It’s ALL Happenin’ Here!!

Sunday September 27, 2009
Preacher: Pastor Mick Roschke

Readings:
Numbers 11:4-6,10-16,24-29
James 5:13-20
Mark 9:38-50

Audio sermon file:

http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/742/F79E6EA8-8543-AAA2-DCBA-FE4FEAB44CFA.mp3


Are we open-minded enough to those of different gender, sexual preference, age, color, race? Do we ever proclaim that “others are not following US”? … and thus try to fashion God in OUR image?

Pastor Mick shared a very interesting notion today – that maybe we want to be open, but we’re still too insecure in ourselves …

“If you knew me, would you (still) like me?”

Maybe it’s the old Woody Allen delivery of the old Groucho Marx line:

“I wouldn’t want to join any club that would have someone like me for a member.”

Our insecurities can lead us to get defensive about not being gifted as others are – “they’re not following US”. Pastor Mick shared a great story about someone at a Church once handing out brochures exclaiming:

“It’s ALL Happenin’ Here!!”

His response was “Don’t Believe It!”

Sometimes, “it’s happening somewhere else”

... and we must be big enough and inclusive enough to recognize that and accept it and even proclaim it. Women, children, the deprived, the lonely, the poor are in our midst and it’s no good hiding from that fact. We have to dive in and get used to it.

We are often judgmental, in viewing the world Top down. In the Delcaration of Independence, women were seen as 75% human, African Americans a scant 60%! In Mark, today, we are reminded that God does not play favorites.

There are no insiders!

The outcast, the marginalized are held up by Jesus through US, through true fellowship.

And here’s the Good News. THEY, those very outcast and marginalized, those held at bay by US, have something gifted by The Spirit to GIVE US. It is reciprocity at work. Not only are these 100% human beings to whom we give time, money, treasure, food, clothing, BUT there is something to receive FROM them, something of The Spirit.

Today, EVERYONE has something to bring AND something to receive.

People are waiting, in Pastor Mick’s words, for the Church to not just be a sleeping giant! God is ready to “get prayed up” and get excited again. We want to be a church where everybody’s revved up to learn from everyone else, EVERYONE …

… because The Spirit is present in some form in each and every person – for the goodness of all!

The Cost of Ambition

Sunday September 20, 2009
Lay Preacher: Vince Prantil

Readings:
Jeremiah 11:18-20
James 3:13-4:3(a), 7-8(a)
Mark 9:30-37

Audio sermon file:

http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/742/786C9C59-967D-0367-BC70-1B6CCF7383CF.mp3


I read the New Testament texts for today … laced with stories of ambition … and I heard a voice. It was a voice of Maurice Boyd, Senior Minister of 5th Avenue Presbyterian Church in NYC ….

And he said if you’re going to talk about ambition, you need to recognize its ambiguity. It can be a very healthy and pretty destructive. We need to say Yes to it and No. We blame people for having it and not having it:

We say of her “Oh, she’s sooooo ambitious!”

And we say “The problem with him, ya see, is he has no ambition.”

No matter what you think about it, ambition has an energy about it … it makes our wheels go ‘round. It can bring out the best in us: ingenuity, discipline, determination. But, in excess, it can become immoral and demonic.
In James, we are asked what pursuits are worthy of children of God.

“If there were dreams for sale, what would you buy?”

We all have dreams, don’t we? We’re all striving for something … buying something? What is it we’re striving for? What are you buying?
… ‘cause everything you’re after’s got a cost. Every day they cost us 24 hours and, in the end, they cost us our life.

The Masoud, the Israeli Secret Service, says it can get anything from anybody with one or a combination of three things: sex, power & money. What does this say about what we really want??

What really drives us?

Is it the promotion? the new car? the new boat? the title of “greatest”? And are we willing to kill for it? To covet out of bitter envy and selfish ambition?
God knows that if we ask for these things, we ask with wrong motives”… God’s not in the wish-granting business … and God knows that these greedy motivations deceive us.
If you want something so bad we’ll do anything to get it, they’ve really got you and we will find our ambition becoming demonic. What drives us is our basic principle and we can’t expect more from our basic principle than it can deliver …

Is that really so difficult? Well, Boyd says, then let’s make it very simple …

If you put self at the center, you’d better prepared to be find your outer limits … and that can be very lonely.

