All Who Love and Serve The Kingdom

It was May of 1373 and a woman lay dying in an English city. The priest had been called in to perform the last rites for her. She looked like one more victim of the sickness and plague that were killing people all over Europe. Her mother brought a crucifix – a cross with the figure of Jesus crucified on it – and put it before her eyes so that it would be the last thing she saw before her mother closed her eyes in death.

That’s when it all began for the woman. She began to have a vision, an extraordinary vision. In this vision she saw in a deep and graphic way the sufferings that Jesus endured, but through it she also saw the love, felt the love that God had offered the world through that cross. She began to see how, beyond all things, it was God’s love and mercy that motivated all that God did.

In one moment of the vision she was looking at her hand. There, in the palm of her hand was something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, round as a ball. “What,” she thought to herself, “can this be?”

The answer came, “It is everything which is made.” She was holding the universe in the palm of her hand.

She was amazed that it could survive. She thought it was so little that it could suddenly fall into nothing. But again she heard a voice that said, “It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God.”

The woman saw three properties in the small thing that was the universe in her hand. “The first is that God made it, the second is that he loves it, and the third is that God preserves it…God is the Creator and the Lover and the Protector.” It was clear to the woman then what she needed to do. “Until I am substantially united to him, I can never have love or rest or happiness, until, that is, I am so attached to him that there can be no created thing between my God and me.”[i]

Julian of Norwich recovered from her illness and lived at least forty more years. But she never forgot the series of visions she received as she looked at the cross. In fact, the whole rest of her life was devoted to trying to meditate on them and to share them with others. She gave the rest of her life to loving God.

As we began this new year, the Vision and Design Team of our church took on the task of looking at our mission statement. You know a mission statement is a succinct expression of what it is that an organization exists to do. The Island Creamery on Chincoteague exists to make fantastic ice cream. That’s their mission. They’ve added fudge and coffee to their offerings. They’ve got free Wi-Fi. They could get distracted by adding other stuff to what they do. But if they forget that they exist to make Marsh Mud and Pony Tracks ice cream – they will be in trouble.

So what is it that Franktown Church exists to do? There is a lot of stuff that goes on here. A lot of great stuff. But what are the things that are so essential that if we didn’t do them, we couldn’t be Franktown United Methodist Church? The Vision and Design Team went back and looked at our mission statement and we liked what was there. It said some great things about who we are. What it said was: “The mission of Franktown UMC is to glorify God by making disciples of Jesus Christ as the Holy Spirit empowers and guides us. We are called to pray, worship, study, witness, serve and love, as we reach out to the Eastern Shore community and beyond.”

The essentials were there and there are lots of great verbs in there – pray, worship, study, serve. But we wanted it to roll off our tongues so that people would remember it easily. We wanted to get down to the absolute essentials. And we found that we were using words that Jesus used.

Do you remember the story of when a lawyer came to question Jesus? He said to Jesus, “Jesus, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus knew he was being tested and that he was dealing with a lawyer so he said, “What does the law say? How do you read it?”

The lawyer summed up the whole of the law like this, "You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole strength and your whole mind and your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus was pleased with what the lawyer said. In fact Jesus used the same summary of the law and the prophets when he was teaching his disciples.

What is the key word in all of that? Love. When asked what it is that God asks from us – what it is that we as a body of Christians are called to do – the short answer is love. That’s what pulled Julian back into life and drove her for the rest of her life – she got in touch with the deepest desire of her heart – to love God with all that she had.

So right up front in our new mission statement we put that the mission of Franktown UMC is to love and glorify God. Glorify – make great. Add whatever glory we can with the small gifts that we have to the name of God. It is our first and great command. So we love and glorify God in our worship. We come here on Sunday mornings, not first because we want to have our needs met. That happens. In many and joyous ways that often happens, but it is not the reason we are here. We come first because we want to give up some love to God. We want to raise the roof for God. We come because it is the deep desire of our souls to be united to this God who created us and who loves us and who protects us. This God for whom the whole of the created world is just a small round thing, has loved us and wants nothing more of us than to love in return.

