Rules of the Road

I’ve been spending some time around high schools the last two weeks. I was up at a Broadwater last week for a scrimmage and got to see some of our Franktown Vikings in the field. Over at Northampton I saw in the gym the girls volleyball team gearing up for action. And, out on the field and in the band room, the marching band has been logging a lot of rehearsal time.

All of that is happening because school is getting ready to begin and playing seasons are ready to begin and all of these students are trying to get their minds and bodies ready for action. I was a basketball player in high school and I remember summers where I spent hours just trying to put together the mechanics of a layup. It’s not as simple as it looks. At least it wasn’t for me. An efficient layup involves timing, coordination, and awareness of what’s going on around you so that you can make split-second adjustments.

It also involves body memory. It just takes doing the thing over and over and over until your muscles and your mind can do it without thinking. They just know what to do because of the training. That’s why all of these sports teams are out there on the practice field. That’s why the band is out there. So that when the time comes to perform, most of the stuff that you have to do will be so second nature that you won’t have to think about it.

Your Christian life is no different. It takes practice to be a Christian. It takes regular exercise of the muscles that you use to be Christian. And it takes a great coach who keeps reminding you that you can do it. That we can do it.

The letter to the Hebrews ends with a kind of coach’s pep talk to the community that the author was addressing. The verses we read this morning feel like a kind of laundry list of things the community ought to remember to do. And maybe they seem like a pretty obvious list to us. Of course, these are things that we ought to do. We take it for granted that this is what Christian life looks like. But you know what happens when you get off your training for a few days, a few weeks, a few months. You lose your muscle memory and it takes a lot of work to get back to where you were.

We shouldn’t take this list from Hebrews for granted, though. First of all because we’re not doing all the things that this list commends. But secondly because we can’t assume that these values, which we think of as human values, will continue if they are not practiced.

“Let mutual love continue.” That’s the heading under which this whole list of practices comes in the 13^th chapter of Hebrews. But what does that look like? We all have our own pictures for that. Like that comic strip in the newspapers that has the heading “Love is…,” every day it can be filled in with some new example. But Hebrews has some very specific ways to illustrate this.

The first command is to hospitality. “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” Radical hospitality is something we have been talking about a lot over the past two years here at Franktown. We recognize it as one of the primary ways that churches remain vital because they are constantly welcoming new people in.

One way that has been happening through this summer is at the community dinners on Wednesday night which have been sponsored by the Word Up group. It is more than a free meal that has been happening. It has been outreach through food and new community being built over food. And it is causing problems. Good problems. There is a strong sentiment from a lot of folks that we’d like to see this continue into the fall. But that means that Wonderful Wednesday will have to look differently. Can we sustain a free meal? Can we maintain our kitchen staff consistently? Can we live with a more simple menu? The feeling is that we can if we take our mission seriously. If we see this meal as more than a meal…if we consider that we are entertaining angels through our hospitality…then something radical can happen.

The second way that Hebrews commands us to mutual love is through remembering the prisoner and the tortured. In the day when this was written, those prisoners and tortured persons were likely other Christians who were suffering for their beliefs, but Jesus urged his disciples to visit the imprisoned, too, without qualification. However they got there, there is a need for transformation and good news in prisons as well.

When we were doing our survey on our new mission statement earlier this year, a few of you wrote that ministries in our jails might be an area to explore. The Vision and Design Team has been looking at that and we have discovered that there do seem to be some real needs among prisoners here on the Shore that are not being addressed. Maybe God is calling some of us to get involved. Maybe all of us should keep the prisoner as a constant in our prayers.

“Let marriage be held in honor by all.” This is another area we have been talking about in the Vision and Design Team. What does marriage mean in a day when so many marriages are broken, when the definition of marriage is being stretched, and when more and more young people see no need for marriage? Honoring marriage means more than giving it lip service – it means developing practices to keep it strong. It means regular time together. It means shared experiences. It means spending time in the marriage bed that Hebrews talks about. It means mutual respect. Christians should be saying something to the world around them through the quality of their marriages. There is the potential for a lot of pain in our marriages. When we open our lives to others we are always vulnerable. But there is also the potential for deep joy and so we pray for our marriages.

The final command in this section is to stay free from the love of money and be content with what you have, something that also deserves its own sermon. In a culture where so much of meaning is built around the desire for material objects, this may be the most counter-cultural thing Christians are called to do. But Hebrews goes on to say that our living free from the love of money is a way to express our reliance on God. If we do not put our trust in money, then we are free to trust God for the things we need.