If what you’re after is power … then you’d better forget about affection. It’s difficult to be after both.

If you’re interested in justice and not in mercy … you’d better not make any mistakes

If what you’re after is security … forget about ecstasy

If you seek comfort, you might have to relinquish meaning

If you’re consumed by your work … you’d better keep one eye on your relationships

If you’re ruthless on the way up … don’t root for kindness on the way down

It’s hard to be after the things we think will satisfy our earthly desires and the ones God created us for …. What dreams are we buying? … and if we manage to succeed, will what we get be worth what’s it’s costing us?

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 back in March:“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 ambition for “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. There is in each of us a butterfly … and Pastor Mick said it best when he said “You need not be perfect, you need only to be the ‘perfect you’. God has had a plan for you since you were in the womb. You just have to find out ‘what that is’ because it doesn’t come with blueprints”. And we won’t find it by knocking our neighbors “off the pile” only “to wind up where we started”.

What does it take to satisfy us? Often when we reach the end of the rainbow, the top of the pile, the pot of gold doesn’t quite have the luster we had imagined. And if what dreams you’ve bought don’t satisfy, more of the same won’t either.

“I learned this from my friends who have sailboats,” Boyd whispers, “No matter how big your sailboat is, somebody’s always got a bigger one!” If I only had a bigger house, a wealthier husband, the boss’ office … and it doesn’t work. Arguing “which among you is greatest” is moot.

Sometimes we know how to spend, but not how to buy. … we tend to spend on the trivial and we’re often willing to pay a lot for it. If we equate “the pursuit of happiness” with sex, power & money, we grant ourselves the God-given right to exploit our neighbor or “do whatever we have to” to get what we want.

There's two morals to the story and they're what Maurice Boyd calls God’s Great Joke. I think it's a two-parter ...

Part I is that, in the end, these things don’t satisfy. There’s less on top of the pile than we imagine. Material rewards won’t satisfy immortal longings. Worldly possessions are not enough for other-worldly creatures.

So then there’s things James says are worth our going after them … character, humility, good-heartedness, sincerity. Pursuits worthy of children of God. How do you attain these things?

God’s Great Joke Part II: … is that …

These things you can’t get by going after them! … and the harder you try, the farther you are from getting them … Imagine trying to be humble and finally saying “Wow, I’m the greatest at humility!” It doesn’t ring true.

There are some people that are desperately trying to be happy and they’re some of the most miserable people on Earth. Out there, there are some people desperately trying to be original and they’re not even interesting. Because they’re after something you can’t get for the reaching.

These things come only by what C. S. Lewis calls “the principle of inattention” – they can be yours ONLY when you’re not looking for them.

… you only get these heavenly things, when you’re after something else, something ULTIMATE and ETERNAL.

Well … that doesn’t sound very concrete, does it?

Perhaps, the good news is that God has endowed all of us … you and I with what Boyd called A Lovely Ambition?

… something you don’t have to try hard at all to do or to be or to chase
… something you are so gifted at that when you find it, it’s as if you’re remembering it more than ever having learned it

… and when you’re “doing this thing” … telling a story, singing in the choir, playing in the band, helping others find their calling, dancing, nurturing K5er’s, loving your children, … well that produces a certain kind of person, the kind that says, well …

… it doesn’t matter if I ever sing at the Met as long as I sing with dignity and purpose
… it doesn’t matter if I paint a masterpiece so long as I paint with creativity, the best way I know how


… because when you’re doing these ULTIMATE and ETERNAL things, those other things … humility, sincerity, the good heart … fly up and land on your shoulder …you get all that thrown in!!

Unsought … it’s God’s good gift … given when least expected.

What do we really value? True worship someone once said is to put the right value on the right thing … rather than chasing after trivial things God did not create us for …

… if you do what you’re gifted to do, if you’re after ‘the perfect YOU’ and you do it with discipline and integrity, God says… THAT is ambition enough

Amen

There’s a Crack in Everything

6th Sunday of Easter, May 17, 2009
Preacher: Pastor Kendra Mohn

Readings:
Acts 10: 44-48
1 John 5: 1-6
John 15: 9-17


Audio sermon file:

http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/742/B360F0E2-1D02-B2DA-323C-441252BCF9A8.mp3


There was a WAY COOL moment that came at the start of today’s service, when the Sunday school kids came out and sang:

David Brooks in an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times described the Grant Study http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/opinion/12brooks.html) in which a cadre of young men from Harvard are followed and studied for the better part of their adult lives. The researchers were looking for, in part, indicators of happiness in the subjects’ lives. When did they attain it? Why and under what circumstances. What were the major factors that played into obtaining it and maintaining it. And these clues to what proffers happiness?

