DownEastPastor

The Search Light of God - Psalm 139

2008-07-18T09:56:00.001-05:00

“When in doubt, go with a Psalm.” Not very profound, admittedly. But useful. It is also the first lesson I try to pass onto our Summer Interns here at Howard Memorial. Folks around Tarboro (where I live) have noticed that we don’t have a summer intern this summer. This is one of our big failings in 2008. It was really hard to locate and intern this year. And so, instead of passing this lesson onto our intern, I am passing it onto the 75 to 100 of you out there who read these blogs.

When in doubt, go with a Psalm.

Why do I say this? Why do I think this?

Martin Luther once said something like the Psalms are a “gospel in miniature” and that all that was needed to understand the doctrines of repentance and salvation could be found contained within them.

In my first ever pastoral visit (back in 1995!), I learned this lesson as I visited a woman, blind from years of eyesight degeneration, grieving the loss of someone she loved. Lying there, immobilized by arthritis and grief I prayed with her. And then I asked her if there was anything else I could do for her.

“You can read to me,” she said. “Read me the Psalms.”

I started at 19 (just beautiful, really, the 19th Psalm). By the mid-30’s she was sleeping, and at peace. I said the Lord’s Prayer in a reverent tone, and I left.

This will come as no surprise to many of you, but as I read those Psalms she knew most of them and recited them along with me. Nearly by heart. Thus the beauty of the moment. Thus my reverence.

Every now and then I am asked why scripture matters? It matters because it shapes and molds lives. When we are blinded, alone, and in pain, it props up, builds up, and carries us up. I know, because I have seen it. Over and over again, like the story I tell above, I have seen it.

Consider Psalm 139, and consider the questions that it raises and asks us:

Psalm 139

Just let these words, from the beginning of the Psalm seep into you richly and think about what they might imply:

O LORD, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

What does it mean to be searched by God? What does it mean to be known by God? What does it mean that God is acquainted with all our ways?

This Psalm, over the years, has given me as much comfort as anything I know.

My good friend Franklin, about to become a minister in Durham talks with an elegant passion about the Psalms. And his passion is rooted in the fact that the psalms tell us about God – in all of God’s grace and wonder and terrible power. The psalms call us to trust God, and respect God. To know God and to fear God. To love God and to lay our lives at the feet of God’s redemption. In this way they become real.

Take for example Psalm 139 – if I am going to find comfort in the fact that God has searched and known me, completely, I am going to have to get over the illusion that I can hide things from the Lord as well. My faults. My sin. My shame. None of that is hidden from God. And so if I am to find comfort in the care of God, I am going to have to reconcile the judgment of God with the forgiveness God offers. “See if there is anything offensive in me,” writes the Psalmist as Psalm 139 concludes, “and lead me in ways everlasting.” Just wonderful.

As good a gospel in two lines as any I know – see if there is anything offensive in me and lead me in ways everlasting. I am not convinced that Martin Luther was right about everything, but he was right about the Psalms. So is my friend, Franklin. And so was the 98 year southern lady all those years ago, grieving, dying, and reciting the Psalms as I read them to her from her family Bible.

In the coming weeks I’ll have some blogs about my summer life and my summer activities. I may even have some pictures. Thanks for reading.

Leaps and Bounds

2008-06-13T12:09:00.000-05:00

Leaps and Bounds

The next two weeks I will be speaking at the Massanetta Springs Middle School Conference. Here is a link to it: Massanetta Springs Middle School Conference.

I will be speaking on the story of Jesus and the healing of the paralytic found in the following places:
Mark 2: 1 - 12
Matthew 9: 1 - 8
Luke 5: 17 - 26

The details vary from gospel to gospel. But the point is the same: this man needed healing. He could not get there. There are some who are skeptical of his need to be healed – why heal him if his paralysis is his fault (that is the between the lines question surrounding the conversation about sin)? His friends carried him. They got him to Jesus. In Luke, Luke even has the gumption to say that “When Jesus saw their faith, he said, "Friend, your sins are forgiven." Note whose faith it was – not his, the paralytic. But his friends.

This leads to all sorts of questions for preaching, teaching, spiritual formation, and character development.

Have you ever been carried by somebody else?
Have you ever carried anyone else – to Jesus, to reconciliation, to help?
Would you remove a roof (see the Mark and Luke versions) to get your friend to help?
Is your capacity to aid limited by convenience or availability?
What about the line between helping someone and enabling their terrible choices and self-destructive behavior – like bailing your alcoholic sister out of jam, after jam, after jam, after jam?

Harder still, Jesus also asks– “Which is easier, telling him to stand and walk or to tell him that his sins are forgiven?” He does not answer – making it deliberately rhetorical. Which makes it doubly tough. Instead he says, “But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins...." He said to the paralyzed man, "I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home." That doesn’t answer the question as much as it changes the subject (notice the appositive, “but” there at the start of the verse.)

So which is easier – to forgive somebody or to help them walk again? I think if you’ll really think about that you’ll find the trouble with answering the question quickly or easily.

This doesn’t even touch the issues that the Pharisees bring to the conversation; or the questions that most of us struggle with as we experience spiritual paralysis due to sin, shame, or meaninglessness.

That’s what I’ll be preaching on this Sunday, and talking about with Middle Schoolers the first two weeks of June.

Speaking of Middle Schoolers, I saw some things on the internet while trying to learn more about Middlers. Most people don’t think about Middlers too often – which is a shame – as those years from 11 to 14 are some of the most fragile and fervent of our lives.

I’ll pass some of this onto you:

The Dumbest Generation?

I saw this at Rotary meeting – describes the kind of world that we are sending them into:

Did You Know 2.0

Did you know? Shift happens.
(this is the original)

Generation Y / Millenial Generation
(be sure to read the part about technology)

Also, if you are feeling really brave, do an internet search for the Jonas brothers, Miley Cyrus, or the word “tweens,” guitar hero, or Teen People.

Don’t ever be afraid to get up off the mat. May God grant you peace as you stand by leaps and bounds.

Can we learn what “it” means?

2008-06-06T08:17:00.002-05:00

image from: www.haitimercymission.org

When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?"
But when Jesus heard this, he said, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.
Go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners."
Matthew 9: 12-13

There are moments in the Bible where Jesus Christ is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more transcendent, illuminating, and revolutionary than we are even aware.

This episode just might be one of them. I am not sure that it is easily apparent, but here Jesus is throwing convention to the mat. He is running against the tide of religious authority, theological thought, and common practice - the holy trinity of social, theological, and intellectual faux pas in 1st Century Judah/Palestine.

“Why do you bother with sinners?” That is what they, his critics, his self-appointed judiciary committee, that is what they want to know.

They thought: the righteous, the clean, the error-free should not be with the unrighteous, the unclean, or the error-prone. Jesus says no. Jesus calls us to sit and eat and know the unclean and their companions.

They thought great teachers should not dine with the sin stricken. They thought the good should not lower their gaze to the bad. They thought that those in the fire should stay in the fire because they had somehow earned the fire itself. Jesus says pull your brother out of the flames. Jesus says stand by your sister as she sinks in sinking-sand and offer her a hand as a means to claw her way out.

Over and over again a dichotomy of a sort is drawn for us as we think about our lives, our mistakes, and our sin. We think the way out of sin is to sacrifice more, to demonstrate how willing we are to change, and to form new means to show God how sorry we are and how badly we want a second chance. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that desire.

The trouble comes in the application. It never works as neatly as we hope it might.

Invariably what happens is something like a NASCAR race. We, each of us, trying to justify our own righteousness and our own sin-sorrow end up trying to out-duel one another. Who can come in first in showing God how much they love the Lord and how far they are willing to go to avoid sin? That becomes the question. “Surely,” we think as we further delude ourselves, “surely the most serious among us will be willing to sacrifice the most?” Right? And if someone is still sinning it means they truly aren’t sorry, correct? So if I am really sorry, and I am willing to sacrifice to show it, and my sister in the quick-sand-like-quagmire of her sin has sacrificed nothing, then maybe that means that God loves me more? Right?