So now it’s your turn. It’s your turn to respond and help to grow this vision. If the first thing we are here to do is to love and glorify God, what ought we to do? What can we do in worship to love God? I was in a Toby Mac concert with the youth on Thursday night. My hearing is just coming back. It was an amazing amount of energy. Toby Mac was bouncing all over the stage jumping on his fellow singers. But he was praising God. Maybe Peter and I need to be doing that.

But not just in worship – in what other ways can we be loving and glorifying God? How can we do that in our life together? In our life in the world? How can we make God more than a brand name we stick onto ourselves like a fish on our cars and more like the source and object of our love?

Spend a few minutes writing in the first section of the third panel of your bulletin. Draw what it looks like if that feels better. We’re going to ask you to turn these so that we can start developing some visions for the short- and long-term. What can Franktown Church be doing to love and glorify God?

So what is the second part of that Great Commandment that Jesus gives us and that the lawyer recites? To love our neighbors as we love ourselves. And Jesus goes on to tell a story to help us know who our neighbors are. The story of the Good Samaritan is a classic and the outlines of it are very familiar to people who have hung around church for awhile:

A man goes down a dangerous road and gets beaten up and left for dead by robbers. Two Jewish religious authorities pass the man by while a foreigner stops to bind his wounds and to get him to a place to recover. Jewish people hearing this story would have been very surprised to hear that the compassionate one was a Samaritan.

At the end of the story Jesus asks the lawyer, “So how was a neighbor to the man that was beaten up?” The lawyer is forced to admit that it was the Samaritan.

Our neighbors are sometimes hard to love and we can convince ourselves that they’re really not deserving of that love. But Jesus keeps calling us out of our comfort zones to meet that neighbor and to be that neighbor by loving and serving them.

In her new book Jesus Freak: Feeding, Healing, Raising the Dead, Sara Miles talks about one of her rules for her church, which is to embrace the wrong people. Hey, it’s what Jesus did. As the priest in her Episcopal Church told her, if you’re going to follow Jesus, sometimes you have to sit in the smoking section.

Miles tells the story of Debbie Little Wyman who started a street church on Boston Commons that inspired a network of outdoor churches – churches that had no buildings. They simply existed to meet and serve people. Wyman, Miles says, “was a small, pale woman, with a great laugh and rimless glasses that made her look like a cross between a nun and a mad scientist.” She began by taking sandwiches to the park. “’It was the oddest thing,’ she said. ‘I had an itch that wouldn’t go away. I just had to get closer to people on the street, to see what Jesus meant.’”

So she packed up peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, bought two cups of coffee from a local coffee shop and went to the park, looking for someone who looked homeless. That was her whole plan for starting a church. As Miles tells it, she “spotted a man and went over and sat down. She was full of doubt. ‘I had no idea what to say. I handed him one of the cups of coffee. He took it and he looked at me and said, ‘So, how are you doing today?’

“’Wham,’ she said, ‘Five minutes in, and I guess I saw who was taking care of whom.’[ii]

Following Jesus means letting that love of God spill over into loving others and receiving love from them. So the second part of our mission statement is the second part of the Great Commandment: to love and serve our neighbors. Your turn again – how can Franktown live this out? Listen to your heart and see if there is one thing that you feel God is calling us to.

So what is it that churches produce? It feels strange to talk that way because in one sense – we are not a business manufacturing goods, but Jesus did tell his disciples that they should make something. They should make more disciples.

We do that through witness – telling others the news about what this Jesus thing has meant to us. But we are Methodists so we also emphasize that experiencing God’s grace and accepting salvation through Christ is only the beginning. We then continue to grow in holiness – deepening our relationship with God and with each other through the practices of study, prayer, fellowship, confession, and Bible reading.

