Respecting The Limits: Finding Healing at the End of Your Rope

Matthew 23:1-12 (NRSV)
Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi.

But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father -- the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

The story is told about a woman and her husband in their golden years sitting together on the back porch of their home watching the sun set. The woman turns to the man and says, “You never nibble on my ear any more.”

The man is kind of taken aback and he blinks and turns to her and says, “Excuse me?”

“You never nibble on my ear any more. You used to do that all the time. It was such a lovely spontaneous thing for you to do. You’d come up behind me and put an arm around me and whisper in my ear that you loved me and then you’d nibble my earlobe real gently. You don’t do
that any more.”

When she finished speaking the man stood up and started heading back into the house. The woman was stunned and she said, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to get my teeth so I can be spontaneous.”

Age has a wonderful way of teaching us about our limits. I often think now about how differently I would have lived as a younger man if I had known what I know now about my body. When I was younger I could shrug off pain and never think twice about it. Sometimes I never even knew I was in pain. It was very easy to bounce back.

In the old days I could eat a double-pepperoni, onion, and anchovy pizza and never think twice about it. Today I can look at such a thing and know what it would cost me to do that and what my night would look like after such a dinner. In the old days I could begin an exercise program and never worry about stretching. Today I have to stretch a lot or pay for it later. I have to hit up Patsy for physical therapy advice.

As I grow a little older I don’t take anything for granted. Hair that used to grow on top of my head now grows in places where hair never used to grow before. My glasses are no longer optional accessories. A visit to the dentist can mean some very bad news.

But I am not complaining. I’m really not. What I know now is that knowing my limits is a gift and I feel sorry for young people who don’t know theirs. Knowing this body I’ve been knocking around in for 41 years makes me appreciate every day how miraculous it is and how vulnerable we are and how easy it is to take for granted this life we’ve been given. When you’re young and seemingly capable of almost anything you set your mind to, it’s easy to forget how tenuous life is and how much we depend on something greater than ourselves for life. It’s easy to forget how much we depend on God.

Which is the reason Jesus has such harsh words for religious leaders. Here in this gospel passage that we have for today, Jesus continues to blast the leaders as he teaches in the Temple in the last week of his earthly life. At the end of Matthew, Jesus is not pulling any punches. He knows the end is coming. He knows he needs to leave some guidelines for his disciples and the rest of his followers as they start to build a new community. He knows they need to know who they are and they need to know their limits.

Moses had given the people the Law. Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of the Law and for centuries since that time the people of Israel had been trying to follow the Law, listening for what God wanted and what God forbade. The religious teachers had developed an elaborate code for understanding just what it was that God wanted the people to do.

Jesus recognized that what they were attempting was noble. It was good for the people to know their limits. “Do whatever the scribes and the Pharisees teach you,” Jesus says because they sit on the seat of Moses. “But whatever you do, don’t do as they do.” In other words Jesus was saying, “Do as they say but not as they do.” Because the leaders had become intoxicated with their own power. Worst of all they had converted the law into a burden for other people to bear so that they could be freed from serving the community. They enjoyed the social respectability, the way they were treated in the market, the honorary titles they were called. They really didn’t care for the heart of the teaching.

But Jesus knew that something more was needed. The Law was not intended to be a burden that oppressed people with ridiculous regulations. The Law was meant to free people to be whom God intended them to be. The Law was meant to remind us of our limits, to remind us of our dependence on God and to tell us that God’s intentions for us are not dominance and prestige but membership in a community that makes us whole.

So when Jesus told his disciples how they were to live, the emphasis was on respecting their limits, humbling themselves and serving one another. This was the way a healing community was to be built.

Martin Luther knew something about this. Luther, you may remember, was the 16th century church reformer who tacked up a list of 95 points for reform on the church door in Wittenburg, Germany on October 31, 1519. We remember that day tomorrow as Reformation Day.
Luther was a tormented and haunted man. As a young monk he could not escape the feeling that he was doomed for all eternity because of the effects of his sin. He was so aware of how little merit he had to offer God and so convinced of how sinful he was that he could only talk about salvation as something in the abstract for other people and not for him. He knew his limits and they tormented him.

Of course, Luther came to a time of great conversion. He became convinced of the possibility of God’s grace offered through faith. In Christ he saw that God had come to offer him a righteousness and a wholeness he could not find on his own. Luther came to know salvation in Christ and to know it for him personally.

But Luther never stopped thinking of himself as a sinner. He never wanted to get over being a sinner, because for him it was a reminder of who he was before God. In knowing his limits he could never be deceived into thinking that he was anything less than a debtor to God’s grace. Salvation did not come to the healthy, it came to the wounded.

He used the story of the Good Samaritan to describe the condition of the Christian: “It is like the case of a man who is ill, who trusts the doctor who promises him a certain recovery and in the meantime obeys the doctor’s instructions, abstaining from what has been forbidden to him, in the hope of the promised recovery, so that he does not do anything to hinder this promised recovery...Now this man who is ill, is he healthy? The fact is that he is a man who is both ill and healthy at the same time. As a matter of fact, he is ill; but he is healthy on account of the certain promise of the doctor, who he trusts and who reckons him as healthy already, because he is sure that he will cure him. Indeed he has already begun to cure him, and no longer regards him as having a terminal illness. In the same way, our Samaritan, Christ, has brought this ill man to the inn to be cared for, and has begun to cure him, having promised him the most certain cure leading to eternal life...Now is this man perfectly righteous? No. But he is at one and the same time a sinner and a righteous person. He is a sinner in fact, but a righteous person by the sure reckoning and promise of God that he will continue to deliver him from sin until he has completely cured him. And so he is totally healthy in hope, but a sinner in fact. He has the beginning of righteousness, and so always continues more and more to seek it, while realising that he is always unrighteous.”

Healing the soul, like healing the body, takes a recognition that we are at the end of our rope, we are at the end of our capabilities and capacities, and trusting that even so we are in the care of the Great Physician. We are in God’s hands. It is the purpose of the scriptures to tell us that’s where we are. It is the purpose of this community to remind one another that that’s who we are. We are all followers of Jesus, made whole by his wounds, “by his stripes you were healed” (1 Peter 2:24). And when we find ourselves wounded and separated from God and from ourselves, we have a place to take those pains. When we find ourselves oppressed by limits we haven’t had to deal with before, we have a place to take those pains. When we find ourselves put down and put out, ground down and used up, overworked and overworried -- in every situation, in every weakness, in every trial and each tribulation, we have a place to take those pains and that is to Jesus. To Jesus, who knows our pain because he walked this valley…who knows our limits because he took our flesh…who knows our potential because he was there at our creation…who knows our salvation because he is our God.

Healing, you see…coming to the end of our rope and finding God…is not just a sidelight to the Christian mission…it’s not just something that Jesus and the apostles did that we now look back on with embarrassment…its not just an archaic relic of the early days of the Christian Church…healing is not just a small, forgotten piece of what Christianity is all about…it is the point of Christianity. It’s why Luther and John Wesley and so many Christians through the centuries have seen a direct relation between the healing of our bodies and the healing of our souls and have described our salvation in just that way - as healing.

When I was serving two churches on the Charlottesville District, the district clergy took a retreat together at Richmond Hill, an ecumenical center on Church Hill in Richmond. The first day of the two-day retreat was supposed to be a silent retreat. Well, that was disastrous. Have you ever tried to get a group of clergy to be silent for any length of time? It’s not easy and it proved impossible, something that was rather annoying to me.

After dinner that night, as the official period of silence came to an end, I was on the clean-up crew with some of the regular residents of the Richmond Hill Community. One of them was a homeless woman who was only staying with them temporarily while she found more permanent housing. We were talking as we wiped down the tables together in the dining hall and she startled me by saying, “You need healing.”