You see where this is going. It is circular and deceiving at best, and just downright awful in its most stringent application. It quickly creates insiders and outsiders – those who are good and those who are not. And Jesus’ world was eaten up with a form of this kind of thinking.
And right in the middle of it he comes quoting Hosea 6:6 – “Learn what this means – I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” Can we learn what this means? Can we learn what it means?
All of us each want the divine report card, the name on the door, the certification on the wall, the resume padded with superlatives – we want the evidence of our hard work and the sacrifices that the work required along the way. And yet, our Jesus, says along with Hosea, that God desires expressions of mercy from us and not feats of strength and totems of sacrificial rigor.
You might think this is easy, but let someone you know who does not deserve a pardon receive a pardon and see how you feel: the co-worker who is caught in a lie who gets off scott-free; the teammate who inexplicably gets a second chance when none is deserved; the sore-loser who storms away and then is welcomed at the after-party. The sinners, prostitutes, tax-collectors, and suffers who have made their own choices – who picked up the crack-pipe, the needle; who took the money from Mama’s purse; who drove off in the brother-in-laws truck. When they come looking for mercy, what will we do?

Can we learn what it means?

I am undecided on the matter. I think we are supposed to learn, but I am not sure we ever do. Perhaps we carry too much baggage to know. Perhaps we never get out of our own way. Perhaps Jesus is asking too much.

But he asks, and we are called to the challenge.

Can we learn what it means? Can we ever offer mercy instead of our demands for sacrifice?

For mercy’s sake in a world long on judgment, I pray we will.

Are we forgotten?

2008-05-23T12:07:00.002-05:00

Notes on Blogging for the Summer :
Are we ever forgotten?

I will be blogging “incidentally” this summer. I have a schedule full of Vacation Bible School, Mission Trips, Youth Events, and the odd day or two of vacation. That means that I will be blogging as I can this summer. I will blog weekly as I am able. For links to a couple of the places I'll be in the next 90 days (not to mention several others):
Massanetta Springs Middle School Conference
The Florida Gulf Coast

Last week at HMPC I preached about whether or not the great commission (Matthew 28: 16 – 20) needed re-commissioning? I decided that it did not. Is it in need of re-conditioning? That was a better question. Just like old sanctuaries that needed air-conditioning in the 1960’s, the church is in need of updates and improvements at nearly every turn. This is a challenge. Why? Well, Pastor Charles Holm, of First Presbyterian Church in Easton, PA says it as well as I have ever said it: “We have a wealth of history, but a third of our members are new. One of the challenges of determining a future course for a church established in 1811 is to make decisions about what you will hold onto and what you will discard to remain vital and vibrant.” (Quoted from the 2007 report of the General Assembly of the PCUSA).

Matthew 6: 24 - 34
This week I’ll be preaching from Matthew 6: 24 – 34 – and it will be titled “The Worries About Tomorrow….” I think it will be relevant. That is all I can hope for. At issue: do we believe Jesus when he says, “And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” Great question, Jesus. Defines a people of faith, really. Is faith the opposite of worry? If not, it is mighty close.

Genesis 32: 3 - 12
Below is a sermon that I preached in the spring of 2000. To have it make any sense you’ll need to read Genesis 32: 3 – 12. But it asks yet another question, “Are We Forgotten?” We worry because we feel forgotten. I hope you like what I offer.

Face it – if you’ve lived long enough it has happened to you. You’ve been driving down the road, at a cookout, in a movie with a friend – and suddenly you’ve realized, “I am supposed to be somewhere else.” You have completely forgotten a commitment, an appointment, a meeting. Instead of the standee – you have become the stand-upper having stood up a client, a date, or a whatever. Or, better yet, hurried from a long week of work, you’ve invited friends over for dinner, rushed to the grocery store and returned home to discover you’ve forgotten the most essential element to the four star meal that you’ve promised.

For my own part, I once in college had Saturday office duty at a job that I was paid to do – I went to an amusement park instead. I had completely forgotten that I was supposed to be there manning the phones, directing folk to the right places. I was riding roller coasters and eating funnel cakes and having a great time with my girlfriend instead. On the ride back, about three miles from home I remembered where I was supposed to have been all day. My heart almost stopped in my chest. Expecting to be fired, I checked every voice-mail I knew to check, I check all the E-mails I had gotten, and found nothing. Turns out it was a slow-slow-slow day, I got lucky – but I had forgotten and it made me sick. For I had discovered that I was not as reliable as I promoted myself as being.

How silly, how unintelligent, how ashamed do we feel – we forget a birthday, an anniversary, a special day in the life of our company – we are people who are supposed to remember, right? And yet, each of us knows the shame of forgetfulness and the pain of being forgotten.

Today we begin a series of sermons and meditations called, “Big Questions for a Big Faith,” in which we explore the questions that we’ve all asked, wanted to ask, or have been asked by those who would challenge our beliefs. Presbyterian Pastor Douglas Brouwer writes that those outside of the church are very good at pulling just the right passages and counterexamples from scripture whenever we start speaking about a loving God. This is good he writes, because “We should be able to answer the tough questions.”

One of the toughest questions to ask and answer about our faith is whether or not we think or believe that God ever forgets us?

We certainly have felt in our lives that we have been forgotten by God – “Why me, God? Why am living like this? Why am I going through this? Why won’t you talk to me, listen to me, respond to me?” – and we are all afraid that God, if we are convinced that He has forgotten us once, will forget us again. Have we really been forgotten? Even though we have felt like it, even though history is replete with examples with folk who have been convinced that God has left them, the question still remains, are we ever forgotten by God?

Today we read from Genesis – Genesis is a book that is composed of cycles – series of stories involving central characters – the creation narratives and cycles, the Abraham epic cycle, the flood, the Jacob cycle, and lastly, the Joseph cycle. Today we find Jacob, at chapter 32, at his weakest, his most vulnerable, his most dangerously precipitous place in his living for he is out of resources, out of ideas, and almost out of his mind, convinced he has been forgotten by his God.

And if anyone should have been in danger of being forgotten it was surely Jacob – Jacob, the one whose name means heel grabber, who had stolen his brother Esau’s birth-right, conned his father in law, swindled every one he had met, including his blind father – Jacob is possibly the biggest scoundrel of the Biblical cast of characters. Here he is – with nothing but goats and women and children – and his assumed angry and vengeful brother with an army of 400 hundred men waiting to crush him in the morning. And so Jacob prays – that God might not forget him, that God might remember him, that God might deliver him. Jacob is aware that the same God that could deliver him, that should deliver him, that promised that he would deliver him, is the very same God that could have forgotten him, should probably forget him due to his actions, and most definitely, it seemed, would forget him sometime during the night. In other words, Jacob is left alone for the first time with nothing but his faith.

A scary proposition, wouldn’t you say? Forgotten by God, alone by the river? A writer named Tim Lehay has built a Christian-Fiction empire on his “Left-Behind” series -- a series that has at its heart the fear that God forgets some people in favor of others. How alone have we felt? How often have we felt abandoned? God, “Where are you we ask?” – at the bedside of a dying friend, at the crossroads of a great decision, at the riverbank before the undertaking of a great challenge.

Jacob, by the river and frightened, was not forgotten. That night, in the part of the story we did not read he wrestled with his fear, he wrestled with his God, and he lived to see the next day in which his brother Esau, greets him with a hug and a kiss instead of war making and arms-deployment. Just when had felt forgotten, God remembered.

As Christians, we confess that God remembers us through Jesus Christ. Becoming one of us, Christ remembers us as his own. Through Jesus Christ we are never forgotten. God is not built to forget us – God is not capable of letting some detail slip His mind. God is with us, God remembers us – we are not forgotten. It is one of the tests of our faith. It is one of our great claims about God. God never forgets us. In this is hope. In this is love. In this is faith. In this is our memory of God, our knowing of God, our trust in God.

Do Miracles Still Happen?

2008-05-09T09:31:00.004-05:00

Back in 2001, I was asked to speak to a group, a Bible Study about whether or not miracles happened. The resulting exegesis, quotes, etc., wound up many weeks later in sermon form. Below is that sermon, "Do Miracles Still Happen?" Please note - this is a whole Sermon, not just a blog. A little longer than normal. Also, please note that to get the most out of the entry, I suggest you say a prayer, asking God for illumination, understanding, and insight. And then you'll need to read from the New Testament, The Gospel of John, Chapter 9: 1 - 12. You'll see quickly it is a healing story, a miracle story, what The Gospel of John routinely calls a sign or a wonder. I make no claims in one sermon to answer this question in an "unabridged fashion." These were just the thoughts I had about the scripture, the text, and the question 7 years ago. If you agree or disagree, let me know. I do enjoy your feedback.

