… In Truth


Sunday, May 28th, 2006
Easter 7B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
John 17:6-19

6”I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. 7 Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; 8 for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. 9 I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. 10 All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. 11 And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. 12 While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled. 13 But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. 14 I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. 15 I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. 16 They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. 17 Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. 18 As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. 19 And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.

They are, in my humble opinion, the most horrifying 20 minutes of any movie ever made. The opening sequence of ‘Saving Private Ryan’, for someone who has never been anywhere near combat, provide a gut-wrenching, heart-pounding, nerve rattling glimpse in a two-dimensional format of the absolute horror and chaos that was the three-dimensional reality on D-Day in Normandy for the first troops to land.

Watching that portion of the film, I was reminded of just how far removed most of the world today is from conditions then. There are, of course, dozens of places in the world where wars are raging and battles are being fought, besides the few that we are engaged in, but none of them seem to carry the weight of the future of the world on their outcome as did the battle of Normandy in June of 1944.

As we had opportunity to view the moving wall last week while it was here, and mark the names in their reading and the passing of the years by walking from one end of the monument to the other, and as we pause this weekend and especially tomorrow, we engage in one of the most significant acts a nation can undertake: to remember those who have given their last measure for something we enjoy here today of which there was no guarantee at the time of their deaths – whether that was the preservation of this nation, or the rejection of fascism, or the preservation of the balance of power to maintain peace in the world at large, while sacrificing it on a local level, there was in each case a lack of certainty surrounding the ultimate outcome.

To that end, when Abraham Lincoln said:

“ in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."

At the dedication ceremony of the cemetery at Gettysburg, he was speaking to the fact that all the words in the world will blow away like so much dust, but that it is in the actions taken by those who are wiling to put their lives at risk – to put their words into action, that brings about lasting and real change.

In some ways, the Gettysburg address was a prayer, spoken by the president on behalf of the nation, but it also served as an encouragement to the people who were there that day – to be so dedicated to the purpose of preserving the union and the nation, that the power of those few words have moved generations around the world.

Our passage this morning is also known as the Priestly Prayer of Jesus. It is spoken shortly before he is arrested, after he has spent the last several days, to not say chapters, teaching his disciples about what is to come, and as we saw last Sunday, teaching them about their ultimate purpose as well as HIS.

What was so radical about what Jesus did was very simply the way he approached God. Prior to his coming, the only method by which the Israelites could approach God was through the high priest, after offering an appropriate sacrifice.

It was through the sacrifice that two things were accomplished: first, the priest himself was made worthy to offer the sacrifice, and the sacrificial victim, say, a lamb, was consecrated – made holy – in the act of being sacrificed.

In the passage of the middle section of the prayer that we are reading today, Jesus is praying on behalf of his disciples, and what we come to see is that he is praying for ALL his disciples – those present then, as well as those to come … later, and now.

Have you ever been prayed over – I mean REALLY prayed over?

Our second semester at the Leland Center, in early February of 2003, I received word the day before our class met that my position at Stickdog Telecom was going to be phased out over the next six weeks or so. There were no plans to pursue a continuing career in the industry, because I knew I was going to be stepping out into something that I’d been preparing for …. my whole life. And even though there was a thrill of excitement about that, not having any idea of what that stepping out would LOOK like was more than a little unsettling. We had rent and bills to pay, and three children to feed and clothe, in addition to ourselves.

We got to class that night and in our opening few minutes we’d always gone around the room and allowed anyone to share any prayer concerns they might have. As Leslie and I shared our news, there was a spontaneous move on the part of our classmates and Brian Williams, the professor, to move in close around us and put their hands on our shoulders and heads, and everyone in the class either spoke or said a silent prayer for us – the sense of it was simply overwhelming. The words that were spoken to God on our behalf were not just encouraging, but empowering, and uplifting, and yes, on some level, challenging – in the sense that I felt that ‘this is an expectation that I need to live into – not in the negative sense of an expectation, but in the sense that it was simply TIME to do what needed to be done to follow God’s call.

This entire chapter is a single overheard prayer. What the disciples heard was Jesus asking God for himself, for them, and for the world of believers that was yet to come: asking for strength, asking for holiness, asking for unity, asking for boldness in love.

