The Meaning of Life

Sunday, March 22, 2009
4th Sunday in Lent
Preacher: Pastor Kendra Mohn



Readings:
Numbers 21:4-9
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

Audio sermon file:

http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/742/A4C2B7BE-EF9F-9AAD-3179-51A15EC99BC3.mp3

Pastor Mohn confessed another of her moments when Erik asked “What are you preaching this week?” to which she replied “The meaning of life”. In what she called a weekly soup of personal conversations, on-line blogging and sermon preparation surrounding the weekly scripture readings, she found a voice of people hungering for an answer to “Why we’re here?” Is it for a comfortable retirement, a sense of self defined by our roles at work or in our family relationships …

Having been intrigued by the new Target ad campaign of redefining people’s sense of a vacation (spray-on sun tan skin colorant), Pastor Mohn elaborated on the sense of redefining ourselves. In the Old Testament and throughout today’s scripture readings there is the overriding specter that “things are not OK”. As we hear in Ephesians, we’re not OK., we’re dead through our trespasses, mired in sin, disobedient, living in the passions of our flesh, children of wrath.

People end up asking “How did we get this far away? How did we get this lost? It’s a huge question. And maybe part of the answer lies in having confused the meaning of life with the American dream. Pastor Mohn muses that she’s not against having dreams, but offer s this querie: As we chase ‘the proverbial American dream’, what answer do we find as we look in the mirror and ask ourselves, “If that’s all there is, where is the meaning in life?”

The dream that arguably posts the desirables as a two-person heterosexual relationship, a big house, 2 cars, a boat, the lake house, 2.3 healthy children who go to good colleges on full scholarship. When we’re honest with ourselves, we can hear echoes of it, desires for it in our own hearts and in our own actions.

The truth is not everyone has or even wants this dream. There are as many ways of living life as there are people living it. Truth is … if that’s all there is, we wind up right where we started.

There’s a great little picture book – Hope for the Flowers … self-described as ‘a tale – partly about life and lots about hope – for adults and others’ … in which two caterpillars, Sprite and Yellow come upon a pile of caterpillars rising into the sky as far as the eye can see. “Do you know what’s happening?” one says to another. “I just arrived myself. No one has time to explain. They’re so busy trying to get where they’re going – up there,” came the reply. “But what’s at the top?” Stripe asked. Again, the reply:”No one knows that either, but it must be awfully good because everyone’s rushing there.” There’s only one thing to do reasons Stripe and he jumps right in. Caterpillars climb atop one another, pushing, shoving, and knocking each other indiscriminately off the pile in an all-out effort to “get to the top”. Eventually Stripe pushes through the clouds only to find there’s nothing “up there”. “High up there”, he concludes, “only looked good from the bottom”. And he climbs back down.

Pastor Mohn said it very similarly:

“If that’s all there is, we wind up right where we started.”

It’s a zero-sum game, you only climb the pile if you’re willing to knock your neighbor off. Our neighbor becomes our obstacle, our enemy rather than our brother, only someone in the way of our realization of “what’s up there”.

So Stripe heads down the pile telling everyone he sees that “there is nothing up there” and that they would be so much the better for building cocoons; that they could fly if only they become butterflies. “I saw a butterfly – there CAN be more to life,” Stripe realizes.

The pile of caterpillars climbs on, ignorant of the beauty contained within each of them. The Israelites carried to freedom by God, find themselves complaining about the food on the road. Invariably, when we are distracted from what God says is the true meaning of life by the little things along the way – that is when the snakes come.

But we have a collection of at least a pair of the Bible’s most powerful and most quoted verses that say we are saved nonetheless.

Ephesians 2:8 … What God has already done … “For by grace you have been saved through faith and this is not your doing; it is a gift of God – not the results of works, so that no one may boast.”

Ephesians 2:10 … Who we are and what our purpose is … “For we are what He has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God created beforehand to be our way of life.”

Caterpillars were born to be butterflies – not climb piles of pillars.

There’s no mention in Ephesians about the boat, the college scholarships, our partner, our security, vacation or what’s presumably “up there”. Our cocoon, the beauty of the butterfly within lies in God’s purpose for us all – to serve our neighbor.

