The Kingdom of Heaven is Like Unto a Knuckleball

I know it's the beginning of football season, but it's almost time for the major league baseball playoffs, too, and you know what that means.  I'm watching my Texas Rangers very carefully as they make their way back to the World Series and I'm going to give you an positive, uplifting story about a baseball player.  And today I want to introduce you to R.A. Dickey.

Now Dickey doesn't play for the Rangers, although he started out with them.  He's not going to the World Series or the playoffs because his team, the New York Mets, is not going to make it this year.  But R.A.  Dickey is having one of the best seasons a major league pitcher has ever had.  He's never had more than 11 wins in a season but he's already got 18.  He's got the lowest Earned Run Average of his career.  Almost to 200 strikeouts.  And he is a likely candidate for the National League Cy Young Award, given to the best pitcher in the league.

But why am I telling you about R.A. Dickey?  Because he throws a knuckleball.  Nobody else who is active in the major leagues throws a knuckleball.  Most pitchers rely on a mixture of fastballs, where they try to blow the ball past the hitter, and breaking balls, which can look like a fastball when they come out of a pitcher's hand, but move and curve and break away from the middle of the strike zone.

Knuckleballs don't do that.  Knuckleballs are not fast pitches.  The pitcher grips the ball with his knuckles and kind of floats it to the plate.  When the knuckleball is working it can make hitters look ridiculous as they swing at the air.  Dickey describes it as trying to hit a butterfly in a typhoon.*  But because the knuckleball is usually so unpredictable, when it's not working the pitcher can give up all kinds of walks and runs.  The amazing thing about Dickey this season, and it's something no one else has really ever been able to do so successfully, is that he has been able to throw the knuckleball consistently well without all the walks.  At 37 years of age, after knocking around the league for more than a decade, R.A. Dickey has found his pitch.

Now here's something else to know about Dickey - he's a Christian and his faith is a big part of his story.  He's even got a baptism story, though it's not what you think.  One time, when he was down in the minor leagues thinking that he wasn't going to make it back to the bigs because his pitching just stunk, he was traveling with the team to Omaha.  He looked out at the Missouri River from his hotel room, and he was a good swimmer, and he said to himself, "I'm going to swim to Iowa," which was 250 yards across this big, turbulent, muddy, dirty river.

Some teammates went out with him to watch this event from the shoreline.  Dickey stripped down to his boxer shorts and went down into the water and started swimming.  But he quickly discovered that this was not like any other swimming he had ever done.  About 60 yards out he was being pulled hard by a strong undertow and he felt like he was just treading water.  He looked back at the shore and he could see that the current had already carried him about a quarter mile down from where his teammates had been standing.  He looked across at the far shore and had to decide whether to keep going or to turn back.  And he turned back.                                                                    

But by this point he was so tired and the current was so strong that he was convinced he was going to make it.  He said he started to weep underwater as he sank down.  "I was praying that God...would protect my family and all that.  I had come to grips with dying...and right as I was about to open my mouth and take in all this water...just end it quickly...my feet hit the bottom of the river and it kind of renewed my adrenaline."** He pushed off the river bottom and came up to a place where one of his teammates had run.  And he pulled him out.

That's the moment, Dickey looks back on as the turning point - a baptism he calls it, when he stopped living out of his anxieties about who he was and what was going to happen to himself and his career, and started living in the present.  He started some therapy to deal with problems in his marriage and in overcoming childhood sexual abuse.  And he started throwing the knuckleball.  Dickey says, "I feel like that there was something very divine about that...I began throwing the knuckleball exactly when I really started working on my life and trying to become...who God had authentically created me to be.  And I think those things parallel each other."***

A knuckleball cannot really be controlled.  You have to just take the ball and get your fingers in just the right place and let it go.  It's not about power.  It's about working with the ball with patience and attention.  And in pitching that way - one pitch at a time - in living that way - with patience and attention - R.A. Dickey has found God had created him to be.

OK, there's your uplifting story.  But here's the thing that speaks a gospel message to me: good living, like good knuckleball pitching, is about practice.  It's about giving yourself over to practices that will help you grow in the faith.

The book of James is all about practices and it is pretty fierce about them.  James made the Protestant Reformers like Martin Luther nervous because the book is emphatic about works.  "Faith without works is dead," James says and Luther saw how that kind of theology could lead people to go off the rails.  He grew up with an understanding of faith that was so works oriented that he was always anxious about his salvation, believing that he had not done enough to earn God's grace and mercy.  He believed that he could never do enough to satisfy God's demands for righteousness.  He eventually realized that, even though that was true, his faith in what Jesus had done on the cross was sufficient to grant him salvation.  And he never wanted to stop living out of that freedom, so when he read James, it made him nervous.  People might think that the only way to heaven is to earn it.  People might think that they can do it without any reference to Jesus.

James, however, is not talking about earning salvation.  He's talking about what happens in the Christian community because we have faith in Christ.  Because we have faith, we will do.  And if we don't do, what kind of Christian witness are we giving?  What are we doing to our souls?

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book not too long ago called Outliers and in it he examines the lives of extraordinarily gifted people.  Who are these people that so excel in their fields that we call them outliers?  In business, music, sports, the arts there are people who are extremely gifted.  What's going on with these people?

Well, one of the things that Gladwell found is that a common thread for them is that they devote hours to their craft.  He even identifies something called the 10,000 Hour Rule.  Truly phenomenal people become phenomenal, not just by having natural gifts, but by giving hours to what they do.  He looks at violinists who we recognize as being outliers and says, "in fact, by the age of twenty, the elite performers had each totaled ten thousand hours of practice."****  "To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fisher got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.)  And what's ten years?  Well, it's roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice.  Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness."*****

That's a lot of hours.  And most of us are not going to dedicate that kind of time to a craft.  But what if we tried?  What if we gave ourselves over to something that would form us and guide us?  R.A. Dickey was late in his career before he took up the knuckleball.  What is our calling to which we would give real time and practice and life?

How much are we giving to growing in the Christian life?  An hour a week - let's say 50 weeks a year - 200 years you'll have the chops to be a phenomenal Christian.  Throw in Sunday School and you've got it down to a century.  But what if we gave more?  What do you think you would discover about yourself and God if you gave yourself to growing in holiness - sanctification as John Wesley called it?  And I'm not just talking about in-church time.  I mean living it in the world.
That is where James calls us to live it.  He knows that God is often found in the poor and we live out of an authentic faith when discover God among the poor and refuse to show favoritism.  God loves people in T-shirts.  God loves people with dirty hands from hard work.  God loves people who love their neighbors - all their neighbors.  God shows mercy on those who show mercy.

The church becomes the church when it lives out the gospel message of Jesus who made a point of living among the poor.  He ate with sinners.  He hung out with lepers.  He gave hungry people food.  He healed the sick.  He comforted the grieving.  And he commanded - not asked - commanded us to do the same.  "You will do greater things than this," he said.  "How will we do greater things if we don't ever encounter those in need?"

In her song about God's upheaval of the world as we know it, Hannah in 1 Samuel sings that "the Lord will judge the ends of the earth" (I Sam. 2:10).  It's a statement of God's sovereignty, right?  There's no place on earth where God's reign isn't accomplished.  But it's also a statement that on the margins, at the edge, at the places where you might think God has overlooked what's going on, the kingdom is coming.

Let me let you in on a little secret - you are living at the end of the earth.  The Eastern Shore of Virginia - how many times have people told you that this is the end of the earth?  Around us there is poverty and need and economic impoverishment and scarcity and racial tensions - but the Lord will judge the ends of the earth.  You can do greater things than this.  Faith, if it has no works, is dead.  All ways of saying - the kingdom of heaven is at hand - in your hands.

So put your hand to the work of the kingdom.  You're not gripping it and burning it into the catcher's mitt like a fastball.  It's not your power that's going to bring the kingdom home.  You're not cutting it or sliding it or curving it so that it sneaks across.  It's not your finnesse or style that's going to bring the kingdom home.  Hold it lightly, this kingdom which is God's gift to us.  Give it your patience and your attention.  Live for this moment, this time.  Give all of your life to this work.  Don't hold anything back.  And then let it go.  Let it go.  Do what you can.  Do all that you can and let God do the rest.  Thanks be to God.

*R.A. Dickey, interviewed by Dave Davies, "R.A. Dickey on 'Winding Up' as a Knuckleballer," KERA News, 10 April 2012, http://keranews.org/post/ra-dickey-winding-knuckleballer.  Accessed 8 Sept 2012.
**ibid.
***ibid.
****Malcolm Gladwell, quoted in Erik Deckers, "What Malcolm Gladwell REALLY Said About The 10,000 Hour Rule," Professional Blog Service, 15 March 2012, http://problogservice.com/2012/03/15/what-malcolm-gladwell-really-said-about-the-10000-hour-rule/.  Accessed 8 Sept 2012.
*****ibid.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Worshipping God with Unclean Hands

OK, kids, my first message this morning is for you.  Did you hear that Gospel lesson that we just read?  The one about the Pharisees complaining to Jesus that about his disciples eating food with unclean hands?  The first thing I want to say is - this is not a lesson on how it is OK to eat with dirty hands.  I don't want you going home and saying to your folks, "I don't have to wash my hands because Jesus said it was OK to have dirty hands."  Uh-uh.  Not the message for today.

