Hope In The Lord

Sunday, May 25^th, 2008

Corpus Christi Sunday

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Psalm 131: 1-3

Theme: A quiet, simple faith

 

 “¹O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

²But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.

³O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore.”

 

 

What a beautiful Psalm.  And one that I’d never stopped on before.  I don’t recall ever reading this one.

 

There are 150 of them, after all.  I hope it’s understood that, unless you are a scholar of the Psalms, or someone gifted with a photographic memory, you’re not going to be able to call to mind each and every Psalm.

 

But the images brought forth in these three short verses are like a deep breath drawn at the end of a hard day’s labor.  It is a mental pause to adjust an attitude, to refocus, to re-center – to regain perspective.  

 

And it couldn’t come at a better time. 

 

“¹O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

              

These last few weeks, it seems, have been … full.  With some good things:  births, anniversaries, celebrations; as well as with sad things … deaths, illnesses, unexpected surprises, troubles, worries. 

 

We’ve heard it before, things come in threes.  I’m beginning to think that it is more a matter of perception and coincidence that they seem to do that – as well as a matter of position.  By that I mean that depending on where you are RELATIONALLY speaking – who you are close to, who you know, who you are aware of – impacts how you perceive how many of those various ‘things’ happen around you. 

 

There was a period in my life when it seemed like everything was crashing in – and I DO mean everything.  It seemed that for a period of weeks, if not months, at least one thing a week happened that figuratively “slammed into me”:  the death of a Grandparent or an Uncle; the death of a friend’s parent, a terrible illness claiming the life of another person. But it wasn’t only manifesting itself through loss of life – illnesses were as much a part of that time as well – diagnoses that had lifelong repercussions, issues of mental as well as physical stability being compromised; people losing their jobs, marriages breaking up, couples breaking up, people who were once friends acrimoniously going their separate ways; all that against a backdrop of events on a national as well as international scale that just seemed to prove once again that the world was going somewhere not very nice in a hand basket.

 

I wonder how knowing this Psalm then might have helped my perception of those times. 

 

Because there are times when we ARE able to dedicate time and attention to ‘lofty thoughts’ – things ‘too great and too marvelous’ as the Psalmist writes – things that touch our spirits, that engage our ability to dream, to wonder, to swirl our minds around the misty heights of thoughts, and ideas, and concepts.  We’ve had a touch of that over the last couple of weeks – in these celebrations of Pentecost and the Trinity.  We HAVE been able to ‘raise our eyes, and lift up our hearts’.  Even in our worship this morning, beginning with our initial greeting, and in the acts of raising our voices together, in praying together, even in observing our discipline of silence, we have, perhaps some, perhaps all, if only for a few minutes, felt our hearts and minds and eyes lifted up. 

 

But if we are honest with ourselves, I would venture to say that there are probably a few of us here this morning for whom that did NOT happen.  It is the nature of a congregation – of any group – that the experiences of this past week, or this past month, or the accumulated experiences of this past year have combined in such a way that that initial claim of the Psalmist resonates most strongly in a voice that is weak with exhaustion, thin with defeat, small and lost in the vastness of space.            

 

 

“¹O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

              

There is more than a hint of depletion in those words.  And it is in the honesty of that voice that I find the closeness of a connection with the Psalmist.  The person who wrote those words knew what it was like to be bone-weary.  To be so spent that even though they KNEW there WERE things ‘too great and too marvelous’, that there comes a point when you have to say ‘not now’. 

 

Traditionally, we ascribe the majority of the Psalms to King David.  There are those that are pretty clearly his, which have over the centuries preserved their Davidic authorship pretty much unquestionably.  There are others that bear the marks of different authorship.  And there are those that seem to indicate that they may have been written by women.  The imagery we find in the Psalms for God, or for an aspect of God, crosses the full spectrum of existence – from storms and earthquakes to Lions and Eagles, to a mother hen and her chicks … and here we come to a mother and child.  And it becomes personal.    

 

²But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.

 

This week one of our friends – a family with two young girls, aged 3 and 2, welcomed a son into their family.  I shared with you Wednesday night that Guillermo – “Memito” – was born that morning, weighing in at 6 lbs 3 oz, and measuring just 17 inches. 