Each of us has a journey to take with God. We are all unfinished products moving on to perfection. So there are things for us to do as we grow. What are the things that we should be doing to help make disciples – followers of Jesus? The youth on Friday night during the lock-in decided that one thing they would try to do is to sit together during worship to let all of us know that they are taking their identity as disciples seriously and to welcome more youth in. What more should we do?

Luke 10:25-37

Just then a certain lawyer put him to the test.

--Jesus, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

--What does the law say? How do you read it?

--You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole strength and your whole mind and your neighbor as yourself.

--You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.

But he wanted to justify himself, so he said to Jesus,

--So who is my neighbor?

--A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and he fell into the hands of robbers who stripped him and beat him and went off leaving him half-dead. Now as chance would have it, a certain priest was going down that road and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. In the same way a Levite, when he came to that place and saw what was going on, passed by on the other side.

But a Samaritan who was traveling came upon him and he was moved with compassion when he saw him. Coming to him, he bound up his wounds, poured oil and wine on them, and placed him on his own beast of burden. He brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave to the innkeeper and said, 'Care for him and if you spend any more in addition, when I return I will repay you.'

Which of these three seems to you to have been the neighbor to the one who fell into the hands of robbers?

--The one doing mercy to him.

--Go and do likewise.

---

[i] Julian of Norwich, A 40 Day Journey with Julian of Norwich, Lisa E. Dahill, ed., [Augsburg: Minneapolis, 2008]

[ii] Sara Miles, Jesus Freak: Feeding, Healing, Raising the Dead, [Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, 2010], e-book location 726.

An Idle Tale That Changed the World

What kind of story do you tell in a graveyard? I ought to have some experience at that. We preachers get called upon to speak words in many a graveyard. And it’s all based on what happened in the graveyard on Easter morning. Today is the day that gives us something to say at the time of death.

The story is told about a young preacher who was called upon to do a service for a pauper who had no family. He was new to the area and wasn’t sure where the cemetery was so he got lost along the way. Finally, an hour after the service was supposed to begin, he pulled up to see that the hearse had already left. A backhoe was standing at the ready and there were two men waiting to fill in the hole. The vault lid was already on.

The young preacher felt very guilty and he decided he should say a few appropriate words for the man. So he put on his robe and launched into an impassioned sermon about the resurrection and new life, he read Bible verses and said a wonderful prayer. As he returned to his car one of the workers leaned to the other and said, “I’ve been putting in septic tanks for twenty years and I ain’t never seen anything like that.”

What kind of story do you tell in the graveyard? There has been such a contrast of things going on here at Franktown these last few days. We’ve had a steady stream of services since Thursday night and the consistent theme of them has been darkness and pain and sorrow and confession and the gory details of Jesus’ death on a criminal’s cross two thousand years ago. And in the midst of it all – an Easter Egg Hunt. I know we kind of jump the gun on that, but it almost seems a kind of relief. When we’re talking crucifixion I often wonder whether it’s appropriate for children. When we get into the whipping and the nailing and the piercing and the dying, what does this say to our kids?

I don’t worry too much because I know children are resilient and for centuries we have been telling our kids scary stories to help them come to terms with the terrors of this world. Hansel and Gretel is just one of many tales that remind us that there are dangers around us. The witch in the gingerbread house is a stand-in for all the ways in which evil can lead us astray. Children do need some conditioning to prepare them for living in the world. Much as we try to protect them from it, they will face monstrous things in their lives and best that they should know the character of the world. But we also usually include a happy ending to remind them that the world is more than predators and nightmares. It is also filled with beauty and hope and goodness overcoming evil. That’s more than we can say for the evening news which never gets past the nightmares.

All the same, I wonder what sort of message we are telling about the world when we talk about Jesus and his death and resurrection. In the midst of pastel eggs and iron spikes and empty tombs are we telling a story that helps our children (and us) know the truth about this world? Or are we telling something that seems to the world an idle tale?

I don’t know about you, but I could use a story that is more than an idle tale. We have way too many idle tales. Movies have predictable plot lines that run from revenge fantasies to underdogs overcoming adversity to boy meets girl. But maybe you’re like me and you hunger for something deeper, richer, more. We want a story that is going to not only touch our hearts but transform our lives.