It was not anything that I would have said. On the surface I felt that things were going well. Physically I felt well. I was a new father at the time and I was thrilled with my children and with my work. But I was also running past my idealism about ministry. I was running into some roadblocks in the church and in my own abilities and wasn’t sure how to address them. I wouldn’t have said it the way this woman said it, but, yes, I needed healing.

The next morning at breakfast she came up to me and gave me this bottle of olive oil that she had purchased with food stamps. “You need this,” she said, “and you need to share it with your congregation. Many people need healing.”

I never saw her again but I kept the bottle and in a few weeks time I invited my congregations to share in a service of healing, something that became a 5th Sunday tradition in our churches. Saying prayers with our brothers and sisters who need healing, lifting up names in prayer of those we know need healing and restoration, anointing one another with oil and the sign of Christ’s cross -- when we do these things we are only doing what the scriptures commanded us to do. James says, “Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven.” [James 5:14-15].

Knowing your limits is a very good thing. It’s not a sign of growing old - it’s a sign of growing wise, recognizing that the mystery of God’s love and power is something we cannot comprehend and can only ignore at a terrible cost. At the end of our rope there is a healing place where we can meet the God who has conquered evil and the grave and whose desire is to bring us wholeness and to bring us home.

There’s nothing magic about this oil. There’s nothing magic about healing. But there’s something powerful about God and you are invited to meet God here. Thanks be to God.

Close Enough to Be Dangerous

Exodus 33:12-23
Moses said to YHWH, "Look, you have said to me, 'Bring up these people,' but you have not made known to me whom you will send with me. You have said to me, 'I know you by name and you have found favor in my eyes.'

Now, I pray, if I have found favor in your eyes, please make known your ways so that I may know you and find favor in your sight. Consider, too, that your people are these people."
YHWH said, "My presence will go with you and I will give you rest."

He said to him, "If your presence will not go, don't carry us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your eyes, I and your people, unless you go with us? In this way we shall be distinct, I and your people, from all the nations which are over the face of the earth."

Then YHWH said to Moses, "This very thing which you ask I promise to do, for you have found favor in my sight and I know you by name."

He said, "Show me, I pray, your glory."

He said, "I will make all my goodness pass by and will recite my name, YHWH, before you and I will show favor to whom I will show favor. I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion." He said, "But you have not the strength to see my face because human beings cannot see me and live." YHWH also said, "Look, there is a place by me and you shall station yourself on the rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a crevice in the rock. I will shelter you with the hollow of my hand until my glory passes by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back, but my face you will not see."

Back when I was in campus ministry we used to take an annual trip to New York City in January to attend a seminar on international issues with our church staff at the United Nations. Since we had to do everything on a shoestring we had to find really cheap lodging in Manhattan and the place we found was a church on the Upper West Side that let us bunk out on the floor for five days. The accommodations weren’t four-star, but one of the things that made the neighborhood attractive was that it was Seinfeld’s neighborhood.

Do you remember Jerry Seinfeld? His television sitcom was the most popular show of the 1990s and it had a huge influence on the students I worked with at the University of Virginia. So when we were on the Upper West Side we always pointed out the diner at 110th and Amsterdam where Jerry and George would get together and dissect the situations they were going through. Down Broadway was the shop where the soup nazi intimidated his customers, another Seinfeld moment. We did the Seinfeld tour.

Now here’s my thesis I want to explore with you. This is why I want to preach about Seinfeld. Seinfeld is an important figure because of what he reveals about who we are in this 21st century world we live in. He’s important because he shows how fearful we are of commitment, how suspicious we are of motives, including our own, and how shallow our public conversations are in a world that has lost its idealism.

Hmm…that’s a lot for one sermon. And somehow we’ve got to get to Moses, too. Let’s see if we can live up that thesis.

The TV show Seinfeld had four main characters: Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer. What made them stand out as TV characters is that they weren’t very likeable. All of them had major flaws and they were very willing to acknowledge that they had major flaws. They were very self-absorbed and their main occupation was to point out and laugh at the outrageous flaws they could detect in other people. Their favorite targets were people who took themselves too seriously, people who were passionate about a cause or anything. Passion was a sign of delusion. Obviously these people aren’t being honest with themselves. If they could see themselves they would know that they’re really covering up for some deficiency. Nobody should believe that strongly. Deep down, they suspected, everyone is really just thinking about herself or himself.

In one typical scene, Elaine was at a movie theater waiting for her boyfriend to show up when she finds out that he’s in the hospital. Instead of rushing out to find out how he’s doing, she first stops at the concession stand to buy some Jujubes. When her boyfriend finds out he’s horrified that she would do that. It was a small moment but classic Seinfeld. The show seems to be saying, “Yes, Elaine should have rushed to the hospital, but you know that you would have been tempted to do the same thing. As noble as we think we are, we all would rather go get some Jujubes first.” That’s the message – we all have distorted priorities and isn’t that funny? And it was an incredibly funny show.

But that suspicion of people who take themselves too seriously has a corrosive effect. If we can’t trust people to be who they say they are, if we can’t trust commitments other people make, if we can’t trust ourselves to be who we say we are, we can be paralyzed by self-doubt, we can be isolated from others, and we can give up on any greater hopes we have for our nation and ourselves. That is the situation in which we find ourselves. We are living in a land where we don’t trust our political leaders – do any of you believe anything you hear in a political advertisement? – because of the effects of divorce and family stresses like alcoholism and abuse, we don’t trust our spouses to live up the vows we have taken or our parents to be able to provide the support and love for us they have promised – because we know ourselves and how conflicted and messed up we feel, we don’t trust ourselves to live up to our highest values, much less God’s intentions for us. Isn’t that where we find ourselves? It’s where I felt so many of the young people I worked with were.

So to shield ourselves from disappointment in this world where we live, we become like Seinfeld. We stop talking about the things we hold closest to our hearts. We stop talking about grand dreams and visions for where we could go and who we could be. Our politicians stop telling us their hopes for the future and resort to boasting matches about whom they would execute if they were elected or what they can do for us as individuals rather than for our state or nation as a whole.

Jedidiah Purdy says we have become a nation of Seinfelds because we are protecting ourselves from disappointment. Purdy is a twentysomething author of the book For Common Things. Part of me wants to hate him because he’s only in his 20s and he’s written a great little book. Who does he think he is doing that at his age? But he hits the nail right on the head when describing where we are headed as a nation. Purdy says that since we can’t trust the grand language we used to use to talk about our hopes, since there is always another side ready to take apart our rhetoric and expose our base motives, we detach ourselves from any firm commitments. “We surely mistrust our own capacity to bear disappointment,” he says. College freshmen show a greater commitment to making money than any previous generation, not because they are greedy but because, Purdy says, they have “a suspicion that nothing else is quite worth the risk” (pp. 14-15, For Common Things).

Which brings me to God. In a society that takes no chances on being disappointed and is suspicious of anyone who believes in anything beyond themselves, what in the world are you doing here worshipping God? You certainly aren’t compelled to be here. Somewhere in the last two centuries we’ve constructed a world that makes it perfectly possible not to believe in God. To bring yourself to this place on a Sunday morning…to be a part of a community that takes the risk of being different, of believing in community and connection, of believing it can make a difference, of believing that God is not only present in the world but that God is transforming the world, of publicly proclaiming that Jesus Christ is not just a good man whose example ought to be followed but a savior whose resurrection changes the universe, of believing that the Holy Spirit is still doing miraculous things like redeeming the world…you’ve come to be a part of a place like this…some of you are even members of this church…have been baptized into this body…what were you thinking? Don’t you know how counter-cultural you are? Don’t you know that this culture doesn’t value hope and trust and commitment?

But we have to be here, don’t we? We have to be in this place. We have to put ourselves in God’s presence. We have to seek after God because even though we know it is a risky thing to give our lives to Christ, the alternative is death and despair and disappointment and we can’t live like that.

