Blinded by the Dark

2 Corinthians 4:3-6 [NRSV]
And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus' sake. For it is the God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Back in the town across the bay where I grew up, in a little place called Orange, we had a movie theater. Orange doesn’t have a movie theater anymore, but in the 1920s they built this grand opera house that had become a place to show movies by the time I came along. And it was a pretty decrepit place when I went there. It had uneven rows of seats so that in some places there would two rows right close together and in other places it looked like a row was missing so that there was a huge gap.

One time I went to the movies with my mom and we got to the theater late. The movie had actually started before we got there so we were trying to find our way in with only the light from the screen to guide the way. You know what that experience is like. You go from the brightly-lit lobby into a darkened theater and you feel like you’re blind.

Mom was leading the way and she took us to a row where some people were already sitting down. We started in and we were not having a good time of it. We were stepping on people’s toes and at one point Mom even sat down on somebody’s lap. It was all very embarrassing, but it got worse. When we finally got to our seats and our eyes adjusted to the light we realized that we were in one of the wide rows and we had had about four feet of space to walk in. I can only imagine what those poor people we had stepped on on the way over must have thought. But what I learned was this - there are times when we have the capacity to see where we are going but we are blinded by the dark.

There’s a spiritual truth in this. As you no doubt know, it is possible and perhaps even typical for us to go on with our lives blinded to God’s presence and calling. We have the capacity to be united with God. In fact, that is our normal state. We were created to be related to God and to one another. But sin gets in the way. The gods of this world, as Paul calls them, distract us from the light of Christ and we end up giving them our allegiance, our money, our trust, and ultimately our lives. We have a hard time seeing Jesus and recognizing him for who he is.

Which makes us qualified to be disciples, I suppose. Peter, James and John had the same problem. They were called away from their lives as fishermen to become followers of Jesus and at times they didn’t seem to get what Jesus was up to or who Jesus was either. Peter, you remember, was the first to confess that Jesus was the Messiah, the Savior all Israel had been waiting for. But he was also the first to rebuke Jesus when Jesus told them that he would have to suffer and die. James and John left their nets pretty easily but they also asked to be at Jesus’ side in glory, not understanding what that meant. In other words, these three who appear in our gospel lesson this morning, and whom we assume were better able to get what Jesus was up to because they were there with him, had a hard time getting it.

But there was that moment when it was unmistakable. Jesus took these three and went to the top of a mountain and he was transfigured. His clothes became dazzling white. Moses and Elijah, the representatives of the Old Testament law and the prophets, appeared next to him as if to say, “This one, this Jesus, is the fulfillment of God’s promise that we proclaimed.” A cloud overshadows them and a voice from heaven, God’s voice, comes and says, “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him!” What more do you need? If they were looking for a sign to tell them who Jesus was, this was surely it. It must have been clear from that point on.

But you know, and I know, that the story didn’t end there on the Mount of Transfiguration. The disciples would go back down the mountain and they would still have trouble understanding. They would still make mistakes and argue among themselves and protest when Jesus talked about suffering and death and fall asleep in the garden when they were supposed to be keeping watch and abandon him at his death and disbelieve his resurrection. There was a lot more to their story, just as there was a lot more to Jesus’ story.

It was these same disciples, though, who took the word to a hurting world. They were the ones who received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and began to preach about the Jesus they had known as Jesus, the Son of God. They had a message to share and did they share it! Within a generation all of the known world was dealing with a proliferation of new Christians who had their lives turned completely around. In the Greek city of Thessalonica, the people of the town dragged the Christians into the street and said, “Look, these people who are turning the world upside down have come here, too!” [Acts 17:6].

What happened was that a people who had been blinded before suddenly were able to see. The metaphor is all there in the story of Paul. Previously he was Saul, a bitter opponent and persecutor of the Christians. But on a trip to Damascus he was knocked to ground by a blinding light and the voice of Jesus. It was literally blinding. Saul could not see until he was taken to the home of a Christian named Ananias who touched him and scales from his eyes and he could see again. He went on to a new life and a new mission as the great missionary Paul. You can just hear the hymn, can’t you? “I once was lost but now I’m found; was blind but now I see.”

But Paul realized that keeping your eyes open is not as easy as it might seem. As he traveled the region and began new fellowships of Christians there was excitement and energy. But there was also confusion and conflict. Paul kept writing back to these new churches and advising them through the midst of deep hurts and wounds. Sometimes false prophets and preachers appeared with conflicting messages. Sometimes leaders would fail or members would be engaged in immoral relationships. There were arguments over food and worship and spiritual gifts. There were theological divides. There were competing religions and the temptations of the world. There were so many things that blinded the new Christians to who Jesus was. They had the capacity to see, but they were blinded by the darkness of the world.

In the passage from 2nd Corinthians that we read today, Paul is writing to a church that was beginning to question the things Paul had been teaching them. It was a hard message for them. They began to accuse Paul of offering an obscure message that didn’t seem as attractive as those being peddled by other preachers who were coming through town. Paul talked about a Jesus who was fully human but also the image of God. Paul talked about a suffering savior who saved us so that we could be servants. That didn’t sound as great as the story being told by some others who emphasized the freedom Christ brings and lived as if they had no responsibilities toward anyone. Paul warned of those who preached a gospel that seemed to point to themselves because it would end up obscuring the one thing that mattered - the preaching of Jesus as Savior.