I guess the question comes down to how have we lived out that strength, that holiness, that unity, that boldness, as a body of Christ?

We as a nation have set aside a specific date to honor our war dead. Do we as Christians honor OUR … martyrs? Are we so uncomfortable with the idea that people have died for what they believed and even, TODAY, are dying for their faith, and yet, we sit in comfort and thank God for our blessings.

Abraham Lincoln called the people of this country to ‘increased devotion to that cause’ for which the men who were buried in that cemetery died. Is it so difficult to hear God’s call on our lives to increased devotion, to ever more courage, holiness, unity and love? Is it a call that we have become immune to, have we heard it so often that we do not even hear the words or ponder the implications?

Are we willing to explore the path that God might have for us as a church, as a body, to discover what it means to be ever more courageous, in speaking truth in the midst of a culture that seems to thrive on gossip and hearsay, on innuendo and outright fabrication. On a society that would rather get tied up in a discussion of what the name of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s baby girl will be rather than address the harsh reality of mass persecution and massacres in Darfur, Sudan, or in the real possibility that, working together, we actually DO have the capacity to end hunger in the world.

Do we have the courage to speak and live in holiness, upholding the sanctity of humanity, granted by God in the original blessing of the world, to a world that today would rather we lose ours by losing sight of the humanity of those with whom we do not see eye-to-eye on anything from the practice of faith to the form of a family, to the how we vote on issues that face the nation as a whole.

Can we as a body speak to … and even more … ACT in unity in spite of our differences? Can we, having come out of DIS-unity in our inception one hundred and seventy-four years ago, or even barely fifteen years ago, carry on the work of the Kingdom without grumbling and complaining? Will the world remember us – this congregation – for the love with which we cared for each other and those around us, or for bitterness and backbiting?

Can we do what Christ prayed for us?

I believe wholeheartedly that we can, and we will, and we must, if we are to lay claim to the name Christian.

Let’s pray.

Cause and Effect


Sunday, May 21st, 2006
Easter 6B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
John 15:9-17

9 As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. 11 I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. 12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. 16 You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

Another image seared into our collective memories: January 13th, 1982, an icy river, a snowstorm covering the nation’s capital, and an airplane struggling to take off with an impossible amount of ice on its wings slams into the 14th street bridge crossing the Potomac River into Washington DC, killing all but six of the people on board, and four people on the ground, trying to make their way home from work. Of the six survivors of the crash, only five made it out of the water alive. Of the sixth passenger, the Washington Post reported the next day,

"He was about 50 years old, one of half a dozen survivors clinging to twisted wreckage bobbing in the icy Potomac when the first helicopter arrived. To the copter's two-man Park Police crew he seemed the most alert. Life vests were dropped, then a flotation ball. The man passed them to the others. On two occasions, the crew recalled last night, he handed away a life line from the hovering machine that could have dragged him to safety. The helicopter crew - who rescued five people, the only persons who survived from the jetliner - lifted a woman to the riverbank, then dragged three more persons across the ice to safety. Then the life line saved a woman who was trying to swim away from the sinking wreckage, and the helicopter pilot, Donald W. Usher, returned to the scene, but the man was gone," ("A Hero - Passenger Aids Others, Then Dies." Washington Post. January 14, 1982.)

The "sixth passenger", who had survived the crash and had repeatedly given up the rescue lines to other survivors before drowning, was later identified as 46-year-old bank examiner Arland D. Williams Jr. The repaired span of the 14th Street Bridge complex over the Potomac River at the crash site, which had been officially named the "Rochambeau Bridge", was renamed the "Arland D. Williams Jr. Memorial Bridge" in his honor. The Citadel in South Carolina, from which he graduated in 1957, has several memorials to him. In 2003, the new Arland D. Williams Jr. Elementary School was dedicated in his hometown of Mattoon in Coles County, Illinois.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_90#_note-0)

Isn’t it odd that an event that occurred twenty-four years ago carries so much more impact than one that carried a global, to not say universal impact just under two thousand years ago? It doesn’t seem in the least surprising, since we have pictures and video footage of what happened on that freezing cold day just a couple of hours north of here. You might think that if we had video or still shots from the crucifixion of Jesus it might carry the same emotional weight, but I suspect even if we did, it wouldn’t.