So then there’s Moses. What an amazing story we have about Moses this morning. I mean, this is late in the game. When we get to this story in the 33rd chapter of Exodus Moses has seen it all. This is after the burning bush when God calls Moses to leadership and promises to be with him. This is after the plagues, after the miracles, after the miraculous journey through the Red Sea when God saved the people. This is after the manna from heaven and the water from the rock that God gave to help the people survive in the wilderness. After the Ten Commandments and the law. After all that, something is still broken between God and the people.

The golden calf episode didn’t help. You remember that while Moses was up on the mountain getting the tablets of the law, the people were down below creating an idol. Aaron, Moses’ brother, helped them do it. They pulled that pitiful little image out of the fire and said, “Here is the God that brought you out of Egypt.”

God was ready to wipe the people out. God said to Moses, “I’m just going to start over. I’m just going to wipe them out and make a new nation with your descendents, Moses.” This is a passionate God, you see, who is disturbing to those of us who are suspicious of passion. Doesn’t God know who God is dealing with? These are human beings. They forget. They’re sinful. They’ve got deep issues with their parents that they just can’t get over and it’s affecting their behavior or some excuse like that. Are you expecting more out of them, God, just because they’ve come into contact with a wild and holy god? Are you expecting them to be a holy people? My goodness, I think you are.

But Moses is passionate at well and he knows that if he is going to follow God he must be able to trust that God is faithful to the promises God makes. So he intercedes for the people. He says to God, “Look, don’t let the Egyptians have the last laugh. They will laugh when they see that the God who brought the people up from slavery only led them into the desert to kill them. Be faithful to your people even if they are not faithful to you.

So God relents, but it’s not all roses and kisses. A plague comes into the camp because of the people’s forgetfulness and idolatry. God allows them to go on to the land that was promised but God refuses to go with them. Israel’s God is not going to accompany Israel any longer.
That’s the setting for this meeting of Moses and God. Something has been broken. The relationship has turned sour. There is a lot of pain.

Moses goes to talk with God and the tone is very subdued. Moses says to God, “Look, you said to me, ‘Bring these people to the new land of promise,’ but you didn’t let me know who you would send with me.”

Moses doesn’t do things alone. We know this. Remember that he wouldn’t leave the burning bush until God gave him his brother Aaron as a helper. But Moses is not asking for Aaron this time. Moses won’t settle for anything less than God. And he goes on to make his case: “You said, Lord, ‘I know you by name and you, Moses, have found favor in my eyes.’ Well, if I have found favor in your eyes, then let me know you. Let me know what you are up to in the world. Let me know you like you know me.”

God responds to Moses, “My presence will go with you and I will give you rest.” It’s a calm, reassuring thing to say. God is relenting. God is promising to go with the people. God is leaving aside the abandonment plan.

But Moses is not reassured. In fact he seems to get more animated as he reminds God what’s at stake: “If you don’t go with us, God, then don’t even let us go up from here. Don’t even let us pretend that we can do it alone. How will the world know that we have found favor in your eyes unless you go with us? You want us to look different from the rest of the nations, Lord, well, then you have to make us different. The only thing that makes us different from all the other nations on earth is our relationship with you. We are your people, God, because we have your name.”

God responds again and again it is a short response. “What you have asked I will do, Moses. Because you have found favor in my sight and I know you by name.” Again God emphasizes, “I know you.” But Moses wants more.

“Show me your glory,” Moses says. It’s a surprising thing to say. It doesn’t seem to follow from what has gone before. Is Moses losing faith in God’s promises and power? What more could he want to see? Already Exodus has talked about showing God’s glory over and over. When the plagues came, that was a manifestation of God’s glory. The cloud by day and the fire by night? Those were God’s glory. The manna in the wilderness? Those were God’s glory. When God speaks to the people it is God’s glory on display, but that’s not what Moses wants. Moses wants to see God.

So God agrees…well, mostly. God agrees to have Moses stand on a rock and to cover him with the hand of God as God’s goodness passes by. Moses cannot see God’s face, but, “After I pass by,” God says, “you can see my back.”

It’s a wonderful image - these two who have shared so much to this point. Moses is so close to God that the Bible sometimes describes them as meeting face to face, but it’s not quite that close. Moses is allowed to come close enough to know that this passionate, liberating God is wild and holy and has chosen, for God’s own reasons, to be Israel’s God.

In this story Moses seems fearful, lonely and uncertain about this God he has staked his life on. In a confrontation with God he reaches for more substance, more contact, more assurance of God’s presence and is rewarded with God’s backside and God’s name. And as a result he can go back to leading the people. They are still a holy people. They are still called to be distinctive among the nations. They are called to be different.

And here you are. Here you are in this place where we have called upon God’s name, where we have invited God into our midst, where we have boldly approached God’s throne and have listened to God’s word. What you may not have realized as we did those things is that we getting dangerously close to a God who has no place for complacency. We were getting dangerously close to a God who is not content for you to remain detached and uninvolved, keeping God at arms length, observing this ‘religion thing’ without being totally involved.

As funny as Seinfeld is, there is no place for Seinfelds in the worship of the God of Israel and the God of Jesus. This God asks more from us than an awareness of how screwed up the world is and how screwed up our lives are. Yes, they are messed up. Yes, we have a tendency to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Yes, we are sinners in need of grace. Yes, we are bundles of old wounds and new anxieties that trip up us even when we put forth the best effort. Yes, we are all those things.

But don’t ever say that you are only human and therefore incapable of living a life worthy of the God who knows you by name. You are a human being, we are human beings, who have been created by God, loved by God, judged by God, redeemed by Christ, reconciled through the working of the Holy Spirit, saved from destruction and damnation and set forth on a course that we could never have imagined and could never have prepared. A way has been prepared for us in the midst of our wilderness. A savior has come among us to make us whole and to call us to follow after him. A passionate, death-defying God is demanding that we shed the self-protective shields that we are using so poorly, to come out from behind our disappointments and cynicism and self-doubt, to come forth unprotected to meet this God who will pass by. God wants you to be close enough to be dangerous. The world ought to be concerned because people who have encountered this God are dangerous people who say to a world in love with death that life has come to stay. The Good Friday world ought to be afraid because we are Easter people who know that God is good and that world will be too.

I don’t want to be estranged from the world in which we live. I don’t want to engage the people around me without hope. I don’t want to believe that I am the worst thing I have ever done. We have encountered a God who is making all things new.

And so we pray. So we read these scriptures. So we search earnestly after God believing that we are continually in the presence of the holy. And when we pray…when we read the Bible…when we meet with one another in small groups and in service…we become the dangerous people we were meant to be. We may always be gazing upon the backside of a God who is always and ever just ahead of us, but to see God’s train passing by, to hear God’s name, and to know that God’s know us by name. This is sufficient for a wild and holy, dangerous people. Thanks be to God.

The Greatest Story Almost Told

Psalm 90

Prayer of Moses, a man of Elohim:
Adonai, you have been our dwelling place from age to age.
Before the heights were raised up, or you wrought the earth and the world,
from age that was to age to come, you are God.
You turn humans back to dust,
and say, "Return, you children of humanity."
For a thousand years in your eyes are like yesterday when it is past,
or like a watch in the night.
You sweep them away; they pass like a dream,
like grass that is renewed in the morning.
In the morning it flourishes and is renewed;
in the evening it fades and withers.
For we are consumed by your anger;
by your wrath we are terrified.
You have set our iniquities before you,
our secret sins in the light of your countenance.
For all our days pass away before your overflowing fury,
our time comes to an end like a breathed moan.
The days we are given number seventy years,
or perhaps, if we are strong, eighty years.
Even so they are days of toil and sorrow,
they pass quickly and we fly away.
Who knows the strength of your anger?
Equal to the respect you command is your wrath.
So teach us how to count our days,
and lead us to wisdom.
Return, YHWH. How long?
Have compassion on your servants.
Sate us in the morning with your faithfulness,
and we will shout and rejoice all our days.
Make us glad as many days as you have afflicted us,
and as many years as we have seen evil.
Reveal to your servants your works,
and to their children your glory.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
and may the work of our hands be established -
O may the work of our hands be established.