We live in an age when the dangers Paul talked about are just as real and present as they always have been. It is hard to keep our eyes on Jesus when we are eye-deep in the darkness of the world. We have so many distractions from the gospel we can’t even begin to name them. Financial worries, relationship troubles, addictions, .mp3s, television, computers, worries, anxieties, illness, fear, greed, consumerism, gossip - these are all things that can channel our inherent desire for God in other directions. We can be blinded by the darkness in the world.
But there is also darkness in the church. I don’t know if you have noticed this but this church is made up of human beings. And not only that - this church is made up of sinners. We pray that we are sinners being healed by the grace of God, but we are only on the way to perfection. We have not arrived.

What this means is that we can sometimes be blinded by the darkness in here as well. We can lose sight of Jesus. Instead of conforming to the image of Christ, who is the image of God, we can conform Jesus into our image. The church is always prone to the danger of bad theology and the result is a great woundedness within the church as well from people who have sought refuge here, who have sought healing here.

How do we see bad theology at play? When we make Jesus out to be an overbearing parent for whom our best is never good enough…when we emphasize judgment without grace…when we deny the capacity built into us from before our birth to cooperate with what God is doing in the world…when we have a Jesus who is more interested in pointing out sinfulness than leading us to salvation from sin…that’s bad theology.

On the other hand when we make Jesus the model of acceptance and tolerance without remembering the way he challenged people to change…when we talk about his willingness to eat with sinners without talking about his willingness to overturn tables in the Temple…when we hear him say “Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone” but fail to hear “Go and sin no more”…that’s bad theology.

When we make Jesus out to be unconcerned with the world…when we make his salvation only a matter between me and God - “Me and Jesus we got our own thing going”…when we believe that the gospel has nothing to say to the powers and principalities that rule in our day…when we see our government out of control and unresponsive to the people, as it is….when we see wars and rumors of war…when we see poverty in our community and divisions in our schools…when we see these things and do not speak because we feel that the Jesus we have remade has nothing to say to the world…that’s bad theology.

When we imagine an Armageddon Jesus who is unconcerned with the here and now because the end of the story is only about destruction and death…when we are overly fascinated with the end of the world because we believe the only thing that matters is the coming of the next…when that God is rending and not reconciling all things to God’s own self in Jesus Christ…when we neglect our lives and our bodies and our relationships in this age because we are convinced they have no ultimate meaning…when we believe in life after death but not life before death…that’s bad theology.

You see where I’m going? Are you going with me? Jesus is always more and other than what we can say about him. He’s always coming to transform our expectations of who he is and never to accept our prescriptions for how he ought to act, because our ideas about making the world new are always going to be tainted by sin. Our will always gets in the way. So how do we discover who Jesus is? How do we escape the dangers of being blinded by the dark? By telling the story. By going back to the story week after week and reading things that just don’t make sense with the way things are. When we read the Sermon on the Mount we can’t help but be confronted by things that make no sense with how things work in the world as we know it. Love your enemy? Blessed are the meek? Don’t store up treasures for yourself on earth? Don’t worry about tomorrow? Who of us can read those words without it catching us up short? How can we read these things and not reflect on how we are living our lives? They are always going to be hard sayings.

That’s as it should be. The Jesus who meets us on the Mount of Transfiguration and on the fishing boat and at the table with sinners and welcoming little children and hanging from the cross and vacating a tomb is always going to be a Jesus who is difficult for us to hold on to. But when we put on Christ…when we keep searching and listening for Jesus…when we decide to follow Jesus instead of him following us…then we will find that the light changes…we can see capacities and abilities we never knew we had…we can see the possibility of transformation and can know that it is not just meant for others but it is meant for us.

The story is often told of sculptors who are asked, “How in the world did you create such a magnificent work of art out of that block of marble?” And the sculptor will often say, “I did not create it. I only revealed what was there in the rock all along.” Somehow they have eyes to see and skill to uncover something in a block of stone which no one else can see. But when they follow that vision to completion we proclaim them creative geniuses.

The world is not unfamiliar with the image of Jesus. His image has been carried around the world by soldiers, missionaries and television broadcasts. Wars are fought in his name, but people find hope and healing in Jesus as well. In one way or another many people have had an encounter with the image of Jesus.

But how many have seen in that image what those disciples saw - a Jesus who cannot be co-opted by human agendas. A Jesus who denies the gods of this world as unworthy of worship and incapable of saving grace. A Jesus who is not content to leave us as we are but who continually draws us into the will of God. This is the Jesus hidden by the image of Jesus.

But those who have ears to hear and eyes to see know that our blindness can be overcome - not by paying attention to the darkness, but by looking for the light. Thanks be to God.

Novelty is Nothing New

Isaiah 43:18-25
Do not remember what has gone before and don’t give undue attention to former things. Look, I am doing something new; it is sprouting up. Don’t you recognize it? In the wilderness I am making a way and I am bringing forth streams in the desert. The creature of the land will honor me, from the dragons to the daughters of the ostrich, because I give water in the wilderness and streams in the desert for my chosen people to drink, the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.