We would probably be distracted by his appearance. We all have an image in our minds of what Jesus looked like, and if we had an actual PICTURE of him, I suspect that the bulk of our time for a good long time would be taken up with getting OVER the fact that “he doesn’t look anything like what I pictured him!”

But the point is this: when we see the reality of what it means for someone to give their life for a friend, or in the case of Arland D. Williams Jr., giving your life up for a small group of basically, strangers – there is a lasting impact on us simply as humans – a mark on our psyche that creates a lasting impression on us for what it means to be human, the frailty of life, and the heights to which heroism can take us.

If you’ve not had a chance to yet, I strongly urge you to visit The Moving Wall – the replica of the Vietnam War Memorial that is currently set up on the grounds of Rappahannock Community College. Whatever differences there might be in our nation about that war, there is an awareness on the part of visitors to both the original monument in Washington DC or to the replica of the fact that to one degree or another, any number of the soldiers whose names appear on the wall died in the act of defending or protecting their fellow soldiers, committing acts of bravery that were at least equal to those of Arland Williams.

Now, imagine yourself telling either one of those stories – either of someone you knew who died in Vietnam under those circumstances or of your friend and co-worker Arland Williams, just a few years after it had happened, only the story you are telling is of Jesus of Nazareth, whom you’d come to know intimately after following him around Galilee, Nazareth, and Judea for three years prior to his execution, and you realize with full clarity that what he did he did by choice. He did it not only for you, but for anyone and everyone you happen to tell the story to.

He did it for the Roman guard who is holding you prisoner, he did it for the local synagogue’s priest who agitated the crowd to the point of creating the disturbance that landed you in jail for supposedly inciting it, he did it for your cellmate, who has been telling you his history of insurgency against the Roman occupying army over the last fifteen years. He did it not just to prove a point, but to make a way where there was none before.

You remember with unusual clarity those last few days before he was taken prisoner in Jerusalem, when it seemed that all he did (aside from clearing the temple) was talk and talk and talk … and you couldn’t turn away, and you couldn’t quite understand what it was he was saying at the time – it wasn’t until just a few days later that things started to click for you … and the clicking became a thundering hammer in your head as the pieces fell into place and you realized just who it was you’d been hanging out with, and what he meant when he said “blessed are you when men persecute you for my sake …”

And you’ve been thinking about that whole ‘abide’ idea … and you want to get across what JESUS meant when he told you to abide in him … he wasn’t telling you to get lost in his being, he was telling you that if you abide in him, he will abide in YOU – you wouldn’t stop being YOU – and HE wouldn’t stop being HIM. You’d be a part of each other – because part of what he treasured about being with you was that – BEING with YOU -- it still catches you by surprise – when you’re just sitting and thinking about those days – yeah, there was a lot of walking around, and a lot of the things he said were confusing at the time, but even in the middle of his sometimes oh-too-frequent exasperated sighs and shakes of his head, he was still smiling at you – he was still looking at you with all the love in the world in his eyes – laughing at your jokes, singing along with you as you sang the old songs around the campfire, praying beside you in the synagogues you visited before they started kicking you out … it still surprises you that he genuinely ENJOYED spending time with you, even if it was just sitting on a rock chewing on sunflower seeds and talking about life, God, and humanity.

And you remember the last and the lasting things. His asking you to take care of his mother, and her to take care of you like the son you had become to her… and that time when he said “this is my command, that you love one another as I have loved you.” And you begin to realize that that was where it all started. That’s where it all gets its beginning. This whole business of the good news you’ve been telling for the last umpteen years.

He wasn’t telling you to abide in him to gain some kind of secret communion with him, he was telling you to abide in him so that you could see what it is like to love your neighbor – your fellow human being – no matter what rank they hold, no matter where they are from, no matter what language they speak, how much money they make or don’t make, no matter if they are clean or dirty in whatever way you want to think of those terms – whether physical or emotional or spiritual – he made that perfectly clear sitting by the well and talking to that Samaritan woman that one time, or when he told that story about the Pharisee and the tax collector praying … it was never about how you appeared in man’s eye, but in God’s eyes, because you see, he wasn’t looking at you with just a man’s eyes, but with God’s holy ones.