Avatar has been the top movie of the winter and it seems to promise that kind of story. It will take you to a whole new world and immerse you in the story with 3-D effects that are stunning to behold. And it is a beautiful thing to watch. But by the end of the movie I felt let down. All these hundreds of millions of dollars and the story ends up being about a showdown between a rebel on a righteous mission and a thug with a big machine? How many times have I seen that with the same predictable outcome?

I want a story that is going to tell me something about who I am and where I’m headed. I want a story that’s going to deal with the deepest fears and longings in my heart. I want a story that’s going to tell me why I’m here and what it is that I’m supposed to do with my life. I want a story that’s going to tell me who God is and what God is about in this world. Come to think of it, I want more than director James Cameron can give me. I want a savior.

Maybe you want that, too. Maybe that’s why we’re here. Easter is one of those days when people make a special effort to go to church. If you’re one of those folks who have been away for awhile and are back because it’s Easter, welcome back. It is a good day to be here, because this Easter story is the most important thing we have to say as Christians. And it’s a story we should never get tired of telling.

Easter is different from Christmas, too. James Miller wrote a column for Slate magazine a couple of years ago in which he noticed that we don’t commercialize Easter like we do Christmas. The culture has kind of adopted Christmas, but Easter, despite the Cadbury eggs and peeps, is not the culture holiday that Christmas is.

Miller says:

“Even agnostics and atheists who don't accept Christ's divinity can accept the general outlines of the Christmas story with little danger to their worldview. But Easter demands a response. It's hard for a non-Christian believer to say, ‘Yes, I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, died, was buried, and rose from the dead.’ That's not something you can believe without some serious ramifications: If you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, this has profound implications for your spiritual and religious life—really, for your whole life. If you believe the story, then you believe that Jesus is God, or at least God's son. What he says about the world and the way we live in that world then has a real claim on you.

Easter is an event that demands a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’ There is no ‘whatever.’”[i]

There is no ‘whatever.’ This is crucial stuff. So if we are here today because of Easter it says something about how we view the world.

The story of the first Easter is simply told. It’s different from action movies or other blockbusters because nothing really happens. At least not much cinematic happens. Especially in the version of the resurrection story that we read today – from Luke. The gospel of Matthew, at least, has an earthquake and a Roman guard falling down in fear. But Luke’s narrative is a quieter sort of thing. But just because there are no explosions that doesn’t mean there isn’t drama.

When we last left the scene, it was Friday. Jesus was dead and buried. Taken down from the cross. Sealed away in a borrowed tomb. The women who had followed him from Galilee had seen his body, seen where it was laid, but then went off to prepare spices for the day when they could return. The Sabbath began at sundown that Friday night and it would not end until nightfall on Saturday. During that time, the women did not go back to the tomb.

Then early on Sunday morning, at “deepest dawn” according to Luke, they went back to the grave carrying the spices. But by the time they got to the tomb, the resurrection had already happened. This is the part we’d love to see, but none of the gospels gives us an account of how it happened that Jesus’ lifeless body left that tomb. When Mel Gibson tried to depict it in The Passion of the Christ a few years ago, he added this scene with Jesus confidently striding out, fully restored, ready to take on the world. But the gospels leave it out.

All that the women see is the huge stone that sealed the entrance rolled away from the tomb. They look inside and see that there is no body. And then two men are standing there beside them (and, yes, this part is a little cinematic) they are wearing clothes that shine like stars.

“Why are you looking for the living among the dead?” they ask. “Weren’t you listening? Didn’t he tell you? He told you this would happen. He told you about the betrayal into the hands of sinful people. He told you about the crucifixion. But on the third day…he told you…he would rise.”

