Hard Evidence of a Savior

Mrs. Turpin was glad that God had made her the right sort of person. It could have been so different. Sure, she was a large woman, overweight, but she was of a good class of people – a ‘home-and-land owner’ with a farm and a husband. There were other people with more money and much bigger houses and more land, but she was not of a lower class and she was grateful for that.

photo by Cristina Cook

As Flannery O’Connor describes Mrs. Turpin in her short story, “Revelation,” she thought of herself as a proper Southern woman living in the mid-twentieth century. She sometimes thought about what would have happened “if Jesus had said to her before he made her, ‘There’s only two places available for you. You can either be a [black person] or white-trash,’ what would she have said? But she hadn’t had to make that decision and she was feeling very grateful for her position in life. Though she sometimes had dark dreams. When she fell asleep after ranking all the people around her by their class and status, she would have “all the classes of people…moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.” But that was in her sleep. In the light of day she knew her place and the place of everyone around her.

She was sitting in the waiting room for the doctor. Her husband, Claud, had been kicked by a cow in the leg and needed attention. So she sat there, sizing up the other people in the room. There was a “stringy old fellow,” “a thin leathery old woman in a cotton print dress,” “a lank-faced woman” she considered kind of trashy, a common woman and her dirty child, a pleasant woman that Mrs. Turpin considered her equal, and a young girl scowling at her over the pages of a heavy book titled Human Development. Gospel music was playing. The song was familiar to Mrs. Turpin, “When I looked up and He looked down…and wona these days I know I’ll wear a crown.”

As O’Connor tells the story, we hear more and more of Mrs. Turpin’s judgmental remarks and thoughts. She also becomes more and more disturbed by the girl with the bad disposition who is glaring at her as if she hates her. Finally Mrs. Turpin tells the pleasant lady, who is the girl’s mother, that if there is one thing she is, it’s grateful. “When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!”

With that the girl, whose name is Mary Grace, hurls the book at her, hitting her just over the left eye. Then she attacks Mrs. Turpin, grabbing her around the neck until she is pulled off of her. The doctor comes in and gives Mary Grace a shot to calm her. Mrs. Turpin gets up but something tells her the girl has a message, a revelation, meant for her. She goes to the girl and asks, “What you got to say to me?”

The girl raises her eyes and locks her gaze with Mrs. Turpin. “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.”

Now Mrs. Turpin’s world is turned upside down. Everything she thought she knew she no longer knows. The order of things that she thought she could trust has been totally rearranged. Back home at the farm she goes out and starts hosing down the concrete of the pig barn she has on the farm, staring at the hogs. She talks to God, “What do you send me a message like that for?...How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell, too?” It’s a shocking turnabout.

John the Baptizer is sitting in prison. Fierce John. We met him last week in our gospel reading when he was out in the desert. Wearing rough, itchy clothes of camel hair. Eating bugs. Shouting at the people who came to see him – religious leaders, soldiers, ordinary people, whoever would come. “Repent,” he said, “for the kingdom of heaven is upon us.” “The ax is at the root of the trees,” he said. “You bunch of snakes,” he said to the Pharisees. “Get ready,” he said, because the Messiah, the savior we have been waiting for, is on the way.

Then he came. Jesus came to John in the desert and it seemed so clear. Here was the one. He was the one. “I ought to be baptized by you,” John said, but Jesus said, “No, let it be so for now.” And John had baptized in the Jordan River.

So it’s very confusing now to see John have such doubt. He’s sitting in prison. He’s wondering what it’s all about. His world is turning upside down. Everything he thought he knew he’s no longer sure of. The order of things he thought he could trust has been totally rearranged. What had he expected? A quick march to Jerusalem? A grand showdown with the powers that be? Another king like the great King David?

John sends word through his disciples to ask, “Are you the Coming One or should we wait for another?” It was that unclear. Even John was beginning to doubt, to look for evidence.

I know you don’t ever have these moments – these moments of doubts. Or do you? Are there times when you wander through the lights and tinsel of this season and wonder if there is some magic yet in this old world? In Advent we light the candles and wait on a Savior as generation upon generation of Christians have done and do we ever wonder why – whether the waiting has been in vain – whether the hopes and fears of all the years will really be met in the coming of Christ again? We make plans for being with family and friends. We tell ourselves that we are going to be happy. We are going to be joyful. We are going to see the promise of God in the land of the living. But we wonder.