 

On Thursday I took Guillermo – the father – and America and Casandra – the sisters – up to the hospital to meet their new brother.  The girls are still VERY young – and predictably, they were curious about everything and INTO everything – including wanting to get out the door of the room and head down the hall of the maternity wing at Mary Washington.  Felicitas, the mother, had gotten SOME sleep, but not a lot, what with getting used to Memito’s being in the room with her and beginning to breast feed him – it makes for some pretty exhausting time to face. 

 

This was not an expected pregnancy.  Though they were happy to welcome him to the family, Guillermo and Felicitas are well aware of the stresses that come with a newborn.  I watched the strain on her face build as the afternoon wore on and the girls became more agitated in wanting to explore and wanting to play and color and go somewhere and do something … and I realized that Felicitas is facing the prospect of handling a newborn and two toddlers alone for most of the day while Guillermo is at work.  And those first words of this Psalm seemed to sound out to me in her voice.

 

“²But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.”

 

There is a calm acceptance in that second verse.  It is a statement of accomplishment.  We’ve seen it happen – a child is upset and crying and fussy, and no one can seem to bring it any comfort, to quiet it, to settle it down … until it finds the arms, or the lap of its mother.  And it is a miracle to watch a child quiet when he draws close to his mother.  It is a beautiful thing to watch a little girl go from crying and wailing to sitting calmly and even begin to smile when she is back with her mother. 

 

The Psalmist is taking that image and making it a description of what happens to our souls when we draw near to God.  But what I love about it is that second part of the second phrase – “my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.”

 

I have a favorite picture of Leslie and the kids.  It was taken when Judson was just a few days old.  We inherited a recliner from Claude, our friend that I lived with before Leslie and I got married.  It was your basic brown, sort of corduroy type fabric-covered recliner; wide arms, pretty deep cushions.  Lots of room, almost big enough for two people to sit in.  Almost.  When Judson was born Hannah was a little more than a month from turning four and Caleb was 18 months old. 

 

In the picture, Leslie has Judson in her arms.  Hannah is sitting next to her on one side, and Caleb is perched on the other side, on the arm of the recliner, caught in the middle of either saying or doing something.  The expression on Leslie’s face is a tired smile.  You can definitely tell she’s been through childbirth recently.  Her hair is ‘all over her head’, and there are circles under her eyes.  She doesn’t have any makeup on.  And you know what?  She never looked more beautiful.                            

So I have this image of a mother with her child sitting next to her or sitting in her lap, writing this praise song to God, caught up in the immediacy of childrearing, the “daily-ness” of it, the “one foot in front of the other”-ness of it, the “what has to happen next”-ness of it.  And the result is a calmed and quieted child who knows she is safe, who knows he is cared for and loved so completely that they cannot imagine a world – regardless of WHAT happens – where it would be otherwise. 

 

Is it any wonder that the Psalmist would then turn and call her people to that same sense of security – that hope that God wants them to feel in relation to HIM? 

 

³O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore.”

 

 

Let’s pray.  

Do You Not Realize?

Sunday, May 18th, 2008

Trinity Sunday

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

2 Corinthians 13:5-14

Theme: The Trinity and the place of mystery in faith

 

 “⁵Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you? —unless, indeed, you fail to meet the test! ⁶I hope you will find out that we have not failed.  ⁷But we pray to God that you may not do anything wrong—not that we may appear to have met the test, but that you may do what is right, though we may seem to have failed. ⁸For we cannot do anything against the truth, but only for the truth. ⁹For we rejoice when we are weak and you are strong. This is what we pray for, that you may become perfect. ¹⁰So I write these things while I am away from you, so that when I come, I may not have to be severe in using the authority that the Lord has given me for building up and not for tearing down.

¹¹Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. ¹²Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. ¹³The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. ’

 

What place does mystery have in our faith?  Granting that there is a necessary degree of DIS-comfort in following the call of Christ on our lives, how comfortable are we with believing something we don’t readily understand?  I posed that question this past Wednesday night, and it seemed that at the time, the general consensus was ‘very comfortable.’ 

 

As you have heard me say before, and as we’ve found time and again in scripture, the Christian faith is about putting beliefs into action.  It’s not about simply understanding something to be so, or believing something to be the truth, it is about translating that understanding and that belief into something palpable, something real, something genuine, something … hmmm … measurable, visible. 

 

Christ’s whole beef with the ways of established religion in first century Palestine was that the two had been separated.  His main problem with the religious leaders in Jerusalem was that they had divorced their belief – their faith – from what they lived, to the point where it had seemingly become the norm, and not the exception to disassociate what the intent of scripture was from how one lived one’s life – and THAT was the accepted model of behavior. 