They did remember. The Bible tells us they did. But they hadn’t dared to believe. That Jesus would be betrayed – that was something easy to believe since he was causing conflict with religious authorities wherever he went. That he would be crucified – they prayed that would not be true, but it was a fate for those who ran afoul of the Roman overlords – and any Messiah would do that. They could believe that. But the rising in three days bit? It just seemed ludicrous. Outlandish. Incredible. Only now it made perfect sense.

The women, and there were many – Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, many more – they ran to the disciples, the eleven Jesus had chosen (11 because Judas had fallen away), and the rest. They spilled out the story – to no effect. They did not believe them. It seemed to them an idle tale, Luke says.

Peter was the only one who made an effort to check the story out. The only one! He ran to the tomb, stooped and looked in. No body. Not even the two men the women had seen. Just the linen wrapping that had been around his body. And he left wondering what had happened.

At this point it was only the women who had experienced Easter. It would take more appearances by the risen Jesus to convince the others. But the bare facts were now out there. Jesus’ body was gone. And the women who went to the tomb now knew that victory had come in an entirely unexpected way. Jesus had confounded them in death as in life. But he had also defeated death.

An idle tale? Some still think so. But this idle tale has changed the world. Empires have fallen. Slaves have been set free. People have faced down oppressive regimes. People have given their lives in mission to tell this story. People who have been lost have been found. People who were dead in every sense that it matters are now alive. All because of this idle tale.

The early church had an interesting way of dramatizing what was happening at Easter. On the night before Easter they would gather in darkness. During the Easter vigil they would bring in the new Christians, those being baptized after months of preparation. And they would do their liturgy as if it were all still up in the air – as if the outcome was still undetermined. As if Jesus were still lying there dead in the tomb. And they would still go on with the service, expecting that the rising sun might bring the last day of creation. Maybe this year Jesus would come to bring all things to an end.

Then they would welcome the light by blessing a candle. The baptizands would turn the west – the land associated with darkness – and they would renounce the devil and his angels. They would laugh at him and literally spit at the evil forces of this world. Then they would turn to the east – the land of the rising sun – and confess their allegiance to Christ, the coming one, the risen one.

The theologian David Bentley Hart says that “to renounce one’s bonds to these [evil] beings was an act of cosmic rebellion, a declaration that one had been emancipated from…‘the prince of this world’ or…‘the god of this world’…so the life of faith was, for the early church, before all else, spiritual warfare, waged between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of the fallen world, and every Christian on the day of his or her baptism had been conscripted into that struggle on the side of Christ.”[ii]

Is that what we signed up for? We want a word of comfort. We want a word of hope for today. And that’s what Easter is – hope and confidence that God has already determined the course and declared where it all ends. But it is also a day that reminds us that it’s not just about us. It’s about God and the great glory of this graveyard story is not just that we as individuals have won a way out of the cycle of death. The greater story is that we are swept up into what God is doing in this world – defeating evil with love, overthrowing the wrong with the right, and making us new creatures through union with Christ. If you say ‘yes’ to this story, you’re conscripted now. The kingdom of God needs every volunteer. What you can’t say is ‘whatever.’

Thanks be to God.

Luke 12:1-12

On the first day of the week at deepest dawn, they came to the grave carrying spices they had prepared. They discovered that the stone had been rolled away from the grave, and upon entering they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus.

While they were confounded with this, look, two men stood beside them in clothes that shone like stars. They became frightened and bowed their faces to the ground as the men said, "Why are you looking for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has been raised. Remember what he said to you when you were in Galilee. He said that the Son of Humanity must be given over into the hands of sinful people, and be crucified, and on the third day rise."

They remembered his words. So they returned from the tomb and reported all of this to the Eleven and to the others. These were Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary, the mother of James, and others were with them. They said these things to the apostles. These words seemed to them nonsense and they did not believe them.

Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. He bent down and saw only a linen cloth and left, wondering to himself what was happening.

---

[i] James Martin, “Happy Crossmas! How Easter resists commercialization,” Slate magazine, April 2, 2010, http://www.slate.com/id/2249525/?from=rss.

[ii] David Bentley Hart, Athiest Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies, [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009], ebook location 1500-1506.