Zack Stonecaster knew exactly where he had been when he started to feel like his life was broken. It was a week ago at 6:54 AM on the banks of the Po River near his hometown of Mattaponi Courthouse, Virginia. He was jogging down a soggy path that ran along the river and he stopped because he felt a twinge in his knee. He knew this wasn’t a great place to go running; there were too many holes and obstacles. But he loved being next to the water.

When he felt the twinge he chastised himself mentally for taking the risk. “Now I’ve done it,” he thought to himself. “I’ve twisted my knee and I’ll be out of commission for a week or two at least.” Zack was only twenty-seven years old but he could be very cautious. He always seemed a lot older than he appeared.

But that’s not the moment when Zack started to feel like his life was broken. That moment came when he looked up from his knee and saw the goose. It was a snow goose limping along to the open water. It’s right wing was stretched out in an awkward position. It was close to the migration season and there were lots of snow geese in the area, but this one wouldn’t be going any further. It’s wing was broken. Zack watched in silence as the goose squawked and slid painfully into the water. That’s when it happened. That’s when Zack started to feel like all was not right with his world.

Not that he had a whole lot to concern him. He was still a young man with a big future ahead of him. But lately the big future was weighing heavy on him. After college he had gone off to Northern Virginia to work as a software engineer, thinking that he would love the opportunity, the excitement, the crowds. He thought his future would come more into focus. But it was no more clear to him now what he should do than it was when he was growing up in Mattaponi with his mother. Now he was back - working for a local internet service company and trying to discover what came next.

He hadn’t thought it was a big deal. He enjoyed his friends, his girlfriend. He was a star on the church softball team. But his mother was growing weaker and the doctors couldn’t figure out why. And looking at this wounded snow goose crossing his path by the river he suddenly felt inadequate to the task of being who he was.

He tried to shake the feeling in the days that followed. At church the next Sunday he got engrossed in the ongoing saga of trying to find the church cornerstone. Mattaponi United Methodist Church was celebrating its 150th anniversary in a few weeks and one of the highlights of the celebrations was to be the opening of a time capsule that was placed in the cornerstone of the sanctuary of the church, which was put in place on the occasion of the church’s 75th anniversary in 1930. No one knew what exactly was in the time capsule but the rumors were running wild. Besides photographs, worship bulletins, letters from the attending bishops and so forth, the capsule was rumored to contain a cufflink worn by the great evangelist Billy Sunday, a sword from the oldest living Confederate veteran in the congregation, and some rogues even swore that a shiny flapper outfit from the 20s had been slipped in by one of the teenagers of the time.

Of course, none of that would matter if they couldn’t find the thing and they had been searching for several weeks now. You would think a cornerstone would be an easy thing to find, but none of the corners had stones of any unusual markings and even Leonard Stout, now 88-years-old and one of the few people who had actually been around when the sanctuary was built and the capsule was buried, had no clue where to find it. At the end of Sunday’s service Leonard went up to the church’s pastor, Eleazar Filbert, and said, “Preacher, I think this church must have Christ as its cornerstone because we sure can’t find any other reason the place is standing.”

Zack hung around after church with some of the men who were convinced that the stone was hidden behind the last stall in the women’s restroom next to the basement fellowship hall. Ten of them piled into the bathroom and took apart the paneling only to be disappointed once again. However they did manage to scare the life out of Dovie Perdue who hadn’t gotten word of the expedition and walked in to find T.P. Tolliver holding a crowbar above a pile of prone men. She used the restroom upstairs.

This week the weather has been rather overcast and rainy as it has been here. Zack usually walked to his job at Mattaponi Online, but this week he never knew what sort of raingear he might need so some days he was over prepared and some days he didn’t wear nearly enough.
The weather didn’t help his mood. After work on Thursday he stopped in at the coffee shop in front of Rockefeller Stout’s new grocery store. Rocky had opened it a few years ago when the town chamber of commerce tried to sell Mattaponi as the Big Melon. They figured if New York City could do it with an apple, they could do it with a honeydew. Now every New Year’s Eve they lower a giant melon from a flagpole to mark the turning of the year and there are melon-themed streetlights along Main Street. Rocky’s contribution to the theme was the name of his grocery store - the Melon-choly Market. It was a depressing name and a fairly depressing place to shop since Rocky hated bright lights, but the coffee was good.

Later, as Zack was walking down the street and the clouds were rolling in for another small storm, he passed Leander Lovett, the town street sweeper, who was using his big push broom to move clumps of newly-mown grass off the sidewalk. Leander was always gloomy, even when the weather didn’t look like a Thomas Hardy novel. Sure enough, there he was mumbling to himself as he pushed the broom, “Grass, grass, we are all grass. Morning comes and it flourishes. Evening comes and it withers and dies. Our times comes to an end like a breathed moan.” Zack thought it was the most depressing recitation of scripture he had ever heard.

But he didn’t stop to talk because the rain had begun and this was one of the days he was under prepared. He scuttled along down the street as the raindrops started a cold pelting of his head. He was just resigning himself to the fact that he was going to be soaked when he heard a voice yell to him. “Young Stonecaster! Don’t you have sense to come in out of the rain? Come on up here and sit with us ‘til this storm passes!”

Zack recognized the voice. It was Leonard Stout, sitting on the covered porch of his home with his feisty wife, Reba. They were the liveliest octogenarians Zack knew and he welcomed the opportunity to get out of the rain and onto the porch with them.

Leonard was sitting in a green wrought iron glider that probably dated to the 1950s. Reba was knitting in a rocking chair nearby. They motioned to Zack to pull up a plastic lawn chair and join them.

“Well, thank you, Mr. Stout. It is a little bit of a mess out there.”

“Well, I’d hate to see you catch a cold from this.”

Reba perked up at this. “Catch a cold?! Pshaw! That’s a healthy young man there. He’s not going to catch a cold from a little drizzle like this. Maybe you and I would, but not him.”

“Well, thanks all the same. It’s good to have some shelter when you forget your umbrella.”

Reba went in the house and returned a few minutes later with some coffee mugs. While she was inside, Leonard and Zack talked about the weather and the lost time capsule, the proposal to put more chicken houses in the county, the cost of gas down at the Royal Farms, the state of the schools, and the new expansion of Moira Meekfoot’s combination auto parts store and florist, a unique place known by the name Big Mama’s Roses and Hoses. It took some time to make the coffee, you see.

But Reba could tell when she reemerged that there was more that needed to be said, so she cut right to the heart of things and said, “What’s your problem, Zack?”

“Excuse me?”

“What’s your problem? You look really down and you don’t usually look down.”

Where to begin?, Zack thought. Do I start with the snow goose or go right back to the time when my father died? Everything was running together for him anyway. So he said, “You’re pretty perceptive, Mrs. Stout. I am feeling out of sorts and I…”

“Out of sorts? That’s a heck of an understatement! You’re depressed, boy. You are captivated by the all the things that aren’t going right and unable to see how God’s a part of any of it. Your get up and go got up and went. You’ve got no umption in your gumption. You’ve got a full six pack but you don’t have that little plastic thingy that holds it all together. I see what’s going on.”

Zack didn’t know what to say to this. “Well, that about sums it up, Mrs. Stout.”

“Please call me, Reba. I need to tell you a story, Zack. Did I ever tell you about my Cousin Brutus?”