We wonder if there can be transformation in this world. We wonder if there is power in this place. We wonder if peace on earth is more than just a sentiment we sing but a possibility. We wonder about the intractable problems of the planet – the wars that never cease, the hatreds that brew, the lives that are lost, the children who suffer, the bereaved who grieve, the marriages that falter, the deep, racial wounds that never seem to heal. We wonder if the savior is coming into this.

Sara Miles is a Christian laywoman in St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco. She came to Jesus by stumbling into the church as an adult and receiving a piece of bread from the communion table. “I didn’t know who Jesus was until I tasted him,” she said. But the taste led to a whole new life for her.

She started a food pantry in the church – right there in the sanctuary around the big round communion table that St. Gregory’s had placed in the center of their worship space. The table hit her like the book that slapped into Mrs. Turpin. It led her to see the world in a whole new way. She found that she was changed and that others were changed when they gathered around that table – both for worship and for the Friday food distribution.

When the people of the church saw that they need around them was great, they prayed for an answer. How could they help provide more people the opportunity for food, for bread, for transformation? A lawyer working on a federal case had contacted Sara about being the recipient of a settlement that was to benefit California charities. Even though he was not a believer, he had heard they were doing good things. He went to work on the case and Sara kept praying.

Then, in the midst of their wondering about where God was leading the food pantry, Sara got a letter from the U.S. District Court. A big settlement had come through and they would be receiving $20,000 a year for the next ten years. Sara called Derek, the lawyer. She called to say thanks, but he stopped her and said, “No, thank you, for giving me the chance to do this…I had to go to church when I was a kid, and they kept telling me what to do—sit still, say this, and…and, you know, I didn’t like that. I don’t like being told what to do…

“Now I take my kids to an Episcopal church…really rich, everyone’s very nice, but you just sit there…When I went to your pantry, I saw all the food, and I thought this is what church is for.”[i]

Maybe doubt slips in because we’re looking too hard for miracles that are shaped the way we would shape them. Maybe the miracle of the savior is not in grand, comprehensive moment of conquest. Maybe peace on earth doesn’t happen in an instant we can capture on live TV. Maybe Christmas doesn’t happen in the ways we try to channel it. Maybe it happens in the hardened heart of a trial lawyer. Maybe it happens when we receive a piece of bread and realize that we are cupping our hands to receive ‘God with us.’ Maybe it happens in the midst of messy, mundane relationships because that’s just how it happened the first time.

Jesus can be frustratingly vague about all this. Sometimes I just want him to answer the question. “Are you the Coming One, yes or no?” But then again Jesus is pretty concrete in how he answers. “Go back and tell John what you see and hear. People who are blind see. People who cannot walk, walk. People with leprosy. People who are deaf hear. The dead are raised to life and the poor have good news proclaimed to them. And happy is the one who is not repelled by me.”

When we touch the world and are touched by it…when we understand that the transformation of the world is happening one life at a time…when we understand that we can be the dead raised to life and can offer that same gift to the walking dead around us…well, Christmas can come.

Mrs. Turpin’s last vision as she stands by the pig parlor washing down the shoats is to see a purple streak in the sky as the sun sets. It cuts “through a field of crimson and [leads] like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk…She saw the streak as a cast, swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black [folks] in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and God-given wit to use it right…

“At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”[ii]

We don’t know in the end whether Mrs. Turpin has been truly transformed and redeemed. We don’t know what she did with this revelation. But then we don’t know what we’re going to do with it either yet, do we? There is a great parade coming. And a place in the battalions of freaks and lunatics for people like you and me. Lives are being changed. Will you join Jesus? Will you taste the kingdom? Will you let Christmas come in you? Thanks be to God.

Matthew 11:2-11

Now John, when he heard in prison about the work of Christ, sent word through his disciples and said to him, “Are you the Coming One or should we wait for another?”

Jesus answered them, “Go, tell John what you hear and see; the blind gain sight and the lame walk; lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised and the poor have good news proclaimed to them; and happy is the one who is not repelled by me.”

Then, as they were going, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John. “What did you go out to the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? No, what was it that you went out to behold? A person dressed in soft clothes? Look, the ones wearing soft clothes are in royal houses. So, really, what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and much more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written:

‘Look, I send my messenger ahead of you,

Who will prepare your way before you.’

“Truly, I tell you, no one has arisen who is greater among those born of women than John the Baptizer. But the least one in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

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[i] Sara Miles, Take This Bread, [New York: Ballantine Books, 2008], ebook location 3660.