Those are the things that Hebrews calls for, but there is something deeper I want to get at. I said that these values can’t be taken for granted and they can’t be. They are not so natural to us that they can’t be lost. They could easily be replaced by an alternative story or an influential movement. In fact, those stories and movements are out there. There are plenty of Hollywood movies that have no room for mutual love. Your average action/adventure hero is a loner motivated by revenge and all too willing to use violent means to secure it. Marriage is suffering from a number of things, the most important of which is that those who support it have trouble saying why it is necessary or even what it is. Living simply is troubled by every advertisement we see. Mutual love is not a given in human life.

I’ve been haunted this year by a book written by David Bentley Hart called Atheist Delusions. In it he traces the Christian revolution back to its earliest days in the Roman Empire and says that our modern notions of compassion and the sanctity of individual lives can be credited to the message of Christianity. “Conscience, after all, at least in regard to its particular contents, is to a great extent a cultural artifact, a historical contingency, and all of us today in the West, to some degree or another, have inherited a conscience formed by Christian moral ideals.”[i] And what sustains that conscience? What keeps our understandings of mutual love from fading away? What keeps our culture from falling into new bad habits and ways of being that may make a mockery of things like hospitality, solidarity, fidelity and simplicity? Nothing but practice and a grounding in Jesus who is the same today, yesterday, and forever.

I never excelled in basketball, but the little bit of proficiency I got was due to those hundreds and thousands of layups I did on the driveway of my house with the basketball goal. If Ben Holland throws a touchdown pass it will be because he’s thrown a thousand passes in practice. If Jordan LeCato spikes the ball for a point it will because she has learned though hundreds of rotations and set-ups just where to be. If we are going to create a place in which mutual love can continue it will be because of the countless hours we have spent in worship, in fellowship, in prayer, in study, in homes, in jails, in face-to-face encounters with others – doing the quiet, sometimes boring work, of loving. God will ultimately bring about the new day. Christ will come regardless. But what will we say when we are asked what we did to let mutual love continue on this earth? What the world needs now is that kind of love. Thanks be to God.

Hebrews 13:1-8 [NRSV]

Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.

Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.

Let marriage be held in honor by all, and let the marriage bed be kept undefiled; for God will judge fornicators and adulterers.

Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, "I will never leave you or forsake you." So we can say with confidence, "The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?"

Remember your leaders, those who spoke the word of God to you; consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever…Through him, then, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

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[i] David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, [Yale University Press: New Haven, 2009], ebook location 2250.

My Life is an Open Book

Up in the mountains there was a family that had an outhouse out back on the property. There was a little boy in the family who hated using that outhouse. It was hot in the summer, cold in the winter and it smelled horribly all the time.

So one day the boy decided he was going to do that outhouse in. The creek that ran by the outhouse was up and he thought he could make it look like the work of the flood if he found a way to push it in. He found an iron bar and he went out to the outhouse, slipped the bar under one corner of the house and with one huge push he turned it over into the creek that ran right by it. The outhouse floated on away.

That night his father came in and told him they were going to have to take a trip together to the woodshed. There was always bad news for the little boy. The little boy asked why and his dad said, “Son, somebody pushed the outhouse into the creek today. Was it you?”

The boy ‘fessed up but he added, “I read in school where George Washington confessed to chopping down the cherry tree and his father didn’t punish him.”

“Yes,” the boy’s father answered. “But George Washington’s father wasn’t in the cherry tree when he chopped it down.”[1]

Confession, they say, is good for the soul. But you and I know that as human beings we can resist confession even when we know it’s good for our souls. We don’t want to admit that there are things we have done that need to be brought up for air and light. We don’t want to believe that being honest with ourselves and others is necessary. We’re pretty content believing that we don’t need to change. We may recognize that inside there is turmoil and discontent, but somehow we get the idea that other people or outside forces are always the source of that discontent when, in fact, confession would reveal that most of what needs to change is in here.

This is also true for nations. Following the decades of enforced segregation in South Africa under the system of apartheid, there were a lot of folks who called out for retribution and pay back – to bring justice on behalf of the black and colored citizens of that country who had been locked out of anything resembling equality. Others felt that a process of sorting out rights and wrongs would be so massive and cause such dislocation that there ought not to be any looking back at all. Just keep moving forward.