But you did not call to me, O Jacob, for you have been weary of me, O Israel. You have not brought me a sheep for a burnt offering, nor have you honored me with sacrifices. I have not burdened you with tributes nor wearied you with frankincense. You have not bought me sweet calmus with silver, nor have you sated me with the fat of your sacrifices. But you have burdened me with your sins and wearied me with your iniquities.

I, I am the one who wipes out your transgressions for no purposes but my own and I will not remember your sins.

Here’s what I have been wondering this week: Why is it that people are so much more interesting on the Internet? When I was a campus minister I did a lot of ministry over the Internet. College students and high school students spend a lot of time communicating and playing in this new virtual world and it is creating a whole new category of relationships that just wasn’t possible before. Even some of us beyond college age who grew up with archaic machines like typewriters and rotary telephones have joined the digital world and are talking to people via e-mail and instant messager. But we still haven’t figured out what’s going on in this new world of networking and we haven’t had enough open discussions to know what sort of ethics should apply to the new relationships we are forming. But relationships ARE forming and we’re meeting people we never would have met before and they are interesting people. At least, that’s what we imagine them to be.

I’m old enough to still be slightly freaked out by all these new possibilities. E-mail seemed like a miraculous thing when it started. Suddenly you could send a note to someone on the other side of the world and they could receive it almost immediately and respond in the same day! My seminary friends in Texas and Scotland were suddenly available to me in a way they weren’t before and our relationships with each other continued. As we were planning for the baptism of Santi Bridges-Pereiera I was able to send a draft of the service to Portugal for them to review.

But e-mail was only the beginning. After that came chat rooms where you could go online and have a conversation with a group of people who would all be there on your screen in different colors interacting with each other in real time. Then there was IM - Instant Messaging, which is where you set up a list of friends who can contact you while you’re online. The first time I did this it was like I was in a room full of ghosts. Suddenly my empty office was filled with seven students and we were talking. It was a real test of my ability to multitask but you get used to this instant availability of people.

And now there are weblogs or blogs where people set up a personal web page and post their comments on politics, religion, and life in general and invite you to respond with comments of your own. I have one, though it has primarily turned into a sermon log, and two weeks ago I had a conversation about my sermon with a young pastor in Michigan who had stumbled across my latest entry. Blogs make everybody an author and a pundit and, at times, it is wonderful to hear the interior voice of some folks who have a lot to say, but find it hard to say in other settings.

But this computer world has its downside. It’s not just that this rapid writing capability makes us prone to error, although it does. I remember a colleague of mine in the early days of word processing who became fascinated with the “find & replace” option. He was going to have two funerals one day, both with a printed order of worship, one for a woman named Mary and the other for a woman named Edith. So when he finished the bulletin for the first service he just had the computer find all the references to Mary and replace them with the name Edith. Which was wonderful until the congregants at the second service got to the Apostle’s Creed and read out, “I believe in Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Edith…” We can be a little careless.

We can also be a little too trusting. Because of the anonymity of the web we can’t always trust that people are who they say they are. In fact, a person with the screen name of ‘suzyQ’ may turn out to be a 40-year-old guy by the name of Fred. Sexual predators love the Internet because they can lurk in the conversations of young people and pass themselves off a something they are not. We have all read stories of relationships that began on the web that ended tragically when a young girl or boy decided to meet the “friend” they found on the other end of a chat room talk or blog comment.

This week Northampton schools sent home a memo to parents and students asking them to be aware of the dangers of websites that allow free sharing of pictures and information. Sites like facebook.com and myspace.com allow students to put pictures and personal information on the web and then invite friends to see their postings. Those friends invite other friends and soon you have a whole group of people sharing thoughts on music, school life, relationships, parents and all the stuff students have always talked about. There is also the excitement of meeting people who may be on the other side of the country or the other side of the world who become part of the conversation through the friend’s invitations. It’s a little like how people in another generation felt about having a pen pal in Australia.

But because students and others feel so comfortable in these sites and in other online interactions that they also feel free to share information like their home addresses and real names. It only seems natural given that you are trying to establish a real relationship. But there are those who will exploit this information and there are dangers. The High School is having an information session on this on March 7 at 5 PM and we will be talking about it at youth group on March 12 at a session we’re calling “Being Virtuous in a Virtual World.” If you are a student or a parent I encourage you to be thinking about this. We are breaking new ground in thinking about this new online world and we all need to learn about it.

Now why am I talking about this in a sermon? What’s theological about the new world of computer relationships? I’m talking about it because I wonder why it is that people are so much more interesting on the Internet. What is it about the real world we live in it that has lost its magic and intrigue for us? Why is it that the relationships we develop with people through computer screens and keyboards have an edge and an excitement for us that we’re not finding in the relationships that develop through conversations over the breakfast table and in warm embraces as we return from a trip? I suspect that we have become disconnected from what God is doing in our everyday lives and we have bought into the illusion that what is novel is, in fact, new. In fact, I think that the search for novelty in relationships is just a sign of something very old - it is avoiding real relationship and blinding us to the reality that God is doing a new thing and we are missing it.