[ii] Flannery O’Connor, “Revelation,” in the collection Listening For God, ed. by Paula J. Carlson & Peter S. Hawkins, [Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994], pp. 18-35.

More Than a Carpenter

So I was at a retreat with a group of college students at Richmond Hill, an ecumenical retreat center in downtown Richmond. It was back when I was in campus ministry and I had taken a group of students who were living together in intentional Christian community to see how another intentional Christian community lived. Richmond Hill is in an old Catholic monastery high on the top of Church Hill in Richmond. The nuns moved out about 25 years ago and an ecumenical group has run it ever since.

If you go there, they will put you up in some of the old cells that the nuns used to use. Over the doors there are the stenciled names of Catholic saints. There’s the Ignatius room, the Augustine room. Well, I was staying in a very small room at the end of the hallway. The only furnishings in the room were a desk, a chair, and a small twin bed. I fell asleep with the chair right up against the bed.

In the middle of the night I woke up with a start. I had a very strange feeling that someone was watching me. I opened my eyes and there, straddling the chair and looking at me, was the King. That’s right. You know who I mean. Elvis was sitting on that chair. It was such a vivid image that when I actually woke up awhile later I had a hard time convincing myself that it was only a dream. And who knows?

I don’t know what that vision meant. At the time I took it to mean that I was really hungry for some evidence of God’s power and my brain did that crazy thing brains do in dreams and gave me a king. But it was during a low period in my life and, strange as it was, it did tell me that God was present.

Today, though, we talk about the real king. It is the last Sunday in the Christian year. Next week we begin Advent, which is the first Sunday of a new Christian cycle, and we will start moving toward Christmas. The scripture lessons will take us back to the promises of the Messiah’s coming and then to the beginning of Jesus’ story in a manger.

The Christian year always ends with this day, though. We may start with a baby. We may walk with Jesus through the sufferings and the trials of his life and death. But we end the year with this image of kingship and we ask ourselves what it means to call Jesus, not just our friend, not just our brother, not just a carpenter, not just a great human being, but the one who will reign forever.

This is not an easy thing for us to hear. Our world doesn’t make it easy for us to talk about who Jesus is for us. There are all kinds of competing claims out there. All kinds of messages. All kinds of options. We might pay lip service to the idea that Jesus is king, but it’s hard for us to live it out.

Last year the Pew Forum came out with a study on how Americans think about their faith and what they found is that most of us use a kind of cafeteria style to put together a set of beliefs. We take a little bit of this and a little bit of that, throw it together and come up with beliefs that are individual as we are. For instance, almost 40% of Americans attend worship regularly at multiple places, 28% at worship of different faiths. 22% of Christians say that they believe in reincarnation, which is about the same percentage as in the general population, and even though the Christian story, centered on Jesus, has a very different message about what happens to us after death. Other people say that they mix their beliefs in Christianity with astrology or crystals or nature worship.[i]

This doesn’t surprise me. It tells me that we are a spiritually confused and spiritually hungry people. We see people who have experienced powerful mystical experiences and we are attracted to that. Like Julia Roberts discovering Hinduism in Eat, Pray, Love. We like the idea of something new. And maybe we have heard about Jesus for so long that we think we know him. Maybe he’s become so thoroughly domesticated that we can’t see him as wild and holy anymore. He’s like the sweater Grandma knitted us when we were teenagers. It’s warm. It’s comfortable. But we’re a little embarrassed to wear it out in public because we’re not sure how stylish it is.

There are dangers to being confused, though. I have talked in several sermons recently about the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a Christian theologian working through the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s and into World War II. Bonhoeffer watched as the Christians around him began to compromise their beliefs in order to conform to the pronouncements of the Nazis. When the Nazis said that Jewish Christian converts shouldn’t worship with German Christians, the main Christian church agreed. When the Nazis said that clergy ought to pledge an oath to Hitler in addition to committing themselves to serving God, the Christians agreed. When the Nazis said that the Old Testament was degenerate and the cross was a bad symbol because it revealed weakness, the church got rid of both.

Bonhoeffer looked at all of this and he could only conclude that Christianity as a religion had failed. If a thousand years and more of Christian teaching in Germany had produced people who couldn’t put up any more resistance than that, then perhaps the religion needed to die. If Christians were able to hear the gospel message and then go on and do whatever they wanted, including doing things that were directly contrary to the gospel, what good was the title Christian? What Bonhoeffer said from his prison cell in the darkest days of the war was this: “We are moving toward a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious.’”[ii]

Bonhoeffer feels far ahead of his time in talking like this. Or maybe it’s just that our culture today feels a lot like his, not because we have Nazis challenging the Christian message but because we have so many other ways in which that message is being challenged. If we use Christianity as our grounding, it seems to be only in the bumper sticker sense.