Leonard interrupted, “Reba, you don’t have a Cousin Brutus.”

“Well, his real name was Bartholomew, but his stage name was Brutus. Brutus Bricklebank Bettlemeister.”

Zack jumped in. “That was his stage name?!”

“Yeah, well, he never was too good with the promotional side of his career.”

“So he was an actor?”

“An actor! Zack, he was far more than an actor. Brutus was a movie star!”

Zack could see out of the corner of his eye that Leonard had his head down and was trying to hide a huge smirk on his face. He was used to Reba’s tall tales after all these years of marriage and he knew this was going to be a whopper.

“Brutus was always something of an adventurer and when the silent movies first started playing down at the old opera house on Main Street he got it into his head that he was going to be a movie star. He didn’t any experience…didn’t have a clue what he was getting into, but did that stop him? No, it most certainly did not. One night at the dinner table with his folks and his three sisters he said, real casual like, ‘I think I’ll head on out to Los Angeles tomorrow,’ just like he was going to run down to Richmond or something.

“At first my Grandpa Jake didn’t hear him right and he said, ‘That sounds good, Bartholomew.’ But Grandma Penelope, she picked up on what he said right away and she stopped in midstream with a forkful of turnip greens hanging there and said, ‘You’re going where?’

“You can imagine there was some arguing after that…some pleading, some crying, some out and out threats but in the end they let him go because they could see he was determined and there weren’t really any good reasons for him not to go, him being 35 years old and all.”

“He was 35 years old?”

“Did I forget to mention that? Yeah, he was 35 and was working on the farm with my grandpa. At any rate, that’s what he did. Picked up the next day and headed for California.

“When he got there he fell in love with the place and he fit in just like he had been there all his life. He told people his name was Brutus and they called him Brutus. Just like that he could start all over again and that’s what he loved about California. Everybody was from somewhere else and it was so easy to just start all over, to forget that you had been a farmhand on a marshy piece of land in the backwaters of Virginia. Suddenly you could be Brutus Bricklebank Bettlemeister. A glamorous movie star. Life could begin all over again.

“Well, eventually Brutus was asked to star in a film being directed by Cecil B. Wartburg on the life of Christ.”

Leonard interrupted, “Don’t you mean Cecil B. DeMille?”

“No, I don’t think so. Now don’t interrupt. Mr. Wartburg wanted Brutus to star as Jesus and all the greatest stars of the day were in it. Rudy Valentino was Peter. Gloria Swanson played Mary Magdelene. Harold Lloyd was Herod and Fatty Arbuckle was John the Baptist. They even got Charlie Chaplain in on it, even though he was an atheist.”

Leonard was shaking his head and trying not to laugh.

“Anyway, they went into production in an orange grove east of L.A.”

“An orange grove?” Zack was curious. “They filmed a movie about the holy land in an orange grove?”

“Well, it was a little awkward. They just pretended they were olive trees and they had a card in the movie near the beginning which said how olives were much bigger back in Jesus’ day. At any rate, it was a powerful movie and all the cast, Brutus included, was really moved by it. Brutus said it changed his life to play Jesus. But the production company ran out of money before they could finish the film so it ended with the crucifixion. They finally released the movie a year later with the title, The Greatest Story Almost Told, but it didn’t do too well at the box office. The ending was just too abrupt.

“Brutus got real disillusioned and one day he left behind all his Hollywood buddies and came back to Mattaponi. He always talked about finishing that movie. He said, ‘It just ain’t right to leave Jesus hanging on the cross like that. There’s more to that story.’ But he got married and took over the farm and was right happy up until he died of a heart attack at a very young age. He was here when they buried the time capsule. He put a copy of that film in there.”

“Reba,” Leonard said. “You better hope they don’t find that time capsule and show your story up to be a lie.”

“Oh, it’s not a lie. That’s the truth.”

Zack nodded his head and thought about the story. He looked rather puzzled and finally he said, “Now, Reba, why did you tell me that tale?”

“Because, young Zack, unfinished stories are very uncomfortable things. You can begin to think that every tale and every life ultimately comes to a bitter end. It’s even there in the Bible. You remember that Psalm where the singer says, “The days we are given number seventy years, eighty years if we are strong and even so they are days of toil and sorrow, they pass quickly and we fly away’? That sounds like a tragedy. Your face today looks like a tragedy. But I tell you what…it’s only the beginning.

“That’s why it makes all the sense in the world to me that Mr. Cecil B. Wartburg got a bunch of comedians to star in his picture show about Jesus. God don’t let tragedies stand. God don’t put up with stories that don’t end well. That’s why the movie had to have a resurrection scene. We may not be able to see the ending God intends for us, but we can sure see where we’re headed. For Christians, we’re hitching up with Jesus and his story ends with an empty tomb and a big shindig in heaven.

“So when I see you all gloomy and anxious at your age and not able to see that you’re a fine example of a child of a God who ought to expect the best because the best is yet to come…well, I think you’re the kind of person who needs to hear about Cousin Brutus. All our minutes are in God’s hands and we’re still waiting for the best ones.”

Zack smiled. He realized he hadn’t touched his coffee since Reba started her tale. He took a few long sips and looked out at the sky, which was clearing a bit. A few minutes later he took his leave. “Thanks for the coffee and the shelter. And thanks for the story, Reba. I think it’s just what I needed.”

As he walked away he could hear Leonard chiding his wife, “Reba, where in the world do you get these crazy tales. The Greatest Story Almost Told?! What was in your coffee?”

The next Sunday T.P. Tolliver dragged himself along in the tiny crawlspace beneath the sanctuary looking for the cornerstone. He emerged, filthy dirty and damp but with a huge smile on his face and a largish metal box. He had found the time capsule.

At the anniversary celebration two weeks later they opened up the box at the service. There was great anticipation. Everyone was just sure the church was going to be scandalized when the district superintendent pulled out a flapper dress. But there was no dress and no sword either. There were some wonderful old photographs and witnesses written by members of the church in 1930 to what God was doing in their lives as the Great Depression was taking hold and so many were losing hope. In the midst of all the despair, the people of the Mattaponi Methodist Church were certain that their lives were in God’s hands. They built a new sanctuary in the face of all that uncertainty, confident that God would establish the work of their hands and make the church a living sign that God is on our side even if time doesn’t seem to be.

But the one thing no one could figure out was why three large reels of movie film were included in the box. The metal reels had survived the passage of time well, but the celluloid film disintegrated almost immediately. There was no chance the film would ever be shown.

Well, I say no one could figure it out, but of course there were at least three people there that day who knew exactly what that film was about. It was an incomplete movie made by a group of people who left their old lives behind to try and create new stories in a new land. They didn’t always succeed and their stories were never quite as good and as complete as they hoped they would be -- especially this one which ended without the most important scene of the movie.
But somehow Zack Stonecaster knew that their work had not been a failure and had not been fruitless, even though the labor of their hands now lay in dust and pieces in an old metal box. Like all of us, those actors lived lives that were always less than perfect but whose gifts were taken up nonetheless in God’s time. The movie might forever remain incomplete on this side of heaven, but somewhere, on the other side, the finishing touches were made, the editing complete, and the story is told in all its glorious Technicolor fullness.

When we reflect on our time in light of its merits before God we are inevitably struck by the brokenness of our lives, the transience, the impermanence of things. Despair threatens to consume us as it has this world in which we live. But in Christ we know that God is redeeming our time. In Christ we know that God is picking up all the broken pieces of our lives and all the scattered moments. God is taking up all the tragic storylines and the way things end so badly and giving them an astonishing comedic twist. In heaven it’s all about comedy.

In God’s time no separation is not followed by a reunion. In God’s time no cross is left without a resurrection. No foolish wanderer is not crowned with God’s favor. And birds with broken wings? They can soar like eagles. Thanks be to God.