What the country did, though, was to set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. People were invited to come and stand before the commission and to testify to what they had seen, what they had experienced and what they had done. The results of the commission were mixed. It allowed truth to be told but it did not always lead to reconciliation. But for some of the people who came, just being able to tell their story was a powerful act of confession.

In Capetown, South Africa, a man told the Commission the story of how he had been shot in the face by the police during a political gathering in one of the settlements. As a result he lost his sight. “He also told of how, two years later, the police beat him with electric ropes, suffocated him, forced him to lie in an empty grave and tortured him in other ways.”

When he was asked how he felt after having delivered his testimony, he replied, “I feel that what has been making me sick all the time is the fact that I couldn’t tell my story. But now it feels like I got my sight back by coming here and telling you the story.”[2] Confession – revealing what is deep and most true about us – for individuals and for nations can be healing – like getting sight back.

Why am I talking about confession this morning? It’s not just because we’ve been talking about it this week in the wake of David Letterman’s confession of moral failings on national TV. That was a strange sort of confession. It was brought about because of the threat of extortion. It was done in front of his studio audience and it was not really clear if he was doing the whole bit as a monologue. Even Letterman himself called it creepy.

No, the reason I want to talk about confession is because I believe that’s where we go when we pay attention to the passage from Hebrews this morning. “The word of God is alive and powerful and more cutting than a two-edged sword. It penetrates to the point of dividing soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, of discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Before this word no creature is hidden. All are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.”

That’s quite a statement. It says to me that if we are really confronted with a new life in Jesus that it is not just some pleasant little endorsement we are making. We’re not just choosing Jesus in the same way that we choose a brand of clothes. I might choose a certain designer or a certain label because I want the brand to speak for me – to tell other people that I have a certain kind of taste or certain values. My clothes, rather than my words or actions will speak for me. I might still be an insecure, hopelessly uncool person, but my clothes will tell you something different.

That’s not how it works with Jesus. Jesus doesn’t just want your endorsement – Jesus wants your life. Jesus doesn’t just want you to put a fish on your car and go on as if nothing else has changed – Jesus wants you to fish for people. Jesus doesn’t just want you to go to church on Sunday – Jesus wants you every day of the week. And it’s because Jesus has a two-edged sword.

That’s a violent image, isn’t it? The word of God is more cutting than a two-edged sword, piercing down to the joint and the marrow, laying us open so that there is nowhere to hide. Because, you see, Jesus knows what that if you are going to be transformed it’s got to be a change right down in the center of your life, where soul meets body and where your intentions, your thoughts and your desires are born. That raw stuff that is at the center of us all – the stuff we don’t want to acknowledge, the stuff we don’t want to pull out for others to see, the stuff that we keep hidden away, stuffed inside – that’s the stuff Jesus knows needs to be changed because it’s our true self. And no matter how much you try to paper it over or put fish stickers on it or dress it up in your Sunday best – that stuff is going to be around your soul like a millstone until you bring it out through confession.

When you think about it we wouldn’t want that word of God to be anything less than a two-edged sword would we? A word that left us just the same as we have always been is no word of God at all. A word that didn’t confront sin and woundedness is no word of God at all. A word that didn’t speak truth to us, that didn’t liberate us, is no word of God at all. A word that didn’t open us up to something greater than ourselves so that we could experience real redemption, real reconciliation, real forgiveness, real transformation – this is no word of God at all.

The theologian Karl Barth says:

An imagined Word of God, …however well and truly imagined, as a mere dream…remains outside the real world and existence of [human beings], leaving the other subjects in the sphere of our world and existence unmolested, but also unillumined and unconsoled in the depths of their creaturely existence. But now God has become [hu]man, and therefore Himself a creaturely being, in His Son, and in this human world of ours His Son lives on in the form of His instruments and their witness. So His power in this testimony is also a concrete power at the heart of this sphere, consoling and healing, but also judging and assailing.^[3]

Do you hear what Barth is saying here? A word of God that only consoles us without also judging our lives is not worthy of being called God’s word. A word of God that only heals without assailing us is not worthy of the name. We want a God to turn the world upside-down because look at the world!

And here’s the good news – God has sent the word that the world needs for its salvation. The word is Jesus Christ. As Hebrews says, this is our great high priest – God’s son – who came and lived among us. Who knows what our weaknesses are like because he was one of us. He was tempted like we are, though he did not sin. And because he is priest he can make the offering that needs to be made.