Colossians has a much larger vision of who Jesus is. Remember that the early church grew up in a Roman Empire that was also a place of many competing religions. The Christians in Colossae would have been very tempted to be just like we Americans are, picking and choosing from a menu of religious options. What made Judaism and Christianity so threatening to the Empire, though, was their insistence on making these outrageous claims for a single God.

The letter to the Colossians says that Jesus was not just a great person within this world, he was also the one who liberated us from the power of darkness and transferred us into a new kingdom. We may have been a people marred by sin and stuck in our tired stories of failure, but we do not have to be that any longer. We have been forgiven and freed for new life with a new ruler who is not like any other ruler in the world.

He was human, but Jesus was also the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, which means he was there at the beginning of all creation. Everything was created thorough him. He is the head of the body, the church. He was there at the beginning and he will be there at the end. He was God. And he was God in a way you never expected. He was God in a way that went to the cross and died and made a way through his blood to peace and life.

Now if you believe that, it means that it challenges every other way of thinking. If you believe that, it means that you can’t live in the world in the same way. If you believe that, it may make you uncomfortable sometimes. But it may also make you understand the greatest power the world has known.

Robert Capon writes that when we Americans think of a powerful Jesus, since we don’t have kings anymore, we think of Jesus as Superman.

“Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It's Superman! Strange visitor from another planet, who came to earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American Way." If that isn't popular christology, I'll eat my hat. Jesus -- gentle, meek and mild, but with secret, souped-up, more-than‑human insides -- bumbles around for thirty-three years, nearly gets himself done in for good by the Kryptonite Kross, but at the last minute, struggles into the phone booth of the Empty Tomb, changes into his Easter suit and, with a single bound, leaps back up to the planet Heaven. It's got it all -- including, just so you shouldn't miss the lesson, kiddies: He never once touches Lois Lane.[iii]

Yet the way that Jesus saves is so much different than that of a superhero. He is thoroughly human and the life he calls us to is to be thoroughly human ourselves. If we follow this Jesus we will encounter each other in deeply personal ways and we will experience a new way of being human.

There is a popular story that tells about a person walking down the beach. She sees a man standing at the water’s edge and flinging starfish into the ocean. She also sees that the beach is covered with starfish and that even if the man stayed there all day he would never be able to make a dent in the number of beached starfish. So she goes and says to the man, “Isn’t this a little silly? You’ll never be able to save all these starfish. There are just too many.”

The man pauses for a moment, then picks up one more starfish and tosses it into the water. “I saved that one.”

Living in this world as a Christian can seem like a silly and pointless thing at times. Following Jesus can seem like a waste. “What good are we to the world?” we might be tempted to ask. Why should we live differently than this world does? But we follow one who says, “I desire that those whom you have given me will be where I am.” Jesus comes to lose no one and invites us to discover what it means to reign with him. Thanks be to God.

Colossians 1:11-20 (NRSV)

May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.

He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers -- all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

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[i] “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 9 December 2009, http://pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/Many-Americans-Mix-Multiple-Faiths.aspx.

[ii] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letter to Eberhard Bethke, April 1944, quoted in “Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity” on the blog Experimental Theology, 10 Oct 2007, http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2007/10/bonhoeffers-religionless-christianity.html.

[iii] Robert Capon, from the website CrossWalks Christian Resources, Brian P. Stoffregen, http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/luke23x33.htm.

Remember When?

They’re getting a little tired now, but I used to get a kick out of those old light bulb jokes. You know, the ones like, “How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to really want to change.” Or “How many Catholics does it take to change a light bulb? None, because they use candles.” Or, one of my favorites, “How many Virginians does it take to change a light bulb? Five. One to change the light bulb and four more to talk about how good the old one was.”


Well, today’s scripture passage invites us to do like the Virginians reminiscing about the old days. Today we’re going to talk about a prophet we rarely ever hear from. We’re going to hear from Haggai.