They didn’t have text messaging or blogs in their day, but the people of Israel had the same problem some three thousand years ago. Well, it wasn’t exactly the same, but they were having a hard time seeing something new in the place where they were. It was the time of the Exile. The people were living far from their homes in a foreign land - in Babylon, which is across the desert from Israel in the country we now call Iraq.

For hundreds of years Israel’s prophets had been warning the people that God was not pleased with them. They had forgotten their God - the God who had created them and given them life…the God who had called them into being as children of a promise to a couple of geriatric parents - Abraham and Sarah…the God who had delivered them from slavery in Egypt and brought them through the waters of the Red Sea and through the wilderness into a new land. You’d think it would be hard to forget a God like that, but the people had and it was the role of the prophets to remind them of who they were and how they had been chosen from all the nations of the earth to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth. But the people didn’t listen to the prophets. Their rulers went astray and finally they were carried off into exile by the powerful nations around them.

Now Isaiah the prophet spoke to the people and unlike the prophets who went before he does not tell them to remember. He starts by saying, “Forget about all that you know about God. Forget about the old stories of God’s deliverance. Don’t remember how God saved your ancestors in the past. God is doing a new thing.”

A new thing? They must have laughed to hear Isaiah say that. A new thing? We’re in exile, Isaiah! Look around! There’s no Promised Land. There’s no Temple. There’s no protection for God’s people. There’s no hope and nothing to hold on to. There’s more than a huge desert separating us from home. There’s despair and dejection and degradation. If there is something new it must be found in Babylon. This is where the power is. This is where the cutting edge technologies are. This is the nation that must be blessed because look at all that they’ve got. God is doing a new thing, Isaiah? You’ve got to be kidding!

But it’s an interesting about the desert. What looks like a hostile, brutal place can surprise you with life. Have you ever been in the desert following a rain? It doesn’t happen very often but when it does all kinds of surprising things happen. Suzanne and I took a trip once to the Big Bend region of Texas in the middle of the Chihuahuan desert. Except for the tall cottonwood trees along the Rio Grande it is a place that looks dead. What plants and animals there are are spiky, hostile things that you don’t want to get near.

But when the rain falls the whole scene changes. Tall, thorny ocotillo bushes sprout blazing orange flowers immediately. Thousands of tiny, yellow flowers spring up in the rocky, sandy soil. Dry gulches becomes flowing rivers. It’s all there waiting to come to life, but you’d never know it until the rain comes.

That’s what Isaiah tells the people. “God is doing a new thing. Don’t you see it? Streams are breaking forth in the desert. God is preparing a new highway to take God’s people home right through the heart of the wilderness. The wild animals of the desert will find their true voice and offer praise to God and they will join the praise of the people as they go back home. Can’t you see what’s happening?”

But of course they can’t. The exile has sapped the people of their hope. The old stories that told them how things were supposed to work just didn’t seem to have the power to ground them anymore. They were in search of a new thing but they didn’t look to God. They neglected the old sacrificial system that helped them to deal with the struggles they were facing. They neglected the God who could free them from their sins. They just didn’t think God of Israel had the power to match the gods of Babylon.

So God tells them that God will be forgetful, too. Though God is burdened by their sin and by their forgetfulness, God will not remember their transgressions. This new thing is not just another version of the same old thing. When God comes to them again, it will be something so new that what is old will truly be passed away. Behold, the new has come.

It’s not too big a leap to say that we live in Babylon, too. Do you feel it? This land that we live in is a great land, a powerful land. All the world looks to this nation to define what is new and what is cutting edge. People come from all over the world to attend school here, to work here, to trade here, to make alliances. We export the latest fashions, the latest movies, the latest technology. Surely this is where the new things can be found.

But we are in exile. The God of Israel, the God of Jesus Christ, is not the God who brings these new things. Many, many people have begun to wonder - what is the point of these old, old stories that we tell about God in church each week? What is the hope that I can find among Christians? What are they doing over there with their odd, little worship practices and their weekly activities? Why do they gather together so much and why do they read that old, old book? Surely there is nothing new in the Christian church.

But we know that the new things the world wants to give us or sell us are not the things that give us hope. We know that there is a deep emptiness at the heart of our society and we feel it in ourselves at times. I see our willingness to expose our lives online, to spread ourselves out for the world to see and possible abuse, as evidence that at our core we have a tremendous hunger for connection. The world is going so fast, the things that are happening to us so complex, the power to change things seems so beyond our capacity, that we just want someone to acknowledge us…to see us…to love us for who we are. This high-tech world is remarkably low-touch, and in such a world, even the comment of a stranger reading our blog from 20,000 miles away can seem like love.

God wants to give us more than that. The God of Jesus Christ did not come so that we could make ourselves disembodied people trying to become real in the ether of the Internet. The God of Israel came among us and lived among us and ate with sinners and touched the sick and healed the disturbed and suffered on a cross and died and rose again to show us what was real. And in taking on our humanity, God gave us the capacity to be truly human, too.

God is doing a new thing. This is not just an upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. This is not just version 2.0. It’s a whole new operating system that God is about. When we pass through the waters of baptism, we are welcomed into a community that dies with Christ so that we can be raised with Christ. We no longer look for the new in novelty. There’s more to life than that. We look for the new in the same place we’ve always discovered it -- in the God who makes paths in the wilderness and ways through the water. In this community, formed by Christ, we expect something new each day.