There was barely a correlation with any of the indicators we have most bought into believing are the main determinants. These were people who were given nearly every opportunity, had doors opened for them and full access to factors deemed necessary for success in life. And the most interesting conclusion was that there seems no way to indicate what will make one person happy and another falter at the brink: not your emotional state in your thirties, not money, not good relationships, not plenty of supportive family and friends, not a faith community.

People who have every reason to be happy are not.
People who have no reason to be … are content.

Interestingly, in the Bible, Jesus NEVER talks about being happy!!!!!

If we lead a Jesus-life, we lead a life abiding in God and God’s love, serving one’s neighbor. In love and service, there is joy. If, in the end, you end up happy about it, well that’s a by-product of a well-lived life, not an end to seek in itself.

The advice Jesus gives is to love. Even in the Grant Study as described by David Brooks, one subject finally says …

“Happiness is love. Full Stop.”

Jesus invites us to look at life differently … to view it as service to others. A month or so back, I blogged about an interesting half-fact/half-fiction book and movie entitled the Peaceful Warrior. It’s still worth a look-see if for no other reason than one interplay of dialogue between a young athlete and his mindful mentor:

“Hey, Socrates, if you know so much, why are you working at a gas station?”
“It’s a service station. We offer service. There is no higher purpose.”
“ …Than pumping gas?”
“Service to others.”

There's even a poignant scene at the very end of the movie about what it is we think will "make us happy", but never will. And, if you want a harkening back to last week's sermon ... a great scene where Dan tries to visit his mentor one last time .... only to find the gas station "manned" by someone new, Socrates nowhere to be found. Like Philip in today's scripture reading, like Jesus on the Road to Emmaus, now-you-see-Him - now-you-don't .... off with the wind.

In today’s scripture reading is Jesus’ Farewell Discourse … (John 13:31 – 17:26). It says a lot. It’s meat on the bones, but it’s so counter-intuitive. Jesus’ topsy-turvy world. And precisely because it’s so counter-intuitive, it bears a lot of repeating.

Abide in God’s love for you.
Love your neighbor.

It’s a new model, a new system, and we’re not always trusting of it. We like for life to be transactual. We like to know for what goes into the box, what comes out. We like to know the price and value of things in which we invest our money and time and effort. We like to know the rules of engagement up front and we like to understand them. In another NY Times O-Ed piece entitled "What You Don't Know Makes You Nervous" (http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/what-you-dont-know-makes-you-nervous/), Dan Gilbert points out that "money doesn't makes us happy - certainty does". There's beaucoup research to indicate that uncertainty raises hormine levels indicative of stroke and heart attack; rats that were always shocked or never shocked exhibited lower stress levels than rats who "never knew" when they woukd be shocked. Those who were uncertain when they would be shocked sweated more profusely, their heart beat faster.

We are frustrated when we either don’t understand the rules or when we’re not allowed to play into them as we think we should, i.e. when they don’t seem transactual. Point in case, asking to bring something when we’re going to someone’s house for dinner. God and others tell us, no, we can’t. But we buck it. We don’t get not putting in for what we know we’ll get out.

And if the system breaks, we don’t understand. We like a very predictable world where everything makes sense. And the transactual model works well for driving and banking and maybe even dating. But there are at least two entities where it breaks down miserably: evil and God.

If you’ve ever lost your job, suffered a loss of a loved one, been hurt terribly by someone, had your trust betrayed, then you know the rules don’t apply. The good news is it’s the same way with God. You can’t earn your way into dinner or offer anything He can’t already, hasn’t already provided.

You can not pay God back. He asks you to Pay it Forward (another good movie, by the way …

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_It_Forward_(film) ). It’s not transactual and it’s not fair by our normal definition(s). If we pay out and don’t receive in return, we feel cheated. The fault in our reasoning is that we forget we were blessed with something to pay with in the first place. We suffer from a lack of understanding of our own initial conditions in the game.