The message for today is - having dirty hands is the best kind of unclean to have.  But that's not the same thing as saying, "Hey, I'm going to eat my sandwich with dirty hands."  Jesus wants you to be healthy.  And he wants you to listen to your mom.

So, what is going on in this gospel story?  It's a little hard for us to get into because the world it comes out of is so far gone.  The Pharisees who were sitting there watching Jesus' disciples eat were not worried about germs; they were trying to get Jesus caught up in a controversy over legalism.

I've been watching the political campaign and I see some of the same things going on.  There's a kind of "gotcha" game and the sad part is that the political campaigns think that you and I are dull enough to go along with it.  You know, every ad takes some little phrase from a candidate, takes it out of context, and then blows it up so that the candidate looks as bad as they can possibly look.  As if Romney really believes that poor people are not important.  Or as if Obama really believes that business owners didn't build anything.  [Some of you are probably shaking your head right now and saying, "O, no.  He really believes that."  But don't do that.  We're smarter than that.  Don't let the ads tell you what to believe.]

But we'll have plenty of time for politics this fall.  What I'm trying to get at here is that the Pharisees were playing a game in which they were trying to catch Jesus out for not towing their line.  The rules they were worried about were the ones they had outlined.  They had taken the old Mosaic laws and particularly the laws about what made something clean or unclean and they had turned them into straitjackets.  It wasn't about germs - they didn't know about germs then.  It was about doing the right thing in the right way.

Mark outlines all of their concerns in this passage.  They were trying to maintain the traditions of their elders.  You had to wash your hands in a particular way.  You had to ritually wash food from the market.  You had to ritually wash the pottery you ate from and the pitchers you drank from and the copper kettles you cooked with and even the dinner couches where you sat down to eat.  A taco stand would have sent these guys right over the edge.

But they know that Jesus is a radical kind of guy.  They know his disciples are doing things differently.  So they know they're going to catch them and when they see the disciples eating without washing exactly the way they washed, they say to Jesus, "Aha!  You're not upholding the traditions of the elders."  And beyond that what they're saying is, "You're not one of us.  You don't believe like we believe.  You are a threat.  You are not a good Jew.  Let's see your birth certificate."

That's when Jesus turns it around on them.  And he goes back to Isaiah the prophet, to the scriptures that he shared with the Pharisees.  And he quotes a verse (Isaiah 29:13) that says, "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me."  What he's saying is - you have made worship and obedience an external act.  But if you only do the act and your heart is not close to God then you have made religion all about you instead of about God.

He spells it out to the disciples later after he tells the crowd a parable.  He says, "Listen.  Nothing is outside of a person going in can make then unclean.  It's what comes out a person that is unclean.  And then later, with the disciples, he gets graphic.  He talks about what comes out of a person and goes into the sewer.  You want to talk unclean - that's unclean.  But you know this is not really about food and digestion.  Jesus is after something more.  And what he wants is not just your diet.  Jesus wants your heart.

Not too long ago I ran across a great book called All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly.  OK, OK, yes, they are philosophers, but their book was really interesting.  They set out to read through all the Western classics of literature from the Odyssey to Moby Dick and to look at how our understanding of who we are as human beings changes through those works.  They spend some time with Jesus and they say that one of the most important things about Jesus was that he created the notion that we have an inner life.  We might want to say that there are other important things about Jesus, but stay with them here.

It's not that people before Jesus didn't have inner thoughts and desires.  It's just that they didn't think they were all that important.  As the authors point out, of the Ten Commandments only one has to do with an internal act - the command against coveting.   The rest were external - take care of your parents, observe the sabbath, don't commit murder, don't commit adultery - things you could see.

Jesus turns all of that inside out - or outside in.  He says, "Where do you think murder comes from?  It's not just something that happens out there.  It begins in your heart.  Adultery begins in your heart.  Theft begins in your heart.  And what is it that Jesus wants?  Not just your good behavior, but your heart.  Dreyfus and Kelly say, "Jesus thus brings the purity of one's desires from the margins of the Hebrew sense of what counts as a worthy life to the center of his Christian sensibility."*  The purity of our desires.

That's just what he tells the disciples.  If you are so caught up in washing the dishes that you can't see what's going on between you and God in your heart, you're doing it wrong.
So hear what he's saying.  Jesus says, "It's not about the externals.  You have an inner life.  And that inner life is messed up.  It's disordered.  It's like a wild, overgrown garden.  And for you to get it under control, you've got to give it over to God."

But listen to what Jesus is not saying here.  He is not saying that the externals don't matter.  He's not saying that our actions don't matter.  What he's saying is that obedience to God is the first step.

Now that's not a popular thing to say in our culture.  We don't like that word obedience.  We don't like the notion that we have to give ourselves over to an authority.  Because we have seen enough flawed authority figures to know how that can be abused.  Obedience is a slavemaster's word.  Obedience is a soviet politburo word.  Obedience is something you send dogs to school for.  Obedience feels unAmerican.

But here's the sad truth.  Sin has made such a mess of things that the only way to find freedom is through obedience.  The only way you are going to discover who you are and what the world ought to be is to give up yourself to God.

Because the world doesn't know.  The world will tell you that you are a bundle of desires and subconscious motivations and that you might as well just give them free rein because they're there and we're free.  But what if you are meant for something more?  What if there is something greater waiting for you if you tend the garden of your soul?  What if God means for you to do more than you're doing?

That's where James comes in, because James knows that dirty hands are part of what the Christian life is all about.  James was writing to the early Christian community and he could already see the divide happening.  There were hearers and there were doers and the hearers were falling into a trap.  They believed that because they heard the Word...because they trusted Jesus...because they had made that movement toward God...they were done.

But James says, no.  If that's how you act it's just like somebody looking into a mirror and then walking away and forgetting what they look like.  Hearing without doing is a great way to lose your identity as a Christian.

Doers look into the law, the things that God has given us to get our inner life in order, and they know who they are.  And they will live out of that.  They will watch their tongue for harmful language.  They will care for orphans and widows - those who are living on the edge.  And they will keep themselves unstained by the world.  Not because they live above it, but because they know that the world is not sufficient to tell them who they are.

This week I was on a mission trip with some of our members down in North Carolina.  We were repairing a roof that had been damaged by Hurricane Irene last year.  And I learned a lot.  I learned that construction workers are worth every penny they are paid.  Watching Will Brown and Jack Smith and Glenn Ballon - the Beast - on the roof doing their thing was inspiring.  And they taught me just enough to eventually get me up on the roof, too.  And that's why I've got abrasions all over me.  It was hot, dirty work but very satisfying.  Especially when the family came to dinner with us on Wednesday night and thanked us for taking care of a roof that had been leaking for a year.

We stayed at an old school that now houses a lot of county offices in Hyde County.  But the gym and cafeteria had been taken over the United Methodist Church and it was also inspiring to see the cross and flame up on the side of the wall there.  We are there in Hyde County.  We are the only relief agency that is still there.  And we are there because we are worshipping God with our dirty hands - living out the gospel one roof at a time.

If we make a numbers game out of this or say that if we do so many roofs it will get us to heaven - we're back in the company of the Pharisees.  But if our hearts guide our hands - if God is moving within us - Jesus is here.  Thanks be to God.

*Hubert Dreyfus & Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, Free Press: New York, 2011, electronic version, p. 534.

YOLO - Seeking Wisdom

You know that I'm a hip guy.  I'm always on top of the latest trends.  I know that 8-track players are no longer cool.  I stopped saying "Gag with me a spoon" several months ago.  And just this week I learned about voice-activated T-shirts, which light up when you talk to them.  I also know what YOLO means.

YOLO is a trendy acronym that is showing up on T-shirts and on Twitter accounts and it stands for "You Only Live Once."  It usually appears when someone is texting you or tweeting about their latest poor decision or, more likely, a hypothetical poor decision.  So you might see a report that has "Filling my mouth with whipped cream and running down the street saying, 'I have rabies.'  #YOLO."  It's silly stuff, although if some of the things that get reported actually are happening I'm thinking YOLO ought to stand for "Youth Overlooking Lasting Outcomes."

But it's not just youth.  We older folks talk about our "bucket list" of things we want to do before we die, some of which involves a certain amount of irresponsibility.  And major ad campaigns encourage us to forget the consequences of our actions - just do it.  Pepsi's slogan of the moment is "Live for Now."  I saw an ad this week, I think it was for doughnuts, that said, "Indulge Now!"  I had never been commanded to eat doughnuts before so that was a strange moment.  Maybe I'm overthinking this trend but do you see a pattern here?  We are living in a  YOLO world and I'm wondering what it all means.  And what does it mean to be a Christian in a YOLO world?  Do we really believe that You Only Live Once?

Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar, has a new book out called Remember You are Dust and in it he talks about the culture clash that we are involved in.  It's not just a clash, he says, it's a crisis, and it's not the fault of liberals or conservatives, the 1960s or Wall Street.  What's happened is that we are now experiencing the fruit of 400 years of living in the modern world.  For about 400 years we have had a world developing that has relied on human reason as it's principle guide to knowledge.  Why do I trace that back 400 years, because that's when Rene Descartes, a French soldier, was sitting in a hut by a fire and started to doubt. He said to himself, "What if I can't trust anything around me to tell me who I am and what the world is like?  What if this is all a dream?  What is reliable?  What can I build a foundation on?"  People before Descartes might have said that God was that foundation, and Descartes believed in God, but he wanted something else to build on and the most trustworthy thing he could find for that was reason.  Do you remember what he said?  "I think, therefore I am."

So for 400 years thinkers, Christian and otherwise, have been building a world based on the best that human knowledge can achieve.  And we have achieved a lot.  We've got medicines that have cured diseases that plagued humanity for centuries.  We can navigate the oceans and fly in the air.  We've put human beings on the moon and a golf cart on Mars that's appropriately named Curiosity because we are a curious race.  I don't think many of us would give up the benefits of the modern world.  The quality of human life is immeasurably better because of it.  And yet, Walter Brueggemann says, we are facing a crisis.

"For many people," he says, "the deep threat and pain of this crisis is the awareness that their children can no longer relate to the great claims of faith, not because they are rebellious, but because they do not care, or caring, cannot understand or see the point.  They no longer know where responsible social passion comes from, why caring is important, or how the disciplines of faith matter, or why.  There is, between parents and children, a common yearning...[that] arises not because anyone is 'bad,' but because an alien perception of reality makes engagement with the tradition of 'fear of Yahweh' unconvincing and without credibility."*

What Brueggemann is saying there with that phrase 'fear of Yahweh' is that the whole biblical worldview and the whole biblical understanding of wisdom is at risk because the 'fear of Yahweh,' the 'fear of the Lord' is receding into the background in the modern world.  And the Bible tells us, in places like Proverbs 9:10 is that the "fear of the Lord is beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight."  Is it human reason that gives us wisdom?  Or is it the 'fear of the Lord'?

Now let's don't beat the modern world over the head with a stick.  That's the temptation, right?  To say that is a godless, heedless world that has forgotten its roots and if it would just turn back to God it would find itself.  Well, perhaps.  And yes, the world often lives as if it is godless and heedless.  But I don't believe that people want to live that way.  I believe people yearn for something more.  They yearn for something to live for.  They yearn for something to die for.

A little over a week ago I had the opportunity to have a lunch with some of the staff and the superintendent of Northampton County Schools.  I listened as they talked about the testing numbers that were needed to declare our schools successful or even adequate.  "We need a 70 and we've got a 69."  It was only when they started to talk about the children that I realized what I needed to hear, what we all long to hear - that success is not measured in test scores.  It's measured in human lives.  And I believe that our children, our parents, our teachers, even our administrators, are yearning for a mission that they can give their whole lives to.  We want to believe...we have to believe that we are meant for something more and our schools will not be transformed until we do believe that something radically important is going on there.

So when we talk about 'putting the fear of God' back into folks, I don't think it's as simple as browbeating people back into submission.  The fear of God is not like the fear of some great and terrible thing where we all get in line because if we don't, well, look out!  The fear of the Lord is not a trembling fear, it is as Bruggemann says, "to take God with utmost seriousness as the premise and perspective from which life is to be lived."**  To take God with utmost seriousness.  That is a countercultural act.

Which brings me to Solomon and the text we read for today.  When we think of wisdom we almost always end up talking about Solomon, because Solomon asks for wisdom.

The Bible seems to look at Solomon with a certain amount of ambivalence.  On the one hand Solomon is revered as being at the highpoint of Israel's history as a nation.  Solomon picked up where his father David left off and built Jerusalem into one of the finest capital cities in the world.  Solomon imported cedars from Lebanon to furnish the new Temple he built for Yahweh, the God of Israel.  Solomon began many building projects, enlarged the army and even began a navy for Israel.  People came from far and wide to admire the wonders of King Solomon.  He developed a reputation for wisdom and later generations would attribute the books of Proverbs and Song of Songs to him.

That’s not all there is to the story of Solomon, though.  He is also remembered as the end of the glorious united kingdom of Israel.  The riches and wealth and honor he attained were short-lived and the kingdom divided after his death thanks to the heavy taxes and forced labor he imposed to build up Jerusalem.

He also seems to have had some issues with women.  Solomon was said to have 700 wives and 300 concubines.  That by itself would have been problem enough - imagine being beholden to 1000 relationships!  But the real problem was that each of these wives brought with them their own cultures and their own religions, since many of them were not Israelite.  Each time a marriage with a foreign woman took place, the custom was to build a shrine in Jerusalem to her nation's god.  So Solomon bore the blame for bringing in all of these idols and foreign gods.

When we get to verse 3 of chapter 3 in 1 Kings we're told that Solomon was a great king who loved Yahweh, the God of Israel, and who followed in the footsteps of David, his father, EXCEPT...and this is a pretty big except...except that he had a habit of offering sacrifices and incense on the high places - and not just in Jerusalem where all worship was supposed to take place.

In fact, Solomon is out making a sacrifice at one of these high places when God finds him in a dream. God appears to Solomon in a dream and doesn't chastise him for being in this strange place, God merely says, "What can I give you, Solomon?"  This is a great dream, huh?

Many of us would be ticking off the new boat, the vacation home in Maui, the extreme makeover, the chance to have dinner with St. Augustine.  (Hey, you have your dreams and I have mine.)  But Solomon is very wise in his response, which makes us wonder if he really needed to be given the gift God gives him.  Solomon remembers God's relationship with his father, David and then says, "You know, God, I'm really like a small child when I think about the shoes I'm trying to fill.  I've got all these people to take care of and they look to me for justice.  I'm going to need help, God."

God says to Solomon in this dream, "You didn't seek long life for yourself, you didn't seek riches for yourself, and you didn't ask for the life of your enemies.  Instead, you asked for wisdom, and because of this I will also give you what you didn’t ask for – riches and honor and long life.”

Then Solomon wakes up and realizes that it’s all been a dream.   Solomon is not a model citizen – just as all of Israel’s kings were flawed and broken people.  But he did have this insight that the world and our responsibilities in it are far more complex than we can handle relying just on our own abilities.  We need humility.  We need a heart that's open to God.  We need wisdom.

Where we will find wisdom in this world?  We have become the masters of knowledge.  Our technologies for sharing information are the best that human history has ever produced.  But we have not become wise.  What we long for is something that can't be zipped along in a tweet or an e-mail.  We long for something that will speak to our souls and we wonder if there is anything that can give it to us.

I can't use reason to give you an answer here.  There is no piece of information I can share with you in this sermon that will meet that longing.  There is nothing new under the sun that's going to speak to that place in your soul that wants to hear a new word.  What I can give you is not knowledge but bread.  Because God's wisdom comes to us through the living bread which is Jesus.  And you attain this wisdom, not in an instant, but in a continual process of coming back to the living Word, coming back to the bread of life, coming back to Jesus over and over again until your famished soul begins to feel alive once more.  Wisdom happens one prayer at a time, one meditation at a time, one meal at a time.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar, who has one of the greatest names for a theologian I can imagine, says:

"We think that God's word has been heard on earth for so long that by now it is almost used up, that it is about time for some new word, as if we had the right to demand one.  We fail to see that is is we ourselves who are used up and alienated, whereas the word resounds with the same vitality and freshness as ever; it is just as near to us as it always was.  'The word is near to you, on your lips and in your heart' (Rom. 10:8)."***

It is just as near to you as it always was.  Despite the fact that we talk about being born again, I think it is true that you only truly live once.  It is a deep, bone-deep kind of living that doesn't give itself over to the superficial comforts of the passing world.  The world doesn't remember where it has come from and it doesn't know where it is going.  It has become disconnected from the promises of God and the story of Christ.  It does not know that it is being longed for by God and therefore redeemed by God's love.  Imagine that.  God is longing for you.  Thanks be to God.

*Walter Brueggemann, Remember That You are Dust [Cascade: Eugene, OR, 2012], pp. 22-23.
**ibid., pp. 13-14.
***Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer [Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 1986], p. 16

Absalom, Absalom

Today's story of David and Absalom is a story of how David's chickens came home to roost.  Now, actually, I don't know if David had any chickens.  I rather doubt it.  And why chickens coming home to roost should be a dark omen is not clear to me.  That's what chickens do at the end of the day.  They come home to roost.  There's nothing menacing about it.  It's not like the movie The Birds where ordinary sweet-looking birds start pecking poor Tippi Hedren.  Chickens are just not that scary a creature.  But that's the phrase we use to describe what happens when things you have done in the past come back to haunt you.  And if I were doing one of those modern paraphrases of the Bible I would headline this section from 2 Samuel that we read "David's Chickens Come Home to Roost."

