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.”