The Eastern Shore is a place of regular rhythms. Every six hours or so the tide comes in or the tide goes out supporting a network of tidal life. Offshore and in the bay schools of fish and dolphin pass through as they have done for centuries. But you all know that there are storms that change things forever. I already know the dates. 1933 and the great storm that moved folks off the barrier islands and meant the end of communities like Broadwater and a new life for places like Willis Wharf. 1964 and the northeaster that hit Chincoteague. These are times after which things could not be the same.

God is doing a new thing here in this place and can do a new thing in your life. If you open yourself to God’s grace and claim for yourself God’s love and recognize that God is not remembering your sin any more if you will only let it go - then nothing can ever be the same again.

Streams are erupting in the desert. A highway is being built across the wilderness to bring God’s people home from their exile. Will you walk with me on that path? Will you go through that water? Will you accept that you are accepted and loved and transformed? Thanks be to God.

Getting Ready for the Race

1 Corinthians 9:24-27
Don’t you know that in the stadium the runners all exert themselves in the race in order to seize the prize? All athletes exercise self-control in all things and they do this to seize a perishable wreath, but we do it for an imperishable one. So, you see, I run, but not aimlessly. Nor do I box as if beating the air. But I beat up my body, so to speak, and make it a servant, so that having preached to others I should not be found unworthy.

It is my task every week to stand in this place and to try and speak a word and I pray that the words I use to speak this word may reflect God’s word and what God would say to us today. It’s a great responsibility and one that I undertake each week with a bit of trepidation. I am listening for that word, too, and I’m hoping I’ve done the things I need to do to put myself in the place to hear God’s voice. But on those occasions when I feel absolutely stuck and wonder what on earth I have to offer you and I ponder the sermon for hours, I often experience God’s voice saying, “Just do it already!” Maybe that’s Suzanne’s voice. They often sound a lot alike.

But today that message that prompts me to speak even when I am uncertain of what I have to offer is exactly the message that I want to say to you. The message of the day is: Just do it already! Now there’s sound theology behind that. We could spend many, many hours parsing exactly what this message means. What is the ‘it’ that we need to do? How should we do the ‘it’ we’re supposed to do? What is the deep meaning of my reluctance to do the ‘it’ I’m supposed to do? When shall I know when I have done all the ‘it’ that I need to do? These are all great questions, but I hope at the end of this sermon you won’t be left wanting to ponder them…I hope you’ll be inspired to just do it already.

Now this is a very Methodist message that I have for you today. Yes, it’s there in the letter to the Corinthians from the Apostle Paul, but it’s certainly a big feature of our Methodist heritage as well. We are a people who became known as the people who went out and did it. Methodists today may be famous for their “methods” - hence the name - but those methods were developed in the 1700s to evangelize the world - to set people in motion toward seeking God in their lives and in their communities. We didn’t just perfect the committee structure to have great committees - we have the structure we have because it helped us proclaim the good news of Jesus. When John Wesley, the first Methodist decided to go out and do it, he went out and did it.

But I get the sense that we don’t feel about our committees today the way Wesley did then.

One of my favorite book series is by Douglas Adams who wrote The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, an absurd little book that is bound to make you laugh if you like quirky humor. In one of the sequels to that book the main character, Ford Prefect, comes upon a planet that is being colonized by a group of television producers, marketing consultants and hairdressers who have been exiled by their home planet, even though they believe that they are really the advance team for the rest of their culture. It’s obvious why they have been sent away very quickly because the only thing they seem to be able to successfully do is to have committee meetings.

When Ford arrives they are having the 573rd meeting of the colonization committee of Fintlewoodlewix. Prefect is struck by the futility of this when he realizes that they have had 573 meetings and have not yet discovered how to make fire. When he protests, the group says, “Well, if you’d look at the agenda, we do have a report from the hairdressers’ Fire Development Subcommittee.” But that is equally futile because, even though the hairdressers were given two sticks to work with, they have turned them into curling tongs. It’s equally bad with the wheel development group because they can’t agree on what color the wheel should be. [The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, pp. 227-229]

This is how we view many of our committees these days. We have lost confidence that what they really ought to be about is what they really are about. Do we think that our committees are advancing the kingdom of God? Do we believe that they are spreading good news? Or do we view them as places where we got lost on endless tangents and where the process overwhelms the goal.

When we gathered together a little over a week ago for our dinner and retreat as a church community, there was that danger that we could start talking about the color of the wheel instead of the character of our church, but it didn’t happen. What happened instead was that we talked about the things we valued about Franktown Church and where we have come from. There were lots of stories about how welcome people felt here and how much they appreciated the relationships they developed here. When we looked at the church profile that we had done through the Natural Church Development program we saw that the characteristic of “loving relationships” was the strongest of the eight they measured.

But we also talked about how important our youth and children are to our congregation. We talked about the missions and outreach programs of the church. We shared how music and drama have been important parts of our history and our present. We celebrated the energy, the gifts, and the giving that made possible the expansion of our church facilities and the landscaping that is now taking place.