So you lock onto some memories, but that is the most treasured of all. The way he looked at you. And in being beheld, you KNEW, just KNEW, that you were also being loved and accepted, and challenged, and called all at the same time.

You never really get over something like that. And what is amazing to you is that you are able to share the experience with others, because in being known, in being loved, you find that now, with God’s Holy Spirit guiding you, you are able to know, to love, to share. You are the one being the catalyst of God’s Kingdom that Jesus spoke about so much.

But it’s hard sometimes. When you are spit on, when you are yelled at, or worse, when you are simply not noticed, not heard, ignored. That is when it is hardest because while you do all you can, beyond a certain point it’s not up to you because it’s not ABOUT you.

It’s about Jesus.

Let’s pray.

Abide in Me


Sunday, May 14th, 2006
Easter 5B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
John 15:1-8

1”I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. 2 He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. 3 You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. 4 Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. 5I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. 6 Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. 7 If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.

Preaching around a national holiday can be both a blessing and a curse. There can be so many factors to take into consideration when one prepares FOR Sunday, to say nothing of being open and sensitive to what it is God might have you say in the particular scripture passage. There is a real issue with whether or not one is even going to incorporate the day being celebrated into the message to be delivered, especially if the holiday in question doesn’t have any directly faith-oriented connections. Mother’s day is, thankfully, not really one of those. We have multiple examples of women – mothers – in scripture who have in one way or another exemplified what it means to be a woman of God so that there is plenty to draw from when we go TO scripture to fill in that picture.

We have the examples of Mary and Elizabeth, whom we read about this past Wednesday evening in our midweek Bible study, and we have Sarah and Rebekah in the Old Testament, Paul speaks of Lois and Eunice, Timothy’s mother and grandmother, in terms that give a strong idea of how faithful they were.
But what happens when we are faced with a situation where the mother in question is … less than exemplary? What do we do, how do we address the family with the mother who is in prison, or who has abandoned them, or who neglects and abuses her children? How do we respond to that family on mother’s day?

We deal with the same issue when we celebrate father’s day. There are, we would HOPE, more mothers and fathers who would give THEMSELVES for their children than not, more who would feed them the last morsel of food off their plate rather than eat it themselves. More who are still uncomfortable with the instruction given on the airplane as it taxies to the takeoff about placing the breathing mask over their OWN nose and mouth BEFORE placing it on their child’s, even though they understand and agree with the need for that instruction.

But we live in a world that sometimes screams at us that things are not the way they are supposed to be. We live in a world where a mother WILL drown her five children, where a mother WILL sell her daughter to get her next fix, where a mother WILL feed her children oatmeal every meal while she feasts. We live in a world where a mother would choose an abusive husband and ignore the reality that the abusiveness extends beyond her to her children, and so her children’s children are condemned to a life of abuse as well.

In the last week or so I’ve seen several poems come across my desk about motherhood, extolling her virtues, telling of how strong she is, how able she is to handle the many different duties that fall to her. Funny stories that talk about how God actually created Eve first, and then agreed with her to create Adam, and they would keep it ‘their little secret’ and let him believe HE was created first, and is the stronger and smarter of the two. The kicker in THAT particular story is that God looks at Eve and winks at her and says, “It’ll be our little secret, just between us girls.” I’ve read beautiful pieces that speak of the qualities of a woman, the nurturing, comforting, caring, and encouraging aspects of a woman’s character.

And guess what? For each phrase, for each image, for each quality, I’ve found myself nodding and saying, “Yep, that’s Leslie … AND Angela, AND Momma, AND Grandma …” Those women who have had some influence on my life … well, not just SOME, but a LASTING impact on my life have all, at one time or another, embodied to me the fact that they were more than they could ever imagine themselves to be.