Now that I've got that off my chest - I think it is remarkable that we have this story at all - at least in the form that we have it.  We are used to having stories of heroes with clay feet in our day.  Not that our heroes literally have clay feet.  That's another one of those phrases that...well, never mind.  You know what I mean.  If David MacCulloch, the historian, were going to write a history of Thomas Jefferson, we would expect that he would include all sorts of things about Jefferson, from the great things (Declaration of Independence!) to the not-so-great (Sally Hemmings!).  But in the ancient world what we usually get are stories that are so cleaned up that great men (and they are almost always men) are described as moving from one great and historic victory to another without ever stumbling or getting so much as hangnail.

David, however, gets the full treatment.  King David, the greatest king the nation of Israel ever had, the uniter of the nation, the establisher of Jerusalem, the man after God's own heart, the most interesting man in the world - THAT David had some issues.  We saw some of them on display last week in the story of Bathsheba where David takes a man's wife, tries to cover it up, orders the man's murder and then pretends like nothing has happened.  And when Nathan the prophet confronts him about it, we hear Nathan's ominous prophecy: "David, thus says the Lord: beware the chickens.  Beware the chickens that will come home to roost."  You know, it's a little bit different in other translations.  This is kind of my paraphrase.  But basically the idea is that because of his sins, David will suffer terrible consequences.  Besides the death of the child that Bathsheba will bear, God tells David that one day trouble will come from within his own house.  Someone in his own house will take his own wives...(yes, wives, plural - it was different back in the day)...someone from his own household will take his own wives and lie with them within full view of the nation.

Well, today's story from 2 Samuel gives us a fulfillment of that prophecy.  Absalom, David's own son, is the trouble from within his own household.  Absalom rebels against his father.  Absalom takes over the Jerusalem as David runs away.  Absalom takes his father's wives to the rooftop of the palace.  Absalom brings all the achievements to the king to nothing.

The piece of the story that we read, though, doesn't give you everything.  It gives you the ending.  The last scene of the story is David mourning over the death of his son, Absalom, after his soldiers, under the command of the general, Joab, find Absalom, caught by his hair in a tree,    (I used to get my hair caught in the trees), hanging, the Bible says, between heaven and earth, and they pierce him with spears...kill him, despite David's orders not to harm him.  When the word comes back, David cries out, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!  Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!"  And you would think that what we have is a story about grief and loss and the pain that comes when families are torn apart by rebellion and trauma.

Except the story is even more complex than that.  We have been here before with David.  He has played this scene out before.  Do you remember how he and his renegade army fought against the old King Saul?  How David had men out trying to take over the kingdom and how they did that, finally surrounding Saul and his son, Jonathan, whom David loved like a brother, on a mountain?  And when David hears that they have died he cries out, "How the mighty have fallen!...Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely!" [2 Sam. 1: 19, 23].  He does not seem to make the connection that going to war will entail death and loss.  Just like he doesn't seem to realize how sending men into battle against Absalom might lead to Absalom's death.

The relationship between David and Absalom is complicated, too.  This rebellion is not the only trouble that had arisen in his household.  Another son, Amnon, had attacked his sister, Tamar, and David had taken no action to rein in the son.  He gets angry but leaves the son alone because, the Bible says, "he loved Amnon" [2 Sam. 13:21].  Family trauma was no different then than it is now.  You and I know that the scars family members inflict on each other can be some of the deepest scars there are.  And you don't have to be a Freudian to know that trauma that is not dealt with - that does not get dealt with on the surface - will come out in other ways - in new cycles of violence and abuse.

So two years passed.  Absalom knows what his brother Amnon did to his sister Tamar.  Two full years pass and Absalom plans a feast for all the sons.  He begs the king to make sure that Amnon can come.  And after he gets Amnon good and drunk at the feast, he gives the command to his servants and they kill Amnon in front of all the brothers.  The chickens come home to roost.  Those chickens.

Absalom flees.  He stays away for 3 years until Joab - yes, that Joab, the general who will kill him - arranges for another prophet to come and tell David a story.  Just like Nathan told David a story.  This time the prophet is woman who tells a story about a man who has only two sons.  The sons get into a fight in the field one day.  It's a tragic fight.  It probably would not have ended badly except that there was no one to separate them and the one son kills the other.  The remaining son now faces the required punishment of death.  But the father will now lose both sons and the possibility of having any heir, which was very important in that society.  You have no name if you have no heir.

The woman prophet says that she is the mother.  She begs for the life of the remaining son.  David is moved.  He declares that not one hair of the son's head will be harmed.  And you remember how Nathan stopped the show with the words, "You are the man"?  Well, now the woman says to the king, in effect, "You have convicted yourself.  How can keep your son as an outcast banished from your presence?  You know good and evil, king.  God will help you discern.  Bring your son home."

So David relents and allows Absalom to come home, but there is no true reconciliation.  David refuses to see him for two years until Absalom forces the question by setting the general Joab's field on fire and demanding an audience with the king.  That just paves the way for the rebellion that follows.

That is the tortured history of David's relationship with his son.  So when he stands there grieving and crying out, "Absalom, Absalom," we know that David may be feeling real emotions, but he has been here before and the situation is complicated by his refusal to deal with the troubles he has caused.  David has shown that he can overlook injustice, that he can not see the consequences of his actions, that he can allow his emotions to overrule his judgment.  And people suffer all around him.

Even now, as he weeps over his son, people are suffering.  His soldiers sneak back into town, having risked their lives for David and the kingdom, but ashamed because the king does not seem to care about their sacrifice or about them.  He only sees Absalom.  It takes Joab to convince him that unless he goes out to see the troops he will lose them and lose the kingdom and very likely lose his life.  So he forces himself to go and sit on the seat at the gates of Jerusalem and to observe the troops filing past him into the city.  Sitting there like a chicken come home to roost.

There are so many things going on in this story.  Some of it goes all the way back to the prophet Samuel's warning that Israel will regret having asked for a king, because the king will take the attention that ought to be devoted to God.  The king will cause misery and suffering.  The king will fail them.  So, in addition to the family drama of David and Absalom, there is the national drama of Israel and Yahweh, Israel's God.

But the perspective we want here is the theological drama.  What does God think of all this?  Surely, yes, God is disappointed by David's actions.  God demands justice and the king fails to deliver.  God expects things that David is incapable of giving sometimes.  And yet, God gives us this story.  We are the heirs of this story.  This story is our story.

We recognize ourselves in this story, don't we?  David's family could be our family because every family, even the best of families, has experienced times when there is undeserved suffering.  Parents victimize children.  Children wound their parents.  Siblings fall out.  The people who are closest to us fail us sometimes.  That's our story.  And we know it.  We journey with it.  We live through it.  It shapes who we are.

But we are baptized into another story.  You can live your whole life shaped by the twisted narrative of the broken world.  You can live your whole life armed with the sense of injustice that comes from being abandoned.  Being hurt.  Being rejected.  Being wronged.  Being the one who has wronged.  And that can be your reality.

Or...you can recognize that what happens in the Bible is the rejection of that reality.  Being baptized in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit means that you are branded with a new name and you become part of a new story that has a new ending.  And in this narrative you are the child who has been wounded by sin who is redeemed by a love that is most clearly visible on a cross.  OK, you're a victim.  What of it?  You are a victim whose identity is redeemed by Jesus.  OK, you were abandoned.  What of it?  Christ was abandoned, too.  He went to that cross alone and he did it to show that God has never abandoned you.  OK, the monarchs and rulers of this world will fail us, our politics will disappoint us, our systems will not work like they're supposed to.  What of it?  God comes to establish a new kingdom and chooses you to be the agents of its proclamation.

I've been very distressed this week by the story of the accident up the road in which a woman struck a child who went into the road after chasing a balloon.  The death was tragic.  But the confrontation that followed was disturbing, too.  Xavier Hill, the child was African-American.  The woman in the car was white.  And in an instant the accident was caught up in all kinds of narratives that had to do with a whole lot more than a child wandering into the road.  People surrounded the car.  Racial epithets and bottles were thrown.  Friends who came to get the driver were assaulted.

The grief was compounded by grievances related to race and beliefs about each other that go back hundreds of years.  We live with those stories all the time, even if we never acknowledge them.  The legacy of racial tensions is all around us and it will continue to cause suffering until it is brought to the cross.  Until it is brought into the light of God's love.  Until we acknowledge that the best place to look for healing is not to our own conflicted hearts, but to the heart of God.  And until we talk to one another out of a deep sense of humility in the face of the wounds that are all around us.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a poem, not about chickens coming home to roost, but about an albatross.  In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner he talks about how he was forced to wear a dead albatross around his neck as a reminder of his crime for killing it.  The dead bird becomes a symbol of all of his guilt, all of his regret, all of his sins.  One stanza of the poem talks about how he looked to his fellow mariners.  It says:

Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
about my neck was hung.

What things have you done, have we done, that would be hung around our necks?  What would be the symbol of our pain and our shame?  And what would it mean if, instead of an albatross, the cross was hung?  The cross on which we find the possibility of new life and new beginnings?