As we do this I want you to imagine a Temple. The finest Temple you can imagine. It sits on the top of a hill and it is made of the most excellent materials available. Cedars from Lebanon. Gold and silver. Elaborate drapes. Tall pillars rising to the sky. It’s the Temple that Solomon built in the days when Israel was at the height of its power. It’s the Temple the pilgrims longed for when they made their way to Jerusalem, marching to Zion. It’s the Temple Isaiah stood in when he saw the vision of God sitting on a throne, high and lofty, and the hem of God’s garments filling the Temple below.


The Temple is where God was supposed to dwell. The Temple is where sacrifices were offered to God continually. The Temple is where the heart of the nation was. And the Temple is what was lost when Jerusalem fell in 587 BC.


The Babylonians finally sacked the city in that year. They dragged many of the people off across the eastern desert. Others fled for Egypt. The king, Jehoiakin, was imprisoned and then invited to sit at the table of the royal family in Babylon with all of the other conquered kings. The great Temple, built to mark the presence of Israel’s God with the people Israel, was destroyed and all of its wealth carted off.


For almost 70 years the people lived in exile. The people who had been promised a land had no land. The people who had been promised a descendant of King David upon the throne had no king. The people who had been a nation had no nation. The memory of Solomon’s great Temple began to fade.


Then deliverance came from an unlikely place. Cyrus, the king of a new power, Persia, came and conquered the Babylonians and released the Jews from captivity. Later his successor, Darius allowed the Jews to go back to Jerusalem and to begin rebuilding the city, rebuilding their lives, and rebuilding the Temple.


Zerubbabel, grandson of the last king, began the work. Working with whomever he could find among the remnant of the people, he started clearing the blocks, clearing the site, building again. Only this time there were no cedars of Lebanon. This time there was no gold and no silver. No ivory. Twenty-eight days in the disillusionment had begun. This was not going to be like the old days. This Temple was not going to have the glory of the old one.


Then the prophet came around again. Haggai, who had been so convinced that the people had to build this building. Haggai speaks again over the blocks of the ruins of the old Temple and the pitiful mud and sticks that were supposed to become the new Temple. “Who is left among you who saw this house in its former glory?” he asks. Nobody. Seventy years later? There must have been hardly anyone left who had seen the old Temple in its glory. “How does it look to you now?” Pathetic. That’s how it looked to them now.


Haggai keeps talking. “Take courage, Zerubbabel. Take courage, Joshua, son of the high priest. Take courage, all you people. Work, because I am with you, says the Lord of Hosts. I promised when you came out of Egypt. My spirit is with you. Don’t you be afraid now.”


If Haggai had stopped there, this little passage might not be so disturbing. If he had left it at “God is with us” it might have been a nifty, little pep talk for people who were trying to just get by. But Haggai doesn’t leave well enough alone. It’s not enough to just promise a struggling people that God is there; he goes on to promise something fantastical.


“Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and dry land, and I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor…The gold is mine. The silver is mine. This house will be even greater than the old house because in this place I will give prosperity, says the Lord.”


Oh, Haggai, what are you promising? Is this what it’s about? Silver and gold and prosperity? Why do you get their hopes up like that? They’re a poor and desperate people, barely getting by. They will always live on the edge of empires that are not their own. They will always be at the mercy of strong powers. They will eke out a meager existence for a few more centuries and then be scattered to the four winds. Jerusalem will once again lie in ruins. The Temple will once again be brought down. What is the promise?


There are preachers who preach this, you know. There are grand sanctuaries from coast to coast that boast the best and the boldest and the greatest. I’ve seen them. I used to live in Dallas and believe me there are some great, prosperous churches there. First Baptist Church in downtown Dallas has just imploded four of their buildings so that they can build a new $115 million dollar campus that will include a fountain plaza. It’s the largest renovation by a Protestant church ever.


The promise is not about the building, though. It’s not about how great an edifice we can construct. It’s not about how marvelous we can make it. The promise of prosperity is that the people can see the glory of God. The promise of prosperity is that all the work, all the effort, all the money, all the resources we put into the church is so that we can see the true promise which is that God is with us.


Our United Methodist bishops met this week. They gathered from all over the world in Panama to hear the report of a group called A Call to Action. The church has got problems. Like many other mainline denominations, we don’t have the financial resources we used to. But we also have stopped growing. There are growing churches and there are areas of the world, like the Congo, where Methodism is exploding, but in North America as a whole, we have been losing money.


So the Call to Action says we have to stop doing what we’ve been doing. We have to restructure our national and international boards and agencies so that they can focus on the mission of the church and the mission of the church is to make disciples for Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. And where does that happen most effectively? In vital congregations. It happens in other places. It happens in campus ministries. It happens in church camps. It happens in church-related community centers. I’ve been a part of all of these. But unless we’re making disciples for Jesus Christ in places like this, we will continue to meander and falter and slow and lose our way.


