You Are Light

Sunday, April 3 2011

Lent 4A

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Ephesians 5:8-14

⁸For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light— ⁹for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. ¹⁰Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. ¹¹Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. ¹²For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly; ¹³but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, ¹⁴for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

If you saw the movie, Forrest Gump a few years back, you will remember how Forrest always had a quote from his mama to sum up just about any situation that a person might find himself or herself in. And if Forrest were to comment on this text from Ephesians, he might have this to say: "It's like my mama always used to say, 'Light is as light does.' "

Light is as light does. And what light does is shine out of the darkness. What light does is to make darkness disappear. Light and darkness cannot exist in the same space, because anytime light shows up, it pushes the darkness away. Darkness can exist on the edge of light, but it can never invade the space light has claimed.

Our lives seem to be filled with gray areas. Areas that are not fully illuminated nor are they fully darkened. Yet, while we try to convince ourselves that these gray areas exist to give us choices, we know deep down inside that the right choices always lead to the light, not the darkness. From inside those gray areas we can see that the right choices are not hidden from us, but are in plain view.

The Ephesians text tells us: "Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you." Those gray areas are described as sleep from which we can awake, or even death, from which we can rise. And when we escape those gray areas, Christ will shine on us. Not only will he shine on us, he will shine out from us.

As Christians, we believe Jesus is the light of the world. He illuminates darkness so that in his light all secrets and hidden evils are revealed. If we choose to live in the light of Jesus, all that is dark within our lives is revealed and nothing is hidden from him, or from the rest of the world.

What is it about light that makes it better than darkness? The obvious answer is that you can see light. Not only can you see light, but light also makes all things in its path visible so that you don't stumble into things. Light has a presence that makes it known to you. You can't miss light when it's around although you may not consciously think about it. But take it away, turn it off, cover it up, and you miss it immediately.

Darkness, on the other hand, is the absence of light. Darkness is empty of light.

When we think of it in those terms, and believe that Jesus is the Light of the world, it is then we can say that Jesus is something you can see, while evil is hidden. Jesus makes everything else visible, while evil blocks things out. Evil is the absence of Jesus. Evil is void of everything that Jesus has come to represent to people.

Light promotes growth. Darkness leads to death.

A woman was working in her garden and came upon a large, green, healthy--looking squash plant, and she began to admire it. The stems appeared to be strong, and the leaves were large. She thought about the beautiful squash that this plant would one day produce.  She looked forward to making squash casserole with them.

A few days later she noticed that the plant was terribly wilted. There were no signs of any damage, and none of the plants around it were in this condition. She couldn't figure out what had happened and she tried to give it extra care to nurse it back to health. But in a couple more days, it was completely dead. She pulled the plant up and examined its roots. That’s when she discovered that a bore worm, which could not be seen from the outside, had eaten the heart out of the stem of the plant.

That's how our dark, hidden sins work on us. Like the bore worm, hidden sins can eat away at the heart of our Christian experience and leave us spiritually dead. When left unexposed to the light, sin continues to do its dirty work: obstructing our lives, destroying the true joy of life, and separating us from a loving God.

A lighted path is easy to follow. We stumble in the darkness.

I have a scar on my right shin.  I got it on our wedding night, and although it quickly became a source of jokes, here’s the real story: We were in a beautiful but unfamiliar cabin in the woods outside London Kentucky.  I got up at some point in the night, in the dark, and didn’t turn on a light.  Getting out of the bedroom was no problem, and coming back in wasn’t one either, but as I approached the bed, I forgot that it was a platform bed, and banged into it solidly.  Gave myself a good two and a half inch cut when I walked into that platform.  If I had turned on the light – even for a moment, I would have seen the platform and would have avoided slamming into it.    

Like a lighthouse on the shores of the ocean, light can lead people to safe harbor or it can warn them of dangerous waters. As people come in contact with Jerusalem, and into our lives, they are looking for family, for fellowship, and for some sense of the divine presence. They want to know God and they want to be known by God.  Are we a light that others can see in the darkness? Are we easily identifiable as followers of Jesus so that people recognize our church as a safe place to be? Not by the name on the sign, but by the way we live and act when WE are outside this building?  Are we, as a congregation, a string of lights that shine out and into our community? Can we lead people to the light of Christ and away from the dangers of sin?

The Holy Spirit living within us gives off a light that people cannot miss. Are we sometimes too busy going about with church work that we forget to do the work of the Kingdom? We can master the budget, the music, the worship, the fellowship times, the Sunday school curriculum, and all sorts of committees, but if we are not running our light outside the building, then it is all for nothing.