You remember the sacrificial system that God had established in the Hebrew scriptures. In order to atone for the people’s sin, the priest would take an animal and sacrifice it on an altar. He would take a knife and pierce the animal until it was laid open before God. The priest would do this over and over because the problem of sin was never “solved.”

Now, Hebrews says, Jesus has become the priest who offered himself as sacrifice. Once and for all. He has gone to the cross and laid himself open for the worst that could be done to him. Pierced in his side. And victorious because ultimately God is victorious over sin and death. Ultimately God wins. And God is merciful and God loves you and me and this world so much that God does not want us to remain as we are. God wants us to win, too. To be made new. “When anyone is in Christ, that one is a new creation; everything old has passed away. See, the new has come” [2 Co. 5:17].

The folksinger Nanci Griffith has a song called “These Days My Life is an Open Book.” In the song she is talking about raw and desolate her life is as she looks for love in this world. She sings this song as if to a lost lover who now only exists as a memory.

“These days my life is an open book,” she sings, “missing pages I can’t seem to find. These days your face in my memory is in a folded hand of grace against these times.” She’s singing about a lost lover but what if that lover is God? What if that lover is the one who knows who she is…who has walked beside her in this world and who knows her story is not a tale of loss but a promise of grace “against these times”?

What if your life were an open book with a story being told in its pages? And what if that story were being written and rewritten by a God who loves you and who wants to make you whole? What if there is a home for you and me? And what if we go there together? To go with boldness and openness before the throne and to let our lives be remade in the likeness of our brother Jesus? What if? Thanks be to God.

Hebrews 4:12-16

For the word of God is alive and powerful and more cutting than a two-edged sword. It penetrates to the point of dividing soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, of discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Before this word no creature is hidden. All are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.

So then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the son of God. Let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses - he was tested in every way that we are only without sin.

So let us approach the throne of grace with openness so that we can take hold of mercy and find grace for help in time of need.

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[1] Adapted from http://www.jokesaboutfathersday.com/fathers_day_joke_690.html.

[2] Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, Vol. 5, Ch. 9, http://www.polity.org.za/polity/govdocs/commissions/1998/trc/5chap9.htm.

[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.2, [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956], p. 676.

Jesus: A Gift for the World

Earlier this week, my great aunt Bess sent me a little package of things she’d been going through. There was an old book and a pamphlet and several newspaper clippings about my uncle Jim Kitchen. I’ve talked about my Uncle Jim before, I believe. He was the brother of my uncle with the rather unusual name of William Nicholas Alexander Amber Robert Thomas David Jingling Poker Fiddlestick Stumptoe Kitchen. We called him Uncle Nick. But if Uncle Nick got the eccentric name, Uncle Jim got the eccentric trophy.

Uncle Jim lived in Blackstone, Virginia and he was a preacher and a teacher, among other things. By the time I got to know him, though, he was retired and living in a house on one of the main streets of town. According to these newspaper clippings he was well-known to the neighborhood because he would sit out on the front porch of the house and greet people passing by on the sidewalk. He had a long, snow-white beard that had tobacco stains in it. And he was generally pretty unkempt, which befitted an old preacher living on his own.

Inside, his house was a maze of old books and papers stacked floor to ceiling with a narrow path through them. It was a good representation of what his mind was like, too, a treasure trove of stories and biblical reflections and family history, all kind of strewn about in no particular order. As a child, I used to love to go to family reunions and talk to Uncle Jim for exactly that reason, but I don’t think many folks knew how to take him. He was part of our family, and a glorious part, but not many of my family members would have chosen him to be our representative to the rest of the world.

So what does the Christian family do with Jesus Christ? I get the feeling that we’re not really sure what to say about Jesus. We’re comfortable with Jesus being the great teacher who welcomes children and tells wonderful parables. We like what he does with the disciples and the way he tweaks the sanctimonious religious leaders for their hypocrisy.

That we can deal with. But when we make exalted claims for who Jesus is…when we talk about him as someone more than just a human being who lived 2,000 years ago in Palestine…when we talk about him as the Son of God…then it can start to make us nervous. Because this Jesus starts to make a claim on us and on the world. To believe in this Jesus is not to just admire a great person from the past; to believe in this Jesus means to change and to be different and to be transformed. What will the neighbors think if we believe in this kind of Jesus?