Whatever the burden is around your neck today, I pray that you will lay it down.  I pray that you will let it go.  Cling to Jesus.  Cling to the old wooden cross.  Cling to the promise of the God who loves you, who hates what sin has done to you, and who wants to make us whole.  This is the God whose son was hung to a tree, suspended between heaven and earth, who was pierced by a spear, who wept for the world, and who knows that the last word is not death but resurrection and life.  May that God give us the courage to fully embrace life and to confront those things that keep us from it.  Thanks be to God.

Calling Out the King

​One of the things that I do when I'm in Dallas teaching is to try and catch up on current movies.  Ever since the Monoplex closed in Belle Haven I haven't had a place to go.  But there are lots of places to see movies in Dallas.  Unfortunately, unless you like spandex superheroes, there aren't a whole lot of good movies to see.

But I did see a film called Safety Not Guaranteed.  It stars Aubrey Plaza from the TV show Parks and Rec.  She plays an intern at a Seattle magazine who gets sent with a reporter and another intern to track down a man who has put a strange classified in the newspaper.  The classified ad says:

WANTED: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 91, Ocean View, WA 99393. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.

So the three of them go off to a small coastal town to track down this guy who is promising time travel.

Only the reporter is going for an entirely different reason.  He wants to catch up with an old flame that he hasn't seen in twenty years, so he's doing his own kind of time travel.  But the intern, named Darius, discovers that the guy who placed the ad may really be on to something.  And she begins to believe that maybe she can go really go back in time to the moment before her mother died in a car accident.  Darius' last conversation with her mom had been a phone call when she had kind of rudely asked her mom to pick up something on her way home.  We realize that she has been living with oceans of regret ever since.

Kenneth, the man building the time machine, has regrets of his own.  He has lost a girl and, in a sense, has lost his mind and is trying to find his way back. I won't spoil the ending but what struck me is the deep personal work these characters are doing.  It's not about the machine.  It's about the healing.  And the movie title gets at what needs to be said - when you try to heal the past, safety is not guaranteed.  It will take confrontation with the pain.  All that said - it is a comedy.

Our Bible story says much the same thing - safety, when dealing with past sins, is not guaranteed.  Last week Peter told you that King David did a bad, bad thing.  The man after God's own heart did a bad, bad thing.  Neglected his duties to lead his armies, coveted and slept with his neighbor's wife, tried to cover up his misdeed when she becomes pregnant, and then murders her husband when that fails.  Yeah, I think that qualifies as several bad, bad things.  The scripture even says that what David did was "evil in God's sight."

David, however, is able to ignore the pain that he has caused.  He goes on as if nothing as happened.  So God sends Nathan to call out the king.  Not an easy position to be in.  But that's why the prophets get paid the big bucks.  Or they would have if they'd been paid at all.

​Nathan is a good storyteller, just like Jesus.  He has a great parable to tell the king.  Of course, he doesn't tell David that it's a parable.  Nathan presents it to him as if it's a real problem going on in another part of the kingdom and he tells it as if he wants David's advice.

​"There is this rich man," Nathan says, "and this poor man living in the same neighborhood.  The rich man has all kinds of sheep and cattle, but the poor man only has one little ewe lamb which he had to scrape up money to buy.  He's not going to make a meal out of this lamb, either.  He raises it up as a pet - more like a member of the family, really.  He lets it eat at the table with him and lets it drink from his cup - even let's it sleep with him.  The poor man really loves this lamb.

​"Now one day a traveler comes to stay with the rich man," Nathan continues.  Now hospitality is a big thing, even today, in the Middle East.  When you have a guest you go all out, sparing no expense.  So you would always have a huge meal and slaughter an animal for a feast.  It's such a big deal, and such a big responsibility, that it's even legal for you to take a neighbor's animal to use for the feast.  But there are two big restrictions - you can't take your neighbor's sheep if you have some of your own, which of course the rich man does.  And you can't take your neighbor's sheep if it is a pet, and, of course, the poor man's ewe is a pet.

​So there is no justifiable reason for the rich man to take the poor man's lamb.  But he does it anyway.  He takes that lamb which the poor man loved so much and fixes it up as a barbecue for his guest.
​
Well, when David hears this story he is livid.  David has a strong sense of justice.  He knows how hard it is for the poor to get an even break in Israel.  He swears by God and says, "As Yahweh lives, the guy who did this ought to die!  I'll make him pay four times over for that sheep and for his lowdown attitude!"

​David doesn't know what he's saying.  He's so caught up in the story that he can't see through it to what Nathan is really trying to say.  So Nathan spells it out for him with four of the most powerful words in the Bible: You are the man.
​
Nathan then proceeds to tell David how much God is displeased with him.  David, of course, is the rich man, and God accuses him of theft and murder in his sins with Bathsheba and Uriah.  Worse still, David is exposed as a hypocrite since his sense of justice doesn't extend to himself and his actions.

In the end Nathan pronounces God's curse which is that David himself will know the tragedy of death and murder in his family.  David himself will know the pain of having his wives taken from him.  And all of this comes true in the rebellion of his son, Absalom, which we'll talk about next week.
​
David is led to confession as he admits to Nathan, "I have sinned against God."

Have you ever been there where David was?  Oh, maybe you never went on a Ten Commandment-breaking spree like David did, but have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and realized that there are things there you don't like.  Things you have done.  Things you regret.  Things you know have warped you.  Deep, deep wounds that continue to cause you pain.  Things that you don't know how to get rid of.  Maybe there's nobody like Nathan standing there pointing the finger at you and saying, "You are the man" or "You are the woman," but you don't really need one when you get in touch with the sin that has distorted your life, twisting you up in knots.  And what do you do with that pain when you acknowledge it?  What do you do with it?

Well, confession, they say, is good for the soul.  And confession of sins is always a step in the right direction.  It's David's first step.  "I have sinned against God," he says.  But confession is not a mechanical act.  It's not something that you and then it's over.  That's why in the medieval church there was such an emphasis on works of satisfaction.  You would go confess to the priest, you would receive some things to do or prayers to say to satisfy the punishment, and then you would receive absolution.

The writer Peter De Vries said, "Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy."*  If we just do it to conceal the pain or to vaccinate ourselves against really dealing with sin, it is not enough.

Confession needs to do things: First, it needs to open us up so that we can see who we are and offer who we are to God.  Secondly, it needs to connect us to the God who knows the remedy and who knows how costly it is.

Safety is not guaranteed when God deals with sin.  It requires vulnerability and openness to the possibility that there won't be a happy ending.  David, as we'll see next week, knew all sorts of heartbreak in the wake of his sin.  Jesus deals with sin through suffering and death, baring his body and the heart of God to the worst that could be done to him.  But on that cross, God deals with sin.  Safety is not guaranteed but forgiveness is.


It doesn't mean that God deals with sin so that you don't have to.  The cross is not a get-out-of-jail-free card.  It's not meant to keep you from growing.  And the only way to keep growing is to do the work of dealing with your soul.  But it gives us the ground to walk on.  We can face the pain because Jesus faced the pain.  We can have confidence that our efforts to be open and brave in dealing with the roots of sin and the consequences of sin will be fruitful because Christ has gone there first.

The book of Hebrews, in chapter 4 beginning with verse 12, says, "God’s word is living, active, and sharper than any two-edged sword. It penetrates to the point that it separates the soul from the spirit and the joints from the marrow. It’s able to judge the heart’s thoughts and intentions. No creature is hidden from it, but rather everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of the one to whom we have to give an answer.

"Yet, let’s hold on to the confession [of our faith] since we have a great high priest who passed through the heavens, who is Jesus, God’s Son; because we don’t have a high priest who can’t sympathize with our weaknesses but instead one who was tempted in every way that we are, except without sin.  So at last, let’s draw near to the throne of favor with boldness so that we can receive mercy and find grace when we need help."

Martin Luther, the great Protestant reformer, when he finally had his moment of clarity, drew strength from this vision of Christ.  He was able to say, "“So when the devil throws your sins in your face and declares that you deserve death and hell, tell him this: 'I admit that I deserve death and hell, what of it? For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction on my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, Son of God, and where He is there I shall be also!'”**

At the end, where else would we go?  When I know that "I am the man" or "I am the woman" to whom else shall we turn except the one who knows that safety is not guaranteed, but God's love is.  Thanks be to God.

*http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Peter_De_Vries/
**http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/29874.Martin_Luther

Branded: Doing Our Part in Communion

Branded: Doing Our Part in Communion
January 29, 2012
Franktown United Methodist Church

Jesus was sitting down at a table at the home of a leader of the Pharisees. Now there's something you don't see every day. Does it surprise you to hear that about Jesus? Jesus was sitting at a table to eat a meal with some Pharisees. That's a little disturbing, isn't it? I mean Jesus had some pretty harsh things to say about Pharisees. You remember that he's the one who said, "Woe unto you Pharisees, hypocrites! You shut up the kingdom of heaven against people. Woe unto you, Pharisees, you devour the houses of widows! Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. (Matthew 23:27 KJV) You serpents, you generation of vipers, how can you escape the damnation of hell? (Matthew 23:33 KJV)" Other than that, I don't see any reason why this scene seems strange.