Pastor Mohn shared a great story that Dan Magnuson shared with her. In Leonard Cohen’s poem The Anthem (http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Leonard_Cohen/215 ):

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

There is the notion that it is in life’s imperfections that God shines through. In the cracks, in the places we lose, where we struggle, that where God shines through. That’s where flowers grow in the sidewalk … in the cracks. In the cracks God sees opportunities to shine His grace through for those open enough to look for it.

The world sees unrequited love as foolish. Jesus sees it as a calling. Jesus takes the crack called servanthood and sees it as a privilege, much like Socrates, the service station attendant in A Peaceful Warrior. Jesus sees death as a means to salvation.

The command today to love one another affords us the opportunity to get close enough to things the world calls folly. And if we get close enough, we will see the light of God’s grace shining through.

As the fledgling professor in Good Will Hunting, the one deemed less successful for his having loved his wife through years of cancer instead of seeking out the awards of academia, tells his lost patient …

Oh, Will, those little things they call the imperfections. They’re the best part. They’re the part you’ll laugh about. They’re the part you most love about one another.

And, as The Anthem says, … forget your PERFECT offering …

You can add up the parts but you won't have the sum

You can strike up the march, there is no drum

Every heart, every heart to love will come but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.

I Don’t Know Why I’m Doing This …

5th Sunday of Easter, May 10, 2009
Preacher: Pastor Gary Johnson

Readings:
Acts 8:26-40
1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8

Audio sermon file:

http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/292/0E84B48B-6191-A778-54B1-BFC8FDD1DACC.mp3


There was a WAY COOL moment that came at the start of today’s service, when the Sunday school kids came out and sang:

I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart.
Where?
Down in my heart!
Where?
Down in my heart!
I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart,
down in my heart
down in my heart to stay

.… and for a few magical, marvelous moments, it lifted and charged the room. For those wonderful couple of moments, everyone had a smile on their face and we were filled with … joy.

How does this happen?

Sometimes it takes The Spirit … riding on the wind; a voice, a suggestion, an inkling that you’re supposed to do something, go somewhere, say something. On the winds of the Holy Spirit, we are often nudged to be a part of something that, at the time, we seem not to understand.

“I don’t know what made me go there. Something in me called me, made me stop by,” we say. And, invariably, there’s the feeling of “I’m so glad I did!”

And that something would not have occurred to you had you not allowed that something to “blow you into the life of another”. On some level, it’s a conscious decision. Philip is called by the Spirit and nudged to “go … to a dangerous road”. And the wonder of it all is “He got up and went”. He probably doesn’t understand why as reason would have it that he shouldn’t want to go, it was not prudent to go, it was a swarthy stretch of road. Philip probably had a day planner and a to-do list, a day full of appointments. But he forewent that.

He is “called” to approach the Queen’s “right hand man” – the guy who guards the money, has the power, influences authority, has the Queen’s implicit trust. He’s dark-skinned, obviously a foreigner, not from Israel. He has personal drivers, a limo … he’s obviously “got it goin’ on”. And, for all that, he’s got “something missing in his life”. He has the great job, the cool robes and it’s still “not enough”. He’s struggling with a passage in Isaiah and …

And something tells Philip … “Hey, go talk to that guy …”

That something is the gift of the Spirit through Baptism … to serve.

Philip “knows this guy”. Philip knows this guy is rich and he knows he’s NOT in this guy’s class. And this Ethiopian eunuch asks what the meaning of the scripture is and Philip fills him in … he tells the story of how Jesus conquered death and sin NOT by way of money or power or leverage, NOT with generals and an army, but by humility.

The eunuch’s response: when he next sees water, he says “What’s t stop me from being baptized, right here, right now?” What a great response!!

So what’s with Philip and the Spirit? Tell your story, write your song, say your piece when you hear a calling. Your witness is all God asks. God’ll take care of the rest. Lead the horse to water. God’ll take over from there.

The cool part? The eunuch goes dancing away after dipping himself in the waters of baptism. He was singing like the little kids this morning:

I’ve got the peace that passes understanding,
Down in my heart,
Where?
Down in my heart!
Where?
Down in my heart!
I’ve got the peace that passes understanding,down in my heart
down in my heart to stay.

I’ve the got love of Jesus, love of Jesus
Down in my heart,
Where?
Down in my heart!
Where?
Down in my heart!
I’ve the got love of Jesus, love of Jesus
down in my heart,
down in my heart to stay.