Dress Rehearsal for the Feast

Matthew 22:1-14
Jesus responded to them again in parables: The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who planned a wedding feast for his son. He sent his servants to call those who had been invited to the wedding feast, and they did not want to come.
Again he sent other servants, saying, "Tell those who have been invited, 'Look, I have prepared my meal; my bulls and fattened calves have been slaughtered and all is ready; come on to the wedding feast!'"

But they neglected it and went off, one going to his field and one going on to his business. The ones remaining seized his servants, insulting and killing them.

Then the king became enraged and sent his guards, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his servants, "The wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy of it. So go out into the highways and call whomever you find to the wedding feast.”

Those servants went out into the streets and gathered up all whom they found, the wicked and the worthy, and the wedding feast was filled with diners.

But when the king entered he looked at the diners and saw there a man not dressed in wedding garments. So he said to him, "Friend, how did you come to this place without wedding garments?" He had no response.

Then the king said to his servers, "Tie up his feet and hands and throw him into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth."

For many are called, but few are chosen.

One of my favorite theologians is Stanley Hauerwas, who teaches at the divinity school at Duke. Dave Magruder may be taking a class with him right now. I like Hauerwas because he’s plainspoken, earthy, and provocative in the right sorts of ways. I don’t always agree with him, but he always makes me think.

Hauerwas is a United Methodist and one of his favorite things to do is to provoke the church into being more like the church Christ intends us to be. He needs to be provocative because there are a lot of things that need to be challenged. Every church needs to be shaken up from time to time to look at its core convictions…to look at what it really believes.

Those of you who have been working with me through the United Methodist Social Principles on Wednesday nights will appreciate his approach, I think. One time Hauerwas said, “I used to believe that Methodists had no core convictions but I now realize that I was wrong. Methodists do have a core conviction and that is that ‘God is nice.’ And the corollary to that is that because God is nice we ought to be nice, too.”

Hauerwas is convinced that there must be something more to the faith we confess that ‘being nice.’ As I have said several times already in these sermons, being nice is nice but it’s not the calling of followers of Jesus Christ who have been shaped by the cross, washed in the baptismal waters, and called to travel in the footsteps of a God who is transforming the world, not just accepting it as it is. We are called to Christ’s side in order to be remade. We are gathered together in community in order to hold ourselves accountable to this transforming love that leaves nothing untouched.

That is a very Methodist vision because if Methodists are true to their tradition they know John Wesley’s emphasis on a Christian journey that involves more than just a moment of justification when we are made right with God by accepting Jesus and the salvation offered through his death and resurrection. Wesley knew that the journey doesn’t end there; our whole lives are then enrapt in a process of sanctification – of becoming more holy so that our lives look distinctively different.

As Hauerwas puts it: “To be made holy is to have our lives rendered unintelligible if the God who has claimed us in Jesus Christ is not the true God. To be made holy is to have our lives ‘exposed’ to one another in the hope that we will become what we have been made” [A Better Hope, p. 160]. Holiness is the journey we are on and we’ve only just begun. If United Methodists…if Franktown Church could reclaim the road to holiness and ‘going on to perfection’ we would look different indeed. We’d be dressed for the kingdom feast.

Now that’s a reference to this really scary parable from Jesus that we’ve just read and before I go on to it I should warn you that dressing for the kingdom feast is not an easy thing. We’re pretty comfortable in the world as we know it. We’re used to an American society that doesn’t ask much from us. Our nation believes in nothing so much as personal choice and individual autonomy. What I do, how I dress, what I watch, where I surf on the Internet, what my visions and dreams should be, what my responsibilities should be, what my relationships should look like, whether I participate in acts of justice or mercy, how I pray, how I treat the poor, how I treat my parents, how I raise my children, how often I attend church – think how many of these we treat as private decisions involving nobody but me, myself and I! And for many of these, if someone were to question us, we would say, “Butt out! It’s none of your bees wax!”

But life in the Christian community runs on a different ethic. As people who find our life, our true life, in Jesus Christ, we know that our lives and even our bodies are not our own. As people who believe that we are radically, inseparably connected to the God who runs the universe we know that we are never in isolation and when we act as if we are autonomous we invariably fall into sin and distortion. Christians believe that they have been given a great freedom and a great power, but it is never freedom to be unrelated or power to determine our own salvation. We need to be continually reminded of who we are and what God requires of us.

And you know how hard it is to do it on your own. You know how exhausting it is to believe that it’s all up to you. You know how absolutely soul-eating it is to be perfect. If there’s not a place to let down your guard and admit who you are and what you are fighting, then sin will consume you. The world will continue to be a place of violent struggle instead of a place filled with the presence of a loving God.

It’s the violent struggle that gets me about this story Jesus tells. He seems to be saying that things are so bad between God and us that the whole story is plagued by violence and separation.
It’s supposed to be the story of a wedding feast. In Jesus’ day these were even more elaborate affairs than they are in our day. The celebration would last for days and no expense was spared on them. It’s not surprising that Jesus would compare the kingdom of heaven to this kind of festivity. God’s kingdom is like a huge party where the community is gathered together to celebrate love.

But in Matthew’s gospel this story comes at a time in Jesus’ ministry that is not marked by celebration. It is near the end as Jesus is moving toward the cross. He is in Jerusalem, after the waving palm branches and loud hosannas. The expectation of that day is starting to give way to continuing conflicts with the religious authorities and plots to kill Jesus. As Jesus is teaching in the temple, the leaders challenge him and he responds with a series of stories that each move to a more explicit denunciation of the way the leaders and the people have responded to him.

Right before this parable of the wedding feast, Jesus tells the story of a vineyard owned by a man who leased it to tenants. When the harvest comes and the man sends servants to collect the produce the tenants are hostile and beat up and even kill the servants. Finally, the man sends his son and they throw him out of the vineyard and kill him. To us, hearing the story after Jesus, the Son of God, was thrown out of the city and killed, the implications of the story seem clear.

But the religious leaders are pretty swift, too, and they get the message. They don’t like it one bit and they want to arrest him. The only reason they don’t is that they are afraid of the crowds.
Jesus isn’t done yet, though. He goes on to tell another parable that is really more of an allegory. The wedding feast story is another story laced with rejection, murder and judgment—not the sorts of things you normally associate with weddings.

He tells the story of a king who plans a wedding feast for his son. He sends out servants to call in the invited guests, but they don’t want to come. Now this is a little strange. The king is throwing a party and you don’t want to come? It’s like getting an invitation to the White House and tossing it in the trash.

The king is persistent, though. He sends out other servants and they have more detailed instructions for the invitees: “Tell them that this party is going to be great. I’ve got bulls and fat calves slaughtered. There’s blood everywhere. Everything is ready!” Now that doesn’t sound to attractive to us, but in the day it was the equivalent of saying, “We’ve got champagne chilling and caviar laid out by the paté. It’s going to be off the hook!” Or something like that.

But even this invitation doesn’t work. In fact, the people have a really strange response. One guy goes off to check his fields. I can’t imagine that. Can you imagine Add Nottingham or Charles Ames passing up a party to go check on the fields? Another guy has some business affairs to attend to. And the rest of the people seize the servants and insult them and kill them. It’s a party, people! They are inviting you to a party!

Something has gone horribly wrong in this community. The relationship between the king and the invitees is so bad that even signs of peace are treated with violence and death. Jesus seems to be comparing this to the response of the religious establishment and the people to the prophets God sent. Even good news sounded like bad news. Even the invitation to salvation was seen as a threat that had to be snuffed out.

But the response of the king to the murderous invitees is just as astounding. He becomes enraged and sends his guards to destroy the murderers and to burn the city! Meanwhile, there’s a feast waiting. Do you remember that this is all about a feast? The tone is going to be a little somber, I’m thinking. But Jesus seems to be referring here to an event that will happen a few years after his death. In A.D. 70 Jerusalem was leveled by the Roman Empire. The Temple was destroyed, many of the city residents killed. Many people, Jewish and Christian, saw this as a punishment for the faithlessness of the people.