There is a wonderful movie called The Peaceful Warrior (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OchAhzYrQNw&feature=related )in which a young, talented college athlete seeking a spot on the coveted Olympic team can “only see gold”. He is befriended by an older and wiser man named Socrates running “a gas station”. Frustrated that the man does not ascribe to his passion for “possessions and material things”, the student spouts off:

“If you’re so smart, why are you working in a gas station?” to which Socrates replies:

“It’s a service station. We provide service. There is no higher purpose”

“Than pumping gas?”

“Than service to others”

In a story that so reminded me of that exchange, Pastor Mohn recalled a vivid memory of raking leaves with her Dad when she asked him “What’s the meaning of life?” to which he replied, “Well, you’re not going to find it standing around thinking about it. You’re not going to figure it out worrying about it or wondering about it.”

We find it only when we are Christ present in our neighbors’ lives, when we give so someone else can live, when we stop striving for “the gold” long enough to slow down and find out what’s going on all around us, when we live our lives for the sake of our neighbors, our siblings, our family.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only son, so that everyone who believes in Him may have eternal life.”

Just as God did not take the snakes away from the Israelites, but rather offered another route around the obstacle, God did not take away sin from the world, but offered His only Son to give us “a go around”. He offered this supreme example of how to live in service to one another.

THIS is the gift from God – the meaning of life – to give freely and fully, to become the butterflies he intended us to be, not caterpillars in search of “something up there” worth climbing over our brothers to attain … to become the peaceful warriors we were ordained to be, those who see the beauty of a body in flight on the gymnastic rings, a human butterfly, not a competitor to vanquish and conquer, to take from.

This is the meaning of life – but you have to “exit the pile”, and “leave the gym” to travel to the service station or the tree where lies the open cocoons … where, like a small caterpillar named Stripe or a young man named Dan, with counsel from a companion named Yellow or Socrates … we finally ... “slowly seemed to understand and somehow knew what to do”.

The Big Kahuna

Sunday, March 15, 2009
3rd Sunday in Lent
Lay Preacher: Vince Prantil

Readings:
Exodus 20:1-17
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22



Audio sermon file: http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/742/90FE6A86-39A3-757E-826E-583E191C282A.mp3


There’s an old Peanuts comic strip where
Lucy, Linus and Charlie Brown are lying on a hilltop looking at the sky on a summer afternoon.




Lucy: If you use your imagination you can see lots of things in the cloud formations. . . What do you think you see, Linus?"
Linus: "Well, those cloud up there look to me like the map of British Honduras on the Caribbean. . . that cloud up there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculptor. . . and that group of clouds over there gives me the impression of the stoning of Stephen. . . I can see the Apostle Paul standing there to one side. . . .
Lucy: Uh huh . . . . that's very good. . . . What do you see in the clouds, Charlie Brown?"
Charlie Brown: "Well. I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsie, but I changed my mind."


You can muck around in Paul’s letter and you can see the struggle. The Jews demand miracles, the Greeks look for wisdom. Some of them are Linus, some of them Lucy. Then along comes Charlie Brown. Who’s smart and who’s stupid here? The Jews, the Greeks … they’re not stupid. They know a lot. But they’re not God!!

Larry Ellison is the CEO of the software giant, Oracle.There’s an old joke “Do you know the difference between Larry Ellison and God? God doesn’t think he’s Larry Ellison.” There’s lots of people who are really smart … but they’re NOT God!

I think we all like to think we’re smart. At MSOE, we polled the students last year and 80% believed they were “above average”. Wow, I thought, I actually teach at Lake Wobegon where “all the children are above average”. We all like to think we’re right about a lot of stuff. What it comes down to is:

We’re uncomfortable being uncertain.

So we demand miracles or wisdom. We carve The Law into stone, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” as the law of economic incentives, Einstein’s speed of light. In economics & science, like religion, we carve out our 10 Commandments, the limits of our uncertainty.

And then … one day … along comes a character … someone who sees something else in the clouds …a different view, someone willing to think outside the box, say “Yeah, but … “ and “What if …”.