As the Voices of Zion also sang today … “Now all the vault of heaven resounds …”
The vault of heaven opens when we walk away from our own lives into the life of another.

Through your witness, God can lead them to a place where they will realize that it wasn’t ever the money or the Queen’s trust that matters. It’s in the waters of baptism that the light’s turned on. The eunuch in all of us is going to have to keep reading (and wrestling) with scripture, keep working on his baptism, but, and here’s the onderful thing, he’s going to “pass it on”, “pay it forward”.

Soon, on some given day, he’s going to say “I don’t know why I’m doing this, but …”

Someone out there, maybe today, maybe tomorrow is longing. They’ll cross your path. And, if you heed the call and brave the dangerous road, something glorious will happen. And in that moment, like Philip, you will be swept away, like Jesus on the Road to Emmaus, you’ll “be gone in an instant” to leave that someone pondering what just happened. And their eyes will be opened to a new light. They will go on joyfully singing, a changed person, with a new smile and a new outlook on life, riding on that wind that brought you to them, spreading that joy that’s filling their heart.

WebKinz Jesus??

4th Sunday of Easter, May 3, 2009
Preacher: Pastor Kendra Mohn

Readings:
Acts 4:5-12
1 John 3:16-24
Psalm 23
John 10:11-18


Audio sermon file:

http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/742/28F5BE7B-F100-1240-2A9F-99895836F6A0.mp3



Perhaps too often, Pastor Mohn offers, we tend to picture Jesus (or see artistic renditions of Him) as blonde with flowing hair, like the cute, stuffed animal sheep we buy our kids in the store, aka WebKinz (www.webkinz.com). They’re soft, cuddly, romantic and, in the end, unlike “the real thing”. As in the Psalm today, the green pastures Jesus will lie beside us in goes hand-in-hand with the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Along with Blonde Barbie Jesus is another Jesus we meet in today’s scripture texts. And, yes, there’s a dirty (and real) side of what goes along with “I am the Good Shepherd”. The reality is Jesus is moving around the world saving His sheep from the wolves, but THAT Jesus doesn’t always look like the one in the frame at the top of the stairs.

The reality is often so very different from “the idea”.

Much like parenting or the proverbial oil change, the job can often be dirty (and painful) in the details.

The Good Shepherd knows His sheep and they know Him. Pastor Mohn shared a story about a “shepherd” in Minnesota who’d had his sheep stolen while at the County Fair. While visiting the County Fair one county over, he found that a farmer there had stolen them. When he approached them, the sheep received him and they KNEW HIM. But Pastor Mohn cautioned us to “wait a minute”. Here’s the Hollywood, Hallmark moment when we tend to romanticize, when the music changes to a “happy ending crescendo” and the Webkinz sheep “comes to be”. But that’s “the idea” that we tend to romanticize. The reality is often different, if we can be truthful with ourselves long enough to resist Hollywood, Hallmark and Webkinz.

It’s not altogether only a sweet story.

WHY do the sheep know their shepherd? When it’s snowy, rainy, storming, he opens the barn door to let them seek warmth; when they’re hungry, he fills the troughs and feeds them; when they’re scared, he’s there to calm them and comfort them. They know the source of their life. When Jesus says He knows his sheep and they know Him, this is NOT a warm and fuzzy story. This is a stark reality.

Pastor Mohn remembers a dirty story of a calf birthed by her father in the mud room of their home. It was a difficult, dirty, messy birth IN THEIR HOME! The calf came too early, too cold, too afraid, but their shepherd, her father, was there to “make it OK”. He would bring the mud and gunk and filth into his own home to save that calf. The mud and blood and dirt and afterbirth, the fear, the mess, the disgusting mess – this is not the stuff of Webkinz.

It is the stuff of Baptism!!

Through all the mess and gunk of your life, God brings you into the warm waters, he gets right in with you and brings you out clean and safe and OK on the other side. There’s no barrier between Jesus and the mess in your life.

When we say that Jesus lies down before us in green pastures, it is because we know He’s there in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. When we say He’s the Good Shepherd, it’s because we know there are wolves out there.

What you won’t see in any Hallmark card or Hollywood movie or cute Kinz website, is that, in the Easter season, Jesus is out there between us and the wolves, to bring us through the mud and the gunk and out the other side.