What do vital congregations look like? The Call to Action group looked at data from over 32,000 congregations and it showed that high-vitality churches consistently share a few common things:
• Effective pastoral leadership including inspirational preaching, mentoring laity, and effective management
• Multiple small groups and programs for children and youth
• A mix of traditional and contemporary worship services, and
• A high percentage of spiritually engaged laity who assume leadership roles


We’ve got a lot of those factors at work here at Franktown. God has been at work here and there have been a lot of faithful people who have followed a vision of what could be. People looked around at this place and said, “It could be more.” And they worked, not only to build a house, a place where more ministry could take place, they worked on a dream.

That’s what Haggai is about. Having a dream from God of what could be and living life out of that. These are hard times in our country. We look around us at what’s going on and we hear a lot of voices that say, “We can’t.” It’s part of what the frustration in last week’s elections was about. We can’t fix our economy. We can’t fix our government. We can’t produce jobs. We can’t give our children a standard of living better than ours. We can’t compete in the global marketplace. Isn’t that how it seems?

Sometimes that “can’t do” attitude hits us as individuals, too. We look at ourselves in the mirror and we wonder what became of the person we used to be. Where did that hair go? Where did my dreams go? Where is the person I thought I was? We hear the faint echo of Haggai talking to those builders of the Temple. “Who among you is left who remembers this house, this country, this body in its former glory?” A black mood starts to creep in. To quote Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poet, “I wake and feel the fell of dark.”

The other day in the paper there was a story about bay scallops. VIMS and the UVA research center down in Oyster are working together on a project to reestablish bay scallops on the seaside. When the youth went on their mini-retreat last summer we went to Wachapreague and Mark Luckenbach showed us some of these scallops in one of the water tables.

The bay scallops were wiped out right around 1933 when the big hurricane that took out the community on Hog Island hit. Sand and mud and silt killed off all the eelgrass behind the barrier islands and when the eelgrass went so did the scallops. But these guys have a vision for what could be. Mark says it will never be like it was. They’re not going to have a major commercial fishery for bay scallops. “We’re basically starting from scratch,” he says. But they know what could be. They live out of what will be. And they do the things they need to do to build towards a day when bay scallops will once again be a part of the marine ecology of the seaside.

That’s what we’re about, as Christians. We live out of hope. We do what we do out a belief that God is going to transform the world. We don’t just lay back and wait for it to happen, though. We don’t wait for the gold and silver to arrive at our feet. We work - one mud brick at a time. One small act of witness. One small act of service. One visit at a time. One shared tear at a time. One small celebration at a time. One more prayer. One more meal. One more moment with a child. One more difficult, wonderful journey with a youth (or a parent). One more time. Until the kingdom comes.

Remember when God was with us? Remember when? God is still with us. So, in the words of Hopkins once again, “Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us.” Let Christ easter in you. It’s a verb. And it takes all the way home. Thanks be to God.

Haggai 2:1-9 [NRSV]
In the second year of King Darius, in the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month, the word of the LORD came by the prophet Haggai, saying:


Speak now to Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and to the remnant of the people, and say, ‘Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing? Yet now take courage, O Zerubbabel’, says the LORD; ‘take courage, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; take courage, all you people of the land’, says the LORD; work, for I am with you, says the LORD of hosts, according to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt. My spirit abides among you; do not fear.


For thus says the LORD of hosts: Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the LORD of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the LORD of hosts. The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the LORD of hosts; and in this place I will give prosperity, says the LORD of hosts.

Of Books and Itchy Ears

Let’s try a little exercise to begin the sermon today. I’m going to read a paragraph I wrote for an essay on biblical literacy a couple of years ago and you pick out images and phrases that come from the Bible:

Some folks said that he was the apple of his father’s eye [Deut. 32:10; Psalm 17:8; Prov. 7:2]. A prodigal [Luke 15:11-32], the boy had broken his father’s heart by going in search of his fortune in the Promised Land [Exodus 12:25 & elsewhere]. Instead he found himself in an unfamiliar country where the habits of the inhabitants were like the tongues of Babel [Genesis 11:1-9]. He tried to make a go of it by establishing a business and networking with new friends, but a series of downturns and tragedies left him sitting on the ash heap [Job 2:7-8] of his life. Finally, tired of feeling like a stranger in a strange land [Gen 23:4; Ex. 2:24, Psa. 39:12], the boy prayed that he might be delivered from his misfortunes which felt like the belly of the whale [Jonah 1:17-2:2]. He prayed that he might return home despite his father’s admonitions that in pursuing money he was giving himself over to the root of all evil [1 Timothy 6:10]. In his fervency he was sweating blood [Luke 22:44] as he prayed. The next day he started back and when he got home he found that his father met him with an olive branch [Gen. 8:10-11] and forgiveness.