I am travelling today and will resume my regular blog entries next week. May God grant you Almighty Grace.

Do Miracles Still Happen?

John 9: 1 - 12

This is a question that has vexed and perplexed every person of faith – and, I am in some ways proud to report, will still challenge those of us who believe in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Picasso once said, “Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.” And he’s right – we are created in a sturdy and resilient way. We don’t just dissolve, we cannot will our births, we do not get to determine the length or quality of our living, so yes, it’s a miracle that we alive and that we are the way we are.

Years earlier the playwright George Bernard Shaw, himself no champion of orthodox Christianity, wrote, “A miracle is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles – for frauds only deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.”

I begin with these two gentlemen’s remarks because they are, if you will, the intellectual response to this question – Do miracles happen? Of course they do, the argument answers, we are complex, we are miracles, and we believe – this itself is miraculous. I, for one, suppose that this is the predominant view of most of us, especially when so many around us are convinced that miracles are everywhere, everyday, and if the check book is big enough, accessible to most anyone.

In her most recent column in Newsweek magazine entitled “Leg Waxing and Life Everlasting” Anna Quindlen begins with these words – “My mother did not exfoliate. In her cabinet she had a big white jar of Pond’s and a blue jar of Noxema. That’s the care her face got. As for my grandmothers – one with skin like tissue paper the other with skin like leather – I imagine soap and water did the job. How surprised these women would be to discover the amount of maintenance the human face needs today – exfoliation, antioxidation, moisturizing, revitalizing and toning – Retinol , alphahydroxy acids, plant estrogens and herbal peels --- My shower and sink have begun to look like a salad bar.”

Miracle weight loss. Miracle skin products. Miracle hair growth products, Miracle hair removal items. Miracle financing which provide the miracles in quality of living in the midst of miracle development amenities. Miracle skin products. Please pardon me for mentioning it, but I believe there is even a rather expensive product called the Miracle Brassiere -- the miracle bra. Anna Quindlen is right – with the salad bar approach to miracle fixes, why do we need the miracle of life everlasting if we can technologically and chemically make this life last forever?

Our culture’s faith in these so called miracles is an illusion though – I know it, Anna Quindlen knows it, Jesus Christ knows it – these things, these miracles are not real. In what is the high point of her piece she suggests that Ponce de Leon himself looked for the miracle --- the fountain of youth -- and he found only Florida.

I don’t want Florida to be my miracle. I don’t want the salad bar. So, the question still remains after we have discounted the frauds, do miracles still happen? Did they ever really happen?

The biblical witness is clear with its attestation – miracles are real, they are important, and they are signs of God’s will, God’s grace, and God’s new kingdom breaking through to our world. All accounts of miracles, especially those of Jesus, begin with a person in some deep need, proceed with a healing of any variety of sorts, and end with witnesses confirming what had transpired.

Here in John’s 9th Chapter we find Jesus at his Earthiest – he makes mud that must be washed away in order for sight to be regained. We are not told why he makes this mud. We are not told why in other Gospels Jesus heals the blind by simply uttering a word, as he tells blind Bartimaeus in Mark’s gospel, “Go, your faith has made you well.” We are told very little, except that the man has not sinned, nor have his parents. Rather his blindness is but a means for the glory of God might be revealed in him and through him – God is, in other words, at work in this man and will be with this man born blind, regardless of the popular notion of the day that his blindness was proof that God had abandoned him. Jesus’ cure is at the least proof that God’s grace extends to those of whom it has been assumed that they have been forgotten. Miracles, as the foundation that has weathered the storms of 2000 years attest, did truly and actually happen.

The question remains as to whether or not they still happen today? Or better yet, do we even seek and are we even holding out hope for the right kinds of miracles?

This used to trouble me at Seminary – about to be ordained in a faith as a minister who was not sure that miracles happened. I sat one day with a man named Jim and asked him – Jim, I thought, believed more than I. “Christopher,” he said, “I have seen them. But before I could see them, I had to know where and when to look.” I got chills – it just seemed so mystical and so impossible.

And yet, Jim was no fool. Just like the people who flock to Lourdes France are no fools – in the 2 centuries that there has been a shrine to the Lady of Lourdes there have 20 – 30 confirmed miracles – investigated and proven interventions of God breaking through and breaking in to our world in phenomenal ways. And yet, with only 20 or so healings, why do the thousands each month, the millions each year flock there?

I saw a show last month on Lourdes, France and the phenomenon. A paraplegic from Scotland was interviewed – “No, I don’t expect to be healed, I’m not ‘en sure I want to be healed,” he said. “I have come here so many times because it is a reminder that God has not forgotten me, and that hope is a precious thing.”

That is in and of itself the most common of miracles – that people find faith in the midst of despair, recovery in the midst of addiction, wealth in the midst of poverty, blessings in the midst of pain. Miracles happen every day, but they are most often miracles of assistance rather than of reversals of creation. The Jacobs Ladder Job Center, through prayer and practical applications finds ex-convicts and the underemployed jobs and security that they have never had. The Charlotte Rescue Mission gives free alcohol and drug rehabilitation to homeless men just 6 blocks from here – 100 men and 90 days. The motto that hangs on the wall – “God has a miracle for you!” And He does, He does! For even though we often believed that we are forsaken, God is still present because Jesus is present and Jesus came out of that tomb as final proof – as a final sign – that God was breaking through the bonds of sin and death to show us a vision of his reign and his kingdom. The most important miracle of all is Christ, and that is the miracle that assumes us all.

Perhaps if we focused upon the reality of that miracle, our sight wouldn’t be so blurred by the fraudulent ones. Like The Miracle of Movie Magic that makes people suspend in the air in martial arts mastery. Or The Miracle of "youth in a bottle" – the miracle of a quick cure for an old wound. Medical miracles we routinely call them but aren’t they really the result of the greater miracles of educational access, decent and honest teachers at colleges and medical school, and doctors who are called to endure the requisite years of training? In each of the supposed miracles that we might work the true miracle is the untraceable tracks of friendship and teamwork and determination that are the foundation for the benefits that we might receive.

As for me, with the eyes of faith that God grants me I see miracles every day. Some bigger than others. I have also had prayers answered and seen people healed, souls renewed, and loves found. I have watched recoveries that defied all logic – teenagers beaten by the world tell me they loved evil and hurting others and then months later after hours of witness, counseling, and love give their lives to Christ and their works to cause of kindness and mercy.I have also been told no when I prayed for healings. So, I cannot predict miracles nor can I control them. Neither can any of us. But we have a Lord who performed them and promised them, and so, like the people of Lourdes we can wait, and we can attest to their reality, and we can know that God is with us – especially in our Christ. And in knowing we can hope, and by doing so, attest the surest miracle of all.

Thoughts on Preaching, Jeremiah Wright, and other Bloggy Thoughts

2008-05-02T09:24:00.006-05:00

I am not preaching a sermon this week. It is Youth Sunday, which means that our Youth -- Junior High and High School -- will be leading the worship service.

As I am a preacher, preaching is nearly always on my mind. I usually walk around with a running commentary in my head, thinking about the scripture for the week, looking for illustrations in magazines and on television. By Wednesday or Thursday I am walking around with a notebook or a pad of paper, jotting down ideas and forming sentences. Depending on the health of my kids, whether or not I have a wedding or a funeral, I finish an outline of the sermon by Thursday afternoon or Friday morning. Then, I write my blog; and then, I complete the outline (I preach from outlines at least 70 % of the time now) or I compose my text, finishing Friday night, Saturday, or more often than I would like to admit, I finish early Sunday mornings.

Last month, John Buchanan, one of the most decorated preachers in our denomination wrote about the hazards of preaching and about the 'handshake ritual' that occurs after the sermon. At the heart of his essay was the question -- what does it mean if folks tell you "good sermon, Reverend?”

What if folks tell you "good job" and you, the preacher, know it wasn't very good at all?