When the power gets low, or the connection is faulty, a light might begin to grow dim. And when the power source is completely severed, the light goes out completely, and the word for that is darkness.

Light cannot help but to shine outward. You cannot hide your light under a bushel basket and expect it to be seen by others and attract attention. A light that is hidden is darkness and does not do anyone any good.

Ultimately, light will show the flaws and imperfections of each of us and all those around us. Our heroes get brought down, our highest government officials have a dark side, our best friends surprise us, and our parents are really human after all. And, oh, how we love to jump on the sins of others, if not out loud, silently to ourselves.

Paul tells us, "For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly; but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light" (Ephesians 5:12--13). Sins are revealed not to be talked about or to become the basis for gossip, not to be pitted one against another to show that I am less of a sinner than you, but sins are revealed so that they might be forgiven and corrected. Sins are revealed so that what is done in the darkness might be overcome by what is done in the light. We are not to attack our brothers and sisters for their sinfulness, but are to admonish them concerning the dangers of being drawn to the darkness.

We are children of light who walk in the light. And while this passage tells us more about what life in the light is not than what life in the light is, like a parent pleading to his children, Paul challenges us to discover that for ourselves. "Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord," he says. We know that the light pleases God. So if we live in the light of Jesus, we will reveal all those things that are pleasing to the Lord. By the same token, we can avoid those things that are covered by darkness.

On that first Easter, God broke through the darkness once and for all. The darkness of the tomb of death was exposed when Jesus rolled away the stone. His light now shines throughout the world.

You who are light ... be light. Do what light does. And you will no longer live in darkness.

Let’s pray.

Strive First

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Epiphany 8

Matthew 6:24-34

Theme:  Setting priorities

²⁴“No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

²⁵“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ²⁶Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? ²⁷And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? ²⁸And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, ²⁹yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. ³⁰But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? ³¹Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ ³²For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. ³³But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. ³⁴“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.  

There are passages in the Bible that speak to us in a timeless voice.  Especially passages that speak of comfort, such as the 23^rd Psalm.  And there are lessons that Jesus speaks that are also equally timeless – “I am the vine, you are the branch”, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life …” the phrases just roll off the tongue and the words stick in our hearts and in our memories like Velcro. 

Today’s passage is not one of those.  At least, it doesn’t seem to be.  When Jesus said ‘do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear’, he had no idea what kind of a world we live in today. 

He didn’t know the multitude of bills that have to be paid, or the letters and calls that need to be replied to, or that the cost of gas keeps going up, and all the driving that needs to happen, or the appointments that need to be made, to say nothing of the ones that need to be KEPT … it’s just one thing after another, and another, and another. 

He didn’t know what MY LIFE was going to look like when he spoke those words almost two thousand years ago. Heck, >>I<< didn’t know just ten years ago!  How could he?    

But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

Let’s back up a little, to the opening verse of today’s passage.  Jesus is concluding the previous thought, where he was talking about wealth – back up to verses 19 & 20:

¹⁹“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; ²⁰but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.”     

So the beginning of today’s passage is the conclusion to that idea, one that we’ve probably heard more than once from any number of pulpits:  you can’t have more than one master at a time.  You either serve the one or serve the other, but you can’t serve both. 

But how does that tie in with worrying – or NOT worrying? 

If we begin to think that the worldly perspective makes sense, that what we HAVE determines our happiness and our worth, we begin to fall into the worldview that underlies that idea, and it might not be what you think.  The determining factor for that worldview – for what forms the BASIS for the idea that wealth equals happiness – is the idea of scarcity. 

David Lose, from Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN, puts it this way:

“I think we live in an incredibly anxious culture. The evening news certainly depends upon worries at home and abroad to attract viewers. Commercials are constantly inviting us to worry about one more thing – usually about ourselves! – the sponsored product should supposedly solve. More and more houses seem to sport home security signs in their front lawns. And whenever I go to the airport I'm greeted outside by an electronic sign that reads, "See Suspicious Activity – Call 1-800...) and inside by an ominous voice informing me that, "The threat level, as determined by the Office for Homeland Security, is Orange." (I don't even know what "orange" is, but I'm betting it's not good.) And there it is: everywhere you turn, everywhere you look, there are visible reminders of just how much there is to worry about.”   