Knowing full well it is a terrible, unhealthy habit, we do, nevertheless, try to put our best face on whenever we go out in public, especially at Church, don’t we? Do we so easily forget that that is a practice that is anything BUT Christian? Walter Wink, professor of biblical interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City, wrote in an article in the magazine The Christian Century, several years ago, about the passage we have before us this morning. In it, he says the following:

For me "abide" once meant: Think only of Jesus. Drown out all other voices. Choke down the rebellion. Manhandle the resistance. For me, it all added up to a religion of repression … But we grow with the text. I had somehow mislearned to regard the command to abide as a personal admonishment. I took the "you" as singular. My God and me, and all that. But that "you" is plural, providing a rich image of the body of Christ, of Christ seeking a body in the world. Had I thought of it as plural, I would have understood it as a reference to the church … I once heard the bit about "bearing more fruit" as a demand that I get cracking and strain hard to bear much fruit if I wanted Christ to abide with me. Then I was taught that I was justified by grace and needed no works, so I forgot about the fruits. Now I begin to hear it as a simple promise: trust yourself to the water and let the current take you where you need to go. The water will both bear you up and accomplish God's purposes. This has been a great stress reducer, to the degree that I have lived it. (Christian Century, April 20, 1994)

I used to secretly step back whenever I heard a preacher say, “You can’t be a Christian outside of church.” My thought process was something like this: Being a Christian means following Jesus. Being a Christian means accepting him as Lord of your life. That is about as personal a thing as can be, so how can that NOT happen EXCEPT in a highly personal, individual way? We MUST be able to be Christian by ourselves because that’s where it … starts.

And that was where my thinking stopped, for a while.

Becoming a Christian, beginning to take on the life of Christ IS a highly individual thing, it begins in the innermost heart, but it doesn’t stop – it CAN’T stop – it MUSTN’T stop there. The simple truth of it is that Christ calls us by name, but doesn’t call us to go it alone. THAT is what the world would like us to do, to see, to feel, and to practice. Being followers of Christ MEANS living in community, living in service, living in communion with each other. THAT is where we can’t be a Christian on our own, because, just as the first disciples remained together after Christ’s resurrection and ascension, and formed a community of faith that began to live out and grow those seeds that Jesus had been planting over the previous three years, so we are to bear with each other the joys and sorrows that we encounter on this broken world. Just as Walter Wink said, the ‘you’ in the passage is PLURAL, not singular. Jesus was speaking to us as a BODY, not as individuals.

Yes, of course, there is individual aspect, an individual responsibility – we DO each stand individually in Christ, but the burden, if you want to call it that, of living out our faith is intended to be a shared one, because we are all called to the same task—that of proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ in word and deed.

Each of those women I named earlier, whether from scripture or my own life, would be the first to admit that they were nowhere near what those poems made them out to be. That they see themselves as much less than what the authors painted them to be. And it is true for each of us: we are much less likely to extend to ourselves the grace that we so easily extend to others: the grace of forgiveness for being flawed.

So we celebrate Mother’s Day. We rejoice in the fact that some of us have mothers who, flaws and all, became, nonetheless, for us models of faith, models of selflessness, models of what it means to live out our faith up close and personal – in the most unrehearsed stage we have – our families.

If we are, on the other hand, one of those who did not have that experience, but whose mother has been someone other than the woman who brought us into the world, then we rejoice and give thanks for THAT woman – that adoptive mother, that school teacher, or Sunday School teacher, or aunt, or neighbor, or grandmother, who stepped in when stepping in was required and molded us into the person we are today.

It is a special and perhaps rare blessing when we can look at both of our parents and see God in them. Just as the Psalmist portrays God gathering God’s children as a mother hen who gathers her chicks under her wings, we can see in our mothers the attributes of God that are not limited to, but are highlighted IN our mothers: the nurturing, the caring, the compassion.

A few years ago, at the awards ceremony in which he received an Emmy for his work in children’s television, Fred Rogers, “Mr. Rogers”, stood up and asked the audience for ten seconds of silence. In those ten seconds, he asked that those listening silently give thanks for the people in their lives who helped them become who they were. I would propose a slightly more directed prayer – to God, for the women in our lives who through presence and in their absence, helped us see who God is, and who we are in God’s eyes.

Let’s pray.