 

Last night I was called over to Riverside to the ER on a chaplaincy call.  The nurse who called me, who is a woman of deep faith, advised me at the outset of the call that the reason she was asking me to be there was to provide pastoral presence, not simply to translate. Calls like that come in not quite regularly, but sometimes frequently in a short space of time.  As I drove over, I was aware of the clock, and wondered how long I would be there, medical tests being what they are, and waiting periods for the results being what THEY are, I expected to be there for several hours at least. 

 

When I arrived, the young man I was seeing and helping with was in some pretty serious pain.  Within just a few minutes of my arrival, he seemed to go into some sort of seizure.  It was a fairly mild one, but still unsettling to watch.  My thought as I was holding his hand and telling him to breath – because he had stopped – was that there was something else going on here.  I had no idea what, exactly, but knew that he wasn’t well.  He came out of the seizure and was babbling under his breathe for a long time after that.  As I helped get him ready to be transported to the radiology department for an x-ray and a CT scan, I was explaining to him what they needed to do while he was in there – the images they were going to be taking – and he seemed to only be half aware of what I was telling him.  As clear as I tried to be with him, his mind was elsewhere.  There was something else going on there.

 

When the ER doctor finally came in to see him after he’d been brought back from radiology, he began asking him a fairly routine set of questions, in order to get a baseline idea of what he was dealing with.  The young man was still pretty much out of it from the pain and was preoccupied with other things, and try as we could, we were only able to get a couple of somewhat straight yes or no answers out of him.  After several minutes of asking questions and not getting answers, the Doctor, somewhat exasperatedly, said he needed to hurry up and get answers, because he had other patients waiting.  We were able to get one or two more answers from the man, enough for the doctor to order a couple of other tests, and then he was off to the next bay and the next patient. 

 

As I sat next to him, I looked at the clock again, and realized there were things that I needed to get back home for, but I also knew that whether I realized it or not, my being there in the room with him was providing him more that simply someone to translate for him, to help with hanging the IV bags or transport him to the CT room, there was something else going on there. 

 

But I had to keep reminding myself of that as the evening wore on.  A few minutes later, three bays emptied of their patients, and the staff was scrambling to get the beds ready for the next patient as well as keep up with the care of the patients they already had.  I stepped out and grabbed a sheet for the gurney in the next room and started helping the nurse put it on.  She laughed and asked me if I was getting bored.  I told her the man I was with was resting a little better, so I figured I’d make myself useful.  What ensued was a conversation about how God works through different events and circumstances in our lives to bring us to himself.  We weren’t just changing the sheets on the bed.  Something else was going on.

 

Wednesday night I began putting some thoughts together with you about how we are to go about the business of living in what is for us a very real, physical, touchable, concrete world, while professing a faith that by definition involves a belief in someone who is – at least to the untuned mind – long dead and gone.  Specifically, I mean Jesus Christ.  In a slightly larger sense, I’m also speaking of the Trinity; God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  It is what our catholic brothers and sisters refer to as one of the mysteries of our faith.  It is something we hold to be foundational TO our faith, and at the same time we admit to not being able to understand it – not because of any lack of mental capacity, but due to our status as finite human beings. 

 

Our passage this morning, as several other places in the New Testament, witnesses the author signing off at the end of a letter.  In the farewell he uses what has become a benediction -- The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. Some estimates of when the letter was written put it around 55 of the Common Era.  That means that it was within 20 years of Christ’s death, burial and resurrection.  What is significant about that is that it underscores the fact that even early on the three persons of the Trinity were already being identified together – in communion with each other and infusing the life of the early church. 

If we back up to the beginning of the passage – this morning’s passage – we find Paul wishing the church of Corinth to spend some time figuring out what they believe – “Do you not realize” he asks, “that Jesus Christ is in you?”  

 

It would seem a fairly standard question, to those of us who have grown up around Churchspeak – or Christianese – the language that is unique to protestant churches – sometimes unique to a denomination – that has developed over the past several hundred years. 

 

But let’s put ourselves – as much as we can – into the brains of those folks in Corinth who were getting this letter and hearing it for the first time.  “Jesus Christ in us?  What does he mean?”  I would suggest that it is as valid a question for us today as it was to our spiritual ancestors in Corinth.  Do we not realize that Jesus Christ is in us? 