What do folks really hear during a sermon? I listen to sermons, and sometimes my mind wonders, my thoughts drift, my tiredness catches up to me and my hearing and attention are compromised. So what do people really hear?

Even scarier -- will I be held accountable for everything I speak or say as a preacher?

I will never pastor an 8,000 member church like Jeremiah Wright (if you don't know who he is by now, just Google his name and hold on tight) and it is highly doubtful that I will ever be video taped or “YouTubed” like he is. But I did see one article this week that suggested that he had been speaking for 30 plus years and that his sermons accounted for more than 208,000 minutes and the sound bites we are seeing on TV account for something like .0000012 of his speaking time (see Christian Century, April 22, 2008, "The Rest of the Story" by David Moyer). Now, I am not pleased by what I hear on the sound bites. Not in the least. It hits me hard and I cannot imagine saying what he says on them about race, America, or history. Jeremiah Wright is the "hot-man" of the moment. His remarks bearing upon a Presidential race here in 2008. In one light I am glad that people and media are taking sermons and preaching so seriously that they are concerned about a preacher and his influence on a President. In another light though, I am led back to my question -- I wonder what will be remembered of me as a preacher? What do people hear and commit to memory? To read a fuller account of who Wright is and what he usually preaches / preached (he is retired now, technically), check this link out:

http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=4678

Now, it is risky to even write about him at all these days. I don't mean to endorse him or defend him or uphold what he said. I only mention him because he is relevant in this moment and because his situation emphasizes my larger question -- namely that there is a transaction between preacher and hearer, and it is a transaction that is brokered by the Holy Spirit, and it is a transaction which is influenced by external circumstances like those I list above.

Full disclaimer: I have heard him speak once, and it was to a Presbyterian audience, and what he said was appropriate to the occasion and theologically astute. It certainly was not about "damning America" or anything else that apparently he has said. I do wonder what I would have done had he broken into that kind of rhetoric -- and I wonder how often he used it in past years?

What do people actually hear when I am preaching? What will my preaching be remembered for? What would my sound bites sound like if they were taken out of context? It is an interesting and scary question for me. As for now, I am glad that I am a preacher of little acclaim.

Bloggy Thoughts about Health and Death:
Last week I blogged and preached about what ministry takes from you -- namely the illusions that you, as a person, will never get sick or never die. In doing the sermon prep I stumbled upon page 146 of Wendell Berry's fantastic "essay" Life is a Miracle. Want to have your thinking changed and your mind blessed by clear writing? Then read Wendell Berry. I commend him to you often in these blogs, I know. I have a friend that accuses me of having a "man-crush" on him, and that may be true.

Berry writes: "An idea of health that does not generously and gracefully accommodate the fact of death is obviously incomplete. The crudest manifestation of modern medicine is its routine, stubborn, and finally cruel resistance to death. This comes of the refusal to accept death not only as a part of health, which it demonstrably is, but also as a great mystery both in itself and as a part of the mystery that surrounds us all our lives. The medical industry’s resistance is only sometimes an instance of scientific heroism; sometimes it is the fear of what we don’t know anything about.
Science can teach us and help us to resist death, but it can’t teach us to prepare for death or to die well. The question of how you want to die is somewhat fantastical but nonetheless it is one that all the living need to consider, one that belongs to the issue of health, and one that health science can’t answer. Do you want to die at home with your people in ‘blessed peace around you,’ which is the death Tiresias foresaw for Odysseus and the one Homer seems to recommend? Or do you want to die in the hands of the best medical professionals wherever they are? Such questions may seem irrelevant until you realize that they define two very different lives.” (Life is a Miracle, Wendell Berry, page 146, CounterPoint Press, 2000)

I’ll be traveling in Louisiana next week. I’ll try to blog from there. God’s blessings to all of you.

The Strangeness of Suffering

2008-04-25T07:15:00.003-05:00

Searing pain.
Loveless emptiness.
Tightness in the chest.
Walls closing in on me.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“So angry I could shake.”
“It’s like dawn will never come.”
“Learning process.”
“A chance to grow.”
“I don’t feel anything.”
Darkness.
Irony.
Despair.

These are just some of the ways which I have heard suffering described over the last 13 years, since I started Seminary.

Just like most of us avoid talking about or thinking about death – most of us avoid talking about or thinking about suffering. Ministry takes many things away from you if you practice it as a vocation – the most obvious example being that you have to let go of the idea that there is anything “easy like Sunday morning” (sorry Lionel Richie). Another is the illusion that you will never grow old, never be sick, or never die. All these things will happen to me if I am so graced to live. There is no way to avoid them. They are the exchange for youth – it is Mother Nature’s Divinely given economy, and God’s lovely drama in which we are engaged to perform for a lifetime. Ministry also demands that we lose our fear of talking about suffering. When many people are running away, ministers are running into the fire of the miserable divorce, the crisis pregnancy, the sudden death, the cancer call, the lost business, the threatened child, the coldness of addiction…..you get the point.

Here’s what I have discovered: While the causes of suffering are totally relative and completely individual, the experience of said suffering is fairly (if not nearly) universal. We all grieve in certain patterns and in certain ways. We all struggle with failure in certain patterns and in certain ways. We all experience fear in certain patterns and in certain ways.

At the risk of theologizing, I’ll end that chain of thought there for now. This is a blog and not a book and to turn it tome-ishly into the latter would be a mistake. So to the point: do you think suffering is good, bad, or indifferent? Or, is it a combination of the three – our experience of it dependent upon the passage of time, the process of feeling, and the gaining of perspective?

Process this: history and experience witness to the circumstance that nothing has caused more people to lose faith, to question faith, than has suffering. “Why did my dad (mother, brother, etc.) have to suffer so terribly?” has cost more people a belief in divine goodness than anything else. And, history and experience have shown that suffering has brought more people to faith than anything else. The people whose faiths inspire me, who trust God the most and who have an envious spiritual depth to them are often those who have suffered the most. Not always, but often. Confused yet? Enjoying the paradox?

Ask this: have you learned more from success or failure? What was the most valuable job experience to you – the one you got the easy undeserved promotion at, or the one where you got fired, downsized, or let go from? How about that paradox?

Or this one: For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God's will, than to suffer for doing evil (1 Peter 3:17). The ethics aside – good is better than evil – the writer of 1 Peter thinks that suffering is a good thing. Maybe even necessary. Maybe even essential. Even better (or worse) – there seems to be an implied (if not overt) suggestion that it is honorable to suffer for doing the right thing. We struggle with suffering when we do wrong. Imagine not receiving a reward, but punishment, for doing what is right? That is so foreign to our way of thinking that it is strange for me to type – I imagine it is strange for you to read.

I’ll stop there. The number of books written on this topic – the pain, virtue, or idiomatic nature of suffering – would rival the stars. But I will stipulate this: the paradox of experience teaches us that the value of a good day, or of a joyful laugh, is directly related to, if not the reciprocal to, the darkness of the pain that we experience form time to time (C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain takes this on). Or – how do we know the good days from the bad if we don’t know enough about the bad to value the good? And, the paradox of faith teaches us that there is no Easter without Calvary – no forgiveness without sacrifice; no cheap grace.

So, is suffering good, bad, or indifferent? Is it ever purely one over the other? Or does time alone, after we have been through the storm, tell the tale?

Satisfaction?

2008-04-18T10:08:00.004-05:00

“I can’t get no satisfaction” – so said the Rolling Stones decades ago. They were hardly the first to express this frustration, to ask whether or not the human mind, soul, or appetite is ever satiated, ever satisfied.

One of my favorite movies is 1997’s As Good As It Gets. If you saw it, you know it – Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, Greg Kinnear, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and a grand-slam ensemble cast. It is just a lovely film about complexity, the problems of adult life, and the anxieties that naturally happen to us if we are ‘normal’ (Helen Hunt) or if we are eccentric or even obsessive compulsive (Kinnear and Nicholson). The pivotal moment of the film, in my mind, occurs to Jack Nicholson, an obsessive compulsive best selling author. He is going to see his therapist / psychiatrist and realizing that he is totally dissatisfied with his life, his relationships, and with himself. In this moment, he turns to an entire waiting room of patients, themselves waiting for therapist / psychiatrist, and asks, “What if this is as good as it gets?” The people waiting wail and cry and are shocked. We all want it a little better, a little easier, a little more complete. And the thought that we are stuck…well, we’d rather not think about it at all.