A few weeks ago the Pew Research Center came out with the results of a survey that gave some fairly depressing results. When they asked people to answer 32 basic questions about religion, hardly anyone passed. You know who answered the most correctly? People who identified as atheists or agnostics. They were followed by Jewish and Mormon respondents. Where did mainline Protestants like United Methodists show up? You don’t want to know. They averaged a little over 15 correct answers – less than half. Evangelical Protestants were only a hair better. The conclusion of the researchers was that, despite the fact that the United States is one of the most religious nations in the world, “large numbers of Americans are uninformed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions – including their own.”[i]

You know, if just having a Bible were the key to literacy, we Americans would be among the most biblically literate people in the world since about 93% of us have a Bible in our home.[ii] But having a Bible in the home doesn’t make you literate any more than having a dictionary makes you a good speller. If it’s going to be useful, a Bible has to be read. But even here Americans rank pretty high. 75% of us say we have read from the Bible in the last year compared to only a quarter of Spaniards.[iii]

We also have a high view of the Bible. A Barna survey found that 48% of all adults “agreed strongly that the Bible is totally accurate in all of its teachings” and that number has increased by 13% since 1991.[iv] Most of us believe that it is “the inspired word of God.”[v] We say with our lips, at least to surveyors, that the Bible is a critical source for God’s revelation.

Even with all that, though, we have a hard time identifying even basic information about the Bible. Only half of American adults can name just one of the four Gospels. More than half can’t name the first book of the Bible. Ten percent of us believe that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.[vi]

So what’s the big deal? I don’t know how electricity works either, but I use it all the time. Does it really make a difference that Christians don’t know the basic information about the Christian faith? Is the name of Noah’s wife really essential information?

In the Second Letter to Timothy, (which is one of the 66 books of the Bible, by the way), the wise apostle writes to young Timothy and says, “Remember.” Remember what you learned. Remember who taught you what you know. Remember those scriptures that formed you and made you. Stay close to the scriptures, (and here he would have been talking about the scriptures we know as the Old Testament), because they are inspired and useful. They will tell you what to teach and they will help you know when there is an error in teaching that is leading people astray. They will form people in righteousness, just like they did you, Timothy, so that they will be ready to go off into the world and to do good works. Stand firm in the story that was given to you, Timothy.

It seems like such a strange exercise. Maybe even a pointless exercise. We stand up here week after week and we force ourselves to read about strange peoples the Amelekites and the Jebusites and we read strange names like Mephibosheth and Jehosophat. We read about strange customs and strange practices that have long since disappeared from the earth. Why would we do such a thing? Who are these ancient Hebrews that we should care? I was born in Virginia. Shouldn’t I care more for Thomas Jefferson and Arthur Ashe?

Questions like that assume that there is no connection between the people of God in Israel and the people of God in Franktown today. Questions like that assume that the only important connections are the ones that I can make and the only identity that matters is the one that I create. But something very dangerous happens when we try to create ourselves. We become empty and at the same time full of ourselves. We make of ourselves a question, as St. Augustine put it in the 5^th century.

I heard an interview recently with a researcher who had worked with a man who had no memory. After undergoing surgery as a young man he had lost the ability to retain any information. So, while he could tell you all about World War II, if you told him that he was celebrating his 80^th birthday he would laugh and say, “That can’t be true.” Each day he would look at his friends and not recognize them. Each day he would forget where he lived. When he began to read he would get to the end of a sentence and not remember how it started.

He said it was like living constantly in a dream. Without memory there was no basis or context for his social relationships. He couldn’t keep track of ongoing events. He was completely disabled.