But back to the feast. It’s still sitting there…waiting for diners. So the king gathers his servants together again and says, “Let’s try again. Go out into the highways and call everybody you find to the wedding feast.” And that’s what they do. They go out into the streets and collect all the people – the wicked and the worthy – and the table of the wedding feast is full.

If the story had ended there, we might have a satisfactory picture of what the kingdom looks like. There’s a lot of violence leading up to it – a really troubling division between the king and the people, but here is a table where everyone is welcome – the good and the bad, the Jew and the Gentile, Cavaliers and Hokies – everybody’s got a place at this table.

But the story’s not over. In fact, it gets even more troubling. The king comes in and he sees all these people at his feast. You think he’d be pleased to see all these people finally showing up to join in the celebration. But there’s this one guy. One guy showed up in a dirty T-shirt and ratty jeans. So the king goes over to him and says, “Friend, how did you get in here looking like that? Don’t you have the sense to put on clothes befitting a wedding?” No response. The guy doesn’t say a thing.

So the king throws him out. Not only throws him out – the king has him tied up, hands and feet, and thrown into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. Matthew is big on wailing and teeth gnashing. He uses this image throughout his gospel. When the angels come to separate the wheat from the weeds in an earlier parable, the evildoers are thrown out to wail and gnash their teeth. The parable of the net that catches good and bad fish – the bad fish represent the evildoers who get thrown out to wail and gnash teeth. The unworthy servant in a later parable that doesn’t use the money entrusted to him wisely? Wailing and teeth gnashing.

The point is that this parable of the wedding feast is suddenly not about the people Jesus is talking to anymore; it’s about the church that will follow in Jesus’ footsteps. Church members who got the first part of Jesus’ allegory might be saying, “Yes! You tell ‘em, Jesus. Those people didn’t understand what you were saying, but we did!”

Now Jesus is turning the tale on them. What he says is, “Don’t be too content with your position. You have received an invitation to the kingdom but that doesn’t mean that you are therefore free to do as you please. This feast comes with some responsibilities. There is a certain dress that is expected. If you don’t look like someone who is expecting the greatest feast you’ve ever attended, you may lose your seat…and then there’s the outer darkness, wailing, teeth gnashing and all of that.

You see, you have been claimed. There is a new life awaiting you, but as with every new birth, something radically changes. If our lives are no longer our own, we will see the world differently. If our lives are hidden with Christ in God, we will live differently. If we are part of the body of Christ, we will relate to other parts of the body differently. If we have been liberated from the power of sin, we will confront those places where sin still threatens us and we will act differently. Not out of anxiety that if we don’t we’ll be thrown into the outer darkness, but out of love for the God who made us and transforms us. The outer darkness is not the power that claims us or threatens to claim us…God is the power that claims us. The Holy Spirit is about the work of sweeping us up into God, not exiling us to teeth gnashing. When we resist that movement of the Spirit it is our own blindness and recalcitrance that moves us away from God.

In the closing scenes of Stephen Spielberg’s World War II movie, Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hank’s character, Captain John Miller, is dying from a gunshot wound he received in a battle. It’s the days following the Normandy invasion and Miller and a small band of soldiers are trying to find a paratrooper, Private James Ryan, behind enemy lines. Three of Ryan’s brothers have died in the war and the army has decided to send him home so that his mother will not have to receive news that all of her sons had been killed. They are there to save Private Ryan.

In the final battle scene Ryan is spared but Captain Miller is mortally wounded. As he looks at the young private whose life he has saved, he says to him, simply, “Earn this.” Earn this. A final scene follows when we see Ryan as a much older man visiting the grave of the captain. It is clear from how he reacts that his whole life has been launched from that moment with the captain. He turns to his wife at the grave and breaks down in tears. He says to her, “Tell me I have led a good life. Tell me I’m a good man.” He desperately wants to know if the life he has lived from that moment was worthy of the gift he had been given.

That is what we’re about in this Christian life. We have been given a priceless gift. In a world marked by violence and sin…in our lives that too often seem so far from God and so far from the way God intends us to be…a feast has been prepared. There is a place at the table for you…even you and even me. And if we accept for ourselves the incredible good news that God has chosen us to be God’s own people…that God in Jesus Christ has saved us for a new life…that God has saved us…then the rest of our lives is about earning the gift…not because the gift depends on our merits, because nothing we can do is that good. But because when we have known such love, the only proper response is to love in return. So that at the end of our days we can say that everything is made new, including me. To quote Hauerwas again, “To be made holy is to have our lives ‘exposed’ to one another in the hope that we will become what we have been made.”

Thanks be to the God who meets us where we are but who is not content to leave us as we are. Thanks be to God.

Fuzzicity

Philippians 3:4b-14
If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day in the family of Israel, tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; according to the law, a Pharisee; according to zeal, a persecutor of the church; according to righteousness under the law being blameless.

But whatever advantages came to me, these I consider disadvantages through Christ. Even more I regard all things as disadvantages because of the surpassing knowledge of my Lord Jesus Christ, for whom I suffer disadvantages in all things and consider them rubbish in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having my own righteousness from the law but rather through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. To know him and the power of his resurrection and to participate in his suffering, to conform to his death, so that may come to resurrection from the dead. It is not that I already have this or have received perfection already, but I press on and seek to seize hold of it, because Christ Jesus has seized hold of me.

Brothers and sisters, I don't consider myself to have seized it, but I do this one thing: forgetting what lies behind, and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on to the goal which is the prize of the heavenly calling of God in Christ Jesus.

You know what one of my favorite Bible stories is? It’s not one you hear very often, but to me it’s just right. It’s just the way I think spiritual “enlightenment” happens.

Jesus is teaching in the villages around Galilee. He’s frustrated because no one seems to be able to understand what he is trying to show them. Especially his disciples. He has just expressed his frustration to the disciples. He says to them, “Do you still not get it? Do you have eyes and fail to see? Do you have ears and fail to hear? And don’t you remember?” [Mark 8:17-18]” No one seems to be able to see what’s really going on.

It is at this very moment that the people bring him a blind man--somebody who really can’t see what’s going on. Jesus takes him outside the village and, (this is the gross part), he spits on the blind man’s eyes and lays hands on him and says, “Can you see anything?”

We’re expecting this to do the trick. Jesus has been healing people all over the place and all it takes is the touch of his hands. Surely touching and…ew!…spitting on the blind man’s eyes will make a difference. But something really unusual happens. When Jesus says, “Can you see anything?” the blind man says, “I see people but they look like trees walking.” Jesus has to lay hands on him a second time for his sight to come in clearly.

I like that story. I like it because I think it describes the process so many of us must go through in order to see clearly. Sometimes things have to get fuzzy before they can get clear. Sometimes we need something to bring us up short - to interrupt our world as we know it -- so that we everything we think we know is fuzzy and the new world that God wants to show us can begin to come into focus.

I have to tell you that I hear this call in what Paul says to us in Philippians this morning. The first thing I want to say today is that in order to get to clarity we first have to go through fuzzicity. (How’s that for a new word?)

Now you may be saying to yourself: There’s too much fuzzicity in my life already. I don’t need any more fuzziness, I want clarity. There are too many things bringing me up short. There are too many interruptions to the world as I know it. The hurricane was a great big fuzzy that made me wonder what God was up to or where God was. Trying to figure out my parents -- now that’s a big fuzzy. Or from the other side -- trying to figure out my teenager -- that’s fuzzicity. What does it mean when I’m facing a huge illness? What do I do when there’s been a death? Where is God and where am I? You may be saying right now: I don’t need fuzzicity, Alex, I need clarity. I need you to make it crystal clear to me how God is in the midst of my school, my work, my life, my relationships, my everything. Don’t give me fuzzy; I need something solid to hold on to.

