit next to you in Church are family. We are family. And Mt. Zion is our blessed and sacred home away from home, the home to which we always seem to return .. again … and again.