We’re Never Ready

3rd Sunday of Easter, April 26, 2009
Preacher: Pastor Gary Johnson

Readings:
Acts 3:12-19
1 John 3:1-7
Luke 24: 36b-48


Audio sermon file:

http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/742/98E11702-3847-ED9E-C464-E6BC7F531D74.mp3



Just previous to today’s text, Pastor Johnson points out, Paul has just cured a crippled man. The crippled man starts jumping and hopping around, singing. You know this guy. He walks funny. He stands out. He has two heads, he’s different …

But this ends up one happy guy. He knows his cure is a blessing.

Often we either don’t know or have forgotten what our true blessings are. We think we know what we need. And Paul gets this. He says “I know what you ‘think you need’, but you are children of God and here … THIS is enough”. He asks “Why do you wonder at this?” and then proceeds to remind them they “killed the Author of Life”. We think we know, but we have to constantly be reminded that we really don’t.

In Luke, today, it’s as if the apostles have all seen a ghost. Again, the greeting “Why are you frightened?”. While in their joy that Jesus was alive, they were still disbelieving.

We are very much like the Israelites and the apostles. We can wrap our heads around “dead”. We get hopelessness and uncertainty. We know about shaking our heads and giving up. We can sink our teeth into that. But “he’s raised from the dead” or “he’s cured … and he’s singing and dancing”? Much less so ….

Today’s story is NOT about death. It’s about a birth.

Much as in Luke’s Christmas story … it’s the BEST … full of the mysterious, the weird, other-worldly, the aura of disbelief … as there, here we are reminded that no matter how ready you are “to have a baby”, you’re NEVER ready!!

You know what’s coming – BUT when it’s upon you, as ready as you thought you were, you’re not ready. Your reaction is to count fingers and toes, to stare almost dumb-faced.

Yoday we witness a grown-up version of “fondling the new birth”. Resurrection? No matter how often it was prophesied, we seek the wound in which to place our unbelieving hands.

And Jesus says “Touch me”

The irony is … we’re more ready for death than birth. We are given 6 weeks in Lent, like 9 months of pregnancy … to wrap ourselves around what we’re not ready for. So what? So here’s the “so what” …

God will get us out of our tight places, believe it.

And where’s the tightest place you’ll ever get?

It’s shoulder-wide and 6 feet deep.

Whatever tight spot you’re in right now, today, God has already made the sacrifice to get you out of it … while it’s easier to say “so what?”, don’t let anybody else ever tell you otherwise.

You may be tempted to not believe this. You may have trouble wrapping yourself around this. But God has made the sacrifice to “raise you up out of this tight place”.

And He will ……

The Default Scenario

2nd Sunday of Easter, April 19, 2009
Preacher: Pastor Kendra Mohn

Readings:
Acts 4:32-35
1 John 1:1-2:2
John 20:19-31

Audio sermon file:

http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/742/2A62828C-3EDB-9FDF-1876-102DE4792F9A.mp3

Pastor Mohn began with the notion that she and Thomas “are good friends”. Often the Sunday after Easter is left to seminarians and associate pastors to preach on Thomas on what’s often a lightly attended 2nd Sunday of Easter service. Pastor Mohn was admitting it was getting tough to come up with new slants on Thomas and she was, ultimately, “saved” by a 47 year old British woman named Susan Boyle.

Susan appeared on the British “American Idol” Britain’s Got Talent. The newest YouTube video to break records was written up in yesterday’s NY Times. Perhaps in response to Susan answering that she wished to be as successful as Elaine Paige, an actress and singer in British musical theater, the audience (and the judges) were somewhat sneering and laughing at her "dream" ... apparently not expecting much from the woman who, until recently, had been taking care of her ill mother. And all this before they heard her even open her mouth to sing. Everyone in the room, in a moment of anticipation of what would follow, bit lips and hid their faces or stared through slits in their upheld hands. And then she sang. Jaws dropped, eyes popped, and the audience was carried away to a standing ovation throughout her rendition of the ballad “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luRmM1J1sfg ).