Let me put it into perspective for you.  If you have nice clothes to wear, AND a roof over your head AND you have a pretty good idea of where your next meal is coming from, you are already better off than several hundred million, if not a couple of billion of your fellow human being.  In fact, if each of those three factors come together for you, you are actually in a minority of the population of the earth. 

We hear a phrase periodically spoken “to preserve our way of life.” That is what it is referring to.  Yes, it is also referring to other less palpable aspects of our culture here in the United States; ideals and laws and things like that, but when it comes down to brass tacks, as they say, it is also very much a reference to our standard of living. 

And it’s not that we are necessarily turning a blind eye to the poverty that exists in the world, we’re not.  Most of the time.  But we ARE constantly reminded of the gulf that exists between us and those people and children whose faces we see in those commercials for any number of charities and help organizations that depend on our contributions to provide that charity or that help. 

And what comes out of that is the idea that scarcity equals unhappiness.  And the converse of that idea is that plenty – or wealth – equals happiness.  And our response to that underlying presupposition is that we begin to be concerned with avoiding scarcity.  We begin to spend a lot of energy and time in the accumulation of material possessions, or figuring out how we are going to acquire material possessions, or how we are going to KEEP material possessions.   

David Lose goes on:

So why can't we give our allegiance and worship to money? Because to do so is to fall prey to the larger worldview that crowns money lord in the first place: scarcity. Again, the issue isn't money per se; the problem comes when we make money our god – ‘that thing,’ as Martin Luther once observed, ‘which we trust for our every good.’ Once we believe that money can satisfy our deepest needs, then we suddenly discover that we never have enough. Money, after all, is finite. And so once we decide money grants security, then we are ushered immediately into a world of counting, tracking, and stock piling. No wonder we worry - in a world of scarcity, there is simply never enough.



The alternative Jesus invites us to consider is entering into relationship with God, the God who is infinite and whose love for us and all creation is infinite as well. Love operates from a different "economy" than money. I mean, when our second child came along, I didn't divide my love for our first child between the two, I suddenly had more love, more than I could possibly have imagined before. No doubt you've noticed the same thing: how the more love you give away, the more you have. Love – and especially God's love – cannot be counted, tracked or stockpiled. And when you live in this kind of relationship of love and trust, you've entered into the realm of abundance, the world of possibility, the world of contentment. Suddenly, in this world – Jesus calls it the "kingdom of God" – not worrying actually becomes an option.



I know, I know, it's hard to believe in this world of abundance that Jesus proclaims, this world that invites us to trust God's faithfulness like a flower does spring or sail upon the currents of God's love like a bird does the air. This is why, in the end, Jesus dies – not to somehow pay for our sins (there we go tracking and counting again), but because those in power were so invested in the world of scarcity that abundance was downright frightening, even threatening. Scarcity, after all, creates fear, and fear creates devotion to those who will protect you (think "threat level orange" again). Abundance, on the other hand, produces freedom. So rather than imagine Jesus' world of abundance, and committed to keeping the power they derived from a fear born of scarcity, the rulers of Jesus' day put him to death (see John 3:17 and following).



But God doesn't operate from scarcity; God operates out of abundance. So in response to the crucifixion of God's Son, God does not, in fact, keep track, or look for payment, or hoard power with which to destroy the offenders; instead, God resurrects – which, when you think about it, is the ultimate act of abundance: creating something, once again, out of nothing, drawing light from darkness, giving life to the dead.



This is the world Jesus invites us into: a world of abundance, generosity, and new life. But it is also a world of fragility, trust, and vulnerability. Lilies and birds, after all, can't defend themselves but must trust God's providence and love.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton? 

It means we have to become adept at identifying when that other worldview – the one that feeds on fear and seems to come so natural – is informing our thought process and our motivations, and stand against it, and in the reality of the Kingdom, where there is an abundance and a generosity that comes directly from God.

What priorities can we set that would reflect that Kingdom reality rather than the worldly reality?  What projects would we take on that would speak to the fact that we DO strive first to live out of the abundance of God’s love rather than of our fear that there won’t be enough to go around? 

What would we dare to do if we daily lived in THAT Kingdom reality?

Let’s pray.  

Belonging

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Epiphany 7A

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Text: 1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23

¹⁰According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it. Each builder must choose with care how to build on it.¹¹For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.

…

¹⁶Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? ¹⁷If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.¹⁸Do not deceive yourselves. If you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise. ¹⁹For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness,” ²⁰and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.”²¹So let no one boast about human leaders. For all things are yours, ²²whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all belong to you, ²³and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.