Satisfaction. Are we satisfied with ourselves? Are we satisfied with our families? Better yet, are we satisfied with God? That last sentence, “are we satisfied with God,” is a hard question to type. God is God. We are not. Our satisfaction is not essential to the preservation of the universe, to the prevenience of grace, or to the origin and maintenance of love. Our satisfaction is a luxury; God’s goodness and mercy, those are the requisites.

There is a stunning moment in John 14 that haunts me and drives this blog today and my sermon on Sunday. Even if you have not read John 14, my guess is that you know it in part. After John 3:16, it is certainly the most famous passage in John and perhaps the entire Bible. John 14: 1 – 7:

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going." Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him."

Very good. Note Thomas’ anxiety. And then note the pastoral, lovely, and kind way that Jesus responds to him. Have you ever heard that before? I imagine many of you have.

And then comes verse 8. Often skipped over. Often forgotten. John 14: 8:

Philip said to Jesus, "Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied."

Just amazing. In the presence of the Jesus and Philip is not satisfied. Philip can’t get no satisfaction. He is standing in the waiting room, and looking to Jesus, speaking to the disciples there, and speaking to us as we read his words: “What if this is as good as it gets? Jesus, is that all? I was expecting a little more for the price of the ticket.”

What is it that God can do to satisfy us? Do we ever let God off the hook? When is enough, enough? Do you think you are a Thomas, or are you a Philip? Or like me – hoping to be a Thomas but much more like Philip demanding more and asking for greater bang for the buck. Will we ever be satisfied?

It is a tough question. It would be so much easier to follow Jesus, to be a good disciple, if we would just get messages in the sky everyday from God. Or, better yet, if our lives had a scroll at the bottom of the screen (like CNN and ESPN and other channels have) – constantly telling us, “God says no, Christopher, don’t eat that cheesecake.” Or, “Yes, you can use that illustration in your sermon.”

Just show us the Father, give us the guide book, the user’s manual, and we will believe and we will be satisfied and we will quit asking for so very much. Just show us, Jesus.

But it doesn’t work that way. Never has. Never will. And often we are like Philip, looking past the Lord in our presence, more focused on what isn’t there instead of what is there, wasting away in missed opportunity and dissatisfaction; our spiritual appetites never satiated because we are constantly waiting on the next course instead of eating what is prepared.

Will we ever be satisfied? May God grant us all satisfaction.

DownEastPastor - new kids photo

2008-04-18T10:05:00.004-05:00

My three children - Patrick, Gabriel, and Amelia

Easter-time 2008

(photograph by me, on my friend Faye's camera)

Sneek Peak - Shepherd's Sunday

2008-04-11T10:58:00.005-05:00

"The Good Shepherd" - Window at Howard Memorial Presbyterian Church,

Tarboro, North Carolina

This Sunday is Shepherd’s Sunday. It’s title derived from Jesus’ autobiographical-testimony: “I am the Good Shepherd I know my own and my own know me – I am the Good Shepherd – the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep” (Gospel of John, Chapter 10).

Shepherd’s are “funny” to us. I have yet to seen a box to mark next to the word “shepherd.” As in filling out the paper work for the LSAT, the GMAT, the SAT, the GRE –

Future Career/Vocation:
§ Doctor
§ Lawyer
§ Actor
§ Shepherd
§ Administration
§ Contractor

You get the idea. Indeed you Gen Xer’s (folks born in the late 60’s or 70’s) will remember our generations first romantic hero, Lloyd Dobler. Played by John Cusack, Lloyd was the heartthrob (and still is) for nearly every thirtysomething woman you know. Lloyd had career aspirations that were less than ordinary. He didn’t want to “sell or buy anything bought or sold” and believed that kickboxing was the sport of the future (incidentally it turns out he was right – it is no longer called kickboxing but it is called MMA – mixed martial arts – and it is HUGE in Asia and America in 2008). Indeed, the only career that Lloyd didn’t consider, I am sure, was “shepherd.”

Shepherd is not something we do.

Shepherd is not something we aspire to become.

Shepherd is not what we pray our little boys and girls will grow up to be.

It is strange and foreign to us.

And so there is a disconnect. What is Jesus talking about? What is a good shepherd? Why is it so important to him that we know him as a shepherd? What not say, “I am the good doctor?”, or the good pastor, or the good innkeeper?

The word shepherd occurs in the Bible 64 times. Moses was a shepherd. David was a shepherd. Joseph dabbled in shepherding. The angels first spoke to the shepherd that Christmas night so very long ago. Long before he was the “reason for the season” Jesus was a tale told around shepherd’s campfires. And so something is going here with all the shepherding to and fro from the Old Testament to the New.

I suppose this is why Shepherd’s Sunday comes around every year. Traditionally the 4th Sunday of Easter, it is a day when we think about shepherding. I will not beat around the bush or trivialize it: preaching about shepherds, shepherding, and sheep is not easy every year. There are only so many illustrations. So many anecdotes.

But it provides a useful forum to ask: I have never shepherded. And yet I think I am able, responsible, capable of leading my own spiritual life. You see most of us want to identify with the shepherd, the leader, the in-charge person, the decision-maker. But Jesus, God, sees us as the sheep.

What do you need to know about sheep? They are totally dependent on the shepherd. Totally. Safety. Water. Grasses. Life itself. All of it -- comes by the grace and skill of the shepherd.

And the hearers of Jesus’ sermon, his self-statement would have understood exactly what he was talking about. Last year I wrote: “If you will allow me to use a badly stretched metaphor…what crawfish is to Louisiana, what lobster is to Maine, what Beef is to Texas, what Barbeque is to Eastern North Carolina – the sheep was to Israel.”

Our trouble is that we do not identify easily with the metaphor. “Don’t be sheepish” is what we hear, and practice, and believe.

Do you see yourself as the shepherd or the sheep? Be careful as you decide. The world needs both. 1 Peter Chapter 2 admonishes us: “For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.” Chances are most of us are sheep. If that makes me sheepish, or even mutton, then so be it. As long as I am following where the Lord might lead, I am of use in the kingdom of God. And usefulness is what the world, and the pasture, and the herd, and field of dreams that is the gospel most desperately need.

When the Answer is No - Sneek Peak (3 of 3 for April 4)

2008-04-04T08:58:00.002-05:00

Blog 3 of 3 for April 4, 2008 – Sneek Peek – The Answer Sometimes is No

Just in case you have never read it, the Book of Deuteronomy is a daunting read. But, it is well worth it. This “second law” of Moses stands near the center of the corpus that is Old Testament.
In one of the odd twists of fate, turns in the story that is scripture, Moses, hero of the Israelite exodus is told, “No – you will not see the promised land.” God stops him on U – he never gets to Z; never gets to recite the final four letters that would complete his journey from Egypt to Midian to Egypt to the Wilderness to Canaan. The heavy lifting of taking Canaan by storm, of confronting Jezebel and the Canaanites – that will be led by Joshua. At Deuteronomy 32:55 (you can read the whole episode at Deuteronomy 32: 44 – 52) Moses gets he verdict: “Although you may view the land from a distance, you shall not enter it-- the land that I am giving to the Israelites.”
Moses gets told no.
Tough lesson.
Tough love.
Tough stuff.
There is no more dejected feeling that when a prayer is rejected. When we search, souls longing for a sanctified yes, and we received a divine no.
And yet, we all know it to be true – sometimes the answer is no.
On Sunday, in part I will preach:

What makes this doubly hard to accept is the fact that we don’t have to do anything wrong, like Moses, to receive a “no” from the mouth of God. Jesus himself prayed for the cup to be taken from him, but was told that it could not be removed. The Apostle Paul in those famous words from 2nd Corinthians wrote “three times I asked God to remove [my pain] from me” but the answer was “no.” Instead, God said, “my grace is sufficient.”
In his book, In the Grip of Grace, Christian writer Max Lucado writes, “Test this question: What if God’s only gift to you was his grace to save you? Would you be content? You beg him for the life of your child. You plead with him to keep your business afloat. You implore him to remove the cancer from your body. What if his answer is, ‘My grace is enough?’ Would you be content?”[1]
I suspect the answer for almost everyone is “no,” we would not really be content. We would be hurt, for we turn most often to God when we are most vulnerable. But to only respond to the pain of our lives, to the pain of God’s supposed rejection with despair might be too hasty, it might just be too easy. Lucado, in the same passage continues, “If you have eyes to read these words, hands to hold this book, the means to own this volume, God has already given you grace upon grace.”
It is precisely the overwhelming goodness of God’s many “yes’s” in our lives that make the “no’s” so terrible to bear. We do indeed, despite the setbacks we suffer, have many, many blessings in our lives. There is truth to Tennyson’s great verse, “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
I do not want to suggest this morning that consolation in the grace of God will magically make the pain of “no” go away. For some this is true. Most of us, though, struggle deeply when we feel God’s rejection. But to loose our faith, to stop the practice of prayer, to give up hope no matter the depth of our loss, to act like Peter in his denial of Jesus instead of Moses in faithful prayer to God is a mistake that we should not make. If we see only “no” every time we think about God, then we have lost touch with God’s grace. Are we so upset with God for saying “no” that we, unlike Moses, no longer see the many “yes’s” that God grants us on an hourly basis? For if we are, then we run the risk of losing everything.

How do you process and deal with God’s “no’s?” I have found that faith is best known when God has said no and our hearts are still saying yes, even in the face of terrible rejection.
“Are you a FDF?” – a Fully Devoted Follower – the Mountaintop Christian Mission of Tennessee asks its participants to ask themselves. Or is our devotion a conditional devotion – only good on the days when we deem that God is good to us?
[1] Quoted from Grace for the Moment, pg. 374.

Pride in the Name of Love - (2 of 3 for April 4)

2008-04-04T08:55:00.001-05:00

Blog 2 of 3 for April 4, 2008 – Pride in the Name of Love

I’ll throw my hat in the ring with the real bloggers, columnists, and pundits. Why not?
40 years ago today, MLK Jr. was shot and killed; 3 ½ years before I was born. In all sorts of ways we date ourselves. U2’s Pride (in the Name of Love) struck me as a pre-teen / tween / early teen. You can watch it here (isn’t the internet cool? – be sure to watch it until at least 2:25 on the time edit):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8Pnlhs7grQ

I immediately knew they were drawing a line from Jesus to Martin Luther King, Jr.. And I immediately felt the conviction demanded by the song and by the witness of the man they sung about. I immediately felt the power of the question implied by the tribute: What are you, you Christopher, going to do in the name of love with the life that you have been granted, the grace you’ve been given?
Writing in the Raleigh News and Observer and preaching today at the National Cathedral, Richard Lescher, homiletician at Duke Divinity School, offers that “…the truest end of humankind is not survival but the blessedness that sees God. Now that he is dead his name must not be co-opted by political parties or special interest groups. Do not loudly claim his name for any and every American cause. Accept him for what he is: a martyr to the Christian vision of a better life.”

http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/columns/story/1024426.html

I suspect that I have always been moved by Dr. King because he has inspired me so. I remember, as a student at Davidson, sitting in the chapel in vigil for civil rights (on Martin Luther King Jr., day one cold January), the vigil from 3 to 4 in the morning that honored Dr. King, and reading from his collected writings. And then reading from the Psalms. Back and forth. Just me, the Psalmist, and Dr. King.
I began reading the words out loud, the echo of my voice keeping me comfort and filling the quiet with my “tending-towards-sharp” baritone. As I read I was struck with the conviction that the hand of God was with each, the Psalmist and the preacher, and that the word of God was present in both.

Long before he was a political figure, a civil rights hero, a giver of speeches on the national mall, MLK Jr., was a Christian, a preacher, a man of faith. And as a man of faith I am brother to him, no matter the smallness of my witness compared to his. All great men and women of faith confront us with the greatness of their witness and they make us ask, “what have I done, great or small, for the sake of God’s love, God’s claim, or Christ’s glory.”

The Paradox of Emmaus (1 of 3 for April 4)

2008-04-04T08:52:00.002-05:00

Blog 1 of 3 for April 4, 2008 – Final thoughts on Easter – the Paradox of Emmaus

I am catching up on blogs from last week. Several thoughts through my mind as the first week of April draws to close….
Have you ever read Luke 24? The post-resurrection account of the doctor-evangelist? Luke 24 begins simply enough – the stone is gone; the body of Jesus gone missing. One of my favorite short passages in all of Christian thought is Frederick Buechener’s entry on Easter, found on pages 45-47 of his book Whistling in the Dark. He writes:

Christmas has a large and colorful cast of characters including not only the three principals themselves but the angel Gabriel, the Innkeeper, the Shepherds, the Heavenly Host, the Three Wise Men, Herod, the Star of Bethlehem, and even animals kneeling in the straw. In one form or another we have seen them represented so often that we would recognize them anywhere. We know about the birth in all its detail as well as we know about the births of ourselves or our children, maybe more so….With Easter it is entirely different….It is not a major production at all, and the minor attractions we have created around it – the bunnies and baskets and bonnets, the dyed eggs – have so little to do with what it’s all about that they neither add much nor subtract much. It’s not really even much of a story when you come right down to it, and that is of course the power of it. It doesn’t have the ring of great drama. It has the ring of truth.

The symbol of Easter is an empty tomb. A tomb. Full of space. Air. Probably damp. Musty or musky. Just empty dustiness and the silence of stone getting older.
You may have seen Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. To me the most authentic part of the movie was the resurrection seen at the end. Oh yes, I was moved by the passion, but the scene that stuck with me was the shortest, seemingly least heroic of all of the scenes. Jesus in the movie, and in the gospels, just gets up. He walks out. He leaves emptiness behind. And that is all. Does there need to be anymore?
Luke who tends to be wordier than his three brothers Mark, Matthew, and John, gives us three scant verses.

Luke 24:1 But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. 2They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3but when they went in, they did not find the body.

What Luke want us to get to, what seems to really matter to him is that Jesus is recognized by those who would follow, by those who would be his disciples, by those who would – well, by us. Just as Buechener reminds us that we easily recognize Christmas, Luke wants us to remember and have our consciousness imprinted by this risen Lord, Savior, King, and Friend. Along the way to Emmaus, again all in Luke 24, Jesus the resurrected one walks with some of his disciples and they discuss Old Testament theology, Jesus’ role in the world, and the events from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. And the whole way, they have no idea who Jesus is. And so the crisis: will they recognize him? Will they know? Will they tell? And then verse 30:

30 When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. 31 Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.

And here is the paradox of Emmaus, and maybe the paradox of knowing Jesus Christ; maybe it what Luke has been driving at all along. At question: why does Jesus vanish as soon as he is recognized?
Discipleship, at its heart is not a destination. We never arrive and are complete with the Lord. As soon as we “get him,” pin him down, recognize him on our terms, Jesus is calling us to another destination, another journey, another servanthood, another mission. As soon as we arrive, we are called somewhere else. So the Emmaus of Luke, and its paradox, is that Emmaus is not a final stop. It is an invitation to travel, grow, and walk with the Lord.
Jesus will open our eyes. And he will call us elsewhere. The beginning of Easter may be the empty tomb; but the end is the overflowing heart; a heart meant to recognize; a heart meant to serve; a heart meant to journey with our Lord.

Sneak Peek – Easter Sunday

2008-03-21T10:25:00.004-05:00

Alive to Christ

Blogging about Easter is a difficult task. Blogs ought to defer to the briefer side of things. And there is nothing brief about Easter. The SILENCE between Friday and Sunday that the eye-witnesses endured. The slow realization that Jesus was not there and all would be changed in their lives as the result of the three days.

In my Sunrise sermon on Sunday morning, I’ll offer:

The disciples and followers of Jesus were there when the Lord was crucified. All that they had worked for seemed lost. Saturday must have been awfully lonely for them. Hiding. Shying away. Realizing that they would have to go back to the family farm, to the lakeshore to fish, to the shop to make cabinets with the long forgotten brother-in-law. I often wonder how sad it all must have been. To see the new reign ushered in by Christ, to watch it proclaimed and lived-out by him, to hear the Hosannas of the crowd, the cries of ‘save us,’ and knowing that Jesus could, like none before him save them in ways that they had never yet imagined. Then – to see Rome win again as the enemies of Christ gloated over his body broken and his life spent.