 

The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of the Father, and the Communion of the Holy Spirit be with us all. 

 

What we are asked to begin to understand – and if not understand, accept – and if not accept – allow for – the possibility that in Christ there was something else going on than a religious genius ‘getting it’ all over again after ‘it’ had been lost for several centuries.  What we hold as central to our faith is that Jesus was not only a man, fully human, but that he was also divine – fully God.  And beyond that, in his absence we have what is in essence his presence through the Holy Spirit dwelling in us.  In other words, we are, once again, not alone. 

 

Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is chock full of hands on, common sense, nose to the grindstone get along suggestions, recommendations … orders, in some cases.  Though he does delve into some theology – the underpinnings of the faith – he is very PRACTICAL in speaking to the problems the church was experiencing.  But with all the practical applications he was giving them, there was an awareness that those were just superficial things, that underlying the actions was a worldview, an understanding of humanity in relation to God that was coming through in just those ways.  There was something else going on there.

 

The scans and X-rays all came back after being read by a radiologist across the world, and they were all negative.  What seemed to be classic symptoms of a kidney stone were at least initially disproven by a specialist.  The head CT’s also came back negative, nothing to show that might have caused seizures.  The doctor decided to keep him under observation for most if not all of the remainder of the night.  After explaining all that to the young man, I asked him where he lived.  He told me, and I wished him well, and told him I hoped we would be able to see each other again soon.  I explained that the Doctor was going to keep him for most of the night, and that I was going to need to go on home.  He extended his hand and thanked me for being there with him.  Started to stumble through it in English, and I laughingly told him to please talk to me in Spanish.  He said “You are a good man.  You were good to be here with me.”  I had wondered in the back of my mind if he would even be able to remember the night’s events, between his pain and the seizures and the pain medications, it seemed unlikely.  But he lucidly dispelled those doubts in our saying goodbye. 

 

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

 

It means we go about this business of living out our faith in a concrete world, in a concrete way, in very real and genuine expressions of faith – whether that be expressed in the visitation of the sick, or calling and checking in on someone, or sending them a card, or sharing a meal, or asking a question of care in the full expectation of engaging in conversation, not just a passing greeting.  But we do all that in the awareness that there is something else going on here.  Just as there was something else going on through the life of Christ on earth, there is something else going on in our life as the body of Christ in Emmerton.  We are not just a place to house a food pantry, to collect money for our benevolvence fund, we’re more than a staging area for meals on wheels each January, we are not just engaging each other on this physical, finite, palpable plane of existence; we are breaking through this veil and bringing in the Kingdom of God.             

 

Let’s pray.  

Parthians, Medes, Elamites

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

Pentecost

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Acts 2:1-21

Theme: The Holy Spirit for ALL

 

 “¹When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. ²And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. ³Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. ⁴All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

⁵Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. ⁶And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. ⁷Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? ⁸And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? ⁹Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, ¹⁰Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, ¹¹Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” ¹²All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” ¹³But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

¹⁴But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. ¹⁵Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o”clock in the morning. ¹⁶No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: ¹⁷‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. ¹⁸Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. ¹⁹And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. ²⁰The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. ²¹Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

 

Something caught my eye as I was preparing for this morning’s sermon.  I knew, of course, that we would be celebrating Pentecost Sunday this morning, and I knew there was a connection with the JEWISH celebration of Pentecost … but I wasn’t completely clear on how that originated. 

 

The alternate reading for today’s text – that is, the birth of the church – is found in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, chapter 11, verses 24 through 30.  In an interesting parallel, THAT passage speaks of the Spirit of the Lord descending … some would say jumping … from Moses to 70 elders of the tribes of Israel.  The story is an odd juxtaposition to the account in Acts.  Yes, the Spirit of the Lord descends on the 70 elders, and they do prophesy, but it is in what appears to be a radically different context.  The people of Israel have just been complaining about not having MEAT to eat, and it gets to the point where God seems to say, ‘If it’s meat they want, it’s meat they’re going to GET!”… and God proceeds to overwhelm them with all the meat they could want – more than they are able to eat, really.  The text even has God saying they’ll have so much it will be coming out of their nostrils! 

 

Pentecost – the Jewish Pentecost – celebrates the giving of the Law, traditionally something that happened 50 days after the Passover – that is, 50 days after the Israelites were permitted to flee Egypt.  So we as Christians recognize our roots in the Jewish tradition by sharing the name of the celebration, but with a different emphasis.  The Law defined the people of Israel.  It is the Spirit of God which would be intended to define us as Christ followers. 