Last Saturday afternoon, knowing that Leslie would be preaching on Sunday, I decided to set myself a task:  assembling Hannah’s new dresser.  It came in 3 flat boxes from the store.  I began at 3:30, opening, unpacking, counting and organizing all the pieces, and, with a little help from Hannah turning the thing over in the later stages, was finally done at 10:30 that night. Even though I freely admit to being mechanically challenged, there are some things that I DO feel capable of doing.  I managed to complete the job with only one small blister and one small cut.

To be able to watch it come together from all the seemingly hundreds of little pieces and flat boards into this big, solid piece of furniture was a deeply satisfying experience.  I’m pretty sure the single determining factor was the fact that I was able to see the project move from beginning to end, and the end product was … something concrete, something I could put my hands on and touch.  Something that was easily quantifiable – easily measurable. 

Not all the tasks to which we set our minds are that clearly defined, that cut-and-dried.  Especially when it comes to spiritual ones.

Paul was dealing with that issue in his continuing interaction with the church at Corinth: the fact that it was not a completed work, but a work in progress.   

In the first few verses of chapter 3, Paul uses language that evokes the image of a farmer. It would be familiar to the Hebrews of his day, who would have grown up with the concept of Israel as being referred to in Isaiah 5 and in Ezekiel 36 as a garden or a vineyard, in those passages, each servant has a God-given task to carry out.  These tasks are meaningful and necessary work.  One plants the seed another waters the land … but growth?  Growth is a gift.  Those who have worked to plant and water can only do one thing once their work is done, and that is to wait.  They cannot make a plant grow.  It is the same with spiritual growth. 

Paul continues the description with a different metaphor, that of a building.  There is the foundation that has been laid in the person of Jesus Christ, and that is what he is building on – he or whoever comes after him. 

The point he is making is that each of the builders – whether himself or someone else – is working towards the same end – the completion of the building.  Just as the farmer and the farmhand go about different tasks to the same end – the harvest – so it is with Paul and other apostles who come and preach and teach the people of the Corinthian church – to deepen their faith, to strengthen them, and to help them mature in their knowledge and understanding of the Gospel.  They are not in competition with each other but are collaborators, coworkers for the Kingdom.  It is the noblest thing that can be said of anyone who works for the Kingdom, that we are fellow workers for God.

I remember in youth group how 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 was always brought up when the discussion turned to how we were to treat our bodies as young people. 

¹⁹Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? ²⁰For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.

It would seem that verses 16 and 17 are an early reference to that same thought, and while that IS one way to understand and interpret those verses, and there IS a valid point to be made, their focus is different at this point in the letter. 

Paul is using the plural form of ‘you’ here.  He is speaking to the Corinthian church as a whole – as a congregation.  This is one place where the King James English serves a clarifying purpose in it’s use of ‘ye’, rather than the modern English ‘you’ that has come to be used for both singular and plural cases. 

Note what Paul is saying: that the Spirit of God – the Holy Spirit – dwells in us both as individuals AND as a community – and that even as we would seek to allow the Spirit to show himself through us by individual action, we are just as bound to allow the Spirit to show himself by COMMUNAL action.  The two go hand in hand. 

We cannot say that the Holy Spirit is working through and dwelling in us when our words or actions are tearing at the spirit of unity, at the willingness to work together for the Gospel, when they are causing strife and dissent and conflict in the larger community of believers.  That is not an easy thing to say or an easy thing to dwell on, but it is one of the lessons we have from the Corinthian church.  There were factions that had formed within the church that were still living as they had in the world before they heard the Gospel, still separating themselves from other believers based on status and wealth and position, still looking down on the poorer and marginalized members of their same community, and considering themselves to be holier because of it. 

Paul is reminding the Corinthians that they are ALL – each and every one of them – a member of that Holy Temple of God, and he gives warning in verse 17 to anyone who destroys the unity of that Temple.  There is some uncertainty as to whether he is directing the comment to particular individual or to a group of individuals in the church, but it is, in either case, a sobering thought. 

Paul then goes back to the themes he’s touched on earlier in the letter – those of factions and of wisdom.  He again uses the word ‘sophia’ in verse 18.  His juxtaposition of the ‘wisdom of this age’ over and against the foolishness of God again underscores how we as humans so easily fall back on trusting our own ability to achieve so much that we extend that skill to … everything. 