As Christian people we run the risk of this sort of amnesia when we lose touch with our most basic stories. But it’s worse with us. We also run the risk of intentionally turning our backs on these stories. What was it that Paul warned Timothy about? That the day would come when people would not be content with the stories they had been given. The day would come would they would have itchy ears, anxious to hear some other story, some other message. Something that was easier to hear. Like maybe a gospel that didn’t ask too much of us. Like maybe a gospel that promised us earthly prosperity. Like maybe a gospel that was not very much different than the platform of a particular political party. Like maybe a gospel that affirmed our prejudices, affirmed our lifestyles, affirmed our moral decisions and never challenged us to act differently than we do. Like maybe a gospel that didn’t have much place for a cross, or for the poor, or for those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.

The only way that you get a gospel like that is if you forget. If you forget where you came from, the gospel can be anything you want it to be. If you close the Bible and never crack the cover…if you let it sit there because it seems too difficult or too archaic or too boring or too irrelevant…if you think its stories are too ridiculous, too outlandish, too over the top…if you think the God you meet in the Bible is too hard to understand and too impossible to believe in…then you can make a god out of anything you want. And so we do.

Why do we go back to the Bible? It certainly doesn’t make sense by any other standard in the world. It only makes sense because there are some stories that we claim and there are other stories that claim us. The Bible tells us about the story that we walked into. It’s a story that began a long time before we did. It’s a story that includes tales of people who were a lot like you and me and who had a difficult time living with and loving God, just like we do. But the Bible says these are our ancestors. Crafty old Jacob – yep, that’s my grandfather (with several greats tacked on). Beautiful Queen Esther? My aunt. Jesus? My brother. My savior. The Word of God spoken into a broken world for the salvation of all people.

So what can you do? Here’s a challenge. Just start with one gospel. When the season of Advent begins next month we’ll be reading a lot from the gospel of Matthew. How about reading that one gospel between now and Thanksgiving? Some things won’t make sense. Matthew talks a lot about things that the prophets have said. But the story is clear enough and the Jesus you will meet in Matthew is the same Jesus who is trying to speak into your life and into the life of the world today.

What else can you do? Join a Bible study or create one. Talk to me or Rae if you’d like some ideas about where to start. Use a devotional like the Upper Room, which is out in the narthex, to start entering the Bible a verse at a time with the help of a devotional writer.

Above all else, approach the Bible like your life depends on it. It’s OK to rage at it, question it, wrestle with it…to study it with all the questions and suspicions that come from being who you are. But expect that there is a life-giving word for you there. Because God still speaks through these ancient words. And God has a message for you and for the world. Just don’t go there unless you want to be transformed.

I’ve been struggling with the Bible my whole life. Sometimes it’s like my crazy relative that I look at and say, “Really? I’m related to him?” But sometimes it’s like my grandmother who could take anything I was going through and turn it into love and warmth. Why do I study the Bible? Because it hasn’t given up on me yet. And if I ever get to the point where my memory fails and I can’t remember one solitary thing about who I am, I hope I can at least remember the words of one of the first church songs I ever learned: Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Thanks be to God.

2 Timothy 3:14 - 4:5

But you: continue in the things you learned and believed. You know from whom you learned them, and you also know that from earliest childhood you have known the sacred writings, which have the power to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All God-inspired writings are also useful for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting faults, for bringing someone up in righteousness, so that the person of God may be fully ready, equipped completely for every good work.

I charge you on behalf of God and Christ Jesus, the one who is coming to judge the living and the dead, and looking to his revelation and his reign: preach the word, stand ready whether the time seems right or not, rebuke, reprove, invite, with all patience and teaching. Because the time will come when sound teaching will not be accepted but instead everyone will gather teachers that titillate the ears as each one sees fit, and they will turn their ears away from truth, but will go out of their way for fictions.

But you: be clear-headed in everything, bear afflictions, do the work of one who announces good news, fulfill your ministry.

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[i] “US Religious Knowledge Survey,” The Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life, 28 September 2010, http://pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx.

[ii] Cindy Wooden, “Not an easy read: Survey indicates Bible hard to understand,” Catholic News Service, May 2, 2008, http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0802435.htm.

[iii] “Vatican survey compares Americans and Europeans on biblical literacy,” June 3, 2008, The Christian Century, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_11_125/ai_n25486031/print?tag=artBody;col1.

[iv] “The Bible,” Barna Reach Group summary of surveys on the Bible and biblical literacy, http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdateNarrow&BarnaUpdateID=216&Pa.

[v] “One-Third of Americans Believe the Bible is Literally True,” Gallup News Service, May 25, 2007, http://www.gallup.com/poll/27682/One-Third-Americans-Believe-Bible-Literally-True.aspx.

[vi]Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – and Doesn’t, [Harper One: New York, 2007], p. 39.