The book of Hebrews in the Bible will not let us get away with a Jesus who isn’t divine. Jesus may be modest about his claims about himself in the first gospels. He may tell people who know who he is not to tell anyone else. He may treat his identity as a secret at times, but the Christians community that followed Jesus couldn’t say that. After walking through the death and the resurrection they knew that Jesus was more than another figure on the scene of history. Jesus was the one that all Israel had been waiting on. Jesus was the one the whole earth had desired.

So Hebrews uses some very exalted language to describe Jesus. It starts out with the note that in former times God spoke to us through the prophets, and the people of Israel could name them off – Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah – they had all tried to bring a word from God to tell the people that God had not forgotten the covenant with Israel…that God had not forgotten what he had called them to do…that God was expecting them to live up to the covenant and that a new day was coming. Now, however, God had spoken in a new way. Now God has spoken through a son.

This is when Hebrews starts piling on the titles so you can’t miss that Jesus Christ was different. “Christ is the appointed heir of all things.” An heir inherits all that a parent has and has authority over it. That’s what Jesus does.

Christ is the one through whom God made creation. Imagine that. At the beginning of all things, Jesus was there and everything was being made through him. It’s not that he just appeared on the scene in 1^st century Palestine. His history is as long as God’s history. This reminds us of the opening to the gospel of John where it says that “he was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” [John 1:2-3]. We may have seen God in a new way in Jesus, but Jesus was there at the beginning.

“He is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being.” Another way to put that is that Christ is the exact representation of God's essential nature, the one who most reveals God. Christ sits at the right hand of God, above even the angels. Christ is the pioneer of salvation. He’s the one who went there first, who blazed the trail that leads to our salvation.

These are incredible titles we have placed on the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. They point to a figure so unique and so powerful that the only proper response is worship and praise. Christ is at the center of what our life in the Church is all about. Yet people can live without Christ. And they do. I’m beginning to think that even the Church feels like it can live without Christ.

If it’s true that we can’t believe in a Jesus like this without changing then maybe that’s our biggest stumbling block. Because we are beginning to despair that we have the power to change. We can't even change ourselves, much less this messy world that we live in. We find ourselves wrapped in a complex web of turbulent issues where Congress can't even seem to agree on the colors of the flag, much less a way out of our health care crisis. We find ourselves trapped in personal disasters where our relationships and our jobs and our health all seem to be spinning out of control. We wonder where we’ll find the power to change and we certainly don't see what Christ has to do with it.

If Jesus is just a man, then why worship him? On the other hand, if he’s so exalted and raised up above us, who are we to him? We might say with the psalmist that Hebrews quotes here, “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you should care for them?” [Psalm 8].

The author of Hebrews goes on and reminds the readers that Christ, even though he was raised to glory, also knew the suffering of death and the reality of human life. Hebrews continues to point to Christ's incarnation as a sign that God really wanted to enter our limited lives and for that reason we can call Christ "Brother" as well as "Savior."

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer was sitting in a cell in Nazi Germany in the final year of World War II, he started to write a series of letters wondering what Christianity would look like in years to come. Bonhoeffer was a Christian pastor and theologian who had worked underground during the rise of Nazi power. He had been very discouraged and disillusioned by the response of the churches during this period. When the Nazis demanded that the Christians put Nazi emblems up in the churches, they did it. When they demanded that the churches preach the racial superiority of the Aryan nation, they did it. When the Nazis demanded that the churches swear allegiance to Hitler, they did it. Bonhoeffer looked at the scene and to him it was confirmation that the churches didn’t believe what they preached. If they had really believed that the things Hebrews says about Jesus were true that would not have been able to live as if they weren’t…as if allegiance to Hitler were more important than allegiance to Jesus…as if salvation came through the Nazi party than through the cross of Jesus.

Writing to a friend, Bonhoeffer said, “We are moving toward a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious.’”[i]

So Bonhoeffer began to believe that maybe it wasn’t true that people couldn’t live without God. The world around him certainly seemed to have developed without any real reference to God. They had effectively sent God to the sidelines. Science had explained away a lot of the things that people used to turn to God for. Secular theories of government had taken God out of politics. People related to one another apart from any religious moral code.