There’s a deeper connection of faith, Susan Boyle and the doubting Thomas as Pastor Mohn points out. Something connecting the faces that doubted they would hear anything they’d ever care to remember. We all struggle to have faith, to believe. Susan Boyle doesn’t have the outward appearance we are taught from an early age to associate with “stardom”. We accentuate the young and the physical and allow it to take our attention from the substantive. Sometimes we are led to "believe" that dreams are only for the young, only achievable by the svelt even with all the examples around us that speak quite to the contrary. We become so "certain" that you have to look like Elaine Paige to sing like Elaine Paige. We search and yearn for certainty so much that we bottle it with a prescriptive recipe: in the absence of the voice, we judge "what will occur" on false pretenses, on appearance of what it ought to look like. And barring evidence to the contrary, we simply choose to doubt rather than believe.

When we can’t absolutely have certainty, we settle for doubt instead of faith.

Doubt, not faith, is the default scenario.

We want certainty. And if we can’t have it … because we weren’t there when the tomb was opened … or because someone doesn’t “look the part”, we choose NOT to believe.

When we have certainty, there’s no need for faith. The challenge is when there is no proof. Pastor Mohn astutely points out that faith … the choice to believe in the absence of proof is always a progression. It must be actively constructed (through effort). One does not call it out of thin air. It is difficult!

What is also sooo fascinating about Susan Boyle’s singing “I Dreamed a Dream” is that the song is about a woman dying, a woman convinced that the end is, for her, imminent. The lyrics, almost ironically, point to the young as being those who fall prey to the tigers that come out in the night. Hear the words she sings:

There was a time when men were kind
When their voices were soft
And their words inviting
There was a time when love was blind
And the world was a song
And the song was exciting

There was a time
Then it all went wrong
I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living

I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving
Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung, no wine untasted

But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
And they turn your dream to shame
He slept a summer by my side
He filled my days with endless wonder
He took my childhood in his stride
But he was gone when autumn came

And still I dream he'll come to me
That we will live the years together
But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather
I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

And Susan Boyle turns this ballad of lost and broken dreams torn asunder by soft thunder into “a bright beginning”. She imbibes the lyrics with a breath of hope as if to announce that …

…between certainty and doubt … THERE … lies a thing called faith

Faith in things unseen, faith that an unemployed woman of 47 can call from within herself the voice that would stir countless to rise from their seats. In his all-too-human stance, Thomas, like all the Britain's Got Talent judges, has made up his mind, to forgo faith for doubt. From where, then, comes faith in the unsung hero, the unemployed older woman with The Voice, faith in The One who came to conquer death for all?

If ever there was a metaphor for the Resurrection in full view, here it is … what our humanity sees so much as an ending was the most glorious of beginnings. Susan Boyle helped show us all again. One chapter's close gives rise to the opening of all that's to come after. "I will make a new thing", Jesus says.

Please forgive one last venture into Britain’s Got Talent. In that same NY Times article was a link to another Britain, a cellphone salesman, Paul Potts, who early on in the history of the show dreamed of singing opera. He chose to sing Nessun Dorma from Puccini’s famous opera, Turandot ... the aria made most famous as the chosen encore for tenor Lucianno Pavarotti. Paul Potts delivers the aria exquisitely
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k08yxu57NA), a piece I still associate with Easter and Jesus rising from the dead only because of the building to the crescendo ending of the aria in which the character sings of desperation that he must rise above … he sings “I will conquer, conquer, conquer (Vincero, vincero, vincero)” These words belted out in song for me bring visions of the rising that only comes through real pain and suffering ... and I see Jesus rising and finally conquering death for all.

Paul Potts breaths into Nessun Dorma perhaps in a way different from Susan Boyle, but just as convincing, a reason to believe that, while we tend to doubt that Jesus will arrive in a older, more worn out package shy the perfect body or luxurious teeth, a package dressed up as Susan Boyle or Paul Potts ... although we tend to doubt that good things will come so packaged, Jesus is full of surprises.

Yes ... between certainty and doubt, there IS faith. Just ask Susan Boyle and Paul Potts.

In a moment after Susan Boyle is finished singing the judge Simon Cowell says (jokingly) "he knew all along she was going to do something extraordinary". But the truth is almost no one did. We are, most of us, Thomas-like at least in this regard. We actually choose to doubt. Maybe it's the safe choice. As Jesus says today, though ... blessed are those who risk "safe", who are bold enough to believe EVEN before Susan sings - blessed are those who choose not to give entirely into the stereotypes of glitz and bodily beauty. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed ... in One who rose from the dead to conquer sin and death, once and for all

Vincero!

Vincero!

Vincero!