John Nash, the mathematician in the movie a Beautiful Mind, said that Adam Smith hadn’t quite gotten it right. And it took a 27 year old Swiss patent clerk named Einstein to turn the world of physics on its head!

And when they do, you can almost always count on one of two things taking place:

(a) Characters are often misunderstood. In the Gospel, Jesus offers an interpretation of the temple so outrageous and so incomprehensible that it’s not until after His resurrection that his disciples finally get it. They’re not able to grasp what Jesus is saying & Jesus is not understood by his audience. Einstein said “Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds.” Now I don’t think we’re the mediocre minds. Mediocre minds are the ones who poke fun at you for seeing a duck or a horse in the clouds. There's an old Korean proverb:

He that knows he does not know is wise; He that does not know that he does not know is foolish.


I think Einstein meant that "mediocre minds" were the fools that did not realize they "did not know", but might have been apt to let others know they did not know.

Research shows that diverse groups of people outperform smarter groups of people, diverse cities are more productive, diverse governments make better decisions … not where everyone sees great things in the clouds, but a greater variety of things in the clouds. No matter who you are or how smart you are, like Garrison Keillor said


“High IQ is like 4 wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places”.


We all get stuck. Getting stuck in different places is what makes diverse groups outmaneuver smart groups.

(b) What these characters said was not that we’ve been wrong or ignorant, but only that our knowledge is only ever incomplete. Nash only revised Adam Smith, Einstein only revised Isaac Newton. They all said “This is great! … But it’s not all there is!” I mean isn’t it refreshing to know that there’s something bigger out there? Einstein told us “to just imagine” … “Imagination,” he said, “is more important than knowledge”. Gerald Schroeder, in his book "The Science of God" took to heart what Einstein "revised" and imagined this ...

When you move close to the speed of light, time shrinks. If creation began at The Big Bang at the speed of light, then the 16 billion years “it’s all been here”, all of creation shrinks into 6 – 24 hour days (give or take a few hours) … and on the 7th day, God rested. How’s that for a duck or a horse? I mean, WOW!!! The Genesis story is great, but Schroeder and Einstein "together" saw something different in the clouds.

Human knowledge and wisdom are always “in revision”. In the text immediately following today’s Gospel, Jesus "did not entrust himself to man because he knew how a man thought". He had to get beyond that. He came to round things out. Jesus was the ultimate revisionist.

In the movie Dead Poet’s Society, John Keating tells his students


“Just when you think you ‘know a thing’, you must look at it from a different perspective.”


He has each one of his students climb on top of his desk and look at the room from “up there”.

Today’s Old Testament text reminded me that … I was preparing for my Confirmation youth group. The topic was the 6th commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill. I thought, “Wow, we’re gonna be going home early tonight.” I mean, really, who’s killed anybody. Is this going to be rocket science?

And then Pastor Johnson climbed on a desk.

He asked if any one of us had ever said anything to someone that just crushed their spirit? … made them give up on an otherwise good idea? … ridiculed someone for being optimistic? Had any one of us seen innocence in another human being and quash it? Had we ever “killed” anyone’s spirit? Well, there went ‘going home early’. It was humbling … I’d never climbed around the three-dimensional 6th Commandment that way before.

So what’s the Good News?

Well, maybe it's just when you think you understand the laws of supply and demand, energy and motion, when you think you’ve got “Thou Shalt Not Kill” pegged, that the temple is quite obviously the building and not the body, maybe what we need to know is that God understands that we struggle with our uncertainty.

Maybe what God wants is for us to lay back and look up at the clouds and tell each other what we see … Some of us’ll see ducks, some horses, some (yes) will even see the Honduras …

... maybe the Good News is that God wants more great spirits and fewer mediocre minds, more imagination and less accumulation of knowledge.

... maybe the Good News is it’s OK not to “stress out” trying to see it all or know it all. That together, we’ll see more, go farther than we could ever go alone. That James Taylor was right in what some arguably call his most spiritual song and one I've asked Laurna to make sure they play at my funeral called The Secret of Life when he sings “Einstein said that he could never understand it all ” Maybe it’s OK to admit “I don’t know enough. I don’t know everything”. God’s the Big Kahuna. Let’s let God know everything. That’s God's thing so let's leave knowing it all to God.