When we looked at where we wanted to grow, though, we saw that one of the areas that was identified for us was passionate spirituality. Now this may seem surprising to you. It was to me. We have had experiences in worship here, especially over the last two months, where I have felt a powerful movement of the Holy Spirit. But passionate spirituality is not just about the quality of what takes place when we are gathered together in worship. It is also about the practices we take on that help us to welcome the Spirit into our lives. One of those is worship, but our individual devotional lives are also ways that we seek God’s voice. Prayer, fasting, Bible study, meeting in small groups: these are practices that draw us closer to God. As are works of justice and mercy and compassion. Our recent cottage meetings to address the crisis in our schools are ways that we move out to engage the world around us with God’s love.

There was a period in John Wesley’s life when he struggled with the kind of life God was calling him to lead. We often hear about his experience in the meetinghouse on Aldersgate Lane in London in 1738 when he was listening to Luther’s Commentary on Romans and felt his heart strangely warmed. Though he was already a priest in the Anglican Church at that point, he was deeply troubled and this was when he began to feel that the message he had been preaching to others was meant for him as well.

But what followed for him in the year after that was perhaps even more important. For a time he met with the Moravians in a meetinghouse on Fetter Lane in London. The Moravians were a quietist group who believed in silence and stillness and being open to God. They believed that since God was the giver of all grace, the role of the believer was to wait on that grace. The Moravians were a warm group with a strong fellowship and Wesley found a home among them for awhile, but eventually he knew that he would have to leave them.

Wesley left because he couldn’t accept that all God intended for us to do was to patiently wait for grace to appear. God had not only given us the ability to receive grace, God had also given us the capacity to cooperate with that grace and to seek it out in spiritual practices. So Wesley, who by nature was not a patient man, pointed to the value of frequent communion and the spiritual disciplines because they could train a person in the way of holiness. They could make a person predisposed toward God’s grace freely given. This was not works righteousness, something that Wesley was often accused of. He wasn’t earning his way to salvation - he was seeking it and using every way that God had given him to get there. [Lord Leslie Griffiths, “The Spirit of the Foundery,” Healthy Church Event, January 2005, http://www.gbod.org/healthychurches/presentations/griffiths-foundery.pdf]

He knew the value of training. When you first learn a sport, like ice skating or skiing, as we’re seeing in the Olympics coverage on TV right now, it can seem very awkward. Your body feels unnatural as you learn new moves and skills and techniques. You wonder if you’ll ever get it. But skilled athletes know that thrill when you realize that you have broken through from being a novice to a real skier or skater. They become infused with something more and what had seemed awkward and unnatural suddenly becomes fluid and beautiful.

Wesley experienced that with his preaching. When he had returned from a disastrous tenure in colonial Georgia to take up preaching again in England he wondered if he had the faith necessary to tell anyone about God. A Moravian friend, Peter Bohler, told him not to worry. “Preach faith until you have it,” the Moravian said, “And then, because you have it, you will preach faith.” Sometimes you have to put on the uniform first before you realize that God has made you a player.

Paul knew this, too. In the Bible passage we read this morning he uses the athlete imagery to encourage the Corinthian Christians not to be complacent in their faith or to merely talk about it in abstract ways. He knew that they lived in an environment where there were many different religious options and many people who could easily ignore the unique message they had to offer. Their time, like our time, was a time when Christians felt a lot of pressure to merely look like the world around them and to downplay the practices that made Christians look distinctive.
Paul reminds them of the runners who often competed in races near Corinth. The Isthmian games were held very close to the city and his hearers would have known the spectacles that pitted contestants against one another. Paul says, “If you’re going to run in one of these races, you’re going to need to be single-minded. You’re going to need to train and to show self-control. If athletes will do all of this to win a prize that is merely a wreath on their heads that will wither away, how much more should we train for a race in which the prize will not fade away, but last forever?”

Then Paul, who was not really the athletic type from what we know, gives them some humorous images of himself. “You see,” Paul says, “I run, but with a purpose. I’m up early every morning whipping myself into shape. Like Rocky in the meat locker preparing for a boxing match, I’m in heavy training. Because I don’t want to be found talking about the race and not being prepared to run it. I don’t want to be preaching the gospel and not living it.” If you’re going to be an athlete, you’ve just gotta do it already!

One more example and then the inspiring conclusion. An interesting thing is happening as we have more professional athletes and more professional singers and musicians. People who normally would not be hesitant about playing sports or singing or playing an instrument are more hesitant to take these things up. Fewer students are becoming athletes. Fewer people learn how to play musical instruments. At least that’s how it is on the other side of the bay. We may be a bit better off here.

But if we feel like we have to sound polished and professional before we ever take up a cause, we never take the necessary risk to become more proficient. We’re afraid of looking foolish.

Let me tell you how to get over this. I have not had a more powerful experience of God’s presence this year than when I visited the Archangels Sunday School class this year. Mark McNair has been leading them in music as they begin each class and it is the best singing because they sing like Methodists! There is absolutely no holding back. John Wesley advised his Methodists to sing lustily (it’s right there in the front of our hymnal!) and that’s what happens in this class. It’s loud and joyful and there is no doubt that people are seeking God. Plus it’s interspersed with testimonies to what God is doing in their lives. It is amazing! We’re looking forward to when they lead us in music at the 8:30 service next month.