Earlier this month I was down on beach with a group of pastors sharing ideas and exchanging thoughts on the future of the church and on the challenge of proclaiming the gospel in our cultural moment. I was looking back into the marsh from the house we were staying at. In the sound was one lone, rather large, jellyfish. I thought it strange that it was alone. I thought it odd that it was there in early March. But there it was. And I thought: I wonder how many of us, pastors and lay people, Christians in America are “jellyfish” Christians. Coming and going with the tide. Eating whatever fate provides. Washed in and out on the whims of forces and currents we cannot control? How many of us live our witnesses, our lives of faith like jellyfish?

Easter is the anti-jellyfish day. Easter breaks through. It says just when you think it is over – it’s not! God gives second chances, adds time to the clock, allows for updates when the software has expired. And with the second chance, with the update, we are told not to be jellyfish, but called to be something more. We are called to be a church, a people of active witness who create opportunities for ministry instead of settling for whatever comes with the tide.

Long before Easter changes the world, it necessarily changes the outlook of those first disciples, men and women, who paid its first witness. As we are inheritors of that witness, we are necessarily changed by it as well. If we are jellyfish, Easter says loudly that this will not do.

Why? Because the love of Jesus and the grace of God are just that sweet, that inspiring, and that transforming!

Two years ago, I said this: “Save the second coming, or your or my departure to go and meet the Lord in the next calendar year, I expect to see us all here, in memory and in hope, to stand at this place and declare with the Saints of every age – The Lord is Risen! He is Risen Indeed! He rises to life to defeat the demon of death. The Lord is Risen! Such is our hope and our faith. And it can neither be diluted by repetition or tarnished by time. Thanks be to God! Happy Easter!”

Can you imagine a jellyfish, real or metaphorical, saying anything like that?

Me either.

Happy Easter! May God grant you his transforming love. Love that makes hate into peace and failure into success. May you have enough love to have your transformational work fueled and your mind uplifted as you seek to do your part in the building of the kingdom and the coming reign of God.

Good Friday - Torn Curtains

2008-03-20T17:47:00.002-05:00

Good Friday – Curtains Torn and Souls Mended

In my March Church Newsletter article, I wrote:

Easter is this month: the apex of the Christian year, the pinnacle of Christian mountain. Easter is our cause for joy – it is proclaimed in every worship moment we share, in every prayer that we pray, and in nearly every hymn that we sing. Hoping against death, believing beyond the tomb, saying that our worst moments are washed clean by Jesus, we proclaim our resurrection faith as a people of the second chance. That’s Christianity, folks. That’s Easter. 1st Peter 1: 3 – 5: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”

But you don’t get to Easter Sunday without Good Friday. You can read the text, from Matthew, of Jesus’ death at Matthew 27: 27-55. Or at this, very long link:

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2027:%2027%20-%2055&version=31

Here’s an excerpt from what I’ll be preaching on March 21, 2008, Good Friday:

Good Friday, brothers and sisters, makes us, more than any other day, humble before the throne of God. It makes us wonder – why does this have to be so hard for Jesus? On Good Friday we dare to ask, was I, and am I, worth it? Do I deserve to have God, to have Jesus go to these lengths for me? Speaking only for myself, each time I ask that question I am left with a slowly developing storm of anxiety. And I am thankful that God judges me on the strength of His mercy and not on the paucity of my witness.

Good Friday also demands that we see the courage of Jesus as proof of the singular divinity of Jesus. As C.S. Lewis so eloquently said it, in Jesus, and in the pain he endured, we have either the Son of God, which was Jesus’ claim about himself, or someone who was a madman. Lewis famously said, “You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God."

[1]

The cross makes us make this choice, and if we choose the faith of our fathers and mothers, then we must admire the courage of Christ, the strength of Jesus who goes to the cross not as a victim of surprise but as a willing participant in a plan whose strategies were set as the world was made.

As Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote in 1994, “THERE WAS no Stoic resignation, no Socratic dignity, nothing to make it easy or natural: Jesus looked at his coming death and saw it as monstrous and dreadful. What compelled the imagination of the early believers was precisely this—that he was obedient in spite of all, that he endured the nightmare for the sake of God’s mercy.”[2]

[1] This is from Mere Christianity, pages 40-41.
[2] Taken from Christianity Today online – “Reflections – Death and Resurrection” compiled by Richard A. Kauffman – March 17, 2008. From Rowan Williams, Open to Judgment, 1994.

Maundy Thursday – The Last Supper – Uplifting the Cup

2008-03-20T17:42:00.003-05:00

Maundy Thursday – The Last Supper

Do yourself a favor: go to this link. It's Google Images, The Last Supper of Jesus Christ:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=The+Last+Supper+of+Jesus+Christ&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2

There are so many images. So many options. So many choices. They are beautiful and strange. Inspiring and lucid. What were Jesus’ options on the last night he shared with his disciples: acts of power? Feats of strength? Long sermons? Soliloquies? Attacking Judas? So many options – and yet he chose to uplift a cup and to bless the world.

I am humbled by Jesus’ love and God’s faithfulness.

Here’s an excerpt from my sermon on Maundy Thursday, March 20, 2008:

“Do this in remembrance of me.” That is what is he said, our Jesus. That we should remember Him and we should share this meal. This is what he asked for on this night so very long ago.

He washed their feet as a servant. He sat as a man of faith presiding over a Passover meal. He told them that some-one of them was going to betray him.
He told them that he would die. And then he asked to be remembered. “Do this in remembrance of me.”

And not remembered like “win one for the Gipper.” No melodrama. No inspiration final speech that would trump and replace what he had said in the months and years leading up to the pivotal moment of his earthly ministry and his teaching.

He does not gnash his teeth. He does not demand a memorial awards show in his honor every year.

He simply tells them what he knows to be true: that this supper will come to represent the sacrifice he is preparing to make for everyone, every man, woman, and child who has ever lived. A sacrifice sanctified by his body and his blood. A sacrifice sacrificed for forgiveness and for life forever. And then he asks to be remembered.

“Do this in remembrance of me.” Those are his figurative last words to his disciples before his crucifixion. These are his parting words to the church assembled at table in the full presence of the Lord.

Sneak Peek - Palm Sunday

2008-03-14T10:39:00.002-05:00

Sunday of Palms – Sunday of Hope?

In the Christian year there is no greater moment of irony than Palm Sunday. I have preached on many Sunday’s Palm in the past about the dichotomy between praise and scorn, between adulation and scourge and the tense closeness of all of them on this Sunday. I have preached many times about the cheers of Sunday becoming the jeers of Friday. I have wondered aloud about the chattering voices, the buzz around Jerusalem that must have taken place.

How glad the authorities must have been that he was just over in Bethany, just over there on the Mt. of Olives, near Jerusalem where they could finally put their hands on him….

How disappointed must the crowds have been – the crowds were always with Jesus from the beginning – that when he finally got to Jerusalem their fortunes were not reversed. You can almost hear the chatter – ‘I thought when he got here we were going to finally get our promise, our reward, our room with a view. But nothing is different. He hasn’t done a thing’ – the chatter that must have littered the streets, turning the tide against him effortlessly from Monday to Thursday of that week so long ago….

You can almost feel the doubt of Judas’ heart, the slipping of Peter’s pride, the consternation on the face of Thomas – what were their unmet expectations…?

How many expectations have died at the hand of disappointment?

Is there anything more poisonous, more murderous to hope, than disappointment?

When I picture the days before the crucifixion I have little doubt that the crowd had lost their hope in Jesus as the victor-saint, the warrior king. We give up on something when we lose hope in that thing. When disappointment defeats hope, and life loses hope, we give up on life.

I once heard a young woman, herself the victim of a terrorist attack, a senseless act of violence describe her attacker as being the face of evil; and not because he was an evil man. But because, she recounted she saw no hope in him. Utterly hopeless, that is how she described him.

The longer I talk with people the longer I am convinced that our capacity to hope and our capacity to be hopeful is perhaps the most defining characteristic of humanity. In my experience, long after people lose faith they still cling to hope.