Secret of Life mp3 file: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TlAD-b7yew&feature=related

For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom. And the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.

God chose the lowly and foolish to teach the supposedly wise. He chose a lowly Swiss patent clerk to straighten out the professors

… and he’s spoken through many a Charlie Brown …

As Pastor Johnson pointed out after watching the movie capturing the peopel of Mt. Zion ... we are all just little pieces of glass in a stain glass window. All alone, just pieces of glass. But together, when we stand back, together we all compose the bigger picture ... and God's in the middle.

Maybe what God wants us to know is that we're to sit on that hill and share what we see in the clouds ... that we need ALL those little pieces of glass, every one … we need every Linus, every Lucy and all the Charlie Browns we can get.

The Lesson of the Skin Horse

Sunday, March 8, 2009
2nd Sunday in Lent
Preacher: Pastor Gary Johnson

Readings:
Genesis 17:1-7,15-16
Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38


Audio sermon file:

http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/742/D1022BC1-DAEE-5A0F-4D2A-D06A155149DD.mp3


In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples how the Son of Man must undergo great suffering. Peter rebukes Jesus who then calls him “the devil”. Ouch! Peter knows Jesus as a mentor and very good friend. He doesn’t want to ehar what Jesus has to say. Die, be buried, raise from the dead. Peter never gets past the “Die” part. And you can’t blame him. Jesus I one of his best friends and Paeter doesn’t want to hear what Jesus is telling him.

This is a text about arguing as friends.

It’s not easy to get in a fight with someone we love. But it’s a sign of real caring. We care enough to disagree. We care enough to rebuke. We care enough to try to work it out.

With family, too, we can disagree, sometimes passionately. We argue, but it doesn’t have to rupture the relationship. Sometimes in martial counseling, Pastor Johnson shared he meets couples who “confess” they never fight. If it’s nottrue, they’re lying. They wouldn’t lie to a pastor, would they? And the lying’s got no place in a healthy relationship. If it’s not true, it’s also not healthy because there’s a problem with “never arguing”.

You have to argue and be willing to disagree. You have to be willing to test a relationship. You have to be able to withstand having different points of view. You have to forge a partnership that can withstand disagreeing. In engineering design, you constantly fortify a design to withstand the expected loads. A component or a system like a bridge that’s never loaded is not deemed a success simply because no car’s ever driven over it.


In the children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit, the Skin Horse says that he has weathered the love that has made his tail thin of hair and his eye rubbed over and over. At the prospect of becomign "real", the Skin Horse shares:



"You become (real). It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

You need to weather the weathering, he claims, to “become real”. And with freinds, you are never ugly. A friend understands. But "it doesn't happen often to those who have to be carefully kept".

You have to find ways to disagree … even passionately.

Pastor Johnson adds here that some folks mention they have friends who are good sounding boards, who listen to their whole story and do not judge them … and he comes to the conclusion …

You can get rid of those friends.

You NEED a friend who’ll tell you sometimes you sin.

You NEED a friend who’ll tell you sometimes you’re wrong.

… and that relationship needs to be able to withstand that.

Lots of times people will say that “You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family.”

But Pastor Johnson offered the notion that it might be more the case that the opposite is true. One author he read has the theory that our friends are picked for us, ordained gifts from God, lampposts sent our way to guide in some sense. Sometimes they are the unlikeliest od characters, so different from us. It’s odd how they come into our lives at opportune moments, by happenstance, by God’s grace.

We do, however, pick our family. We LOVE Aunt Josie, but Uncle Harry – he’s not getting near that punch bowl. We pick out and shape our family.

Our friends are unlikely, beautiful “grace notes” in our lives. And you can be that only if you’re willing to fight and only if you’re willing to make up.

Gary Johnson admitted he liked this lesson because he thought of it differently now than he did or would have earlier in his life. He knows now that your best friend is someone who can’t bear to see you in pain. Peter can’t watch or hear what Jesus has to say anymore. Then … a few days later, it’s Peter who recognizes Jesus and runs out to embrace him. And Jesus says, “Peter, do you love me? … Peter, do you love me? … I’d like for you to be the one to feed my lambs.” Their friendship survives Peter rebuking Jesus, Jesus calling Peter “the devil”; it survives the name-calling, the arguing, the betrayal … because they always have forgiveness and the deep love from which these arguments were born.