 

What stands out for you in the story?  That there were people from all over the Roman Empire represented?  That there was a sound like a rushing wind?  Tongues of flame over their heads?  That they were talking in every tongue represented there?  It is certainly one of the more colorfully described events in the New Testament, in fact, probably THE most colorful. 

 

You see, in a sense, the Christian Pentecost paralleled the original Pentecost.  While the first commemorates the giving of that which defined for us how we should ACT, the second defined for us how we should BE – that is, where our actions, where our thoughts, our sense of self, our place of rest, our source of hope, should reside.  In the first, God is saying ‘This is what I tell you” in the latter, God is showing us “this is who I AM”. 

 

Because that was, in the end, what happened at Pentecost.  We speak of God incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ.  It is one of our basic tenets of faith – one of those foundational pieces of what we build our understanding of faith on. 

 

Another piece of the foundation is the Trinity.  God in three persons, blessed trinity – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  Now, we have God with all of God’s attributes – immortal, invisible, wise, beyond our understanding and yet accessible through the person of Jesus and … and … the Holy Spirit – the comforter, our companion, the intercessor. 

 

We sing about the Holy Spirit, we study about him to some degree, but do we really live out the reality of his presence in our lives?  It is the Holy Spirit that moves our own consciences to first recognize his presence, and in so doing, sensitizes us to an awareness of the Holy in our lives – and the immediate and direct CONVERS – the Unholy as well.  we are made aware, by his prompting, of what we are doing that is grieving to the Spirit of God, that is not of the Kingdom, that is bringing darkness rather than light into our lives, that is tearing us down rather than building us up – and not only ourselves, but those around us.

 

Last week and earlier this week I sat with the family of Chano Arellanes, and wondered at the way they were still able to find it in themselves to laugh and joke, to play after suffering through the tragedy that took his life.  There were moments of profound grief – when we first greeted each other – at the airport and at Minerva’s home – the tears didn’t stop for a long long time.  But in the next few days, I watched as Cristel and Juan Carlos and Angel Gustavo and even Minerva at different times broke out of their sorrow and were able to laugh and kid around, surrounded by family that loved and supported them and cared for them – and communicated in a completely accessible way that they – Chano’s family – were not facing their future by themselves. 

 

In a similar way, the disciples were still struggling between the grief of the death of Christ on the cross, and the utter astonishment of the resurrection.  Part of them was still thinking that this MUST be a dream – there is no WAY this could really be happening.  And yet it was. 

God is again letting the disciples know – letting US know – that we are not going about this on our own, running from the starting gate under our own steam, finding out how far we can get before we run out of fuel, out of energy, whatever.  God is providing for us that which we MUST have to make this work – GOD GOD’S SELF – dwelling in us!

 

The simple truth of the matter is that were it not for the Spirit of God in and through us, the church would not exist today.  I firmly believe that.  We can talk about it in philosophical terms, or we can experience it in emotionally charged services and tearful confessions at the altar, but ultimately we have to come to grips with the fact that God has chosen to dwell in US – fallible, fragile, proud, egotistical, bull-headed, shallow, selfish people … not terribly unlike the people of Israel who complained of not having enough meat to eat after being freed from a life of slavery … and that the promise of presence PERSISTS. 

 

We are his presence in the world.  We are his light.  We are his Joy.  We are his Love.  We are his help.  We are his hope. 

 

What does that mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church on Pentecost Sunday, 2008? 

 

It means that we are not only ourselves, though we ARE that – we need to understand that as well as anything else.  We ARE us --- but we are MORE than that --- we are the US God intended us to be – or that is our GOAL.  God wanted Hilda to be Hilda, of course, and God wanted to shine through her gift of music.  God wanted Cliff to be Cliff, and God wanted to shine through his gift of leadership.  God wanted Sam to be Sam, and God wanted to shine through his gift of steadfastness – faithfulness.  God wanted each of us to be who we are, and through being who we are he wanted to highlight one other aspect of who HE is. 

 

We are not all expected to play the organ, or the piano, or sing, of lead, or be caretakers, we ARE all expected to be a facet of an incredibly multifaceted gem – the body of Christ named Jerusalem Baptist Church. 

 

Let’s pray.