That’s what I wish for you and for me in all that we do here at this place. Yes, we’re fearful and doubtful at times but you know the first thing real angels says when they appear in the Bible - Do not be afraid! Yes, our lives sometimes seem so distressed and we seem so distraught that it is hard for us to see what we should do, but that doesn’t excuse us from doing what God has called us to do. Put it into practice. Preach faith til you have faith and then because you have it you will preach it.

Yes, we are tired and heavy laden, but somebody said he’d give us rest. Yes, we are shackled by heavy burdens, but somebody said he’d share our load. Yes, we don’t want to look like fools, but somebody said that the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of the world. Yes, we aren’t sure of the path, but somebody said he was the Way. Yes, we get lost, but somebody said he’d seek us out and welcome us home. Yes, we stumble and fall, but somebody said he’d lift us up. Yes, we do a lot of sitting on the premises, but it’s time for us to do some standing on the promises.

Are you getting ready for the race? Because you’re in it. Are you getting in shape? Are your running with purpose? Or are you still wondering what to do? You know what to do. God is calling you. God is reaching out to you. God is urging you. Just do it already. Thanks be to God.

The Freedom of a Christian

1 Corinthians 9:16-23
For if I preach the good news, it doesn't give me the right to boast, for a compulsion is placed upon me. Woe is me if I do not preach the good news!

If I do this of my own free will, I have wages, but if not of my own will, I am entrusted with a responsibility. So then what are my wages? That in my proclamation I may make the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my rights in the gospel. For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them.
To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law) so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak.

I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.

You know it’s going to be a good sermon when it starts with a parrot joke. So here goes. The story is told of a burglar who broke into a house in the dead of night when he thought nobody was home. So he’s collecting some valuables and putting them in a bag when he here’s a voice say, “Jesus is watching you.” He stops for a second but then thinks it must only be his conscience speaking so he returns to his work. But he hears it again. “Jesus is watching you.”

Well, now he’s really getting scared so he flicks on the light and there in the corner of the room is a parrot in a cage and a huge Doberman pinscher dog. The burglar says to be bird, “Is that the only thing you can say? ‘Jesus is watching you’?”

At that the bird turns to the dog and says, “Sick ‘em Jesus.”

I’m here this morning to correct some misperceptions and to spread some ‘yes’ perceptions about what it means to be free in Christ. I want to say just this today. If you get it the first time around you can sleep through the rest of the sermon if you dare. But what I want to say is very simple: Jesus sets us free so that we can be servants. Jesus sets us truly free so that we can be servants of God.

Now that doesn’t sound like such a radical idea, but you know that it is. We have a lot of misperceptions in our heads about what Jesus does for us and what Jesus expects of us. For some people, that story of the parrot and the burglar is not so far from the mark because we believe that the way Jesus relates to us is like a watchdog, watching our every move to see if we have been naughty or nice and ready to “sick us” if we go astray. If we have this image in our head then Jesus becomes a punitive Santa who sees us when we’re sleeping and knows when we’re awake and knows when we’ve been bad or good (so be good for goodness sake)! That doesn’t sound much like freedom.

Other folks believe that being a Christian is a drag. The stereotype of Christians is that they are laden with rules and burdened with all sorts of concerns. In this view, Christians only have a list of “Thou shalt nots” to attend to and they certainly can’t be having any fun, even though some of them are called “fun”damentalists. Some of us even have that stereotype. We worry if we’re feeling joyful because there must be something wrong. Freedom in Christ doesn’t compute.

But Jesus sets us free. Paul says so in his letter to the Galatians. “For freedom Christ has set us free. So, stand firm and don’t submit to the yoke of slavery again.” [Gal. 5:1]. Jesus is our Liberator. Jesus is all about defeating the “cosmic powers of this present darkness” [Eph. 6:12]. Jesus doesn’t want us to be fearful slaves of a harsh master. Jesus came to set us free and so we are.

It’s only when we accept our new life in Christ and realize our freedom that we begin to understand how enslaved we were before. It’s not easy resisting God’s will. When we do we end up serving a lot of things that we have no business serving. There are many false gods in the world and they go by familiar names - consumerism, self-aggrandizement, substance abuse, power, greed - you know their names. They are seductive and they are often glorified by our media. Which, I have to say, seems more and more immature every day. To watch the entertainment and even the news and political programs on TV today you would think we were all in a state of arrested development at somewhere around puberty.

But that’s not what I came to talk about today. I came to talk about freedom. Freedom in Christ. A freedom that overcomes all the old ways and saves the old me and tells me that I am no longer constrained to serve those false gods. Whatever I was before, I’m not now. Whatever I was enslaved to before, I’m not bound to it now.

One of Martin Luther’s most famous writings was titled “The Freedom of a Christian” and he talked in grand language about how Christians should not feel constrained by anything - even the law of Moses - because Christ had done everything necessary to make them free through his death on the cross. “A Christian person is the most free lord of all, and subject to none,” Luther said. Because of Christ the door was opened for all people to be priests and kings. We are living in a new age in this time after Jesus’ death and resurrection. What was needed to free us from sin and death has been done.