For most of our 50,000 years of recorded history, we gazed at the moon and wondered what it was, what it was made of and how far away it was. And finally, we decided to engage the challenge. Our technology had advanced to the point where it was almost within our reach, and from that day in September 1962 when President Kennedy announced our intention to put a man on the moon within the decade, we set our minds to it and completed the task within seven years of that date of that speech. 

Our abilities and skills and knowledge have grown exponentially in the intervening decades.  And our hubris – our pride – has kept pace with that growth.  There is an almost breathless anticipation to know and to see what we are capable of.  To be sure, we are capable of what would even in the relatively recent past be considered miracles.  To be able to instantly communicate with someone thousands of miles away simply by pushing some buttons and placing a device next to our ear, or to be able to open the chest of a living human being and repair a tear in the tissue of an organ and close them back up and have that person recovery to full health, would be unimaginable to our ancestors.

There is a measure of justification in being proud of an extraordinary accomplishment, but hubris is something else – it is unmitigated pride – pride without humility, pride that ignores the fact that we are created beings, frail and fraught with weaknesses and flaws.

We are SO skilled, SO capable, SO gifted by God to be so creative and inventive, that we tend to forget where the gift comes from, so dazzled are we by our fancy trinkets.

It is a fundamental point to understand that if we begin to rely on our own abilities, our own skills and knowledge as a way to understand and master the relationship between God and us, and by that understanding we are attempting to close that gap ourselves, we are trying to be the arbiters of our own salvation, and that is something that only God is in a position to do.  There is no form of human understanding, of human wisdom, that can hope to fully grasp the mystery of the cross.

I wrestle with it even now.  I question the why of the sacrifice, the why of the atonement, why the need for all of that – the passion – to take place at all.  It seems, to my supposedly modern sensibilities, such an archaic thing, a barbaric thing.  I would much rather find a cooler, less passionate, cleaner, clearer, simpler act that God might have taken in order to redeem the world to God’s self.

There must be a radical break in our understanding of wisdom.  It is a turning away from our self-centered wisdom and an acceptance of God-centered wisdom that is revealed in the cross of Christ.  Not what we can learn about life in the world, or the Solar System, or the galaxy, but what God reveals at the cross – THAT is wisdom.  It’s not that we SHOULDN’T strive to learn as much about life in the world, the Solar System and so on, but that we must keep in perspective what that knowledge is to be used for. 

Verse 21 – ‘for all things are yours’ … Paul steps back and is saying to the Corinthians, ‘look, yes, there is all this knowledge and all this wonder and it is all there and it is all good, but it is not to be used to divide you from your brothers and sisters in Christ.’ His essential call to the Corinthians is for unity in Christ.  He again brings in the factions, speaking perhaps euphemistically of those belonging to him, or to Apollos, or to Cephas, and he expands it to encompass the whole of human knowledge – ‘the world, or life or death, or the present or the future,’ and he says that that way of thinking is irrelevant to the Kingdom.  We all belong to Christ, and through Christ we all belong to God.   

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist church at Emmerton?

I wondered as I was putting this message together how many of you would begin to question at a certain point in it whether I was directing the message at a particular situation within our community of faith.  Let me assure you I am not – at least not intentionally – not KNOWINGLY.

I simply think it is helpful to visit the lessons we find in scripture at any point in our walk, in our joint pilgrimage, as we travel this road together, to have maybe a dispassionate view – a view at a distance – of a situation with which we may have been faced in the past or with which we may be faced with at some point in the future. 

In doing that, my prayer is that we would be able to step back and remember the lesson that our spiritual ancestors at Corinth laid out for us as they struggled with their own faith and their own identity as a community of faith.

Let’s pray.      

        

Shall Flee Away

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Advent 3A

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Isaiah 35:1-10

Theme:  The Improbable Good News.

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus ²it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God. ³Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. ⁴Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.”

⁵Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; ⁶then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; ⁷the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes. ⁸A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God’s people; no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray. ⁹No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there. ¹⁰And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

Note to the reader:  While I will continue to put manuscripts together, I am going to be trying to step away from them more intentionally.  I will use them as a way to put thoughts down in words as they come to me, and hopefully to organize them as they may need to be.  They may or may not reflect what and how the messages are delivered on Sunday mornings. 

Christmas used to be so simple.  It was about the presents.   Even growing up in a home where the Christmas story was THE Christmas story, where we would wait to open our gifts because first Daddy had to read the passage from Luke and then we would always have a family prayer, even in that context, at least as a boy, IT WAS ABOUT THE PRESENTS. 