If you find yourself in these disagreements with a best friend, with someone you consider your pal for a long, long time, this is a gift. It’s a gift of your friendship that you can withstand these moments.

By God’s grace, you will mend these relationships because that’s what you wanted to do all along. By God’s grace and with Peter as our example, the mending will take place.

When You Realize ...

Sunday, March 1, 2009
1st Sunday in Lent
Preacher: Pastor Kendra Mohn
Readings:
Genesis 9:8-17
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1:9-15



Audio sermon file: http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/742/611B843A-9CD9-C29C-FF9E-2840D30477C4.mp3


I heard Pastor Mohn had a really good sermon to preach today. I heard it from Pastor Mohn – right before she said she wasn’t going to preach it!

A long cold took the wind out of the larynx and she pocketed that sermon. I sat disappointed in my pew. She confessed she was disappointed (too) but she figured on a pretty cool substitute. She pointed out tha the Gospel from Mark was not long-winded. The verses today are short, compact, but chock-full – Pure Hemingway.
Mark did not need many words to tell the story he had to tell … and there was a reason.

So Pastor Mohn mused …

Think about when you passed on The Best News You Ever Heard

“I’ve been accepted”
“I’m pregnant!”
“I’m NOT pregnant!!!!”
“We’re staying …”
“We’re going …”
“It’s FINALLY over!”
“It’s only just begun.”
“EUREKA!! I found it!”

These moments of realizing your best news are the in-between places Pastor Johnson referred to just last week. The bookmarks of life.

This news, by the way? How long did it take you to share it? Was it anti-climactic? Did you script it in a long arc? How long did it take to get it out … in words? Was it something you blurted out, not neat and structured, but just couldn’t contain?
Something so good “it fell out of you”? Did you rush to find somebody particular to tell? Or did you just tell a complete stranger?

If you think this last notion is a tad unbelievable, I have to interject with this short, but true tale of the weekend I asked Laurna to marry me. I asked her atop of the Pinnacles National Monument in California. En route back to our bed and breakfast, she was plotting who to tell and in what order and when. She asked me to PLEASE NOT tell anyone before we told our parents. I dutifully agreed. At breakfast the next morning, someone asked if what all we had done the day before. Laurna blurted out “He asked me to marry him!” I choked on my raspberry fru-fru tart and yogurt marmalade. So much for the best laid plans of sharing this news with family first. Not just not family, but complete strangers.

The reality of sharing really good news is it changes what comes next.

In an irrevocable way. The next becomes now – before you know it. What comes after is so interesting it changes everything. In the movie When Harry Met Sally, Harry picks the oddball moment at New Year’s Eve to let Sally know what he finally realizes he’s felt … and it changes EVERYTHING:

Sally: You can’t just walk in here and expect it to change everything. It doesn’t work that way.
Harry: Well, how does it work?
Sally: I don't know, but not this way.
Harry: How about this way? I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.
Sally: You see? That is just like you, Harry. You say things like that, and you make it impossible for me to hate you, and I hate you, Harry. I really hate you. I hate you.

But, of course, we all know … she doesn’t. And what we also know is it’s quite the opposite. Sally says he can’t just say something and expect it to change everything. But then he does … and it does. As much as this is not how she dreamed of “getting the news”, she realizes also that it’s really the transformational moment for Harry. It just fell out of him. And what comes after is a beautiful, wonderful thing.

It happens to us every morning. The Good News spills over and the Kingdom of heaven comes to you, an unforgettable moment that changes everything afterward forever … for those who truly hear it. And it makes it impossible to reject it … for personal, petty or selfish reasons. It’s a “Eureka” moment.

And then … a smile … because we know it’s true.

Wow … and that was “the substitute sermon”!?

I hope I get to hear “the really good sermon” someday. I trust it IS really good. For now, I felt privileged to have heard this one ‘cause I LOVE that scene when it just falls out of Harry .. and then, through a tear strewn face, Sally smiles … ear to ear.

That’s Good News worth sharing any day!