But there he is. Jesus and the Pharisees. Sitting around the table sharing a meal. And somebody gets a little too exuberant in the crowd. Somebody is overcome by the sight of these two parties together. This person thinks its a sign that bipartisanship is going to break out. Maybe he's had a little too much wine. At any rate, this guy yells out, "How happy are those who will sit down to feast at the kingdom of God!"

Jesus hears the man. Who couldn't? He yelled it out. But he doesn't say, "Yeah, it's going to be great." And he doesn't call him out by saying, "Hey, don't get your hopes up just because I'm breaking bread with these whited sepulchres." No, he responds with a parable, the point of which seems to be that the table is open, but you've got to want to come.

A man had a feast, a great feast. And he invited people to come. But everyone had an excuse for why they couldn't come. "Oh, you know I just bought some property and I've got to go look after it." Oh, you know, I just got married." "Oh, you know, I just bought some cows." They wouldn't come. So the man sends his servants out in the streets of the town to invite the poor, the lame, the outcasts. And they come, but there is still more room. So he sends them out into the countryside to gather whomever they can. But he is most disturbed with those who wouldn't come. Those who were invited initially will not taste the meal.

Today we're continuing our Branded series. We've been looking at things that mark us as Christians and we spent two weeks looking at baptism. Next week we'll begin to talk about ministry and the various forms of ministry God's people get involved in. But last week and this week we are talking about communion, the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist.

Last week I spent a lot of time interacting with John Wesley's sermon, "The Duty of Constant Communion." Wesley laid out the case for why we ought to come to the table. Why we ought not to neglect Jesus' command to 'do this to remember me." But today I want to talk about what our part in communion is. The meal is God's gift. But what we do with it is something else. And Jesus' story about the feast makes it clear that we can accept the invitation or not.

I mentioned last week that I had put out a question on Facebook asking for people to give me their reflections on communion and I shared one last week. Other people wrote about the great appreciation they have for the meal. Margaret Holland wrote to say that "It reminds me that God is the host of the party and all are invited to eat, reflect, and pray." It remind me of that guy at the feast. It's a party. Everyone is invited.

Skeeter Armstrong said, "For me it is a means of grace that allows us to put aside our differences and gather around the tables as the family of God knowing that, no matter how sinful we are or feel, that all is forgiven and we can begin again to become more Christ-like." It's a time to begin again. To confess our sins. To reconcile with one another. To become more Christ-like.

Debbie Bridges said something similar. She said, God's "grace and calming is transmitted to my body and soul telling me yet again - try to be, to do, to work harder and you will be a better Christian." Grace that leads to action.

There is an ethical side to communion. It is a party and it frees us and then it moves us be something for the world. Last week we talked about coming to the table, but today I want to talk about what it means to leave the table.

The other scripture that we have for today is from Paul's first letter to the Corinthian Christians. Some people will talk about this passage as the place where Paul lays out a 'theology' of communion. But really Paul is not doing that. Paul assumes that the Corinthians know what communion is. He's just trying to straighten out their practice of it. Because...as we mentioned last week...the Corinthians were taking communion unworthily.

Last week we talked about how some people will use this passage as an excuse not to receive communion because they are afraid they are not worthy to receive it. Wesley responded in his sermon that the problem for the Corinthians is not that they were unworthy. Wesley takes that as a given. We're all unworthy. The problem was the manner in which they received communion. The Corinthians, he said, were "taking the holy Sacrament in such a rude and disorderly way that one was 'hungry, and another drunken.'"*

But it was more than just a rowdy party. The community was neglecting its form, what it was supposed to look like. One New Testament scholar, Peter Lampe, says that the early Christian practice of communion was probably something akin to a potluck dinner. People would bring food and share what they had. But the problem was that the richer Corinthians, who had more food to bring, were not waiting for others before breaking into the food. So people were going hungry while others were getting out of hand.** What kind of community was this?

So Paul reminds them what the dinner is all about. He reminds them that the origin of the meal was in Christ's last meal with the disciples. Jesus was thinking about his death on the cross when he told them, "This is my body." He was thinking about his death when he said, "This is my blood." So now, Paul says, "This means that every time you eat this bread and drink from this cup you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes." (1 Corinthians 11:26 GNT)

You proclaim the Lord's death. Now there is an undeniable joy when we come to this table. We are tasting heaven. We are experiencing communion with the saints. We are entering the kingdom of heaven. We should be shouting, with that guy in the Pharisee's house, "Happy are those who feast in the kingdom of God!" But we are proclaiming Jesus' death. Our connection is not only with the risen Christ who will bring all things to final victory, but also with the Christ who knew the suffering of this world and who stood by the weak. As Paul says at the beginning of 1 Corinthians, "I proclaim Christ, and him crucified."

So the way that we eat this meal says something about what Christ is doing in the world. And how we live as people who share this meal says something about what Christ is doing in the world. As Lampe says:
"In the Eucharist, the death of Jesus Christ is not made present and 'proclaimed' (11:26) only by the sacramental acts of breaking bread and of drinking wine from one cup.  In the Eucharist, Christ's death is not proclaimed only by the liturgical words that accompany the sacramental acts.  No, in the Eucharist, Christ's death is also proclaimed and made present by means of our giving ourselves up to others.  Our love for others represents Christ's death to other human beings. Only by actively loving and caring for others does the participant in the Eucharist 'proclaim' Christ's death as something that happened for others."***

That's why I say that perhaps the most important part of communion is what happens when you leave this table. If we only come to this table to be reminded of what God has done for us...if I only come to be reminded of what God has done for me...then I have not gone far enough. This is where the Branded series takes a very important turn. While we receive God's claim on our lives...while we respond and accept God's claim on our lives...our journey does not end there. Unless we then turn out to the world and express with our own lives the other-directed love of God, then we have turned the gospel into a pat on the back, a massage at the spa, and a cozy spot by the fire. The gospel took Jesus to fishing boats and sick people. The gospel led him to sit at the table and to eat meals with Pharisees.

It's not wrong that its our neediness that leads us to church or to God. We all have deep needs. We may come to find that they're not needs worth having, as Will Willimon said, but we do have them and they open us up to God. But if the only reason we keep coming to church is to have our own needs cradled and cuddled, then we have not truly been broken open by God. We are not proclaiming the Lord's death until he comes. We are simply proclaiming our continuing need to be at the center.

The first step in gospel healing is to know that we are loved. That is absolutely true. For many of us, this is the greatest breakthrough we have to make. But that healing is only effective if we learn how to love ourselves. To have the opportunity to love another person and to love God is to become truly human. Communion opens us up so that we can go on to love.

Yesterday we celebrated the life of a remarkable woman in this sanctuary. Laura Dennis was a huge part of the life of this congregation. She was a giant, even though she only stood so high. She was a leader because she knew how to love. She loved her family. She loved her church. And she loved the world. As I mentioned in the service yesterday, she was pushing UNICEF boxes just a few years ago. She was making a list of needs for residents at Heritage Hall even when she was one of those residents.

Laura Dennis is at this table. She is able to shout today, "How happy are those who feast at the table in the kingdom of God!" But she can do that because she ate at this table in the not-quite kingdom of God and was nourished on the food that Jesus provides.

So come to the table. Let it remind you who you are. Let it form you into a servant of Christ. So that you can proclaim Christ's death and Christ's power and Christ's love. Thanks be to God.

*John Wesley, "The Duty of Constant Communion," in This Holy Mystery: A United Methodist Understanding of Holy Communion by Gayle Carlton Felton, [Discipleship Resources: Nashville, 2006], pp. 67-68.
**Peter Lampe, "The Eucharist: Identifying with Christ on the Cross," Interpretation magazine, Vol. XLVIII, No. 1, Jan. 1994, p. 41. I am grateful to Brooke Willson for putting me onto this investigation with his observations on 1 Corinthians 11.
***ibid., p. 45

Branded: The Duty of Constant Communion

So here we are in week 3 of our new worship series - entitled "Branded." In this series we are talking about the things that brand Christians as a distinctive people. Things that Christians do that nobody else does and that Christians all do - whether we are United Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, or Catholics.

We spent the last two weeks talking about baptism - what it means that God claims us from before we are born. What it means that we claim the God who claims us. What it means that "You will die" to sin when you go through the waters of baptism. And what it means to walk with Christ as a baptized sinner.

Today, though, I want to turn for two weeks to something we spent a lot of time on last year as we came out of Lent. I want to talk about communion. Now I realize that we are walking on some sensitive ground here because last year we moved from a practice of having communion on first Sundays and special Sundays to having communion just about every Sunday. And it may have been one of the biggest changes to worship that has happened here in a long, long time.

Last May, after we had been having communion for about 6 months, I asked for some responses. Many of those responses were very appreciative. “It has changed my experience of worship,” one person said. I guess that could go either way!

“I realized that it didn’t become less special but more special when we had communion every week,” said another.

Somebody else said, “For all the doctrines, dogmas, liturgies and allegories associated with Christianity, only communion is a true connection to the presence of Jesus.”

And then there's this one - “Surprisingly it has made communion more precious and helps me to remember every day we should be thankful for God’s grace – noticing the ordinary and not taking anything or anyone for granted.  I love it!”