I DO remember that, even from a relatively early age, it wasn’t ONLY about what we got, but also about giving.  There were a couple of years as a young teenager when that went by the wayside somewhat, but from what I can remember, it really WAS as important to give as it was to receive.  I would encourage you to check that against the memories of my family, though, as their memories are likely different than mine. 

One thing I do remember, distinctly, and it is something that has persisted to the present day, was the feeling of frustration that came with the business of Christmas – the busy-ness of it.  The sense of near-desperation that came from spending time doing something that I increasingly found distasteful – shopping.  Not just dealing with the crowds, but dealing with the feeling of inadequacy when it came to finding ‘that perfect gift’ for whomever it was I was looking for.  You wanted to find something nice, but … maybe not TOO nice … something that seemed more expensive than it actually was.  You wanted to impress, but not break the bank in the process.  The exception was our Christmas engagement.  But that is just what it was – an exception. 

One exception to this was a couple of Christmases ago when we purposefully gave to an organization – Heifer International – in the name of the kids’ teachers as Christmas gifts – gifts that provided either chickens or goats or some such thing to families in developing countries that would then enable them to … improve their situation – their condition in life. 

But even in that circumstance, the prevailing culture had so insinuated itself into our sense of what Christmas is about that it still felt like something was missing. 

It’s been in the light of that that I’ve realized just how hard it is to swim against the stream.  Especially when that stream is supposedly celebrating something you AGREE with – that you in fact celebrate yourself!

I don’t want you to leave here thinking that I am the Grinch, or that Scrooge and I are interchangeable.  It’s not that I don’t like Christmas.  I do.  I really do.  I love the idea of celebrating – especially as the winter deepens and as we move into a new year – both the church year and the secular one. 

I like the idea of blessing people with unexpected gifts … sometimes even overwhelming them.  We’ve been on the receiving end of that, and knowing how it feels makes me want to try to do it as often as we can for others.  I like the idea of celebrating in spite of the circumstances.  We’ve lived through Christmases that have followed both personal and family losses, but being able to celebrate regardless of what has happened, or of what we are in the midst of suffering, helps me to lift my eyes to the hills, as it were, and see from where my help comes.  It gives me a sense of perspective and helps me remember that there is more going on than just what is happening in my life at the moment, and that it’s not all about me.

And that was the first step in my discovery that Christmas … that Christ’s Mass, wasn’t at all about exchanging gifts … but about receiving the greatest, the best gift of all.

And that is where the music from the last Christmas Cantata begins to swell in your head and you tune out the rest … and you fill in the words to the songs you’ve sung all through the years during this season … and it all begins to sound … plastic. 

But let’s focus in on something that isn’t plastic, that was real, that happened. 

I heard an excellent message a couple of days ago, preached by Bruxey Cavey, teaching pastor at The Meeting House, which is a church made up of a network of six different congregations in the Toronto, Canada, area.  They belong to the Brethren In Christ denomination.  He was the guest speaker at Woodland Hills church in St. Paul, Minnesota, last Sunday. 

In it, he stated something that really resonated with me, and it was this:  The world is full of pain and suffering.  That is a fact.  In the nativity, God was running towards our suffering, to come alongside us and share in it – to be with us in that suffering.  God chose to enter into our existence in order to show us how much he loves us. 

We may not admit to it, but I think there are times when we tend to lean towards the idea that, because of all the suffering in the world, that God must be at a remove from us.  But he is anything BUT that.  He has drawn close, he has entered into our own lives, through the person of the Holy Spirit, to make us aware of that otherness that exists, that may not be evident, and unfortunately frequently ISN’T, but that DOES come into existence whenever we model Christ’s behavior and life to the world around us.

And this is where it gets hard.

It’s hard not just because we are swimming against the current and because the current in our particular instance claims to be generally flowing in the same direction of our faith tradition, but hard because it gets down to being open with each other, to being willing to admit faults and failures, and to ask for – and hopefully receive – a gift that Christ himself modeled in his ministry:  forgiveness. 

Part of being a part of a community of faith – a family of faith – is being accountable, being willing to share in our struggles, in our shortcomings, as well as our victories. 

I stand here this morning to ask for your forgiveness.  Whether by accident, or a confluence of circumstances, or by reluctant intent, there have been instances in the last few weeks and months where I have not been the pastor that I needed to be to you.  Times when I stood here and preached on the importance of being Christ’s presence and ended up being absent for the most part from your lives. 