So what was Christian belief going to look like? Bonhoeffer said that it wasn’t enough for religion just to be brought in when people talked about death or sin – those troubling areas where society is a little more open to a religious explanation. “It always seems to me,” says Bonhoeffer, “that we are trying anxiously in this way to reserve some space for God; I should like to speak of God not only on the boundaries but at the center, not in weaknesses but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness.”[ii]

So how do we put God in the center? How do we proclaim Christ in a world that seems to have no need of him? What do we do to say that Jesus is not just hanging out on the edges waiting for us to trip over something that makes no sense and then looking for divine guidance? What do we do to say that Christ changes everything?

Maybe the answer is in creating Christ-shaped places in which to welcome the change God wants to bring about. When we were in England it seemed like everywhere we went there were ruins of abbeys and monasteries. And they were all designed exactly alike. After awhile we got really good at walking into a ruin and saying, "OK. The altar was over there, the dining hall up there, the bathrooms were over here and the dormitories were here. Great let's go."

But one of the most affecting monasteries we saw was one near York, where we lived, called Fountains Abbey. A lot of it had survived including one place that really told me what monastic life was like. Near the dining hall, or refectory as it was called, there was a huge fireplace, large enough to place a tree for burning. It was the only place in the entire abbey that was heated and the monks were not allowed to be in this room except for a small portion of the day unless they were ill.

Now this is a stone building and England is cold in the winter. I can see in my mind's eye a young monk entering the abbey and facing that first cold winter. I see him in his rough wool habit huddled by the stone wall separating him from that warm, glowing fire - trying to soak up the little warmth that seeped through. I can imagine him trying to cope with the monastic schedule which would have him waking up at 2 in the morning for worship, followed by study in the cloister and work in the gardens before a simple breakfast. I can see him wondering about the possessions and family he left behind.

Yet in this new world, so different from the one he left behind, the monk encountered one figure in a very dramatic way, and that is the figure of Christ. The world of the monasteries was a Christ-shaped world that offered the power to change lives, both for those few who could take the vows and for those many who depended on the hospitality and service the monastics could provide.

In the Methodist Church we're not in the business of monasteries anymore, but we do have a calling to create a space in which people can find transformation. Even though we live in a world that thinks it can get along just find without Christ it is not true that we live in a world that is satisfied with itself. As my old Christian Education professor, Dick Murray, used to say, "A high-tech world demands a high-touch Church."

We are called to create a "touching place" where the castaways of a throwaway society can come to touch and be touched and to find the power to change. The Church can be a different space, a unique space in a world that values style over substance. But we can only be unique if we believe that we are, and we are only unique in what we have to offer for healing - and that is Jesus Christ, who is all of those fantastic things that Hebrews says he is, pioneer of salvation, representative of God, and heir of all things, yet who is also one thing more - our brother, who knows firsthand the lives we live and the deaths we die, who endured the suffering of crucifixion and death, to show us that God is not just above us but also with us.

This meal we come to share today is an invitation. It is an invitation from Christ himself to discover that Christ-shaped space where we can be transformed. We come to remember this Jesus of Nazareth who was one like us and yet like no other. We come to celebrate what God did through him then and what God continues to do now. We come to share with people of all times and all places who also eat this meal - saints who once walked this path and those in many different countries who walk it with us today. Thanks be to God.

Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12

In former times God spoke in many and various ways through the prophets, but in these last days God has spoken to us through a son, whom God appointed heir of all things, through whom God also made the worlds; he is the radiance of God's glory and the representation of God's essential nature and he sustains all things by his powerful word. Having made purification for sins, he was seated at the right hand of the Majesty in the high places, having become so much superior to the angels as he inherited a name more excellent than theirs.

For God did not subject the order which is coming, about which we are speaking, to angels. Now someone has testified somewhere,

"What are human beings that you remember them,

or the children of humanity that you visit them?

You have made them for a little while lower than the angels;

with glory and honor you have crowned them,

subjecting all things beneath their feet."

For in subjecting all things to them, God left nothing outside their control. As for now we do not see all things under their subjection, but we do see Jesus, who was made for a little while lower than the angels, being crowned with glory and honor through the suffering of death, in order that, by the grace of God, he might know something of the death we all face.

For it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should perfect the pioneer of their salvation through sufferings. For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all of one, and for this reason he is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters, saying,

"I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters;

in the midst of the congregation I will praise you."

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[i] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Letters and Papers from Prison,” excerpted in Readings in the History of Christian Theology, Volume 2, ed. by William C. Placher, [Westminster Press: Philadelphia, 1988], p. 163.

[ii] Ibid., p. 164.