But…and you just knew there would be a ’but’, didn’t you?…this doesn’t mean that there are no changes in the way that we live as Christians. Luther went on to say, “This doesn’t mean that we should be careless or go on to lead a bad life. The Christian is lord of all and subject to none, but she or he is also servant of all and subject to everyone.” Finding a new life in Christ means that our priorities change. The world shifts on its axis. We are pointed toward a new star for guidance. Once we know that Christ changes everything - Christ changes everything. And suddenly we find ourselves serving others because that’s just what we have to do. Oh, we are free to do other things. But when we love Christ, what else is there to do except what Jesus would have us to do?

There’s no better example of how this all works out in a human life than Paul. Paul, if you remember, was a bad guy in the Christian story. He shows up first as a persecutor of the Christians and a zealous persecutor at that. He’s on his way to Damascus to continue his reign of terror when he is confronted by Jesus and turned completely around. He is freed from being the person he was to become something more.

Paul responds by becoming Christianity’s first great missionary. He travels throughout the Jewish communities of the Middle East but then he has a vision of someone in Greece begging him to come across the water to Europe and he does. He becomes an apostle to the Gentiles - to those who were not Jewish but who responded to the good news of Jesus anyway.

In this passage we read from today, Paul is writing back to one of the churches he started in the Greek city of Corinth. He reminds them that he really was free and that he could have demanded a fee for the service of preaching the gospel, but he doesn’t. Someone working for wages might be suspect to new converts. Besides he feels a compulsion to preach the gospel. He has to preach the good news. He has to tell people about Jesus. “Woe is me,” he says, “if I don’t proclaim the gospel!”

His life has been so reoriented by his encounter with the Living Christ that he can not do anything other than talk about what happened to him. He wants others to know what it means for him and what it can mean for them. And it affects the way he lives in the world. He starts entering into new cultures and new worldviews. He was a Jew and he was trained in the synagogues, so he went to the synagogues and talked about Jesus. He was an educated man who knew the Greek and Roman world, so he talked with Gentiles. He could talk philosophy so he talked with philosophers. He was one of our first cross-cultural missionaries. “I am free with respect to all,” Paul says, “but I have made myself a slave to all so that they could hear what the good news might mean for them. I have become all things to all people that by all means I might save some.”

This week I was in Blackstone with our Virginia Conference Board of Ordained Ministry. When I joined the Board four years ago I was the youngest person on there and it was rather intimidating. I remember what I thought of the Board when I had to go appear before them when I was seeking ordination as a pastor. At that time they were the suits - the men in black (and they were mostly men) - and they were the heavies. Well, now I am one of the suits and it’s amazing how your perspective changes when you get on the other side of the interview table.

I am amazed at the people who come before us at these interviews…mostly pleasantly amazed. These are men and women who have placed everything on the line to follow a call. And they are entering into the United Methodist ministry, which asks a lot from them. We believe in itinerancy which means that people who are ordained elders can expect to move throughout their ministry. We believe in open itinerancy, which means that elders can be moved anywhere within the conference. So we have to prepare people who can go into ministry in rural areas and suburban areas, in the mountains and in the cities, in predominantly black churches and predominantly white churches, in neighborhoods in crisis and in places of great wealth. Elders can even expect to go to the Eastern Shore - but only the fortunate few.

What this means is that we need incredibly versatile people who are comfortable stretching out of their comfort zones. We need pastors who are willing to walk out of their culture and to learn another. We need pastors who are educated and flexible and willing to work with all ages. We need pastors who have families that are also willing to at least understand what the call requires. When people put themselves up for this type of role, it is remarkable.

But people will do this. They will respond to a call that requires all this of them because they have a quality that we need more than any of those that I have just mentioned. They have a love for Jesus and a desire to serve and a compulsion to talk about the good news of Jesus because they know what has transformed their lives. They know that they have been shaken up, reoriented and set on a new course. They stand ready to give an account for the hope that is within them. They are free to do many, many other things, but they are servants of God because what else could God-touched people be?

But this is not just true for clergy; it’s also true for every Christian. It’s true for you. These past two days we have had some wonderful sessions as we got together for a church wide retreat using the results of our Natural Church Development survey. Friday night we got together for dinner, we sang, we talked about our history, we talked about our present, and we started to look ahead to our future. What we said is that God has done remarkable things with us. God has blessed this congregation and the members of it in many, many ways. We have been freed to do many things in this remarkable church.

But there is still a world that needs to hear the good news. There are people who are desperate for the good news. And they come in all shapes and sizes and in many different backgrounds. Many of them don’t look like many of us. They may be poor. They may be heartbroken. They may be ill. They may be Hispanic. They may speak another language. They may think different. They may be from here or they may be come heres. And you may think that you don’t have what they need.

But I tell you what you do have. If you have discovered something here…if you have met God in this place or in the ministry of this church…you have something that can change lives. You don’t have to be afraid that you don’t have what it takes to reach out to someone else. You have been given everything you need. You have Jesus.

Come on…stretch yourself a little. There’s room at this table for many more to come. But how will they know if you don’t realize your freedom in Christ and become the servant of God you were always meant to be? You’re going to meet some people this week who need some good news. Give it to them. You’ve got it. Thanks be to God.