For the most part, you’ve been models of grace to me in the wake of those times.  You’ve understood the demands on my time from other responsibilities, and have allowed for that.  And while I am profoundly grateful for that, you need to know that I understand that it is not something that I would allow to go on, that I am mindful of what it means to BE with you, alongside you, sharing with you.

So it is in the hopefulness of Advent that I come to the place where it started, to the manger, and ask God to prepare my heart once again to receive the Christ Child.  The hay here is still a little damp, a little musty, and being that, it reminds me that the circumstances of the world didn’t change just because Christ came into the world.  The potential for the world to change went through the roof, but the actual circumstances remained … imperfect.  Jesus was born, and Quirinius was still governor of Syria.  Herod was still in the palace.  The Romans still occupied – and terrorized – Palestine. 

But the world was ready for Christ.  That was the perfect time for his coming. 

So this handful of hay is my imperfection, my clumsy attempt to be what Christ wants me to be, and this manger is my life, my heart, and I want to make myself ready for what God would have me do, even as I know he has led me this far, with this I’m saying to him, whatever comes next, whatever you ask, with your help, I will do it. 

As we close this morning, I would invite you to come forward, if you want to do it during the hymn of response, that's fine, or if you'd rather wait and do it after, on your own, that's okay as well, and take a handful of hay and place it in the manger, by way of saying ‘Yes, Lord, prepare my heart. May it be your resting place, your home.”

Let’s pray.        

All, All, Everything, All, All

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Christ the King Sunday

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Colossians 1:9-20

⁹For this reason, since the day we heard it, we have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, ¹⁰so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God. ¹¹May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully ¹²giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. ¹³He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, ¹⁴in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. ¹⁵He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; ¹⁶for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. ¹⁷He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. ¹⁹For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, ²⁰and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

Today is the last Sunday of the year. 

Seriously. 

It is the last Sunday of the year – the traditional CHURCH year.  Next Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent, and according to the traditional liturgical calendar, it is the first Sunday of the New Year.  We will observe our New Year by celebrating our hanging of the green service, so please plan to come and participate in a beautiful service that sets the stage – literally – for our walk towards Christmas and the coming of the Christ Child. 

But today we focus on the fact that this is the LAST Sunday – and we look to what this past liturgical year has brought us.  This is known as Christ the King Sunday or The Reign of Christ Sunday, because it serves to remind us of Christ’s place, not simply in our lives and in our community, but on the whole broad stage of the Cosmos – the Universe. 

Next Sunday we will begin the walk towards Bethlehem, and that will take us to the place where God became flesh and dwelt among us.  We will begin his life where he did, as the newborn son of Mary and Joseph, with hands and feet and a nose and eyes and hair, everything that we each share as members of the human race was also shared by God in his incarnation, but while he was fully human, he was more.  And in today’s passage, Paul underscores just how much more Jesus IS the Christ.    

As I’ve shared with you before, the church year is a little different from the … for lack of a better term, the secular year.  And that is as it should be.  We NEED to be a little different from the rest of society – wherever that society happens to be.  We read and hear about the Chinese New Year, and it is out of synchrony with our current calendar, and we can easily see and say “that is a different way of … being, a different way of counting, that is expressed in the fact that the Chinese have a traditional calendar that is maintained outside the … one that is more universally accepted and used.” 

Being out of step with celebrating our ‘New Year’ reminds us that we DO march to the beat of a different drum, that we DO answer to a higher call, that we DO listen for another command than the rest of the world that surrounds us, that we ARE called to be different, to be distinct, to stand out.    

That’s not to say that we are to be so far removed from it that we are unable to engage, to interact, and to enter into relationship with it.  We DO have that responsibility, and it is more than a responsibility, it is … a calling. 

When we use that word, ‘calling’, in our context, it needs to be understood that a calling is received from one who has authority over our lives.  For us to even be able to invoke that terminology implies that we understand and accept that one’s position to be able to PLACE that call on our lives. 

If I say, “I’ll call you”, what is the first thing that pops into your head … a phone call, right? 

You don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that what I am talking about is a call on your LIFE – something that you’ll dedicate the rest of your life to – no.  And that’s because it is me Kenny, saying, “I’ll call you”.  In our context here, in Emmerton, on this next to the last Sunday of November, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, at a time when the majority of the adult population and a sizeable and sometimes troubling portion of the youth population has a mobile phone, “I’ll call you” has a very ordinary connotation.  It simply means that I am saying that I would like to talk to you, so I’ll call you – from my phone to yours – and we’ll talk then.  No major life-changing decision to be discussed, usually, nothing more than maybe planning a meeting at some point in the next couple of weeks. 