But it wasn't all this way. Some folks said that they didn't like having it every Sunday. For some it just didn't feel right. It felt less special. They worried that other parts of the service, like the sermon, might get less attention because of time concerns. They liked the rhythm of communion once a month and felt like the words of the ritual might become too familiar, too rote, too mechanical. For some it dredged up old questions about what the clergy are here for. What exactly is Alex doing up there at the table? Why are he and Peter the only ones who break the bread? And what kind of innovation was this? Were we becoming Episcopalian? Or Catholic? How many other United Methodist churches are doing this?

I'll be honest - not a whole lot, even though our denomination as a whole has encouraged the practice of weekly communion. In 2004 we adopted an official study as United Methodists entitled This Holy Mystery which, for the first time, set down our understanding of communion. It encourages churches to move in this direction.

But we are not doing this because the United Methodist Church says to. We are not doing this because I say we have to. I want to revisit this because our feelings and questions about communion are very important. And I don't want to discount any negative feelings about the way we are doing communion because they say that something significant is going on. Something we value is being touched on. And I don't want to use fancy theology to convince you that you shouldn't feel the way that you do - or that you should. I do want you, however, to pay attention to those feelings and questions and give them serious examination.

And who better to do serious examination of our souls than John Wesley?

Now John Wesley is an important figure for Methodists because he was really the first one of us. He was a preacher, a writer, a campus minister, and a world-class organizer. When people threw the slur at him that he had a method for everything, he took it as a compliment, and when they went on to call him a Methodist, he took that as the name for his new movement.

It was a movement, not a church. Wesley was an Anglican priest in 18th century England. His father was an Anglican priest. He saw what he was doing as a renewal movement for his church, which was spiritually dead and morally bankrupt. But he gave his blessing to the American Methodists forming their own church after the American Revolution. And after he died, the British Methodists formed their own denomination, too.

O.K., O.K. - but what did John Wesley believe about communion? Well, he believed that we have a duty of constant communion. Not frequent communion. Not once a month communion. Not high holy days communion. He was a stickler for constant communion. And why did he believe that? Because Jesus said, in the gospel reading which we had from Luke for today, as he celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples, that his followers should "do this in remembrance of me." Do we have some hand motions for this?

Now remember this, because what I'm going to do now is to give you some pieces from John Wesley's sermon entitled, "The Duty of Constant Communion," and let you see how he thought about this question, because you will see that the issues have not really changed. But the theme that runs through the whole sermon is "Do this in remembrance of me."

The sermon starts with this paragraph and it's a bad opening paragraph because it's the best paragraph in the whole sermon. You really shouldn't show off your best stuff in the first paragraph. But that's what he does and what he says is:
"'Do this in remembrance of me.' It is no wonder that men who have no fear of God should never think of doing this.  But it is strange that it should be neglected by any that do fear God and desire to save their souls; yet nothing is more common.  One reason why many neglect it is, they are so much afraid of 'eating and drinking unworthily,' that they never think how much greater the danger is when they do not eat or drink it at all.'*

There are two scripture references here. One is Jesus' command from the gospel. The other is a quote from 1 Corinthians in which Paul warned the Corinthians about their conduct at the communion table. That command about "eating and drinking unworthily" gets used sometimes as a reason for not taking communion. But we'll get to that.

Harry Kennon, who is a retired pastor in our conference, quoted this on Facebook this week when I asked for some responses about communion and he said, "Ironically, some seem afraid of grace and forgiveness more than sin." Wow.

So John Wesley goes on to look at what this command to "Do this in remembrance of me" looks like. First he looks at why we should do this. And his first reason is a good one - because Jesus commands it. And secondly, he says, the mercy we experience in communion is good for us. That mercy is forgiveness of our sins and nourishment and strengthening of our souls. Why would we not want that?

Thirdly, it lets us leave our sins behind so that we are free to move on to perfection. Fourthly, the ancient Christians did it and the whole Church did it for many centuries - four times a week at least plus holy days. In fact the early church had a rule against coming to prayers and not taking communion. Fifthly, the Gospels and Paul's letters show that the practice was not just a show, but an outward sign of an invisible grace. Something really happens in communion. Something inside us.

So there are all sorts of good reasons to receive communion, not least of which is the command to "do this in remembrance of me."


Then Wesley gets into the objections to constant communion. In the first objection he imagines a person saying, "Yeah, but where does it say that I should do this constantly?" Wesley thinks this is a slippery slope. If we get into the business of determining when to selectively apply the commands of God we will have all sorts of excuses. We can say, for instance, "Well, yes, God commands me to take care of my parents but I did that once." If we have the opportunity to obey God's commands we should do that whenever we have the opportunity.

So there is the duty aspect of this thing. But there is also the mercy aspect of this thing. If God is handing out grace and mercy, why would you take advantage of it? God wants us to be happy, God knows that we can't be truly happy using our own means, so God gives us these means. Why would you refuse that offer of grace? And then Wesley goes back to his main theme - But even if you didn't get anything from it, it's still a command from God.

"O.K., O.K., but let's go back to that passage in 1 Corinthians where it says, 'whoever eats and drinks unworthily, eats and drinks damnation upon themselves.' I'm not worthy so I won't go forward."

Wesley, in effect, says to this objection, "You are always going to be unworthy, so if you are never going to reach out and receive God's mercy because you are unworthy, how will you ever be saved? Unworthiness goes with the territory when you are human beings. And on top of that - the command is to "Do this in remembrance of me" and so what you are saying is that you are going to disobey God's command because of your unworthiness which only makes you more unworthy. And on top of all this, Paul is not saying that unworthy people shouldn't go to communion. He is saying that when people go to communion they should not eat and drink unworthily. The problem was that the early Christians were getting rowdy and drunk at the communion meal. That is not an issue in most churches today.

"O.K., O.K., well, what if I have fallen into some sin lately or committed some crime?"" Well, you should repent, but don't add to your sin by failing to come to receive grace.

"O.K., O.K., well, what if I'm too busy to properly prepare to come to communion. What if my business prevents me from doing the self-examination and soul-searching I ought to do?" Wesley says, if you're too busy to do the work of your soul you are "unpreparing" yourself for heaven. Don't act like it takes an act of congress to get ready for communion. This is the way he puts it: "No business can hinder you from this, unless it be such as hinders you from being in a state of salvation.  If you resolve and design to follow Christ, you are fit to approach the Lord's table.  If you do not design this, you are only fit for the table and company of devils."

Now we get to the big objection - "Well, I don't want to take communication too often because it may 'abate my reverence' for it." 'Abate my reverence' for it is 18th century language for 'it will get to be rote and I may not get that feeling I like to get.

Wesley goes back to his theme - The command says, "Do this is in remembrance of me," not "Do this in remembrance of me unless it abates your reverence."

"But I've been going to communion constantly and I'm not experiencing the benefits I expected." I bet you can guess Wesley's response. Even if you don't experience any benefits, God commands it. And even if you don't feel it, on some unfelt level you are receiving the benefits of grace even if your don't yet see the effects. God may yet give you eyes to see what all this constant communion will bring.

Now, I admit that Wesley can be a little rigid. You can come out of a sermon like this and think that the one line summary of it is something like, "What part of 'Do this in remembrance of me' don't you understand?"

But here's why I think Wesley and Jesus ought to be heard: Because like every good mystery they have to be lived to be understood. You can't explain what parenthood is all about until you've gone through childbirth or colic or nightmares or potty training or adolescence or graduation. You can't explain what love is after the first kiss or the wedding vows or the many years of companionship and trials. You can't explain what a calling is like or a profession. You can throw words at it, but you just have to give yourself to it.

I get the nervousness about communion. I really do. I feel it myself. When I stand here I want to feel the immense mystery of it all. I don't want to let it just pass by. And does my mind sometimes wander as come back to the old familiar words that I can say in my sleep? It does. Do I sometimes feel unworthy to stand here in this place and say these words? Often. But one of the most powerful things I have even done as a pastor is to take a loaf of bread and to break it and to see your faces through the broken halves of bread. To share that bread with you. To receive that bread from you. To know that the life of Christ which was poured out for you and for me is present in some way that goes far beyond me and what's going on with me that day.

In my sermons on communion last year I said this, but I'll close with these words again today. I preside at this table so that you can preside at every other table in this whole, blessed, God-hungry world. I preside here to remind you that you dare not neglect God's presence out there. You come here because Jesus' commands you, but you go there because Jesus' commands you, too.

Your behavior out there is a testimony to what this bread here means. Don't forget that people are hungry for bread, hungry for grace, hungry for love, hungry for justice, hungry for a new day and they don't know where to find it, but you have been to the table. You know where the bread is. And you know how to give it. Don't you forget that this bread is a promise of what God is doing in this world.

You don't need an advanced degree or the bishop's hands on your head to break a loaf of bread. But unless you're feeding regularly at a table where you are reminded that the bread you hold is heaven on earth, then you will start to lose the ability to see that every other morsel of food you take in your hands is a sign of grace. My calling tells me to feed people in the name of Jesus, so that you can feed people in the name of Jesus until the kingdom comes. And the duty we respond in eating here is constant. Just like the love that brought us here. Constant. Thanks be to God.