I’ll give you all of that, but when God shows up in the midst of our fuzzy and uncertain lives it may not strike us at first as something earth-shatteringly solid. God first needs to disrupt the lives we have been living and to call us to new place we are supposed to be going. The way to clarity may not be all that clear. We may see God’s kingdom in the distance, but it may seem like trees walking.

We’re still getting to know each other, so I need to tell you a story. It’s the story of how I finally heard God’s call to the ministry. Some people get that call in a blinding flash, like Paul getting knocked off his donkey on the road to Damascus. Other people find themselves in the midst of a situation of great need and suddenly realize that’s where they are supposed to be, like the Queen Esther discovering that she had attained her position so that God could use her in a time of great persecution for the Jewish people. Some people get the call at Emmaus, others through Disciple Bible Study, others at a revival. For me it took a weasel.

I was a year out of college, working at a radio station as a news director and disc jockey. It didn’t pay a thing, but I loved it. I had already started dreaming about the next step in a radio news career. I put in applications in bigger media markets. I started imagining myself opening the CBS Evening News like Walter Cronkite.

One thing I was not thinking about was ordained ministry. I wasn’t even that tied in to a church. Oh, I had thought about it as a youth, but I had discovered radio in college and I didn’t think I would look back.

I was content in my life. I had met Suzanne and we were married and living in an apartment at the foot of a beautiful mountain. We had a great network of friends through our clogging group. I thought I was content.

But then a minister friend, someone who had been my mentor since I was a youth, invited me to help out at a United Methodist youth retreat for the annual conference. I had done youth work before. I was intrigued. So I said, “Yes.”

On the last night of the retreat, the leader of the session read a story about a weasel. It wasn’t overtly a story about God. It was written by a naturalist named Annie Dillard who lived for a time at Hollins College near Roanoke. In a short story titled, “Living Like Weasels” she described an encounter she had with a weasel by the pond at Hollins.

It was a brief encounter - no more than a few seconds - but it affected her profoundly. She was fascinated by this ribbon of a creature with its intense eyes. She recalled stories she had heard from friends about a weasel who had bitten into the hand of a man and who would not let go until the man plunged his hand beneath the water of a pond. Weasels, you see, do not give up when they are seeking their prey. They go for the jugular and don’t let go.

In the story Annie Dillard recalls that another friend had found the skull of a weasel embedded in the neck of an eagle. Obviously it had missed its mark, but still held on, refusing to give up its prey. The eagle probably had flown through the skies with the weasel still attached, gutting it and letting its bones fall off across the fields below.

Finally Dillard wonders what it would be like to live like a weasel -- to live by instinct and not by choice. Yielding to the God-given impulse to search out your point of life and to attack it with your whole self and to hold on to it until it carries you aloft, flying over fields until your bones scatter across the ground. How wonderful it would be to give in to the perfect necessity of following your instincts to the pulsing, point of life.

Well, that story was just what I needed to hear to make my contented life fuzzy. I needed something to shock my sensibilities so that I could hear God’s voice again. I needed a reminder that even though I could have been a radio news director or even Walter Cronkite, that was not what I needed to be. At that moment I wasn’t sure exactly what it was I did need to be, but the path I was on was not the right one. My point of life was calling me in a different direction.

It wasn’t even that clear at that moment. When I got home from the youth retreat I got a call from a radio station in Ft. Myers, Florida that was going to offer me twice what I was making in Charlottesville. Now, double nothing and you still get nothing but it seemed like a lot at the time. They gave me 48 hours to decide. And Suzanne and I talked. I went for some very long runs down the mountain valley. And I turned the job down. Ten months later we were in seminary. It still wasn’t clear to me what it would mean. I was still in a state of fuzzicity. But I was on the way to something and I was living like a weasel.

The point is that we need an interruption to life as we know it to get a glimpse of what God intends for us. It is not the case that being a Christian means just being a nicer version of what you have been before. Emily Post may be a fine teacher of etiquette, but she’s not the one who’s going to lead us to the kingdom. Only Jesus Christ can do that and his way looks different.

The things we take confidence in to get us through our daily lives are not sufficient to get us through the fuzziness. A solid financial nest egg, good health, being a pillar in the community or the church, having a large number of social contacts -- none of these can protect us from the uncertainties of life. You didn’t need Katrina and Rita to show you that, but they certainly make it clear. All of our advantages count for nothing when we are faced with tragedy and death.

But we do have one advantage -- we have a God who loves us, who came to be among us, who counted every earthly advantage as nothing, who was born in the poverty of a manger, who lived with no roof over his head, who gathered a ragtag group of followers together and made them his family, who associated with the worst elements in society, who was condemned as a common criminal and executed without even the dignity of the clothes on his back. If it’s not clear to you that this way of Jesus is the only advantage we can claim, then welcome to the fuzziness.

This is just what Paul talks about in the passage from the letter to the Philippians that we read this morning. Paul is telling the Christians in Philippi that if they want to get into a boasting contest, he would probably win. He was an upstanding Jew, trained in the faith, a defender of the law, and blameless under the law.

But he knew that there was something that had interrupted all the confidence he had placed in his earthly position. He knew that he had been seized by Christ. He knew that his life was to be found in Christ. He knew that because of this everything had changed for him. Because of this the story of Jesus death and resurrection was the most important story he could tell. It’s scandalous, yes. It’s ridiculous, yes. That God would come and suffer and die in order to claim us? It’s absolutely outrageous. But it’s just the sort of thing we need to interrupt our lives and make us think twice. It’s just the sort of thing we need to get us over ourselves and into God.

When you find your life in Christ your whole life story gets told anew. It then makes sense to say that “I was born just outside the city as Christ suffered and died,” because in some sense our story begins on that hillside of Calvary at the cross. The death-defying God leads us through the baptismal water so that we can emerge through the light filtering into an empty tomb. And we walk out of the tomb into a garden that is every bit as new and miraculous as Eden was. Life begins again, our lives are born anew as we discover what God is doing.

Paul clings to this. He says, “To know Jesus and the power of his resurrection and to participate in his suffering, to conform to his death, so that I may come to resurrection from the dead -- this is the righteousness Jesus asks from us.” Not to make it on our own merits, not to believe that we have already arrived, but to know that we have been claimed. Our lives, Paul says, are like a race in which we press on, seeking to seize hold of the prize just as Christ Jesus has seized hold of us.

Is that what you’re doing? Do you feel like you’re leaning forward into God’s new age or are we holding back? Do you feel like you’ve been seized by the God who will not let you go or are you convinced that you are dangling at loose ends? Are you pressing on to the goal or just feeling oppressed? Are you running the race or feeling run into the ground? Do you remember that you have been baptized? Do you remember that our lives are not our own, that they are God’s and are destined for God? Do you remember that God so loved the world that God sent the only begotten Son so that whosoever believes in him might not be condemned but saved?

Do you remember? Because if you don’t, we’ve got a reminder. It’s not much really. Not a potluck dinner spread. Not an all-you-can-eat buffet. It’s not the finest bread or a well-aged wine. It’s a loaf and a cup and a story of how Jesus came to claim you and me and to fuzzy up our world and to move us on towards our heavenly calling. Do this, Jesus says, to remember.

When we gather around this table, we do it with our sisters and brothers all over the world. It’s the most distinctive thing we Christians do. This is our family table. And the people who gather here are not here because they’re perfect. Far from it. They’re here because they’ve been invited, because they’re crazy, mixed-up lives have been interrupted by something greater. They’re here because of Jesus. And that’s how you get the best seat at the table - not by being perfect, but by being a child of God.

Thanks be to God.