Paul is writing to the Colossians to remind them of just who it is they serve – who they pledged to love and lives to, and from whom they might have been straying.

The language in this passage is … astounding in it’s scope.  The ancient world was blatantly polytheistic.  That is, there were multitudes of gods, with their accompanying temples, rituals and followers.  We may think we’re an overchurched society, with a sanctuary every few miles, try every few yards. 

In truth, I sometimes wonder if that hasn’t changed that much in the intervening centuries.  We still tend to create our own gods, we just keep it on the ‘down low’… it’s a much more subtle presence through which these … contemporary and not-so-contemporary gods make themselves known.  We still can find the god of the senses – in our hedonistic pursuits of immediate pleasures, regardless of consequences.  We can still find the god of mammon, alive and well in the measure of our worth through the size of our bank accounts.  We can still find the god of fear and power in our willingness to wield power over and against our fellow humans who speak, act, live and think differently from us.  

To understand the radical notion that Paul is putting forth, we have to first understand that he is speaking in these terms about one who stood on NONE of those titles in order to make himself known. 

Jesus did not descend in a fiery chariot from the sky and summon Caesar to an audience.  He did not speak and strike down the power structure that was in place at the time – neither the Roman nor the Hebrew.  He did not zap the fishermen from Galilee and make them follow him as he wandered around the countryside for those years of his ministry. 

¹⁵He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; ¹⁶for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. ¹⁷He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. ¹⁹For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, ²⁰and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

You would think that if someone was that powerful, that all-encompassing, that awesome, that it would only be RIGHT for that power to be exercised, to be wielded, to be USED. 

Trouble is, that is the way the world uses power.  Not God. 

Think about it.  God creates the universe, the world, everything; sets things in motion, designs, springs them into being out of nothing; however you want to understand it, God created.  Then God, who having created, is OUTSIDE creation, chooses to come into creation, into the now broken and sometimes so wretched world that we live in and become subject to the vagaries of human existence, and does that up to and including being put to death. 

What does that tell us about the power of God? 

It tells us that God does not use power in the same way humanity uses it. 

We COULD argue that God chose to not use God’s power at all, because if God had, the outcome would have been radically different. 

But I think we miss the picture if we say that, because we’re still coming at this whole incarnation of the King of Creation from a human perspective. 

Knowing and understanding power from a human perspective presupposes that power to be used … to be the motivator for a response that is desired from another – whether an opponent or a friend is not important.  It is the fact that that power is there that prompts the response.

God’s example in Jesus Christ was to dispose of the coercive aspect of the human understanding of power completely, and come not in the form of a King, but a servant … a homeless preacher and teacher who spent no time building up his reputation, or a movement to fight the existing power structure on IT’S terms, but on God’s terms. 

And those terms were these: through the blood of his cross

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church, in downtown Emmerton?

Most of us have heard it since we were children, sometimes not so often, sometimes seemingly way too often.  This whole business of the sacrifice doesn’t sit well with our current sensibilities.  I agree wholeheartedly.  It doesn’t.  We struggle with the idea that, in order for there to be a reconciliation between the Creator and the creation, there had to be, on some level and in some way, a sacrifice made for that … atonement … to heal that broken relationship between God and humanity.  I struggle with that, sometimes in more profound ways than I realize, when I see the state of the world around me, and wonder if there was any sense to it at all. 

Ultimately, though, I keep coming back to this: in history – ALL of history, ALL of creation, EVERYTHING and EVERYONE that God has made; even with ALL the brokenness and ALL the turning away that has been the sad hallmark of humanity’s relationship with God, God has been the one to come back to us from a place of … love.  Like a loving husband, who despite his wife’s flirtations and falls, keeps after her; like a foolish shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep and goes after the one that was lost; like the obsessive homemaker who turns her home upside down looking for a single coin, like the every-loving, every-welcoming father who misses his youngest son so much that he waits and watches for him every day after he leaves, and then runs to him and falls on his neck and welcomes him home with kisses ALL over his face …

THAT is the image of God that comes through.

In this season of Thanksgiving, may we find our hearts lifting hymns of gratitude for the one who will not, no, will not, no, will NEVER desert us.

Let’s pray.