*All quotations from Wesley's sermon are from the reprint in This Holy Mystery: A United Methodist Understanding of Holy Communion, Gayle Carlton Felton, [Discipleship Resources: Nashville, 2005], pp. 65-70.

Branded: So You're Baptized. Now What?

Branded: So You're Baptized. Now What?
Franktown UMC
January 15, 2011

Last weekend I was with the youth in Ocean City for a big retreat. It was great fun. The Renners were very gracious in offering us their condo. The weather was great. We saw some great bands. And we learned some sign language.

Reggie Kapps was the main speaker. Very dynamic. Very funny. Very powerful. And in one of his sessions he was telling the story of Genesis chapter 3 - the Adam and Eve story in which God tells them - "If you eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will die." Reggie really wanted to emphasize this point, so he kept saying, "You will die." He got us to say it with him. "You will die."

After repeating it a few times he looked over at the sign language interpreter who was up on the stage for the whole session and he saw that she had been repeating it right along with us - "You will die." So he got us to do the sign language with her. "You will die." Try it with me - "You...will...die." We've been doing it around the house all week. Somebody does something we don't like - "You will die."

It's a good place for us to start this morning because today we're going to continue our "Branded" series and we're going to talk about baptism again and the first thing that I have to say is - "You will die." Wow. Really?

Now just a refresher on what this series is all about and why we're calling it "Branded." I talked about wearing my cowboy boots as I was praying about this and some of you were singing the theme song to the old Chuck Connors TV show last week when you heard the title: "Branded. Scorned as the one who ran. What do you do when you're branded and you know you're a man?" In the TV show Connors plays a disgraced cavalry soldier who is branded with the label of being a coward. His saber is broken in two and he carries that broken saber as a symbol of what others have come to think of him.

Some of you know what it's like to be marked like that. To have other people label you and to treat you as that label instead of as a person. Maybe you've been through a divorce and you've felt like that has marked you. After the sermon last week, somebody told me that that's how she had felt following her divorce - like some scarlet 'D' was marked on her for all to see.

What we talked about last week, however, was how the brand of our baptism marks us in the most important way. It shows us how God claims us. How God reveals to us the reality of who we are. How it gives us our identity. I showed the clip from the movie Toy Story in which Buzz Lightyear discovers that he is not a space ranger but a toy and how that was a crushing blow to his self-image. Then he looked at his foot and there was his owner's name - Andy - written right there on his boot. Then last Sunday night, Lena Gonzalez came to Bible Study and showed us that she had written 'God' on the bottom of her boot. Baptism reminds us that God has a claim on us and the love of God in baptism is a gift that gives us our identity.

Today, though, I want to talk about what it means for us to claim that gift. Why is it important that we accept the gift of baptism and what do we do with it? And the reason it is important is because - "You will die."

Let's start with another movie, though. In thinking about branding, I started to think about the ways that we brand ourselves. So I asked for some tattoo stories...

[Video clip]

Tattoos are not really about putting something on our skin. Tattoos are really about something going on inside of us. They are about an inward journey. Sometimes those journeys are about remembrance and desire and a reaching for something more. Sometimes, though, those journeys are just about pain. They're about drawing blood and letting the world see what is going on. When young people cut themselves it is often about a sense that they are not right...that the world is not right...that there is so much brokenness and hurt that they have to give it some kind of physical expression. When all we see is pain, the voice we hear is the one that says, "You will die."

So let us hear a new word from Paul. We read from Paul's letter to the Romans this morning. And Paul has a hopeful word. Did you hear it? Paul does not say, "You will die." No, what Paul says is, "You are dead." Doesn't that sound hopeful?

Paul is writing to the new Christian churches because they are all trying to get their minds wrapped around what believing in Jesus means. They didn't have youth rallies and a lot of hymns or even a New Testament to tell them about Jesus. So they often got it wrong. Especially the grace side of things. Surely we have to do something to earn God's love. Surely there is a step we have to take to get God's grace.

Paul says, 'No.' What we have, on our side of the equation, is nothing like merit. Nothing like faithfulness. Nothing we can show that gives us a claim on God's love. What we have...what is ours to offer...is brokenness and sin. And what is the fruit of sin? What does sin merit from God? Condemnation. Rejection. Repudiation. God is great. God is good. God is righteous. God is holy. God doesn't have any truck with sin. God doesn't fool around with ungodliness. That's why it's called ungodliness. And we live in an ungodly world and we lead ungodly lives. So what should we expect from God? "You will die." And what does God give us? "Jesus loves you." God gives us grace.

So when Paul says this, the immediate response is - O.K. We sin and God gives us grace. And God's grace is sufficient to cover every sin. So that means the more sin there is the more opportunity God has to offer grace. So why don't we sin more so God has more opportunity to be God? Makes sense doesn't it?

That's how Paul begins this sixth chapter of Romans - with this question hanging in the air. And his response is "Me genoito!," which is Greek for "Are you crazy?" Once you know that sin equals death you can't go back to believing that it's a harmless thing. I mean, you can. There are plenty of baptized Christians who have gone astray. Some of them are named you and me. But when we do that we are not in our right minds. Being baptized in Christ, we have been exposed to the news about who we really are and what the world really is. We have been immersed in grace. When we sin we're just being stupid - putting our fingers in our ears and pretending that God doesn't care.

We can make God out to be the big, bad authority figure when we do that. We can say, "God doesn't want us to have any fun. God is just sitting there with a willow switch waiting to whack us when we do something God doesn't like." But the reality is God is standing there watching us beat ourselves with willow switches when we sin. We can blame God, but it's always been the case that we do the greatest damage to ourselves.

Stephen Dobyns wrote a poem on the Garden of Eden story that ends with the line: "Kicked out, kicked out. Who could believe that lie? We'd begged him for a chance to make it on our own."* Dobyns is playing with the notion that perhaps being kicked out of the garden is not the best explanation for what happened. We can push the blame off on God, but it's really we who want to try to make it own, apart from God's grace.

But here's the thing that's most amusing. Dead people don't have the power to harm God and when we sin we are dead. Do you remember that this was the good news? It's not that "You will die." The truth is "You are dead."

Romans chapter 6 verse 1 - "What then should we say? Are we to persist in sin in order that grace may increase? Me genoito! Are you crazy? We are dead to sin - how can we still live in it? Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized to death?" You were baptized to death. You gave your life to Jesus, he sucked you under the waters of baptism, you drowned, you died. I know it seems all sweetness and light when we take a baby in those beautiful white gowns and douse him with water...when we lay hands on her head...but when we give that baby to Jesus...we are baptizing her to death.

Jesus did not come to walk the earth so that we could keep on playing our pretend games. Jesus did not go to the cross so that we could mess around like life doesn't matter. Jesus didn't put on a crown of thorns so that we could fritter away our potential on things that do not last. Jesus came to baptize broken people to death.

The poet Franz Wright was baptized as an adult after facing down many demons in his life. In his poem "Baptism," he writes about how the broken person he was is dead:
I drowned him
and he's not coming back.  Look
he has a new life
a new name
now
which no one knows except 
the one who gave it.**
This is the good news - that we are dead, but, look, "he has a new life, a new name now, which no one knows except the one who gave it."

Paul's way of putting this is that we were buried with Christ through baptism into his death so that we also might walk in newness of life, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father. You were baptized to death so that you can walk in newness of life. You were baptized to death so that you can live.

Then Paul says in verse 5, "If, being united with him, we are dead"...that word 'united' there is an agricultural term. "Sumphutoi" is the word. It's what you say when you're planting seeds together in the ground. They are "sumphutoi." That are united in death. The seeds go down into the earth and you cover them up and you think that they're gone for good. But something happens down there in the earth. Some mysterious power brings something forth from those dead, inert seeds. Some new life raises up from the grave. Some new shoots begin to spring up. Some new growth breaks through the earth. Something green is growing.

And it doesn't happen all at once. It's not a full grown plant. It's got a lot of growth ahead of it. It will have to brave the wind and the heat. It will have good days and bad days. It will still have to depend on having the nutrients it needs. The water it needs. The sun it needs. But those seeds that were dead. They are alive. And there is no more miraculous thing on earth than when dead things come back alive.

If you are baptized into Jesus, you are dead. Maybe you forgot that. Maybe you're acting like a zombie and wandering around in some sort of half-life where you forgot that you are dead and then all of your actions have the character of sin. But you have been baptized to death so that you can truly live. The grace that claimed you is yours for the having. You are fearfully and wonderfully made and the Love that made you is waiting for you to claim it. The evil of this world...the sin in your life...has no power over this Love.

Every day that you are alive you have this Love - not because you earned it, but because God gives it. But every day you have this Love, you have the opportunity to live it. You are branded. Thanks be to God.

*from a Facebook post by Mary Karr, 14 Dec 2011. She goes on to say, "Talk about hubris. The human arrogance of projecting onto the place where we imagine God sits all our own fear, malice, dread and loathing."
**"Baptism," Franz Wright, in Walking to Martha's Vineyard [Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2003], pp. 44-45.