Dostoevsky, whose works explored hope and hopelessness as deeply as might be possible, once said, “To live without hope is to cease to live.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. penned, “We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.”

Hope is the currency of the soul. And insofar as the soul might be the conduit for our awareness of, and communication with, God, if we are to know or feel close with God our souls must be healthy. And a healthy soul is one that is vested in a diet of hope. Even hope eaten in the face of bitter reality. Hope in the face of terrible fact and circumstance.

Psalm 31 is the text for this Sunday, for Palm Sunday. And the Holy Spirit, in its genius has provided us with this beautiful morsel. For your consideration (verses 11 – 16, NRSV):

11 I am the scorn of all my adversaries, a horror to my neighbors, an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me.
12 I have passed out of mind like one who is dead; I have become like a broken vessel.
13 For I hear the whispering of many-- terror all around!-- as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life.
14 But I trust in you, O LORD; I say, "You are my God."
15 My times are in your hand; deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors.
16 Let your face shine upon your servant; save me in your steadfast love.

Note the flow. The Psalmist is a horror. He is dread. He is dead in the minds of those who know him. And those who don’t know him plot to take his life. Sound hopeless to you? Does to me.

And then the turn at verse 14 – and it is huge turn! He finds hope! He hopes in God! He is not dead as long as he has hope. This sounds a lot like where Jesus found himself during Holy Week. Whispers. Accusations. Fickle crowds. Tired disciples. Alone in the garden. Hoping in God that all would be well. That the love he was called to show would be the love that saved him and by divine proxy saves us. I, for one, am glad Jesus never lost hope in God, even long after the crowd lost hope in him.

How much hope do you have in your life? Ever had a day or a moment without hope? Ever lived a hopeless hour? There is no life without hope. Hope is a hallmark of our trust in God. Hope is the music by which we should be known. I pray that you will have a hopeful holy week.

Sneek Peek - The Economy of Fact and the Negligence of Faith

2008-03-07T08:08:00.004-05:00

I have a confession to make. A confession rooted in fact, even though confession is primarily a faith-influenced endeavor. Which is to say that if one has confessed something, or if one is confessing something, that one has taken it on faith that some behavior, some decision, some action is either less wise than some other that one could have chosen; or, it (the behavior, decision, action) is in fact (there is that word again) less righteous (and less right) than another which could have been chosen and could even be described as sinful; or, described as sin. This is to say that sinful behavior, and by proxy sin itself, are at best matters of faith. At the least they are defined by tradition or experience. But they are very rarely factual.

Sin is not a matter of fact. It cannot be proved that one should remember the Sabbath (see the 10 commandments, Exodus 20, about fourth on the list) the way one might prove that eating two cheesecakes from a refrigerator which originally contained four cheesecakes does in fact leave the refrigerator with two cheesecakes. Telling a small lie to get the car dealer to shave a little more off the bottom line is not a factual enterprise. It does not fit smoothly into numbers and figures which might be interpreted any variety of ways. But, on faith, we might still know that it is a lie. And factually while we might have saved money, and benefited in real ways from the savings, faithfully we still separated ourselves from God and violated what we understand, on faith, to be God’s covenant with us.

So confession is always a faith-driven enterprise and it is always a part, whether as a statement of belief or an admission of sin, of a faithful response to God or to some authority which is able to expect the confession of us in the first place.

And so, as I make my confession today, you’re called (if you are still reading, which is asking a lot from that convoluted paragraph above) to trust my testimony, to follow where it goes, and to take my confession at some value. Or, you might say that since confession is about faith, and you are about to read one of mine, you’re called on faith to take my confession as my word. There is no factual way to prove anything I confess.

My confession: of the many sermon topics and sermon titles I have penned the past 9 years – more than 350 of them – this title and this topic are near the top of my favorites list. I absolutely treasure this lesson from the book of Daniel (Daniel 6: 10 – 23) which I think tests the limits of the tension between facts and faith. The facts of the story:

1. The King issues an intractable edict.

2. Daniel breaks the law, violates the edict of the King.
3. The King, because of the edict and the said violation thereof (I have relatives that still think I should have gone to law school), is required to order Daniel’s death (even though the King has grown fond of Daniel).
4. Daniel is cast into the den of lions.
5. The door is shut real tight, a stone rolled in its way assuring death and dismemberment (an Easter allusion? Perhaps).
6. Daniel prays.
7. Daniel lives.

And then Daniel says something that cannot be factually accounted for or easily explained or proved:

My God sent his angel and shut the lions' mouths so that they would not hurt me, because I was found blameless before him.

A faithful response, a faith-testing, faith-affirming testimony in light of factual, actual, guaranteed death? I wonder how much traction this kind of living, this type of response, might have in 2008?

Doctor: “You have cancer. We need to schedule your operation.”
Daniel: “Doc, give me a couple of hours. I need to pray about it before I decide.”
Doctor: “But you have cancer.”
Daniel: “Yes, that may be true. But I need to pray before anything else happens.”

And so this dialogue could go on. Why? Because ours is a world of facts and arithmetic. We value fact. We like figures. We want the surgery because we know it works. We want the proof to be on the page, in the pudding, and in paragraph form.

This is not a bad thing. No, it is not. We need facts – they build bridges and make roads; they create medicines and fire alarms. They are generally good. But we trust them more than we ought.

There are times when faith is what we are called to trust and declare. There are times when faith, and not fact, is to be our testimony, our witness, and our confession. There is not a single fact which will get Daniel out of the mouth of the lions. And yet, he got out. Investment in this story is a matter of faith as well as it challenges us with its near improbability and its next-to-impossibility. Can you pray your way out of a lion’s den?

This tension, between fact and faith, arithmetic and belief is one that I savor. It makes trust in God a delicious proposition. It is, regrettably, sometimes what makes Christians seem naïve. It makes the skeptics roll their eyes. Not that Christians don’t use facts or need them: we do. But that we trust God and we practice faith when the facts don’t easily suggest success and the numbers don’t add up to a winning combination.

Hoping against all obstacles. Trusting in God even in the face of the figures. Uplifting a word of testimony and trust and expressing our deep faith even when the economy of fact turns a tide against our point of view. Yeah – that seems like church to me. That seems like faith. And it is, in spite of the odds and the risks inherent, a confession I’ll gladly make.

Sneek Peak - Star Power

2008-03-01T11:13:00.003-05:00

I wonder what Barak Obama or Hilary Clinton would do for a little American Idol air time? In the celebrity making machine, from its judges, to its hosts, to its contestants, Idol is nearly unrivaled (full disclosure - I watch Idol a lot. Not every week, but a lot). I heard once again this weeks about the cultural morass that is evident and suggested by the fact that Idol logs more votes and attention that Presidential politics.

A popular question is What Would Jesus Do? And usually we have very little idea. We can prayerfully predict, but that is all. On the issue of celebrity we have a good idea. You'll find it at Mark 11: 1 - 11. No doubt Jesus' great celebrity moment.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2011:1-11

Did you note Jesus's response to the praise of the crowd? How many curtain calls does he make? How many trips out of the dugout to tip his hat? Did you miss it?

If you are a little confused by my questions, this is intentional. Why? Because Jesus' non-response to the celebrity he's generated is all you need to know about what Jesus thinks of celebrity. He does not embrace it. He does not trust it. He is not interested in it. He just goes off with his disciples and retires for the evening. Good for him. If only so many of our supposed celebrities would do the same.

If you have high-speed internet and can stomach it country singer Brad Paisley's take on our celebrity culture is funny and at times insightful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEPe4fZNf74

The next time you tune in or turn on, ask yourself: is there talent here? Or is it just the accident of marketing? Before you log onto http://www.gawker.com/, consider whether or not any of those people who we are endlessly gawking at are people who would be willing to help you in your toughest hour? In the end, friends, family, and our God are about all that love us back and who arrive to pull us from the deepest pits and the toughest times.

Keep reading in Mark and see how many of those who more interested in a celebrity than a savior, a warrior instead of sacrifice, how many shouted for Jesus on Sunday had left him to die on Friday. And then ask yourself - what is the true value of celebrity?

My take: it's worth less than any of us can imagine.